Jan. 12, 1992 or 1997: HAL of a Computer


Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen or read 2001: A Space Odyssey, this article contains details that reveal important plot developments. So, if you like to be a tabula rasa when you view a film or read a novel, stop here.

1992, or maybe 1997: HAL 9000, the master computer aboard the Discovery spaceship in the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, becomes operational. He will inspire millions of dreams — and some nightmares — of artificial intelligence.

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First, the year: When astronaut Dave Bowman is removing the hardware modules that govern the computer’s higher cognitive functions, HAL regresses to his infancy and begins an eerie recitation of bits of his earliest knowledge: “I am a HAL 9000 Computer Production No. 3. I became operational at the H—A—L plant in Urbana, Illinois, on the 12th of January, 1992.”

At least that’s what HAL says in the 1968 film. Director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke co-wrote the screenplay, inspired by Clarke’s 1950 short story “The Sentinel.” The film was not based on a novel, but Clarke soloed a novelized version of the screenplay. In the novel, he changed HAL’s birth year to 1997.

Now, the name: Chapter 16 of the novel clearly states that HAL stands for “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer.” Many film viewers, however, thought HAL was a one-letter-ahead cipher for IBM. In his book The Lost Worlds of 2001, Clarke dismissed that idea as embarrassing, given all the help IBM had given to the film: “We … would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence.”

In fact, HAL’s original name was Athena, goddess of war, wisdom and fertility, but Kubrick decided a male personality and voice would be better for a menacing supercomputer. Martin Balsam was cast first for the role, but was dropped because his voice was too emotional. Canadian Shakespearean actor Douglas Rain won the role with neutral, unctuous tones.

The place: Urbana, Illinois is home to the University of Illinois and — since 1986 — the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which developed the first web browser, Mosaic. HAL’s lobotomy monologue in the book mentions his first instructor, Dr. Chandra. In fact, the only Chandra at UI in 1968 was a Mr. Shasti Chandra. He was writing his thesis on spacecraft attitude control, but told a reporter he had nothing to do with making the film.

The movie cost $10.5 million ($66 million in today’s money) and premiered in New York City on April 3, 1968. The dazzling special effects did not impress all the critics: The New York Times described 2001 as “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring,” while Pauline Kael deemed it “monumentally unimaginative.” Kubrick promptly cut 19 minutes from the film, and the final cut debuted three days later.

HAL also appears in three sequels: 2010: The Year We Make Contact (aka 2010: Odyssey Two), 2061: Odyssey Three and 3001: The Final Odyssey. In 2010, Dr. Chandra further pooh-poohs the IBM-HAL name theory.

Source: The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, ed. Jerome Agel, Signet, 1970

Image: Dave Bowman starts dismantling HAL 9000’s central core in the Discovery.
Courtesy MGM

This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 12, 2009.

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Jan. 11, 1922: Insulin Makes a Nice Shot

1922: Insulin is used for the first time to treat diabetes in a human being.

During a clinical test at the University of Toronto, an injection of bovine insulin was administered to 14-year-old Leonard Thompson by endocrinologist Frederick Banting, who had been researching ways of extracting insulin from the pancreas. The boy suffered an allergic reaction to the first injection, but further work improved the extract. A second injection administered a few weeks later was successful.

Banting was then able to produce large quantities of insulin, but the process remained impure until pharmaceutical maker Eli Lilly offered its assistance. Banting cut a deal with the drug company, and insulin came into common use.

For his work, Banting, along with collaborator John James Rickard Mcleod, was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Source: Wikipedia

Photo: Insulin crystals

This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 11, 2007.

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Jan. 10, 1863: Take the Tube

1863: London inaugurates the world’s first subway service. Approximately 40,000 Londoners ride the trains the first day.

The original line ran from Paddington Station to Farringdon Street, via Edgware Road, Baker Street, Portland Road (now Great Portland Street), Gower Street (now Euston Square) and King’s Cross. The train took 18 minutes to make the 3¾-mile journey. By 1880 the line was carrying 40 million passengers a year.

