October 30 - John J. Loud

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On this day, in 1888, John Jacob Loud received US Patent #392,046, the first ever for a ballpoint pen. For hundreds of years, if you wanted to write a letter to someone or sign a legal document, you needed two things: a container of ink and a pointed object you could dip in the ink and then scratch out a few letters before dipping again. Feathers, or quills, became quite useful for writing with because of the hollow tube running down the center of them. Dip a feather in ink and some of it got sucked up into the tube giving you the ability to write a lot more before having to dip again. Plus you could keep the tip of the feather sharp, creating a nice point to write with. The whole process was fairly messy, however. If you’ve ever seen old letters and documents, you might have noticed that there are frequently drops of ink all over them, smeared letters and a distinct unevenness to the amount of ink used on any given word. Add to that the fact that you had to keep cutting yourself a new tip (and you had to keep sharpening the knife you used to do that) and it’s no wonder that the art of writing was a time consuming pastime.

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But man is a pretty smart, inventive creature. In the 1820s, using steel writing points, or nibs, became popular. Although metal nibs had existed since the dynasties of Ancient Egypt, they produced inferior writing results compared to a quill until improvements in design and manufacture came along in the Nineteenth Century. The advantage of steel nibs was not only that they lasted far longer than quills but that different nibs could be designed to create different writing effects. They still usually had to be dipped in ink though and were still messy. Someone got the idea to make the handle of the pen hollow and fill it with ink, which solved the constant dipping problem but probably made it easier to get ink everywhere trying to fill it. Leave it to someone who wrote all the time, like a banker, to come up with a better way.

John Loud was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts on November 2, 1844. After graduating from Weymouth High School, he went on to Harvard, earning a law degree in 1866. He apprenticed for a prominent local law firm and was even appointed to the Suffolk County Bar before he decided that a life in law was not for him. In 1871, John joined the Union National Bank, the same bank his father worked as a cashier, as an assistant cashier. When his father passed away three years later, John was promoted to the elder’s position. He remained a cashier with Union National for the next twenty-one years, until his health necessitated that he retire in 1895.

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Banking wasn’t the only thing that held John’s interest during those decades. He was also an avid tinkerer. His first patent, #375,453, was granted in 1887 for improvements he made to make toy cannons safer (but since they still fired like a real cannon, it’s debatable whether you can use that word). The following year, he received patent #385,127 for a cannon that launched fire crackers, was partially collapsible for storage purposes and, in his own words, “perfectly safe for children and careless persons to whom accidents frequently occur in using fire arms.” You might be forgiven for thinking that his third and final patent was also cannon related, but as I mentioned earlier, it was actually for a new kind of pen.

The inspiration for the ballpoint pen had nothing to do with letter writing. The stated purpose of John’s new invention was to make it easier to write on rough surfaces like wood and leather. Instead of a nib that drew ink out of a reservoir using a capillary action and was great for fine lines and letter writing, John’s pen used a tiny little ball as a nib. The ball rolled around in a socket at the end of the pen, keeping ink from spilling out but getting coated with ink as it turned. When the ball was dragged across a surface, it acted like a mini paintbrush, leaving a trail of ink behind.  And his pen worked great. On everything but actual paper, where often times it wouldn’t write at all. The mechanism was just too crude to lend itself to letter writing. Since no one could think of very many reasons why they’d want to write on wood, no one decided to manufacture the new design and the patent ran out in 1905 virtually unused. It would take the creation of new, more viscous ink along with far more precise manufacturing practices to create an economically viable ballpoint pen and the patent for that wouldn’t come around until 1943.

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It’s unclear whether or not John invented anything else. If he did it wasn’t enough to warrant another patent. After retiring from the bank, he became interested in genealogy, directed his church’s choir, wrote poetry, spoke at local functions and served as a trustee of the Tufts University library. All of that plus the time spent with his eight children I’m sure made for quiet, humdrum twilight years. John passed away in his home in Weymouth, fairly close to the spot where he started life 71 years earlier, on August 10, 1916.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Paul J. Smith

October 29 - Black Tuesday

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On this day, in 1929, prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed, forever being known as Black Tuesday and helping to usher in the Great Depression. The Great War, as World War I was known before there was something to properly compare it to, had brought more death and devastation than anyone still alive had ever seen before. The collective reaction to all that grimness was to pull up your hemlines, loosen your morals a bit and have a good time while you could. Or at least that’s how the decade known as the Roaring Twenties is depicted today.

