Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York’s Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps

How SAGE jumpstarted today’s technology and built IBM into a powerhouse. //

IBM had recently entered the computing realm in the early 1950s, and it was already dominant in punch-card tabulating. With its emphasis on research and development and customer support, IBM was chosen by the Air Force in 1953 to design and construct the AN/FSQ-7 systems. While the project contributed about 10 percent to IBM’s bottom line for several years, the real benefit to IBM was access to the advanced designs at MIT and to revolutionary technologies such as core memory. As the SAGE project wound down, IBM engineers used their accumulated skills and applied them to the newer commercial offerings for years afterward.

While flying on airlines today has its own unique set of hassles, actually booking a flight is (relatively) painless. This wasn’t so in the 1950s, when schedulers went through racks of index cards, each with a particular flight’s info, all stored in what resembled a library card catalog. Only a few schedulers could fit around the card catalogs, and making a flight reservation could take an hour or two. Through a chance encounter, an IBM executive met the president of American Airlines, and they discussed how the airline needs paralleled the capabilities of SAGE. Recognizing the competitive advantages of a computerized reservation system, American contracted with IBM to develop SABRE. SABRE quickly became a huge success and through multiple corporate reorganizations now operates now as Travelocity and Expedia.

American history, furthermore, has been marked by numerous Great Awakenings. There is no better time to expect a new Great Awakening than in the aftermath of an all-encompassing worldwide crisis of meaning. There can be no starker reminder to the partisans of scientism and radical environmentalism that Mother Nature is not necessarily our friend. Earth-worship, which has ancestral pagan roots even before the Greeks sang the praises of the goddess Gaia, is incapable of providing meaning to the human condition. Rather, genuine meaning can only be found by dedication to pursuing permanent truth, discerning permanent truth, and, ultimately, living in accordance with permanent truth.

The solution, in short, is religion. The solution is the need for a revival of America's distinct Judeo-Christian heritage, whose substantive underpinnings have chastened our excesses of intemperance, inculcated virtue across generations and permitted Americans to freely engage in the most fundamental pursuit known to man: seeking and abiding by truth according to the dictates of one's own conscience. //

In his Farewell Address, President George Washington said, "(L)et us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."

In the mid-1700s, Benjamin Franklin served as a delegate for colonial America and spent a great deal of time traveling to London and Paris. During this period, it was quite popular and entertaining for amateur musicians to perform on sets of "singing" or musical glasses. Franklin attended one of these concerts and was intrigued by the beauty of the sound. Almost immediately, he set to work applying the principles of wet fingers on glass to his own musical creation.

Ben Franklin completed his glass armonica in 1761. (Its name is derived from the Italian word for harmony.) He didn't simply refine the idea of musical glasses, which were played much like children at the dinner table play them today, with notes being determined by the amount of water in the glass. Rather, Franklin made chords and lively melodies possible on his new instrumental invention. //

At the time of his death in 1790, when more than 5,000 of them had been built, Ben Franklin had collected no money from his glass armonica. He refused to patent any of his inventions, saying:

"As we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously."

In ‘Sleeper Agent: The Atomic Spy in America Who Got Away,’ former Wall Street Journal reporter Ann Hagedorn provides a captivating account George Koval, who was born in Iowa and died a Soviet hero.

Malcolm Nance, the onetime National Security Agency cryptographer and current Brookings Scholar, once observed, “nothing in the world happens by coincidence.”

But when it came to George Koval, the Soviet sleeper spy carefully embedded into the Manhattan Project who, with his all-American background and scientific training, revealed key American nuclear secrets to his Moscow patrons, the U.S. national security establishment seemed all too willing to overlook as mere coincidences the unlikely concatenation of events leading to Koval’s betrayal.

Russia's Supreme Court has ordered the closure of International Memorial, Russia's oldest human rights group.

Memorial worked to recover the memory of the millions of innocent people executed, imprisoned or persecuted in the Soviet era.

Formally it has been "liquidated" for failing to mark a number of social media posts with its official status as a "foreign agent".

That designation was given in 2016 for receiving funding from abroad.

But in court, the prosecutor labelled Memorial a "public threat", accusing the group of being in the pay of the West to focus attention on Soviet crimes instead of highlighting a "glorious past". //

There were shouts of "shame!" from those in court as the decision was read out.

The ruling also shines a light on the rise in repression in modern-day Russia, where Memorial's own human rights wing now lists more than 400 political prisoners, and independent groups and media are increasingly blacklisted as "foreign agents".

