Today in History – July 6, 1997 – the Sojourner Rover (above), carried by the Pathfinder spacecraft, rolled onto the Mars’ surface. Click on the image above right to see a video of its initial positioning. Sojourner was designed as a six-wheeler that used a rocker-bogie suspension system; each wheel having its own drive motor, and the corner wheels also have independent steering motors.

Launched on December 4, 1996, Pathfinder impacted the surface of Mars earlier on July 4, 1997 at a velocity of  18 m/s (40 mph) and then bounced into the air 15 times at a maximum height of  15 meters (50 feet), before rolling and coming to rest  1 km from the initial impact site. The lander and landing site was named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.  Pathfinder was designed, built and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA.

The project ended on March 10, 1998 when the lander failed to respond to communicate with controllers at JPL. The mission operated three times longer than its original 30-day planned lifetime.

The images from Pathfinder-Sojourner are spectacular, ranging from videos of Martian sunsets (click on image above left to see movie), data on the composition of the Martian rocks and the role of water on Mars. Quoting from a NASA press release of June 29, 1998:

The current assessment of data from this instrument suggests that all of the rocks studied by the rover resemble a type of volcanic rock with a high silicon content known on Earth as andesite, covered with a fine layer of dust. All of the rocks appear to be chemically far different from meteorites discovered. on Earth that are believed to have come from Mars.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s  currently active Mars rovers – twin rovers called Spirit and Opportunity – landed on January 4, 2004 and January 25, 2004, respectively. They were originally scheduled to operate for three months, but are now in their sixth year of hard work.  The rovers have set the longevity record for broadcasting to Earth from a distant planet.   Although  Spirit got stuck in sand, Opportunity has been traveling towards the Endeavour crater on Mars since August 2008.

The next Mars rover Curiosity is planned to launch in 2011 and will be a six-wheeler much like  Spirit, Opportunity and Sojourner. Unlike these earlier Mars rovers, however, Curiosity will also use its mobility system as a landing gear when rocket-powered down to the Martian surface on a tether in August 2012.

I was honored to have served on the Advisory Board for the Engineering Division at JPL and was impressed with their “faster, better, cheaper” approach to space exploration.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the Pathfinder mission, Mars rovers and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education, Engineering Mechanics Engineering Education, Computer Engineering Education or the Mechatronics Engineering Education Community sites.

Also on this date in 1885, Pasteur first tests rabies vaccination. See our related resources on viruses and vaccines. or visit our Biomedical Engineering Education community site.

Today in History – July 4, 1997 – Launched on December 4, 1996, Pathfinder impacted the surface of Mars on July 4, 1997 at a velocity of  18 m/s (40 mph) and then bounced into the air 15 times at a maximum height of  15 meters (50 feet), before rolling and coming to rest  1 km from the initial impact site. The lander and landing site was named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.  Pathfinder was designed, built and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA. 

The Sojourner Rover (above left) carried by Pathfinder rolled onto the Mars’ surface two days later on July 6. Click on the image above right to see a video of its initial positioning.

The project ended on March 10, 1998 when the lander failed to respond to communicate with controllers at JPL. The mission operated three times longer than its original 30-day planned lifetime. I was honored to have served on the Advisory Board for the Engineering Division at JPL and was impressed with their “faster, better, cheaper” approach to space exploration.

The images from Pathfinder-Sojourner are spectacular, ranging from videos of Martian sunsets (click on image above left to see movie), data on the composition of the Martian rocks and the role of water on Mars. Quoting from a NASA press release of June 29, 1998:

The current assessment of data from this instrument suggests that all of the rocks studied by the rover resemble a type of volcanic rock with a high silicon content known on Earth as andesite, covered with a fine layer of dust. All of the rocks appear to be chemically far different from meteorites discovered. on Earth that are believed to have come from Mars.

Now take the quiz: What happened to the Pathfinder on Mars?  http://bit.ly/Pathfinderquiz

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the Pathfinder mission and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education, Engineering Mechanics Engineering Education, Computer Engineering Education or the Mechatronics Engineering Education Community sites.

