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1869 (Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries)

Live in a lighthouse on Chesapeake Bay

(NBC) Wanted: A homeowner with a dedication to history and lighthouses, willing to do a little renovation and, of course, live in a home set three miles offshore.
Unlike other lighthouses, the Wolf Trap Light Station is not firmly anchored to a rocky shore, but set out in Chesapeake Bay. Built in 1894, the Mathews lighthouse is a "caisson-style" lighthouse, which means it was constructed to withstand ice flows and whatever else the Atlantic Ocean throws that way. Continued

Project Diana

(Wikipedia) Project Diana, named for the Roman moon goddess Diana — goddess of the hunt, wild animals and the moon — was a project of the US Army Signal Corps to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive the reflected signals. Today called EME (Earth-Moon-Earth), this was the first attempt to "touch" another celestial body.
From a laboratory at Camp Evans (part of Fort Monmouth), near Wall Township, New Jersey, a large transmitter, receiver and antenna array were constructed for this purpose. The transmitter, a highly modified SCR-271 radar set from World War II, provided 3,000 watts at 111.5 MHz in 1/4 second pulses, and the antenna (a "bedspring" dipole array) provided 24 dB of gain. Reflected signals were received about 2.5 seconds later, with the receiver compensating for Doppler modulation of the reflected signal. Continued 

 

Credible Amelia Earhart radio signals were ignored as bogus

(Discovery) Dozens of previously dismissed radio signals were actually credible transmissions from Amelia Earhart, according to a new study of the alleged post-loss signals from Earhart's plane. The transmissions started riding the air waves just hours after Earhart sent her last in-flight message.
The study, presented on Friday at a three day conference by researchers of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), sheds new light on what may have happened to the legendary aviator 75 years ago. The researchers plan to start a high-tech underwater search for pieces of her aircraft next July. Continued

"What hath God wrought"

May 24, 1844 - Samuel F. B. Morse sent the message "What hath God wrought" (a Bible quotation, Numbers 23:23) from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Text: Wikipedia Photo: Library of Congress

Time!

(LoC) On November 18, 1883, four standard time zones for the continental U.S.A. were introduced at the instigation of the railroads. At noon on this day the U.S. Naval Observatory changed its telegraphic signals to correspond to the change. Until the invention of the railway, it took such a long time to get from one place to another that local "sun time" could be used. When traveling to the east or to the west, a person would have to change his or her watch by one minute every twelve miles.
When people began traveling by train, sometimes hundreds of miles in a day, the calculation of time became a serious problem. Operators of the new railroad lines realized that a new time plan was needed in order to offer a uniform train schedule for departures and arrivals. Continued

Photo: MDRails

My Dutiful Balloon: Precarious Reconnaissance in The Great War

While wandering through a churchyard the other day we found an odd line on a gravestone: 28 BALLOON CO. That was a new one. We were a stone's throw from the border of Aberdeen Proving Ground and it got me to wondering if APG was home to a balloon company, and even stranger, what if the guy landed here and was buried on the spot? Well, he didn't land there, dead in a graveyard, but the base was home to the 28th Balloon Company, also a balloon school, and a unit of the 18th Airship, whatever that was.
The balloonists were hoisted in the air in baskets, hanging from little blimps, which were tethered to the ground, in order to see what the enemy was up to. The enemy didn't care for it and would shoot at the balloons. The balloonists were well protected with covering fire to discourage attack, but this didn't deter enemy aircraft from targeting them anyway; there was a whole class of aces known as "balloon busters." The balloonists were equipped with parachutes which they seemed to use use rather often. But it must have been an effective way to gather information as there were a lot of balloon outfits on both sides. According to Stars And Stripes, there were 35 American balloon companies in France during World War One. 23 of the companies were active at the front, making 1,642 ascensions.