In court, lawyers for Memorial argued that the group's work was beneficial for the "health of the nation". They declared Memorial a friend of Russia, not its enemy, and called the case for liquidation absurd and "Orwellian".

Among the sites the group failed to mark with its "foreign agent" status was the vast database of victims of political repression that it has assembled over three decades of work.

The team argued that any mistakes had been corrected and that shutting down a prominent and respected organisation over such technical errors was disproportionate.

In a statement later on Tuesday, International Memorial said it would challenge the ruling and find legitimate ways to continue its work. Russians needed an honest reflection of their past and no-one would succeed in "liquidating" that need, it added. //

Vladimir Putin has placed great store on the Soviet victory over the Nazis in World War Two, part of his hankering for the old days of superpower status - a far more attractive focus for many Russians than the parallel history of secret courts, prison camps and firing squads.

"Why should we, descendants of the victors, be ashamed and repent, rather than take pride in our glorious past? Memorial is probably paid by someone for that," the prosecutor claimed in court. //

"A power that is afraid of memory, will never be able to achieve democratic maturity."

"Власть, которая боится памяти, никогда не сможет достичь демократической зрелости."

Dr. Piotr M. A. Cywiński, director / директор @AuschwitzMuseum https://t.co/0Oqsc1xvDf
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) December 28, 2021

A document containing President Abraham Lincoln's signed pardon of a Civil War soldier has been the source of much controversy since its 1998 discovery, after historians concluded that the date had likely been altered to make the document more historically significant. A new analysis by scientists at the National Archives has confirmed that the date was indeed forged (although the pardon is genuine), according to a November paper published in the journal Forensic Science International: Synergy. The authors also concluded that there is no way to restore the document to its original state without causing further damage. //

then was a pardon for a Civil War solider in the Union Army named Patrick Murphy, a private who had been court-martialed for desertion and condemned to death. The pardon is written perpendicularly in the left margin of a letter dated September 1, 1863, requesting a pardon for Murphy. Lincoln's statement reads, "This man is pardoned and hereby ordered to be discharged from the service." It was signed "A. Lincoln."

It was the date that made the document significant: April 14, 1865, meaning the pardon was likely one of the last official acts of President Lincoln, since he was assassinated later that same day at Ford's Theater in Washington, DC. The pardon was broadly interpreted as evidence for a historical narrative about the president's compassionate nature: i.e., his last act was one of mercy. The discovery made headlines and brought Lowry considerable renown.

Longfellow had fallen into a depression in 1861 when his second wife Frances died. She had been sealing envelopes with hot wax when a flame caught her clothes on fire. Henry had rushed to her aid and tried to smother the flames. But by the time the fire was out, Frances had been burned beyond recovery.

She died the next day. Henry, burned badly as well, was too sick to attend her funeral.
The death marked a turning point in Longfellow’s life. His physical appearance changed dramatically as he began growing his beard because the burns disfigured his face. Mentally, he sank into depression. //

In 1863, Longfellow suffered another blow. The poet was a staunch abolitionist, but he, like the entire country, was troubled by the Civil War. His son Charley in March of 1863 had decided that, regardless of his father’s wishes, he would join the fight. He ran off to Washington to enlist in the 1st Massachusetts Artillery.

Charley fell ill with “camp fever” (probably typhoid or typho-malarial fever) and was sent home to recover for several months with his family. That summer, having missed the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), he rejoined his unit on August 15, 1863.

On the first day of that December, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was dining alone at his home when a telegram arrived with the news that his son had been severely wounded—inaccurately stating that he had been shot in the face—four days earlier. On November 27, 1863, while involved in a skirmish during a battle of of the Mine Run Campaign, Charley had been shot through the left shoulder, with the bullet exiting under his right shoulder blade. It had traveled across his back and nicked his spine. Charley avoided being paralyzed by less than an inch. //

On Friday, December 25, 1863, Longfellow—as a 57-year-old widowed father of six children, the oldest of which had been nearly paralyzed as his country fought a war against itself—wrote a poem seeking to capture the dynamic and dissonance in his own heart and the world he observes around him that Christmas Day. //

He heard the Christmas bells ringing in Cambridge and the singing of “peace on earth” (Luke 2:14), but he observed the world of injustice and violence that seemed to mock the truthfulness of this optimistic outlook.

The theme of listening recurs throughout the poem, eventually leading to a settledness of confident hope even in the midst of bleak despair as he recounts to himself that God is alive and righteousness shall prevail.