Today in History – June 29, 2007 -The first Apple iPhone is sold. The initial price tag of $600 limited sales to early adapters and Apple fans, of which there were many  (photo of waiting line upper left). The price was reduced to $400 soon afterwards and in 2008 the iPhone 3G at $200  released the flood gates of demand. Apple sold over 10 million iPhone 3G units worldwide within five months of its release.

Three years later there is competition from other vendors, but the release of Apple’s iPhone 4 sales still topped 1.7 million in a few days after its launch on June 24, 2010. “This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

Photo caption (upper right): “Wearing iPhone placards on their heads, two Japanese customers show off their iPhone 4 at a mobile phone store in Tokyo on June 24. Hundreds of Apple fans braved sweltering humidity to form giant queues in an upscale Tokyo district in a race to be among the first in the world to get their hands on the latest iPhone.”

I do have an older iPhone and am still learning the features on this one. I think I’ll wait for more before I get an upgrade. I am reminded though of HP’s first pocket calculator, the HP35 released on February 1, 1972. I was an undergraduate engineering student and my parents bought me the next version, the HP45. I still carried both it and my slide rule around on my belt – really. Primates love our gadgets. Did you know that the the first ball point pen went on sale in 1945 at a price tag equivalent to $150 in today’s money? 8,000 people are reported to have swarmed a New York Department story to by them on the first day of sale.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on iPhones, smart phones and cell phones. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Design, and Engineering Management education disciplinary communities.

Also on this date in 1995, the US Shuttle docks with the Russian Space Station. This is the first time in 20 years that American and Russian spacecraft have successfully docked in orbit.

Today in History – June 26, 1974 – First barcode using the universal product code (UPC) was scanned by a cashier at a supermarket checkout counter. A shopper named Clyde Dawson handed a cashier at the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio named Sharon Buchanan a 10-pack of chewing gum. The gum’s black and white barcode was scanned with a $4000 laser scanner from PSC, Inc. and rang up at 67 cents. A new era in supermarket shopping was born.

The barcode was originally patented by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver on October 7, 1952 for “Classifying Apparatus and Method”. Although it was commercially available in 1966, it took work in standardizing to make it successful. George J. Lauer is credited with the invention of the Universal Product Code (UPC) that made barcodes viable (left image above).

If you are interested in seeing Clyde Dawson’s package of Juicy Fruit gum, go to the Smithsonian Institute’s Museum of American History. Today supermarket barcodes are standard and available for a fraction of their original cost.

Thirty-four years after their introduction, barcodes on supermarket items may soon become as antiquated as audio cassettes – they only tell the cashier which type of product is being sold, while Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) allows retailers to track every item individually through the use of smart tags.

Because such tags transmit the information they contain to any RFID reader nearby, employees locate misplaced items more easily and hopefully deter theft. While cost concerns have hindered the adoption of the new technology, just like its predecessor in the 1970s, the humble bar code seems unlikely to stand a chance once RFID reaches critical mass.

Luckily, it has found many other uses beyond retail, in fields such as certified mail, courier services and airline luggage processing, although customers might come to wish airlines placed smart tags on their suitcases. Two novel areas stand out: airline check-in and e-government.

If you recently checked in for your flight using your home or work computer, rather than at the airport kiosk, you might have noticed that the bar code on your boarding pass looked a bit odd – the black-and-white pattern was more complex than the usual array of vertical bars we all have grown accustomed to. You were, in fact, staring at a two-dimensional bar code.

Two-dimensional bar codes were developed in the late 1980s to store large amounts of information with high security, especially when space is limited. They are also extremely difficult to forge. Continental Airlines even hopes to let customers check in by uploading 2D bar codes on their cell phones, which would decrease paper costs, and is now testing the viability of the approach in a pilot program.

The US government uses bar codes too. The American embassy in London, among others, puts bar codes in the confirmation emails it sends to visa applicants once they have submitted their documentation online. The bar code is scanned when the candidates arrive at the embassy for their interview, allowing the visa officer to quickly access their information. Paper tax forms have bar codes as well. Additional potential applications include driver’s licenses and medical patient records.

Even if bar codes disappear from retailers’ shelves, they will not go the way of the audio cassettes any time soon.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on barcodes and RFID tags. Additional curricular materials on modern manufacturing practices can be found on the Manufacturing Engineering Education or the Industrial Engineering Education community sites.