It is true that the 1920s gave rise to a lot of different trends. Women had just been given the right to vote and were asserting themselves like never before. People began flocking to cities, looking for better paying jobs and a ritzier lifestyle than could be found in small towns. Teetotalers convinced the government to play the role of a stern parent by enacting a prohibition on the sale of alcohol, which didn’t cut down on the amount of booze people consumed but it did make having a drink more exciting. Movies exploded into theaters across the country, silent at first but actually talking by the decade’s end. Optimism was so thick in America you could practically bottle it and pour it on your morning pancakes.

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That good feeling was also reflected in the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average experienced a nine year boom cycle that saw it increase in value tenfold. The bull market was so long and so high that many investing experts declared it would never end, the market had reached a permanent plateau. They were, of course, wrong. But what happened to make them so wrong?

It turns out there were some definite yangs to go along with the optimistic yins and not everyone in the country was prospering, especially those who actually lived in the country. Even with huge chunks of Americans abandoning rural areas, the farmers who remained were better than ever at what they did. The overabundance of agricultural products throughout the Twenties caused prices to drop dramatically, a good thing for someone trying to feed their family on the cheap, a terrible thing for someone trying to make a living growing things. There was widespread poverty slowly gripping wide swaths of America. Meanwhile, in cities, Prohibition had basically given a green light to organized (and frequently not-so-organized) crime. The rise of speakeasies, rum runners and mythical creatures like Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone made for great newsreels at the theater but also made it much more dangerous to live in urban areas.

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One of the real kickers, though, was that although it seemed like money was flowing like a river everywhere you looked, most of that was an illusion, especially when it came to stocks in the second half of the decade. As the market rose and rose, more and more people wanted to get in on the bonanza. Most people also didn’t have much cash lying around to invest. Not an issue said the banks. The future is so rosy, we’ll lend you the money to buy stocks. You’ll have no problem paying us back. Buying stocks on margin, as that practice is known, is rarely a good idea. If the market goes down even a little bit, you can quickly find yourself in deep trouble. Buying stocks with up to 70% borrowed funds, is just plain stupid. And yet that is exactly what banks were letting people do. By August 1929, there was an estimated $8.5 Billion in borrowed money invested in the stock market, more than all the currency in circulation in the entire country. In spite of the fact that trouble had already been brewing for several months.

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At the end of March 1929, the Federal Reserve issued a warning, concerned about how many stocks were being purchased on margin. That warning caused a small crash on March 25, as many investors decided to cash in all at once. National City Bank announced two days later that it would loan out an additional $25 million in an attempt to stop stock prices from falling. The tactic worked. Even though troubling news kept pouring in from other areas in the economy (construction was flat, steel production and car sales declined, consumer debt was climbing), the market not only rallied but gained 20% between June and September.

Near the end of September, two things happened that would seal the fate of the New York Stock Exchange. First, Roger Babson, a leading expert in finance at the time, warned of a coming crash. His words became a bit self-fulfilling as a bunch of investors believed him and prices dropped dramatically. Most people shrugged Babson’s prediction off and called the dip a necessary market correction, nothing to be worried about. Second, the London Stock Exchange crashed badly on September 20 when Clarence Hatry, one of its top investors, and his cronies were thrown in prison for fraud. The instant weakening of foreign markets to American businesses caused the US market to begin to wobble. Over the next five weeks, there were a few days of volatility followed by a few days of calm and then back to volatility.

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As October crawled along and investors got more and more nervous, the sell offs started picking up speed.  On Thursday, October 24, the market lost 11% almost as soon as it opened. Employing a tactic they’d used to stop a crash in 1907, several Wall Street banks banded together and made bids to buy up large chunks of US Steel and other blue chip companies for more than the asking price. By the end of the day, the Dow Jones was only down 6 points (less than 2%). The rally continued on Friday, erasing the rest of the loss. Crisis averted. Or not.