I imagine the balloonists were a breed apart. Who would take such hazardous duty? One story from Stars and Stripes relates how a French soldier, forced to parachute from his burning craft (Did I mention the balloons were filled with flammable hydrogen?), found himself being strafed by a German plane, the balloonist calmly pulled a pistol from his holster and started blasting away at the pilot.
The paper also noted that the members of the balloon corps were usually near the top of the list when it came to generosity, donating liberal amounts of their pay to various charity drives.
By 1923 it was all over; lighter than air technology was on its way out and the army was through with the balloon corps. Nearly a hundred years later, it is just another forgotten aspect of an unpopular time.

Nov. 4, 1952: Univac Gets Election Right, But CBS Balks

1952 (Wired): Television makes its first foray into predicting a presidential election based on computer analysis of early returns. The Univac computer makes an incredibly accurate projection that the network doesn't think credible.
The Univac, or Universal Automatic Computer, was the next-gen version of the pioneering Eniac built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. in 1950 and sold the first Univac to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951. Continued

Photo: U.S. Army/Wired

QSL cards on exhibit at Harford Community College

(Aegis) Before cell phones and Facebook, there was amateur — or ham — radio. These radio operators would connect with other people around the world and share what daily life was like on their side of the country — or sometimes globe — all from the comfort of their own homes.
One or several radios would take up space on kitchen tables or office desks where plates and papers would normally be and act as the base of these experimental radio stations, called "shacks," just waiting for another person's voice to come in through the airwaves.
Indeed, it's a hobby that persists in some circles, despite the emergence of other instant communication venues like the Internet. Continued

Photo: Radio Age Magazine, Sept 1926, via Library of Congress.

Up in the Air: The turbulent history of Civil War ballooning

(NYTimes) The first manned balloon flight took place in France during the early 1780s and, not surprisingly, people began thinking of how to turn the balloon into an implement of war. Within a few years, the French army was using observation balloons in battle, and Benjamin Franklin even suggested that balloons might actually be used to convey soldiers into the fray. In 1849 the Austrian high command sent some 200 unmanned balloons, laden with timed explosives, over Venice. Unfortunately, the wind shifted, carrying them back over the hapless Austrians.
Ballooning caught on in the United States as well, and by the beginning of the Civil War there were several budding “aeronauts,” as the balloonists styled themselves, anxious to place their crafts and skill at the disposal of the Federal forces, including an ambitious and highly capable young New Englander named Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe. Continued

Check out our article on World War One balloons: My Dutiful Balloon: Precarious reconnaissance in The Great War

Glen Rock, Pa., was important telegraph station during Gettysburg Campaign

(Cannonba!!) Glen Rock, Pennsylvania, is a small town in south-central York County, just a few miles north of the Maryland line. Home to some 1,800 people, it is situated astride the historic Northern Central Railway tracks, which is now the York Heritage Rail Trail. Settled in 1838, it grew alongside the railroad and was incorporated in 1858. Continued

Photo of Glen Rock courtesy of Nightening.

Hellam Post Office to close doors Saturday

(YDR) To commemorate the Hellam Post Office's last day in operation, which will be Jan. 22, local historians are encouraging people to get mail hand-canceled with the round Hellam date stamp.
Members of the Kreutz Creek Valley Preservation Society plan to do oral interviews with people about their memories of the post office that day as well, said Katina Snyder, treasurer of the historical society.
She suggests that people bring an envelope with a stamp affixed to it to get the round Hellam date stamp. However, she advises against putting the envelope in the mail, just in case it gets canceled again at the processing center. Continued

Photo: Postal officials encouraged Rural Free Delivery (RFD) carriers to replace their horses and wagons with the latest in transportation technology. This unidentified carrier painted his early electric-motored vehicle in the same paint and identification scheme as the RFD wagons of the era. Circa 1910 (Smithsonian Institution).