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Despite its success, it was not widely copied for more than three decades. The next metro subways to open were Budapest and Glasgow in 1896. Boston opened in 1897, Paris in 1900 and New York in 1904.

The system relied on steam-driven trains, which made proper ventilation critical. There were also several independent companies operating the trains, making logistics a nightmare.

By the 20th century, however, trains had been electrified and tunneling methods improved. The system, which became known as the Underground, was largely consolidated by 1902 under the ownership of American tycoon Charles Yerkes.

But it wasn’t until 1933 before all the lines came under the control of a public corporation called the London Passenger Transport Board. Governance of the system has successively passed to the London Transport Executive (1948), London Transport Board (1963), London Transport Executive (again, 1970), London Regional Transport (1984) and Transport for London (2000).

During World War II, Underground stations were used as ad hoc air raid shelters during the Blitz.

Today the Underground comprises 11 lines (not counting the Dockland Lights Railway or the converted suburban rail lines of the London Overground), serving 270 stations in metropolitan London. The system carries roughly a billion passengers per year, making it one of the largest in the world. By comparison, the New York City subway system carries 1.6 billion passengers annually and Tokyo 3.1 billion.

Source: Various

Photo: Underground trains at Earl’s Court Station.
Tom Page/Flickr

An earlier version of this article appeared on Wired.com Jan. 10, 2007.

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Jan. 7, 1851: Foucault Gets the Swing of Things

Foucault Pendulum

1851: Léon Foucault uses a pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. It is the first direct visual evidence not based on watching the stars circle in the sky.

Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was born in 1819. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, but he dropped out of medical school when he made his first scientific discovery: He couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

Without formal scientific training, he worked as a lab assistant and continued tinkering. He used the new Daguerreotype photographic process to take the first photograph of the sun. Together with Armand Fizeau, in 1850 he devised a way to use rotating mirrors to measure the speed of light. They observed that light travels more slowly in water than in air.

Scientists had been trying for two centuries to drop objects from towers and measure their drift as the planet spun beneath them. It didn’t work: too quick, too crude, too many interfering factors.

Foucault had an insight. A pendulum hanging on a wire and swinging directly north and south would appear to the observer to slowly move its plane of oscillation as the Earth turned underneath it.

To grasp this, just picture a pendulum at the North Pole. It starts at zero degrees longitude and swings back and forth, as the Earth spins below it. For every hour it’s going back and forth, the Earth will have moved 15 degrees of longitude eastward. The effect is less farther away from the poles, but it’s still there.

After weeks of work in the cellar of his home, Foucault hung a 5-kilogram [11-pound] pendulum from a 2-meter [6½-foot] cable in January 1851. He observed a small clockwise motion of the pendulum’s apparent plane of oscillation. The pendulum was going straight back and forth, but the Earth moved for Foucault.

(Sources disagree on whether the crucial experiment took place on Jan. 6, Jan. 7 or Jan. 8. We’ve taken the middle course here.)

Foucault refined his apparatus and also derived his “sine law” showing the governing influence of latitude on how much a free-swinging pendulum would move. Specifically, the angular speed (in clockwise degrees per sidereal day) is 360 times the sine of the latitude. A Foucault pendulum will rotate through a full 360 degrees at the North Pole (the sine of 90 degrees is 1), but not at all at the equator (the sine of zero degrees is zero).

Foucault arranged a demonstration for the scientists of Paris on Feb. 3. He told them, “You are invited to see the Earth turn.” And so they did, as they watched Foucault’s pendulum move on an 11-meter [36-foot] wire at the Paris observatory.

French President Louis Napoleon was a science buff, and he arranged for Foucault to give a public demonstration of his remarkable pendulum on March 31. Under the lofty roof of the Pantheon in Paris, Foucault hung a 62-pound brass sphere on a 220-foot cable. A pointer attached to the bottom of the sphere traced patterns in sand on a low wood platform.

The public was dazzled. President Napoleon soon became Emperor Napoleon III, and he gave Foucault the position of Physicist Attached to the Imperial Observatory. While there, Foucault’s work on the centrifugal governor improved the precision of surveying instruments.