Within a decade (1872), the poem was put to music by the English organist John Baptiste Calkin for a processional, set to the the melody “Waltham.”

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a lesser-known Christmas song, and not generally the first to be requested around the Christmas tree. The lyrics were born out of painful circumstances, but as with other classic hymns, the story behind the song gives it gravity and drives home the message of hope and the power of God’s marvelous plan. //

Longfellow was a staunch abolitionist, something that was proudly reflected in some of his writing. So, when the Civil War came, his oldest son, Charley, was eager to do his part. As a Second Lieutenant, Charley fought in the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia, and narrowly dodged the Battle of Gettysburg by coming down with typhoid fever, writes Justin Taylor of the Gospel Coalition. He was back in the fight by August 1863, but Charley’s luck was running out.

Taylor writes that “While dining at home on December 1, 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow received a telegram that his son had been severely wounded four days earlier. On November 27, 1863 … Charley was shot through the left shoulder, with the bullet exiting under his right shoulder blade.” Longfellow’s son survived his injury and was brought home to recover.

Longfellow found himself staring down another Christmas season as a widower, with five children dependent on him and now one child on the brink of death. Outside, he heard the Christmas bells ringing, but I imagine he could also hear the cannons and gunfire of war in his mind. The world was tearing itself apart. There didn’t seem to be much space for peace on earth or goodwill toward men. //

I think I love this song especially because it is raw and real. It’s a Christmas song that doesn’t cover up the world with holly and tinsel and say everything is just fine. Longfellow acknowledges that the world is broken, but he doesn’t leave it there. There’s more to the story, and that’s what makes the message of Jesus’ birth so joyful.

Clive Irving highlights in an article on HistoryNet that Brown, head of the program’s configuration group, solved both of these issues seamlessly for Sutter. He looked at dozens of configurations before placing two standard cargo pallets side by side and drew a circle around them. This move created a vast cargo hold and a main deck just under 20 feet in width. Additionally, to solve the evacuation issue, he drew two aisles. These simple but effective moves pushed the direction of the cabin in the right direction, assisting the birth of the commercial widebody.

100 year old sealed bottle of J.H. Rogers & Co Limestone Whisky, Maysville, KY
Made Spring 1912 bottled Fall 1923. Pre Prohibition. Bottled during Prohibition. //

Interesting bottles...hard fact about selling older whiskies is that nearly all collectors will only buy bottle that are 'viable' to drink.

Bottles with 'cloudy' whisky, or ones that are below the shoulder level of the bottle are not worth very much.

From the looks of your photo, you may have 3-4 that would be considered 'viable' bottles....worth between
$100-$250. (The rest would sell for about $40-$50) //

Update on 100 Year Old Sealed Bottle Of Whisky, Made Spring 1912 Bottled Fall 1923

James from Maryland swung by my place in Ohio to purchase my bottle. After telling the history of my bottle it turns it likely came from the same source shown here by Flyfisherman. A long forgotten prohibition horde discovered during a building rehab near Cincinnati about 10 years ago. My father lived next door to a family selling individual bottles for $6.00 a piece as fun curiosities.

My deal with James was the sale of my bottle along with a sample tasting of some other vintage Whisky. The two of us sat on my back patio and spent a few moments enjoying that exact same batch of whisky from another bottle of the Cincinnati horde that had a weak cork. Tasting Bourbon from 1923 is something everyone should have on their bucket list.

A very enjoyable and memorable transaction with a man who knows more about the History of vintage whisky than anyone I am ever likely to meet again.

Thank You James

Native America and the Mayflower: 400 years of Wampanoag history
Four hundred years ago, the Wampanoag People watched on as a ship arrived on their shores.

It was not the first ship they had seen arrive, nor would it be the last. But this particular vessel and the people on board would have far and long-lasting consequences for their future and legacy.

The Wampanoag Tribe, also known as the People of the First Light, has inhabited present-day Massachusetts and Eastern Rhode Island for more than 12,000 years.

A recent conversation about the dangers of false claims of expertise stimulated me to revise and republish a nearly 11 year-old post.