Today in History – June 24, 1963 – First television video recorder is demonstrated. The Telcan was the first domestic “TV recorder”. The Nottingham Electric Valve Company developed a simple reel-to-reel system, using ordinary 1/4 inch audio tape that recorded linearly with stationary heads. It could only manage a maximum of 20 minutes of low-resolution black and white recordings, though the tape could be turned over to get about 40 minutes per spool.

The Telcan went on sale in 1963 and was mainly sold as a kit, for $60 [2005: $840]. Unfortunately, the kits only appealed to technically competant buyers with money. It never captured the imagination of the general buyer and low sales caused the product to fail in the market. It is reported that only two Telcan machines are known to exist today – one in San Francisco, the other in the Wollaton Hall industrial museum in Nottingham.

Another factor in the Telcan’s demise might have been that it was restricted to black and white for programs of any length. A decade earlier the color television was catching the public’s attention and was being sold at a reasonable price and didn’t require putting it together as a kit. If you had the money, which new technology innovation would you pick?

On March 25, 1954, RCA began mass production of the model CT-100 color television. The cost of the set was $1,000 – not much less than a new car! Unsurprisingly, it took some time for color television to catch on. Not until 1966 did a network (NBC) broadcast all of its programming in color, and color television sales did not exceed black and white sales until 1972.

Initial quality of color television receivers was low: the picture was small (the CT-100 had a 12-inch screen) and the images were not very bright. Advances in technology such as the transistor and integrated circuits led to improvements in size, power consumption, and image quality. In recent years, the very standard underlying color television has been subject to intense debate, as high-definition digital television comes to the fore.

For additional information on the history of television see: FCC website, IEEE History Center or view my earlier March 25th blog on RCA’s production of the first color television set.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the television. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Also on this date in 2009 was the launch of the first hybrid solar/natural gas power station. Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on solar power.

Today in History – June 5, 1977 – Apple II goes on sale. Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II personal computer that was released in 1977, featuring a central processing unit (CPU), keyboard, floppy disk drive, and a $1,300 price tag. The Apple II launched the personal computer revolution. He left Apple in 1981 and went back to the University of California at Berkeley and finished his degree in electrical engineering and computer science there. Since then, he has been involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, including improving computer capabilities in schools.

So how do you build one of the first personal computers? Wozniak says when he teaches Personal Computer 101 he asks students to go to the Apple I Owners Club, founded in 1977 by Joe Torzewski. The site contains over 120 pages detailing the Apple I computer. It shows you what it was like to actually buy and assemble one. If you’ve never seen an Apple I or II, check this site out and see how the personal computer revolution began. Want to know more, read Wozniak’s book: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on Apple computers and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education, computer science education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History -  May 20, 1899 – the American Physical Society (APS) is founded for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics. It was originally formed at Columbia University by 36 scientists from 17 institutions who elected Henry Rowland as their first president and A.A. Michelson as the first vice-president. It has since grown to a membership of more than 46,000 and publishes some of the most prestigious physics journals in the world. As the APS has grown, it has become ever more involved in issues of public outreach and education. For more information on educational resources in physics, see the APS Education web pages, search the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on applied physics, or visit the comPADRE Digital Library for physics and astronomy education, a partnership of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the APS, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Society for Physics Students.

Also on this date in 1790, Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo flight across the Atlantic. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the history of flight or view our Aerospace Engineering Education community site.

Today in History -May 16, 1960 – Theodore Maiman develops the first ruby laser, one of the first functional optical lasers while at the Hughes Aircraft Company. Maiman (left photo) was influenced by articles by  Charles H. Townes at al.: J.P. Gordon, H. J. Zeiger and C.H. Townes, Physics Review, 95 (1954) 282 and  J. P. Gordon, H. J. Zeiger and C. H. Townes, Physics Review, 99 (1955) 1264.

There appears to have been quite a competition between Maiman and Townes (photo second from left) in developing the first functional laser. Townes  patented the maser (Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) on March 24, 1959, using ammonia gas and microwave radiation – a laser that doesn’t use optical light. Although Maiman was nominated for a Nobel prize, the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Charles Townes (50%) and Basov and Prokhorov (each 25%). Maiman was awarded 1983/84 Wolf Prize in Physics and the Japan Prize in 1987. He also holds patents on masers, laser displays, optical scanning, and laser modulation. Until his recent death on May 5, 2007, Maiman served as director of the Control Laser Corporation and a member of the advisory board of Industrial Research Magazine.