Over the weekend, most of the country’s newspapers carried big stories about the events of Thursday and Friday. All the investors who had borrowed all that money got totally spooked. When the market opened on Monday, October 28, the Dow posted a record loss of 13%. Wall Street was out of options and could do nothing but watch the slide. Many stocks couldn’t find buyers at any price as investors seemed frozen in disbelief. The following day, Black Tuesday, over 16 million shares of stock were traded, a volume record that would stand for next four decades. The Dow lost an additional 12% of its value. The market as a whole lost $30 Billion in just two days. In 1929.

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October 30, 1929 would see a one day rally in prices with the Dow gaining 12% back, but the euphoria was short lived. By November 13, the market had lost nearly 48% of its value. There would be mild gains over the next few months followed by another long decline. The market bottomed out on July 8, 1932 when the Dow closed at just over 41 points, the lowest of any day in the twentieth century, representing a loss of 89% from less than three years before. By that point, the United States, along with the rest of the world, was mired deep into the muck of the Great Depression, by far the biggest financial crisis of modern times.

Also on this day, in Disney history: The Nightmare Before Christmas

October 28 - Macy's Department Store

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On this day, in 1858, the very first RH Macy and Co. store opened in New York City. Rowland Hussey Macy was born on the island of Nantucket in Massachusetts on August 30, 1822. At the ripe old age of fifteen, he took a job on a whaling ship (not an uncommon thing for the young men of the area). During his time at sea, Rowland did what many a sailor has done: he got a tattoo. While some get the name of their sweetheart (or their ship or their mom, depending on their temperament) plastered across a bicep, he choose, for reasons we will never know, a red star placing it either on his hand or his forearm (sources can't seem to agree on this detail and while photographs existed during the latter part of Rowland's life, there is no visual evidence of it preserved for posterity). Anyone familiar with the logo of the chain of stores named after him will immediately recognize the significance of that tattoo.

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Rowland quickly decided that a life at sea wasn't his cup of tea. By the age of eighteen, he'd made his way out to California with his brother Charles. The gold rush was just hitting its peak when the Macy Brothers decided to open a dry goods store in Marysville, the self proclaimed Gateway to the Gold Fields. Unfortunately, the cash flow of miners proved to be too erratic for them and the store folded. Charles stayed in California, while Rowland moved back east. In 1851, he opened another dry goods store in Haverville, Massachusetts hoping to service the woolen mill workers there. That store also failed. Rowland opened two other dry goods stores that would go bankrupt. The good news is that all that failure wasn't going to waste. Rowland was learning how to successfully run a business along the way and by 1858 was primed to actually make a go of one.

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This time, Rowland moved to New York City. He set up his new shop on the corner of 6th Avenue and 14th Street. It was an area pretty far north of any other dry goods store and the relative isolation worked in his favor. That first day of business might not have seemed terribly auspicious (he made only $11.08 worth of sales, about $350 today) but it was the beginning of something big. As business expanded, Rowland began taking over the neighboring buildings, incorporating them into his store and adding all sorts of different goods. Each time he added a new department, he saw a significant bump in sales, which in turn fueled the need for more space and more items for sale. It was a vicious circle with a byproduct of wonderful profits.

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Rowland's success continued throughout the 1860s and 70s, when, in 1875, he brought two family members in as partners. With the addition of his nephew, Robert Valentine, and his cousin's husband, Abiel La Forge, Rowland was able to relax from the rigors of running a business. He didn't actually get to enjoy that relaxation for long, though. He passed away from inflammatory kidney disease while on a trip to Paris, France in March 1877. His new partners didn't get to enjoy their involvement with the company for long either. Abiel died in 1878 and Robert passed in 1879. The store did stay in the hands of the Macy family for another 16 years before being bought out by Isidor and Nathan Straus, who had apparently made good money as licensed third party china sellers in the store for several years.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the Straus Brothers made a momentous decision for their successful retail venture: they decided to move. Closing the store at 14^th Street, they moved even further north to 34^th Street , building a new structure on Harold Square. Opening in 1902, the flagship Macy’s would eventually occupy almost an entire block of prime New York real estate. Still in operation today, the Broadway store boasts over 1.2 million square feet of retail space (with an additional 1.2 million square feet of other space) and is estimated to be worth $3.3 Billion empty. It doesn’t really matter what kind of price tag you put on it, though. The building was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1978, which of course, makes it priceless.

