Time is a created thing. To say “I don’t have time,” is like saying, “I don’t want to.” – Lao Tzu
1826 – Matilda Joslyn Gage, American activist is born.
Matilda Electa Gage was a suffragist, a Native American activist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author, who was “born with a hatred of oppression”.
Matilda Gage spent her childhood in a house which was used as a station of the Underground Railroad. She faced prison for her actions under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 which criminalized assistance to escaped slaves. Even though she was beset by both financial and physical (cardiac) problems throughout her life, her work for women’s rights was extensive, practical, and often brilliantly executed.
Gage became involved in the women’s rights movement in 1852 when she decided to speak at the National Women’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, New York. She served as president of the National Woman Suffrage Association from 1875 to 1876, and served as either Chair of the Executive Committee or Vice President for over twenty years. During the 1876 convention, she successfully argued against a group of police who claimed the association was holding an illegal assembly. They left without pressing charges.
Gage was considered to be more radical than either Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton (with whom she wrote History of Woman Suffrage and Declaration of the Rights of Women). Along with Stanton, she was a vocal critic of the Christian Church, which put her at odds with conservative suffragists such as Frances Willard and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Rather than arguing that women deserved the vote because their feminine morality would then properly influence legislation (as the WCTU did), she argued that they deserved suffrage as a ‘natural right’. Despite her opposition to the Church, Gage was in her own way deeply religious, and she joined Stanton’s Revising Committee to write The Woman’s Bible. She became a Theosophist and encouraged her children and their spouses to do so, some of whom did.
1882 – Robert Koch announces the discovery of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis.
During his time as the government advisor with the Imperial Department of Health in Berlin in the 1880s, Robert Koch became interested in tuberculosis research. At the time, it was widely believed that tuberculosis was an inherited disease. However, Koch was convinced that the disease was caused by a bacterium and was infectious, and tested his four postulates using guinea pigs. Through these experiments, he found that his experiments with tuberculosis satisfied all four of his postulates. In 1882, he published his findings on tuberculosis, in which he reported the causative agent of the disease to be the slow-growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis. His work with this disease won Koch the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1905.
1896 – A. S. Popov makes the first radio signal transmission in history.
Popov’s work as a teacher at a Russian naval school led him to explore high frequency electrical phenomena. On May 7, 1895 he presented a paper on a wireless lightning detector he had built that worked via using a coherer to detect radio noise from lightning strikes. This day is celebrated in the Russian Federation as Radio Day. In a March 24, 1896 demonstration he used radio waves to transmit a message between different campus buildings in St Petersburg. His work was based the work of other physicist such as Oliver Lodge and contemporaneous with the work of radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi.
1912 – Dorothy Height, American educator and activist is born.
Dorothy Irene Height an American administrator and educator, was a civil rights and women’s rights activist specifically focused on the issues of African-American women, including unemployment, illiteracy, and voter awareness. She was the president of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.
1965 – NASA spacecraft Ranger 9, equipped to convert its signals into a form suitable for showing on domestic television, brings images of the Moon into ordinary homes before crash landing.
Ranger 9 was a Lunar probe, launched in 1965 by NASA. It was designed to achieve a lunar impact trajectory and to transmit high-resolution photographs of the lunar surface during the final minutes of flight up to impact. The spacecraft carried six television vidicon cameras – two wide-angle (channel F, cameras A and B) and four narrow-angle (channel P) – to accomplish these objectives. The cameras were arranged in two separate chains, or channels, each self-contained with separate power supplies, timers, and transmitters so as to afford the greatest reliability and probability of obtaining high-quality Television pictures. No other experiments were carried on the spacecraft.
If you’re looking to spark the mind of a friend, daughter, sister, cousin, mother, aunt, anyone really — electronics is a wonderful hobby and perhaps a career. We’re doing this sale with the hopes of turning on some minds to science, engineering and curiosity about how things work. We hope you enjoy the sale, the projects and the content we have planned for today.
In addition to the sale we’re also going to do a post per hour for the next 24 hours (stop back each hour!). Every hour we’ll feature a woman we admire who is doing amazing work right in the tech/maker/art/science space. This is our list, 24 isn’t enough, but it’s a start – here’s another great list on the Anita Borg site. Read more.