It provides documented proof that Jimmy Carter was not a “nuclear engineer” and never served on a nuclear submarine. He left the Navy in October 1953, about 15 months before Jan 17, 1955, the day the the world’s first nuclear submarine went to sea. //

Here is a quote from the first debate between President Ford and Governor Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign as transcribed in the Sep 24, 1976 issue of the New York Times:

Q: Governor Carter, I’d like to turn to what we used to call the energy crisis. Yesterday a British Government commission on air pollution, but one headed by a nuclear physicist, recommended that any further expansion of nuclear energy be delayed in Britain as long as possible. Now this is a subject that is quite controversial among our own people and there seems to be a clear difference between you and the President on the use of nuclear power plants, which you say you would use as a last priority. Why, sir, are they unsafe?

‘Capabilities of Atomic Power’

CARTER: Well among my other experiences in the past, I’ve been a nuclear engineer, and did graduate work in this field. I think I know the capabilities and limitations of atomic power. //

Since you remember enough about the 1950s/early 1960s to have been traumatized by “duck and cover” drills, you are old enough to personally recall the public’s interest in the energy crisis that was precipitated by the October 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. Do you recall how interested some people were in stimulating investments in more nuclear power as a means of reducing America’s vulnerability to another attempt to use oil as a weapon?

My interpretation of the history is that Carter’s friends in the upper elites of the hydrocarbon economy took advantage of his political ambition and his tenuous connection to nuclear energy to help put him into position to sabotage “the plutonium economy.” He might have had other goals and priorities, but once his purpose had been served, he lost enough support to make him a single term president.

Do you happen to recall that the title of Carter’s campaign book was “Why not the best?” and that he explained that choice of title in homage to the influence that Admiral Rickover had on his performance in life? //

Yes, Carter had an affinity for the coal industry. When Carter was running for President, roughly 40% of US coal production was from companies that were oil company subsidiaries. Here is a supporting quote from an Oct 3, 1976 NY Times article titled “Breaking Up Big Oil.”

Right now oil companies control between 26 percent and 40 percent of coal production (the lower figure comes from the Haskell committee, the higher from the United Mine Workers). Seven of the 15 largest coal companies are subsidiaries of oil companies. As Big Oil’s coal ownership climbed, so did coal prices: 300 percent. There was probably a connection. The nuclear‐energy industry is also being swallowed by the oil industry, which owned about 30 percent of our uranium reserves 10 years ago and today holds between 50 and 55 percent. As for shale and geothermal lands, virtually all of those leased to date have gone to oil companies.

Note: Like many commenters on the energy industry, the author of the NY Times piece did not understand that uranium was (and remains) only a small portion (5-20% depending on how it’s counted) of the nuclear energy business. //

In my opinion, it is the height of vanity for someone with a general engineering degree and service on diesel power submarines who did not even finish nuclear power school — which is the first baby step in a lengthy process of developing nuclear energy expertise in the US Navy program — to assert that he “knew nuclear engineering.”

When Carter made his policy decisions, he was asserting that he understood more about nuclear engineering and safety than thousands of nuclear scientists and engineers who had, by then, spent a couple of decades adding professional experience to their formal education on the topic while Carter, who left the Navy in Oct 1953 and never again focused on nuclear physics or engineering, raised and processed peanuts, made a fortune, and served as the governor of Georgia.

Peripherals were part of system that launched Minuteman III missiles in the '80s.

Thirty years ago, Pan Am ceased operations. The US airline put its stamp on civil aviation like no other and will always be remembered, especially by people in Berlin.
It's been three decades since Pan Am closed up shop. Its last flight, PA436, from Bridgetown, Barbados to Miami took place on December 4, 1991, ending the global aviation icon's 64-year saga.

It's a saga that is still remembered today all over the world, but especially in the once-divided city of Berlin, where the blue Pan Am globe on the tail of the airline's Clipper aircraft was always seen as a symbol of hope and freedom during the Cold War.

"No other airline has influenced aviation nearly as much, and no other carrier understood it so well the importance of letting the public participate in these achievements," said Berlin-based real estate developer Matthias Hühne, Pan Am expert and author of an extensive homage to the airline. "That's how a myth formed: the freedom to be transported to almost any place on Earth within just a few hours."

Thanks to its huge network reaching even remote corners of the globe, Pan Am was able to do just that; no other airline had the same reach.