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Since the early 1900s, Macy’s has been through plenty of ups and downs while simultaneously imbedding itself in the national conscience. The famous Thanksgiving Day Parade started in 1924 and has been delighting visitors to New York ever since. I’ve been fortunate enough to see it in person once and while it’s always fun to watch on television, it’s pretty spectacular to be there. The store also became famous for attracting customers during the Christmas season with lavish window displays along Broadway and an in-store Santa. The latter practice was immortalized in the 1947 movie Miracle on 34^th Street. Not all of the publicity that Macy’s has gathered over the years has been positive, however. In 2005 they settled a lawsuit over their security practices when combatting shoplifters. The New York State Attorney General’s Office found that they had violated numerous laws by operating private jails and liberally using handcuffs when dealing with suspected thieves.

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Fiscally, Macy’s has ridden the rollercoaster of bust and boom that has plagued the retail industry somewhat better than most. Somewhat better because while the name still exists, the company itself is nothing like Rowland or the Straus Brothers ever imagined. Macy’s began expanding its presence across the country by buying up smaller regional chains in 1924. This strategy worked fairly well until 1983 when the company lost a bid to buy Federated Department Stores. That loss signaled a shift in Macy’s fortunes. In 1992, Macy’s filed for bankruptcy, narrowly surviving the restructuring process. Two years later, Macy’s and Federated did merge into one entity but at a cost. Federated was now in charge of things, moving the company’s headquarters from New York to Cincinnati, Ohio. The only upshot was that Federated decided that the name Macy’s was more valuable than any other in their portfolio and most of the stores they own have been rebranded under the sign of the red star.

Today, Macy’s is America’s largest department store chain and was last seen at slot 118 on the Fortune 500 list (both of those rankings are based on sales). With over 580 stores, more than 130,000 employees worldwide and more than $25.7 Billion in annual revenue, they’ve come a long way since Rowland first unlocked the front doors 161 years ago.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Elsa Lanchester

October 27 - The Federalist Papers

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On this day, in 1787, the first essay of what collectively became known as the Federalist Papers was published. The Revolutionary War had barely begun before the thirteen American colonies were already trying to figure out how they were going to govern themselves as their own nation. Everyone pretty much agreed that a king was a bad idea, but beyond that, agreements were hard to come by. The Second Continental Congress drew up draft of a constitution for the colonies almost immediately after finishing the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The whole thing was fiercely debated over the next sixteen months as the war raged on and frequently interrupted meetings. By November 1777, a final draft of the Articles of Confederation was hammered out and ready to be ratified by the individual colonies. One month later, Virginia became the first state to sign on to the new nation and, by February 1779, so had everyone but Maryland (the Old Line State had some issues that it took two years to negotiate; they finally ratified the Articles in February 1781). From that point onward, we may have called ourselves the United States of America and we may have been able to finish the war together, but we were United in name only and it was our own fault.

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The Articles of Confederation was a fairly doomed document from the start. Because of everyone’s skittishness about the power of the King, very limited powers were given to the central government. State governments were each individually more powerful than the Feds, which caused far more problems than it solved. Rival states could basically refuse to work with each other and the federal congress didn’t have enough teeth to make them work things out. By 1786, it was pretty clear that the States couldn’t stay United unless the agreement joining them was radically different. In January of that year, James Madison and the Virginia legislature began calling for another convention to discuss amending the Articles of Confederation. Over the next several months, the other state legislatures began to agree that something needed to be done.