Despite Foucault’s imperial support, the university-trained scientists of Paris sniffed at him as an unschooled upstart. They turned him down several times for membership in the French Academy of Sciences, before finally admitting him in 1865. Foucault died in 1868 at the age of 49.

Source: Various

Photo: Foucault pendulums are a popular feature in science museums around the world. This one hangs out in the National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan. For reasons explained above, you’ll see more rotation in Reykjavik or Punta Arenas than in Nairobi or Quito.
Photo: sylvar/Flickr

This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 7, 2009. We’ve taken it out for another spin.

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Jan. 6, 1912: Birth of the Supreme Tech Skeptic

1912: French social critic Jacques Ellul is born. He will become a thoughtful skeptic who worries about the negative impact of technology on the human condition.

Jacques Ellul wore many hats: sociologist, philosopher, humanist, theologian, law professor. He studied the work of Karl Marx and embraced a good deal of Marxist theory, which he did not consider in conflict with his religious beliefs. The son of an atheist father and Christian mother (.pdf), he was raised without religious training. He became a Christian at 22, and his strong faith — Ellul defined himself as a Christian universalist — underpinned all his work.

In his cosmopolitan family, Ellul grew up with a distrust of statism, which partially explains his attraction to Marx. His took an active role in the French Resistance during World War II.

He was the rare French intellectual who remained a provincial all his life. He did not beeline it for Paris, as most of his contemporaries did, choosing instead to remain in the seaport town of Bordeaux, where he was born. He was a professor at the university there for most of his career.

Ellul’s ambivalence toward technology was grounded in large part in his religious and social convictions. He believed that “technological tyranny,” represented by the increasing encroachment of modern technology into our private lives, posed a threat to both human freedom and faith.

He wrote widely on the subject, including the 1964 book, The Technological Society, which is considered his most important work. Ellul was not critical of technology per se, but with the ways it is used by some to impose their will on others. He was especially critical of mass-media outlets, which he believed are completely manipulated by powerful and generally antagonistic special interests.

He wrote:

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed, precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the link between the individual and the demands of the technological society.

One has to wonder what Ellul, who died in 1994, would have made of the internet’s long reach.

Source: Various

Photo: Jacques Ellul taught at the Institute for Political Studies in Bordeaux, France, from 1937 until 1980, gaining international fame as a critic of technology’s effect on society.
Sophie Bassouls

This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 6, 2009.

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Jan. 5, 1972: Nixon OKs ‘Low-Cost’ Space Shuttle

1972: President Richard M. Nixon announces that NASA will develop a space shuttle system, touting its reliability, reusability and low cost.

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The Mercury and Gemini programs had put Americans into Earth orbit. Apollo had been to the moon seven times — landing four times — and would return to land twice again later in 1972.

But NASA wanted a reusable rocket ship to explore Earth orbit and to supply and staff a space station. Nixon gave the go-ahead:

I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970s into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980s and ’90s.

This system will center on a space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back. It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. In short, it will go a long way toward delivering the rich benefits of practical space utilization and the valuable spinoffs from space efforts into the daily lives of Americans and all people.

NASA director James Fletcher’s remarks referred once again to the shuttle’s “modest budget” and reduced complexity. The plan was to make 48 flights a year (.pdf) at about $50 million per launch ($260 million in today’s money).

Starting in 1981, the shuttles have made 132 space flights in 30 years, averaging four or five missions a year. The years immediately following the Challenger and Columbia disasters saw no flights. 1985 had a record high nine missions, and 1990 to 1997 averaged eight flights a year.

University of Colorado researcher Roger Pielke Jr. calculated in early 2005 that the shuttle program to that point had cost $145 billion, or about $1.3 billion per flight. (Based on a 1995 midpoint, that’s about $1.9 billion per flight in today’s dollars.)

The Apollo program cost a total $19.4 billion from 1960 to 1973. That averages almost $2.2 billion for each of the nine lunar missions. (Based on a 1967 midpoint, that would be about $14 billion each today.)

