Hasta La Gadget!

There are surprisingly few documents from 1969 that mark the birth of the internet. We have some notes scribbled on a pad of paper, and a few newspaper articles after the fact. But there weren’t any reporters parked outside of 3420 Boelter Hall at UCLA on October 29, 1969 to witness that historic moment when the ARPANET gasped its first breaths. In fact, it wasn’t even above-the-fold news.

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During his 1984 State of the Union speech, President Reagan announced that the U.S. would build a new permanently manned space station within a decade. The Space Shuttle program was underway, and a permanent space station seemed like the next logical step in our bold push into the final frontier. It didn’t hurt that the Russians were already working on Mir, and America didn’t want to look like it was resting on its laurels.

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It seems every six months or so these photos of Marilyn Monroe from World War II make the rounds on the good ol’ internet machine. At the time they were captured in 1944 she hadn’t yet taken the name Marilyn Monroe, nor had she dyed her curly locks blonde. She was simply known as Norma Jeane Dougherty and worked in a factory in Van Nuys, California. David Conover, the Army photographer who snapped these shots is credited with "discovering" her, as she soon went on to fame and fortune. But there’s one detail about these photos that rarely seems to gets mentioned: Marilyn Monroe, the future sex symbol that would set a generation’s heart aflutter in the postwar era, is assembling a drone.

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The September 1928 issue of Science and Invention magazine included an illustrated cover that dared readers to find all of the scientific errors they had planted. Forty-eight scientific errors, in all. And $500 in prizes to the winners who submitted the correct answers.

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In the 1970s, civilian researchers at places like IBM, Stanford and MIT were developing encryption to ensure that digital data sent between businesses, academics and private citizens couldn’t be intercepted and understood by a third party. This concerned folks in the U.S. intelligence community who didn’t want to get locked out of potentially eavesdropping on anyone, regardless of their preferred communications method. Despite their most valiant efforts, agencies like the NSA ultimately lost out to commercial interests. But it wasn’t for lack of trying.

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