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In May 1787, a Constitutional Congress met in Philadelphia and was authorized to make some necessary changes to the Articles of Confederation. Fortunately (in hindsight at any rate), the delegates decided to ignore that narrow authorization, had closed door meetings and drafted an entirely new document. By the end of September 1787, the details had been worked out and the new agreement was ready to be sent to the states for ratification. The new Constitution gave a lot more power to the central government which necessarily took power away from individual states. Naturally this angered quite a few politicians at the state level.

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Almost as soon as the Constitution was announced, people began publishing essays in various papers denouncing it. Not that they did so publicly. Instead it seemed as though several long dead Romans, going by the names Brutus and Cato among others, were warning the American people about this newfangled style of government and how terrible it would be to adopt it. After months of hard work, though, the Founding Fathers weren’t going to take such abuse lying down. Alexander Hamilton decided that the case needed to be made for the Constitution. He teamed up with John Jay, the future Governor of New York and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, to write a series of pro essays that would also be published in newspapers anonymously (even though Alexander’s chosen pen name, Publius, was one he’d used before). When John became too ill to continue after writing just four of them, Alexander turned to James Madison who filled in quite admirably.

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All told, the three men would write 85 essays together, with Hamilton composing the most at 51. The articles were so well thought out that many scholars think someone would be hard pressed to write better arguments for the Constitution today. The first 77 essays were published between October 27, 1787 and April 1788. By then, there was considerable interest in having all of them together in one place. In March and May 1788, two volumes were published under the title The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787 (you can see why they quickly became referred to as the Federalist Papers). The remaining eight essays were then published individually in newspapers the following June and July.

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Ironically, it’s doubtful that the Federalist Papers had much influence on whether or not the states ratified the new Constitution, the whole reason they were written to begin with. By the time they were printed, several states had already voted to ratify. By the time the Papers were ready to be used in debates in New York, ten other states had passed resolutions to accept it. Since only nine were needed to make it official, if New York hadn’t jumped on board, they would have been awkwardly out on their own.

The real influence of the Papers actually came later. Starting soon after their publication (and continuing right up to today), the judicial branch of the government uses them to help decide what the Founding Fathers meant when trying to interpret decidedly fuzzy parts of the constitution. The Federalist has been quoted nearly 300 times in decisions made by the Supreme Court alone. Which hasn’t been without controversy itself. Chief Justice John Marshall once said that if you couldn’t find meaning in the text of the Constitution itself, you shouldn’t go digging for it in the extracurricular writings of a few of its framers. Which, of course, didn’t stop him from mining the Federalist when it suited him.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Walt Disney's Disneyland

October 26 - The Erie Canal

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On this day, in 1825, after eight years of construction, the Erie Canal was finally finished, joining the Hudson River to Lake Erie. As early as the 1724, the people of New York saw a need for an easier way to get from New York City to the Great Lakes. Roads at that time were pretty rudimentary, making travelling by horse drawn carriage faster than walking but still time consuming and unpleasant. Boats were much smoother on the joints and potentially much faster (depending on whether the river was flowing towards your destination or not). While the Hudson River, the one that emptied into the Atlantic Ocean there in New York City, allowed for goods to travel deep into the area north of Manhattan, it only went so far and only in that one direction. In order to get goods to the western part of the state (and, by extension, the rest of the country), you had to put them into wagons and go over land. There weren’t any waterways that went in that direction and railroads didn’t exist yet. Wouldn’t it be great, folks began to dream, if ships could sail all the way to the Great Lakes?

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The early proposal for building a canal couldn’t get off the ground, but the idea didn’t go away. It was revived in the 1780s and again in 1807 when it began to gain some traction. The following year, land was selected, a survey was done and all that was left to do was systematically wear down the opposition to such a large undertaking. And perhaps the biggest objection to the project was the scale of it. Whether it was the 360 miles that lay between the Hudson and Lake Erie, or the fact that the land rose more than 600 feet in elevation between those two points, the Canal was considered a foolish undertaking based on the engineering requirements alone. If you factored in the fact that the route had to cross the northern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains and would require the removal of tons of limestone (besides all the run of the mill dirt), it’s no wonder that President Jefferson rejected the idea declaring that it was “just short of madness” to even try. The canal’s backers then went to work on New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, who bought into the promise of economic prosperity the endeavor could bring and approved it.