The Large Scale Systems Museum (“LSSM”) is a public museum in New Kensington, PA (just outside Pittsburgh) that showcases the history of computing and information processing technology. “Large Scale” means our primary focus is on minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers, but we have broad coverage of nearly all areas of computing, large and small, dating back to the 1950s.

pdp1170-profile.jpg

LSSM is a real physical museum that you can visit, not an “online” or “virtual” museum. We are a living museum, with computer systems restored, configured, and operable for demonstrations, education, research, or “re-living the old days”. Our staff of volunteers comprises a number of experienced engineers and technicians who are highly experienced with these systems, painstakingly restoring them and maintaining them in like-new condition.

flexo-pdp8-dg.jpg

If this sounds odd to you, think of an antique car collector with an old Corvette or a Model-T Ford. But cars only revolutionized transportation, while computers have revolutionized everything, including cars! Every aspect of our lives involves computers in some way.

Even in our ubiquitous mobile phones, from the latest smartphones to the humble flip-phone. There's at least one computer inside each one, making everything work. Every aspect of its operation, from recognizing button presses to identifying itself to cell towers, is controlled by a computer.

ibm-as400-s34-crop.jpg

Our bank accounts, our car maintenance, our baby pictures, all handled by computers to make our day to day lives easier. Are you old enough to remember when it took days or weeks for one doctor to receive your medical records from another? Now it takes seconds. Remember when we had to take checks to the bank to deposit them? Not anymore, and all of this great functionality that depend upon came from somewhere.

tour-1.jpg

The history of computing is rich and full of great stories, breakthroughs, successes, failures, and strong personalities, all culminating in the device that you're reading this website on right now. Everything we have today came from somewhere, and we teach that history here at LSSM. From aesthetics to internals to real-world uses and operation, we preserve it all.

But the popularity of the love locking trend only really took off after the release of the Italian movie “Ho Voglia di Te” (I want you) in 2007. It was inspired by the like-named novel, from the hand of Italian author Federico Moccia, which was published a year before. One scene features the protagonists locking their love by attaching a padlock to a lamppost at thePonte Milvo in Rome and throwing the key into the Tiber river. //

It didn’t take long for young European fans to pick up on this hype. In 2008, the first padlocks of love appeared in the City of Love. Because of its convenient steel frame and romantic location, the Pont des Arts soon became the Love Lock Bridge in Paris. //

In 2014, the Paris Love Lock bridge literally succumbed to the weight of all that love. The grilles of the Pont des Arts were not strong enough to carry hundreds of kilos in padlocks. With over 700,000 locks in total, weighing 45 tonnes or the equivalent of 20 elephants, and the prospect of another 7,500 locks added each year, an intervention was needed to guarantee the public safety and save this iconic Parisian brige.

In August 2014, the Paris Mayor’s Office launched the campaign “Love without Locks” in which they tried to convince tourists to find other ways to celebrate their love on the padlocks bridge. But no picnic or selfie could convince lovers to refrain from hanging even more tokens of everlasting love. The City of Paris had no other option but to remove the padlocks. On June 1 2015, the grilles were removed and eventually replaced with glass panels to prevent history from repeating itself.

The same was done at other Paris bridges, ones that also suffered from the love lock craze: The Pont de l’Archevêché at the southern tip of the Île de la Cité and the Passerelle Léopold-Sédar-Senghor that connects the Orsay Museum to the Tuileries Garden.

The document exists among the papers of Justice Bushrod Washington. It was traced by scanning through hundreds of microfilmed documents. The images used in the story are photographs of the original.

The original purchase agreement for a tract of land that would become the Liberian capital of Monrovia was uncovered by historian C. Patrick Burrowes in August. (Chicago History Museum) //

It was billed as a land of promise — a place where free Black Americans could obtain more political rights and a better quality of life.

Liberia did not receive its name until 1824, but the territory that became its capital city was purchased on Dec. 15, 1821.

Almost exactly 200 years later, a Liberian historian has discovered that original purchase agreement — a document missing since 1835 that sheds light on the acquisition of the only U.S. colony in Africa.

C. Patrick Burrowes, who was born in Liberia and has taught at Penn State Harrisburg and Marshall University, uncovered the handwritten document in August. It details the sale of a tract of West African land that later became Monrovia, the Liberian capital. The selling price was about $300 worth of weapons, rum and other merchandise.

The document’s whereabouts had been unknown for so long, Burrowes said, that there was speculation it had never existed at all. For the historian, finding the purchase agreement has been the most significant discovery of his career, he said. And for historical understanding of Liberia’s origins, this document helps debunk several prevailing myths about the acquisition of territory that became its capital.

“The details of the land transfer have been shrouded in some controversy, so the recent discovery by Dr. Burrowes is timely, especially so close to the 200th anniversary of the event,” said Herbert Brewer, a Morgan State University historian who studies slavery and the African American diaspora.