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Fall of Aztec Empire
The omens were many: the devastating destruction of the temple of Huitzilopochtli by fire, Lake Mexico boiled over and flooded homes, a comet soared across the sky, some fishermen discovered a bird with an oddly strange mirror on its head and when the Emperor looked at its reflection, he saw a vision of future destruction and war. The Aztec Emperor Montezuma II , born (circa 1466), demanded meaning from the soothsayers, who said that the events prophesied the end of his kingdom. And, in fact, this would come true, starting with the appointment of Hernán Cortés, Chief Magistrate of Santiago, on October 23, 1518 , as “captain-general” to command an…
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Kodak Founder George Eastman
George Eastman was not the inventor of the camera. His genius was in making the less than ideal camera that he first worked with as a bank employee at the age of 24 in 1878 better. Its awkward size was like a “soap box“. He made it smaller and introduced a compact rolled film with gelatin on a strip of paper. He innovated a new camera named the Kodak (1888). Source
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History of Skid Row
The term “Skid Row” derives from Seattle. Washington, where “skid roads” were the places that loggers slid their cut timber to the ports for shipment. By the 1930’s the term referred to the rundown areas of cities, characterized by bars, brothels and the like originally attracted by loggers, and began to include the presence of homeless and other extremely low income populations.
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IBM’s Launch of Personal Computer Model 5150
Researching the history of the personal computer reveals how far along we have come, since IBM launched its first personal computer, model 5150, on August 12, 1981. It was an extravagant affair held at the New York Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The New York Times’ article in August of 1981, NEXT, A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK, boasted of a “second generation of machines” with the ability to, “…use microprocessors capable of handling 16 ”bits,” or units of information, at the same time, twice the processing power of existing 8-bit machines. ” At 21 pounds and costing $1,565 the 5150 was a great success having much to do with a big advertising push that moved the…
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King Tut
History of the Egyptian King started when Tut, full name being Tutankhaten, meaning “the living image of Aten“, was born approximately 1343 B.C. , or cited elsewhere as circa 1341 B.C.E, though no one knows for certain his exact date of birth. His coming of age was during the reign of Akhenaten. He lived in what was then the almost 2000 year old country of Egypt; a barren dessert land on the North coast of Africa facing toward the Mediterranean Sea and split in half by the Nile. It is thought, though as with his birth the timeline is uncertain, to have become king at age 9, and ruled until he died at the age of 19…