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Construction began on July 4, 1817 in Rome, New York and progressed slowly at first. The United States didn’t have any civil engineers at the time and the men overseeing the project were amateurs at surveying at best. The first 25 miles of canal didn’t open until 1819, a rate of digging that meant the whole 363 miles would take nearly thirty years to complete. Fortunately, the men engaged in the work were learning better ways of doing it as they went along and the pace picked up. With a large influx of immigrants, mostly from Ireland, providing a cheap and ready labor force to go along with the innovations, the final 338 miles, ending at the eastern tip of Lake Erie in Buffalo, only took six more years.

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In spite of frequently being referred to as Clinton’s Folly during the preceding eight years, the economic impact of the Erie Canal was felt almost immediately and would be the main driver behind New York’s dominance of the national scene for years to come. The canal was designed to accommodate 1.5 million tons of freight a year. Within a month of opening, it was clear that number was woefully small. In less than a year, the tolls collected from use of the Canal surpassed the amount of debt of the state of New York incurred in building it. And much to the builder’s surprise, it wasn’t just freight that rode the new waterway. More than 40,000 tourists, businessmen and settlers travelled via the canal just in 1825. Food costs on the east coast dropped and machinery poured into the Midwest. Communities sprang up along the canal’s route as did cottage industries catering specifically to flatboat passengers. Business was booming in every possible way for everyone and anything connected to the Erie Canal.

The first expansion of the Erie Canal started in 1834, just nine years after fully opening. The canal was made almost twice as wide and twice as deep over the next 28 years. At the same time, several feeder canals were added to the waterway, turning it into a bona fide transportation system. One went between the Erie Canal and the Finger Lakes in the south and another connected with Lake Champlain in the north. Even as railroads began being built across the same area in the 1850s, traffic on the Erie Canal still continued at a pace far beyond the originators wildest imaginations.

In 1903, New York announced that it was revamping the whole canal system, largely by building a new one. The public response ranged from questions as to why this was needed to absolute outrage over the project. Most of the outrage came from communities that had prospered from the Erie Canal but were going to be bypassed by the new Barge Canal (it used several natural rivers the planners of the original had avoided on purpose). The state forged ahead anyways and opened the new canal system in 1918, effectively ending the era of the Erie Canal (in spite of the fact that large chunks of it were incorporated in the new route). The Barge Canal still proved popular for moving freight, reaching a total 5.2 million short tons of goods as late as 1951. The push by President Eisenhower to improve America’s roadways and the resulting rise in the trucking industry would be the final nail in the canal’s coffin. It steadily declined in use until the 1970s, when the state stopped making improvements to it all together.

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Parts of the Old Erie Canal (as pre-1918 canal is now called) still exist and can still be used. Many sections have been filled in and become surface streets, like Erie Boulevard in Syracuse, or even subway routes in Rochester. Several small chunks have turned into municipal parks and one 36 mile stretch between Rome and DeWitt is a state park. And who knows? If you live in New York you might even still get something that was shipped on the state’s canal system. It’s mostly used for items too big to transport by rail or road, but as recently as 2012, over 43,000 tons of stuff still moved on it.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Bob Hoskins

October 25 - William Higinbotham

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On this day, in 1910, William Higinbotham, contributing inventor of the atomic bomb and early video game designer, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. William did most of his growing up in Caledonia, New York before moving to Massachusetts to attend Williams College. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1932, he really stepped out of his comfort zone, hiking all the way to New York City to continue his studies at Cornell University. His area of expertise was the burgeoning field of electronics. When World War II started with a bang, William began working for the federal government at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping to develop a radar system for the military, including the display found in B-28 bombers. After two years on that project, he was moved out to New Mexico in 1943 to become part of the top secret group creating the nuclear bomb. As head of the electronics team for the Manhattan Project, William was responsible for the bomb’s ignition system. He was present at the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, and it profoundly affected his worldview.

