Google parent company Alphabet’s internet-beaming Project Loon balloons have taken on their first commercial task. The high-flying communications aircraft are now providing thousands of Kenyans with internet access.
Kennedy Mitchum, a recent college graduate from Missouri, believes that the dictionary’s current first definition of racism is too simple and too often employed to dismiss concerns and avoid accountability.
Defined as “a pronoun of choice for someone who doesn’t identify as either male or female,” searches for the definition of the non-binary pronoun rose by 313% in the last year.
The iPhone launched on June 29, 2007, when Apple opened its stores to buyers who had waited hours, sometimes days, for a $499 glass rectangle with no keyboard and no instruction manual. Steve Jobs had unveiled it months earlier as “an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator,” and the audience laughed, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t.
The first mobile phone call rang out on a Manhattan sidewalk in April 1973, when Motorola engineer Martin Cooper lifted a 2.5-pound prototype to his ear and dialed his rival at Bell Labs. Passersby thought it was a film shoot. It would take another decade before anyone could actually buy one.
The first email was sent in 1971, when engineer Ray Tomlinson typed a throwaway string of characters and pinged it between two computers sitting side by side in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office. He also picked the @ symbol as the separator — a split-second choice still shaping how billions of people reach each other today.
ARPANET sent its first message on October 29, 1969, when a UCLA graduate student typed “l” and “o” to a computer at Stanford Research Institute 350 miles away before the system crashed. Built by grad students on refrigerator-sized machines, those two letters marked the quiet beginning of the networked world we now inhabit.
The Oxford English Dictionary is now the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press.
Faroese returned to the page in 1854, when scholar Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb and Icelandic grammarian Jón Sigurðsson published a written standard after three centuries in which the language survived only in speech and song. They rooted the spelling in Old Norse so it could be read across every island dialect — a quiet act of linguistic democracy that still shapes a language spoken by around 69,000 people today.
Morse code took shape in the mid-1830s, when American artist Samuel Morse sketched a way to send language through wire as electrical pulses. Engineer Alfred Vail refined it by 1840, counting movable type at a New Jersey newspaper to assign the shortest signals to the most common letters. It was the first time a message could outrun a horse.