Gordon Gould was the first person to use the word “laser” (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation). And he may have created the first light laser. As a doctoral student at Columbia University under Charles Townes, he built an optical laser starting in 1958 but failed to file for a patent for his invention until after other laser researchers had filed their own patents. In 1997 after many legal battles, Gould was awarded the first patent for the laser. He was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 1991.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on applied physics or view our Electrical Engineering Education community site. Also see Laserium inventor Lisa Garmire’s blog on the Maser patent of March 24, 1959.

Today in History – May 11, 1997 – Garry Kasparov, reigning World Chess Champion, loses tournament to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. The event was the twentieth century version of John Henry’s “man against machine”. The triumph of human intelligence was not to happen, however, as in the shocking finale on May 11th World Champion Garry Kasparov resigned 19 moves into Game 6 and lost in little more than an hour. This was the first time a current world champion had lost a tournament match to a computer. Match commentator Yasser Seirawan was stunned: “What we just witnessed was a landmark achievement in chess . . . I absolutely didn’t expect this to happen.”

The event was viewed by millions of chess and computing fans who were able witness the competition live on this Web site, which now serves as the official archive.

Unlike earlier chess playing programs that relied on artificial intelligence (AI) as the primary technology, Deep Blue’s strength coupled AI with advanced storage and compute power. The massively parallel RS/6000 SP-based IBM computer system was designed to play chess at the grandmaster level in a way that could consistently store and analyze many more moves ahead than human players.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Kasparov and Deep Blue, artificial intelligence and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education, computer science education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History – April 30, 2008 – Toyota Prius worldwide sales top 1 million mark. Although the Toyota Prius started as a niche green car when Toyota unveiled the first generation in 1997 it has become the highest selling hybrid on the market. Toyota announced that its cumulative sales passed the 1 million mark, with approximately 1,028,000 units sold as of the end of April, 2008.

The name “Prius” comes from the Latin “to go before” and, based on their pioneering leadership in hybrid vehicles, they certainly can claim this title.

The Prius was first launched in Japan in December, 1997 and began selling in Europe, North America and other markets in 2000. In 2005, Toyota began first overseas production of the Prius in Changchun, China, and sales of Prius vehicles in South Korea are expected to begin in the latter half of 2009. In 2003, the second-generation Prius, equipped with the Toyota Hybrid System II, was introduced with improved environmental performance and power. In August 2007, Prius G, S and S “Standard Package” Japan models achieved a fuel efficiency of 29.6km/l in the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport’s newly introduced JC08 test cycle. (The Prius S and S “Standard Package” models achieved 35.5km/l in the older 10-15 test cycle.) The Prius is also one of the first vehicles to meet the new 2015 Japanese fuel efficiency standards set out under the Law Concerning the Rational Use of Energy (http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/08/0515.html).

According to Toyota, Prius vehicles worldwide have contributed to a reduction in CO2 emissions (considered a cause of global warming) by producing approximately 4.5 million tons less CO2 when compared with gasoline-powered vehicles in the same class and of similar size and driving performance.

However, Toyota’s U.S. sales have been battered by the ongoing economic slowdown, tumbling 39.8 percent from February 2009. Gasoline prices, which surged during the first half of last year, have come down drastically, and it is unclear whether gasoline-electric hybrids will continue to sell as briskly as they have in recent years (http://www.theautochannel.com/news/2009/03/12/453117.html)

Toyota is introducing the third-generation Prius later this year, but that is expected to meet intense competition from the Insight hybrid from Japanese rival Honda Motor Co. Honda recently introduced a new Honda as the cheapest hybrid ($19,800) in the U.S. market.

However, Prius is still the world’s top-selling hybrid. Toyota is dedicated to eventually offering a 100% hybrid line-up, boasting that hybrids will be the standard drivetrain by 2020.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Prius and hybrid automobiles and automotive engineering and design or visit the Mechanical Engineering Education Community site.