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William immediately realized the implications of the Bomb and knew, now that the genie was out of the bottle, that everything must be done to contain him as much as possible. In February 1946, just months after the weapon he helped create ended World War II, he co-founded the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit group dedicated to the non-proliferation of nuclear devices. William served as the first Chairman of the FAS and over the next four decades would hold various positions including Executive Secretary, Council member and even Chairman again. The FAS counted among its major political victories the defeat of a bill that would have put nuclear research under the control of the military and the creation of the US Atomic Energy Commission.

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In 1947, William began working at Brookhaven National Laboratory for the AEC in the job he would hold for the rest of his career. Eleven years into his tenure, he was in charge of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven and created something that was years ahead of its time. The laboratory held an annual exhibition it called Visitor Days. William noticed that most of the displays were fairly static and dry (a nice way to say boring). He thought it might liven things up a bit if there was a game people could play that would showcase some of the work being done at Brookhaven and be entertaining at the same time. Enlisting the help of two colleagues, David Potter and Robert Dvorak Sr, he created a tennis simulation that involved separate controllers for each player and displayed the ball bouncing over a net on an oscilloscope screen (the round screen that you always see radar on in the movies). He says it took about two hours for him to make a rough design of the system and Potter and Dvorak about two weeks to build and debug it.

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Tennis for Two, considered by many to be the world’s first video game (it preceded Pong, the first video game anyone remembers, by fourteen years), debuted at the 1958 Visitor Days and was an instant hit. Hundreds of visitors lined up to play the game throughout the entire event. One of the interesting aspects of Tennis, at least from a post-Pong perspective, is that the action was viewed from the side rather than from above. That means that players watched the ball arc up and over a stationary net rather than seeing the ball simply move from one side of the screen to the other and back. When the exhibition rolled around the following year, a second version of Tennis for Two was created which incorporated a bigger screen and options to do things like increase or decrease the effect of gravity on the ball to simulate playing on other planets. And then the game quietly disappeared. Since William amassed more than 20 patents during his lifetime for various ideas relating to electronics, he was asked near the end of his life why no one ever patented Tennis. He said he had no personal reason to as the patent would have belonged to the government, not him and the government thought the whole idea was a lot of silliness with no practical value (never mind the fact that the video game industry had sales of more than $43 Billion just in the US in 2018).

In 1974, William began acting as technical director on the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, a quarterly publication of Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (Brookhaven is one of the sustaining members of the INMM). While he retired from the Lab in 1984, he would continue to assist with the Journal for the rest of his life. He passed away on November 10, 1994 in Gainsville, Georgia, hoping that he would be remembered more for his work on nuclear nonproliferation than for his work in creating video games, but we don’t always get what we want. Not that his son didn’t try. Every time someone contacted him about Tennis for Two, he would insist that they mention the FAS alongside it. At least the FAS itself was listening. Shortly after William’s death they named their national headquarters Higinbotham Hall.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Walt Disney World

October 24 - Blanche Scott

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On this day, in 1910, Blanche Stuart Scott became the first woman to fly a plane in a public event. Born on April 8, 1884 in Rochester, New York, Blanche fell in love with powerful machines at an early age. Her father, a successful manufacturer and salesman of patent medicine, bought one of the early American car models. Blanche used to gleefully drive it around the city, drawing the attention and ire of the Rochester City Council, but at that time there was no minimum driving age and the thirteen year old was allowed to continue. By 1900, Blanche’s parents were worried about their daughter’s wild, tomboyish tendencies and packed her off to a finishing school. Whether or not she was turned into a more socially acceptable example of the feminine sex, one thing is certain: her finishing did nothing to dampen her adventurous spirit.

1910 was a big year for Blanche. In the first part of the year she became the second woman in America to drive a car from coast to coast. The trip was sponsored by the Willys-Overland Company, later known for its design of Jeeps for the military, and intended to show that a woman could not only travel from New York City to San Francisco, but could make all the necessary repairs to her car herself. Blanche’s only travelling companion was a reporter, Gertrude Phillips. It isn't clear what needed to be done to the car on the trip (or whether Blanche fixed things herself) but the two women did arrive unscathed in San Francisco 68 days after leaving New York. Why did it take so long? Maybe because outside of cities, America only had a grand total of 218 miles of paved roads at the time. 

