December 7, 1941 is the day the attack on Pearl Harbor took place. A day later The United States and Great Britain declared war on Japan. World War two now had its two largest combatants fully engaged. The war would intensify as man’s inhumanity to man scaled new and scientific heights.
The United States had been assisting its old allies Britain and France with weapons and funds since the beginning of the war in 1939. So soon after the end of the Great War (914-1918), Britain was ill equipped to wage another campaign. The U.S. had declared itself neutral and Adolph Hitler had stated on several occasions he had no desire to go to war with the United States.
Less than half an hour after FDR finished his speech and he request for a declaration of war, Congress passed a resolution to enter a state of war with Japan. The vote was unanimous. A similar vote in the house had only one vote against. Before lunch on December 8, 1941 America was at war.
On December 1, 1887 the first story about the fictional but historically famous British sleuth Sherlock Holmes was published. The story was “A Study in Scarlet” and first appeared in “Beeton’s Christmas Annual” capturing front page space. The work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is well known in popular fiction, television and cinema. But the man behind the man is a little less familiar.
Born May 22, 1859, Doyle was still in his 20s when he created the character of Sherlock Holmes. It wasn’t an easy upbringing for Doyle and his family and his experience colored the man he was to be. Born into a Scottish family to a story telling mother and alcoholic father, Doyle was sent to England for his schooling. Being Scottish, he was teased by his English classmates and had a hard time adjusting. He did discover however that he had inherited his mother talents for story telling and writing.
Doyle left school at 17 bolstered rather than beaten down by his upbringing and circumstances. Despite coming from a family of well known artists, Doyle chose medicine as his career path. Perhaps this is where the character of Dr. Watson came into being. Doyle chose to be the foil to his own imagination rather than the central character of his books.
The character of Holmes actually came from a college professor Doyle met during his schooling. A master of logical deduction and puzzle solving, the professor inspired Doyle and influenced his writing.
As a medical student, Doyle was offered a position as a ship’s doctor and had the opportunity to travel to the Arctic. Throughout his travels and during his studies, Doyle was publishing short stories to make a little extra money. Although he did work as a doctor both off and on board ship, Doyle encountered many circumstances that left him poor and dissatisfied.
Eventually, Doyle set up his own practice in Plymouth, England and worked hard as a doctor during the day and as an author at night. He spent a year perfecting and drafting “A Study in Scarlet”. Despite trying out other characters and story lines after this, it was the Sherlock Holmes mysteries that changed Doyle’s life and catapulted him toward literary fame.
Doyle wrote, married, had children, traveled and wrote some more. He was a dedicated and passionate author. In 1893, Doyle killed off the Holmes character disappointing thousands of fans but Doyle had other things on his mind. His father died, his wife became fatally ill and he sank into depression. Doyle’s later life was filled with paranormal investigation, trips to America, service in Africa during the Boer war, a new marriage, more children and of course, writing stories, plays and poetry to solidify his place as one of Britain’s most celebrated Victorian writers. He passed away in 1930.
Many writers yearn for the talent and luck of a man like Arthur Conan Doyle. Few are aware of the colorful and sometimes dark life he had to lead in order to color his pen just so. Still, because of him we have Holmes and Watson and remain historically grateful.
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Video game systems for the home are a multi-million dollar industry and the current popular consoles from companies like Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are technological marvels with games that look more like movies than like video games. The thing all of these systems have in common is they owe their existence to one of the earliest arcade video games that was translated into a home version and was responsible for the beginning of the video game industry. The game released in 1972 by Atari is PONG which is a game based on tennis and has simple graphics by today’s standards but was a phenomenon when it was first released. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell assigned the task of designing the game to Allan Alcorn as a training exercise. Alcorn was experienced with electrical engineering and computer science but had never designed games before so this was way to get him accustomed to creating games. Bushnell based his idea on an electronic table tennis game he had seen for the Magnavox Odyssey video game system. The game is played either by one player versus to computer or two players against each other by controlling a paddle that moves vertically on the screen. A ball is volleyed back and forth and points are scored by hitting to ball past the opponents paddle. Shortly after the game was released in bars and arcades, other companies created their own versions of PONG.
Atari added features to their designs and to stay ahead of the competition and they pushed their employees to design and create new games. In 1974, an Atari employee named Harold Lee suggested making a version of Pong for the home that would work with television sets. Atari promoted the idea to some companies who thought the product was too much of a risk and turned them down. Sears was interested in the product and offered an exclusive deal to sell the product with the Sears Tele-Games logo. The product launched on a limited basis during the Christmas season of 1975 and was an instant success selling approximately 150,000 units. Predictably, other companies jumped on the band wagon and released their own home versions of the game adding variations and other features. To try and stay ahead, Atari released new versions over the years with elements such as 4 players working together in pairs or playing against each other.
Born in Albany in 1874, Charles Fort, the so-called “father of modern phenomenalism, ” was something of a factotum in his early years. After a formative trek from England to the south of Africa, Fort spent the next decade of life working odd jobs, while attempting to gain a foothold as a newsman and science fiction novelist. During this time, Fort produced ten books — only one of which ever saw publication.
Fort’s interest in seeking out anomalous phenomena seems be an outgrowth of an inborn anti-authoritarian streak. Never in his work does he to claim to know the cause of these freak occurrences outright; rather, he merely points to the inability of then-modern day science to account for events that shouldn’t be possible, yet were witnessed by dozens – and sometimes hundreds – of bystanders. 
Such theories, however, may have been yet another mode for Fort to thumb his at the powers-that-be. He labeled himself an intellectual agnostic and wrote in the very first chapter of Lo! that “I believe nothing of my own that I have ever written.” After his death in 1932, Fort’s many followers carried on his curiosity driven crusade, eventually resulting in the founding of The Fortean Society the very same year and The International Fortean Organization in 1965.
Most of us are familiar with record players even though MP3 players, Compact Discs, and other digital media are the current popular technologies. Record players and their vinyl discs are making a comeback and is a nostalgic item for those of us old enough to remember when they were the best way to have music other than the radio. The phonograph is not a new technology but the history and development of it is fascinating. The first device built to record sound waves was invented in 1857 by Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.
In 1886, Cichester Bell and Charles Tainter patented the Graphophone which used wax coated vertical cylinders to record and produce the sounds. These cylinders used a different way of recording and playback. Edison’s devices were patented specifying an embossed technique which produced a three dimensional image on the medium. The Bell and Tainter device was called the Graphophone and used engraving which cuts grooves into the surface. Then in 1887, Emile Berliner developed the Gramophone which used a wax and zinc coated disc that recorded the motion of the stylus. An acid bath firmed the groove the stylus had created and removed any excess material so the recording could be played back.
