Among the first few announcements made when Barack Obama (USA) took office in January 2009 was the news that the president, an avid emailer, would use email to stay in touch with senior staff and personal friends during his presidency. However the title for the first US President to use email in office goes to President Bill Clinton (USA), who sent one e-mail as a test and another, with the help of his staff, to astronaut John Glenn while the astronaut was in orbit on Continue reading →

Primates appeared in the late Cretaceous epoch about 65 million years ago. The earliest members of the sub-order Anthropoidea are known from both Africa and South America in the early Oligocene era, 30-34 million years ago. Finds from Faiyûm, Egypt represent primates from the early Oligocene period, 37 million years.

Margaret Hughes (UK, 1643-1719) appeared as Desdemona in Thomas Killigrews version of Othello, The Moor of Venice on the 3 December 1660, at a converted tennis court called the Vere Street Theatre, London, UK. The audience were told during a prologue that she would appear and during an epilogue was asked: And how do you like her? The applause that followed guaranteed the place of actresses on the English stage.

In July 2008, biologists from the Osaka Bioscience Institute in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, identified a protein that is necessary to efficiently transmit visual information to the brain. Having determined that the protein is used in kinetic vision (being able to detect fast-moving objects), they named it pikachurin after Pikachu, who is also apparently very fast.

The 1500-valve Colossus formulated by Prof. Max H. A. Newman (1897–1985) and built by T. H. Flowers, was run in December 1943 at Bletchley Park, Bucks to break code made by the Lorenz-Schlussel-zusat 40 machine, or Tunny as the British called it. It arose from a concept published in 1936 by Dr Alan Mathison Turing (1912–54) in his paper On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Colossus was not declassified until 25 Oct 1975. The credit for being the worlds first electronic computer Continue reading →

The earliest public presentation of sound-on-film was The Arsonist (Germany/USA 1922) a short drama made in the Tri-Ergon process, shown at the Alhambra cinema, Berlin, Germany on 17 September 1922. It starred Erwin Baron (USA), who played seven of the nine parts.

The first electric railway was made by Thomas Davenport, a blacksmith in Vermont, USA, in 1835. It was a small railway powered by a miniature electric motor. The first serious attempt at electric power on a railway was made by Robert Davidson in 1842 when he tried out a battery locomotive weighing five tons on the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway, Scotland, where it ran at 6.5km/h (4mph). The first practical electric railway was built by the German Engineer Werner von Siemens (1816-92) for the Berlin Continue reading →

The oldest known purpose-built Christian church in the world is in Aqaba, Jordan. Built between 293 and 303, the building pre-dates the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem, Israel, and the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, West Bank, both of which were constructed in the late 320s. The church is the first purpose-built Christian church discovered from the period before Christianity found favour with the Roman imperial government. It even pre-dates the greatest of all the Roman anti-Christian persecutions, that of Diocletian in 303-313. The Continue reading →

Game: Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo Publisher: Capcom The first puzzle game to be inspired by a beat-’em-up is Capcom’s Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, which, in spite of its title, isn’t actually a sequel. Instead, it’s a two-player, columns-style puzzle game, released in 1996, that pays homage to the publisher’s beat-’em-up heritage: the title is inspired by Super Street Fighter II Turbo and the super-deformed characters are drawn from the Street Fighter and Dark stalkers series. A year later, Capcom released what is the Continue reading →

Gueorgui Kostadinov was the first person to achieve a quadruple front somersault with a half turn presented on the Russian swing, during a performance at the Wuqiao International Acrobatics Festival, Wuqiao, China in 1995