Image courtesy airandspace.si.edu

Significantly, Blanche's cross country route went through Ohio, where she got to see the Wright Brothers and their flying machine in action outside of Dayton. If that wasn't thrilling enough, she accepted an offer in California to actually ride in an airplane. By the time she got back to New York, Blanche knew exactly what her next challenge was going to be: training as a pilot. The publicity from her car exploits was enough to catch the attention of Glenn Curtis, one of the country's pioneers in aviation. He reluctantly agreed to teach Blanche how to fly a plane. In August 1910, the lessons began. To basically keep her grounded until she knew what she was doing, a block of wood was installed under the gas pedal. Theoretically, that meant the plane would never get enough speed to take off. It's unclear what happened on September 2, but Blanche was alone in the plane when it soared to a height of about 40 feet. After a few moments in the sky, she brought the aircraft in for a gentle landing. It was the first time, albeit entirely unintentional, that a woman had solo flown an aircraft. That is also an unofficial first because of dubious reporting issues. Because it isn't possible to pinpoint whether Blanche took her solo hop on September 2 or September 9 or somewhere in between, the Aeronautical Society of America officially credits Bessica Medler Raische with the first female solo flight on September 16 of the same year. Since they don't deny that Blanche took a hop, the just object to the lack of an exact date, I think it's a moot point. All of the dates that Blanche may have done it on precede Bessica's date, so she wins.

Image courtesy wikipedia.org

What isn't in dispute is that Blanche became the first woman to pilot an airplane in a public event. Impressed with her skills, Curtis offered her a position in his flying exhibition team. Her first event took place just weeks after her lessons in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Dubbed the Tomboy of the Air (a nickname I'm sure mortified her parents), Blanche became quite the stunt flyer, perfecting the "death dive" maneuver which involved soaring to 4000 feet, plummeting to 200 feet and pulling up at the last possible moment. She didn't relegate herself to just air shows though. She also began setting distance records for women, flying 10 miles in July 1911 and then 25 miles less than a month later. In 1912 she signed on with another aviation pioneer, Glenn Martin, becoming the first female test pilot for him. She flew most of his prototypes that year, many of them before the blueprints were even close to being finalized. By 1916, amid a growing concern over the public's appetite for plane crashes (she'd had one herself in 1913 that kept her out of the air for several months) and disgust with the lack of positions available in the industry for women, Blanche exited the pilot's seat for the last time. Not that she was done with firsts by a long shot.

Image courtesy imdb.com

What does a girl do when she's done flying planes? She turns to screenwriting, of course. It's not as far fetched as it seems because she'd already starred in the first film about flying, The Aviator's Success, and a second flying movie, The Aviator and the Autoist Race for a Bride, both in 1912. Reaching out to her Hollywood contacts, she began writing scripts for RKO Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal. During the early Twenties, she was the studio manager for an outfit in Long Island, New York. Throughout the Thirties, she also starred in, wrote and produced various radio shows that aired on networks in California and her native Rochester. Then she decided to get back into aviation, sort of.

Image courtesy mysticstamp.com

On September 6, 1948, Blanche chalked up another first when she became the first female to ride in a jet plane (and it was piloted by none other that Chuck Yeager to boot). Following that historic flight, the accolade period of her life began. The Aeronautics Association of the United States honored her in 1953. A year later, she was hired on as a consultant to the United States Air Force Museum, eventually helping them gather together over $1,000,000 worth of early aviation memorabilia. And in 1960, the Antique Airplane Association honored her on the fiftieth anniversary of her first flight (they clearly agreed with me about her and Bessica). Blanche passed away at Genesee Hospital in the same city she entered life, Rochester, New York, on January 12, 1970. Since her passing she has continued to rack up accolades including a United States postage stamp (air mail of course) issued on December 30, 1980 and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2005.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Lucille Martin