Project Diana

(Wikipedia) Project Diana, named for the Roman moon goddess Diana — goddess of the hunt, wild animals and the moon — was a project of the US Army Signal Corps to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive the reflected signals. Today called EME (Earth-Moon-Earth), this was the first attempt to "touch" another celestial body.
From a laboratory at Camp Evans (part of Fort Monmouth), near Wall Township, New Jersey, a large transmitter, receiver and antenna array were constructed for this purpose. The transmitter, a highly modified SCR-271 radar set from World War II, provided 3,000 watts at 111.5 MHz in 1/4 second pulses, and the antenna (a "bedspring" dipole array) provided 24 dB of gain. Reflected signals were received about 2.5 seconds later, with the receiver compensating for Doppler modulation of the reflected signal. Continued

Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

(nicholasjohnpatrick.com) Reading David McCullough’s 1776, I found myself wondering: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents? If so, when did American accents diverge from British accents?
The answer surprised me. Continued

Image: Miss Carolina Sulivan - one of the obstinate daughters of America, 1776. Cartoon shows Sullivan's Island, portrayed as a head-and-shoulders portrait of a woman who looks like William Pitt, right profile, with large hairdo meant to conceal fortifications, cannons, and several battle flags. (Library of Congress)

Jim McKay

(Wikipedia) James Kenneth McManus (September 24, 1921 – June 7, 2008), better known by his professional name of Jim McKay, was an American television sports journalist.
McKay is best known for hosting ABC's Wide World of Sports (1961–1998). His introduction for that program has passed into American pop culture.
... Later he gave up his job as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspapers to join that organization's new TV station WMAR-TV in 1947. His was the first voice ever heard on television in Baltimore, and he remained with the station until joining CBS in New York in 1950 as host of a variety show, called The Real McKay, which necessitated the changing of his on-air surname. Through the 1950s, sports commentary became more and more his primary assignment for CBS. Continued

The nation's first daily newspaper

(LoC) The nation's first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, began publication on September 21, 1784. The New England Courant, the first independent American newspaper was published by Benjamin Franklin's older brother in 1721. At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, 37 independent newspapers kept the colonists informed. The press contributed to the war effort by publishing broadsides, relaying information, chronicling the war, and sustaining community life. Continued

The Washington Star

(Wikipedia) The Washington Star, previously known as the Washington Star-News and the Washington Evening Star, was a daily afternoon newspaper published in Washington, D.C. between 1852 and 1981. For most of that time, it was the city's newspaper of record, and the longtime home to columnist Mary McGrory and cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman. On August 7, 1981, after 130 years, the Washington Star ceased publication and filed for bankruptcy. In the bankruptcy sale, the Washington Post purchased the land and buildings owned by the Star, including its printing presses. Continued

Photo courtesy of Friends Told Me I Needed a Blog

7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio

(Slate) The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology that, because of its particular place in the spectrum, can bounce off the atmosphere and travel across continents. The FBI's criminal complaint paints a picture of stateside spies hunkered down in front of their radios, year after year, in homes in Montclair, N.J.; Yonkers, N.Y.; Boston; and Seattle, furiously filling spiral notebooks with "apparently random columns of numbers" broadcast from the motherland. Continued

July 6, 1920: Pilots Navigate Using AM Radio

(Wired) 1920: A U.S. Navy seaplane departs Hampton Roads, Virginia, and heads out over the ocean. Using a new radio compass, the pilots are able to locate and fly directly to a Navy ship nearly 100 miles offshore. It’s the first use of radio navigation by an aircraft.
During the post–World War I boom in aviation, pilots navigated primarily the same way drivers did at the time: They followed roads. Using maps, pilots could follow roads — or perhaps rivers or other prominent features — from place to place.
Unfortunately, unless a pilot knew the way, there was no way to directly navigate between two locations. For the Navy, the problem was a bit more difficult. Continued

Image: Wikipedia

Arthur Godfrey: A Man for a Long, Long Season

(Dick Cavett) ... Arthur Godfrey was not just an entertainer. If the phrase ever applied to a human being, he was an industry.
Advertisers so craved his then-revolutionary and greatly successful practice of personally delivering, live and ad lib, each and every commercial that sponsors waited in line. He was top salesman in radio and television — so it is said. So large was his take for the network on his morning show that it was avowed in the ad industry that by the time William Paley (Mr. CBS) finished his breakfast, Arthur had paid the network’s bills for the day.

Image: Library of Congress