So, space shuttle flights have certainly been less expensive than Apollo lunar missions. But even adjusting for inflation and despite their many achievements, shuttle launches cost seven or eight times what was promised.

Source: Various

Photo: The first flight of the Space Shuttle Orbiter Endeavour launched on May 7, 1992.
NASA

An earlier version of this article appeared on Wired.com Jan. 5, 2009.

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Jan. 3, 1957: Electric Watch Debuts, a Space Age Marvel

1957: The Hamilton Electric 500 is announced at a press conference. It is the first battery-operated electric wristwatch and the first to never need winding.

The 500 was made by the Hamilton Watch Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which began developing the timepiece in 1946. Eleven years later, that development was not yet complete but the company, feeling the pressure of competition and wanting badly to be the first out the door with this innovation, called the press conference and went into production.

It was an instant hit at a time when “progress” was the watchword and all eyes looked expectantly to the future. And it was, briefly, the “watch of the future,” with its ultramodern design and cutting-edge technology. But there were fundamental problems with the 500 that soon became apparent.

Battery life was relatively short, for one thing, so while winding was no longer necessary, frequent battery replacement — in some ways a more arduous chore — was. And “newer” doesn’t always mean “better,” which the 500 proved by being prone to failure, making it less reliable than the standard wind-up watch.

In the end, though, Hamilton’s technology was not only flawed, but transitional: The watch’s hands were driven by a complex wheel train. By the late 1960s, quartz movements — with many fewer parts — had arrived, and Hamilton ended production in 1969.

The 500 is now a highly prized collectors’ piece.

Source: hamiltonwristwatch.com

Photo: The watch battery is smaller than the button on the shirt cuff.
Bettmann/Corbis

This article first appeared on Wired.com Jan. 3, 2008.

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Dec. 31, 1938: Set 'em Up, Joe … for a Breath Test

1938: Cops in Indianapolis put the drunkometer to its first practical New Year’s Eve test as a breath analyzer. It proves a success.

The drunkometer, which some of you older imbibers might remember from when the cop made you breathe into a balloon, was invented by Dr. Rolla N. Harger, an Indiana University biochemist, in 1931. He patented his device in 1936 and helped draft the act that made it the legal method for helping establish blood-alcohol level.

Harger’s drunkometer, a model of simplicity, was the first tool to successfully measure alcohol levels using breath analysis. The subject being tested blew into a balloon. The captured air was then mixed with a chemical solution, which changed color if alcohol was present. The darker the solution became, the more alcohol contained in the breath.

From there, the level of alcohol in the person’s bloodstream was estimated using a mathematical formula, which Harger also developed. As he pushed for his patent, Harger also pushed to outlaw drunk driving, which, in the wake of Prohibition’s end, was becoming more than a nuisance.

Simple as it was, Harger’s device had been a long time coming. Attempts to measure alcohol levels by measuring breath content date back to the late 1700s. Prior to the drunkometer, the only effective method was through the direct testing of blood or urine samples. While effective, both methods were cumbersome and costly — not to mention completely irrelevant in terms of preventing trouble. The beauty of Harger’s method was that police could pull drunk drivers off the road before an accident occurred.

Inebriation is apparently a subject of some interest in Indiana. In 1954, the breathalyzer, the tool that eventually replaced Harger’s drunkometer, was invented there by Dr. Robert Borkenstein, a laboratory technician with the Indiana State Police.

No device can measure actual intoxication, however, since a variety of factors determine how alcohol affects individual drinkers. Hence the expressions hollow leg and cheap drunk.

Source: Various

Photo: Simulating a drunk, a willing subject demonstrates the drunkometer test.
Corbis

This article first appeared on Wired.com Dec. 31, 2008.

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Dec. 28, 1973: Endangered Species Get a Helping Hand

1973: The Endangered Species Act is signed into law by President Nixon.

The act came into being as Americans grew increasingly aware of the damage being done to the environment — and the threat posed to specific animal and plant species — by rampant economic growth.

Declaring existing conservation policies inadequate, Nixon tasked Congress with devising new legislation aimed specifically at protecting species and their ecosystems threatened by economic encroachment. The result was the Endangered Species Act.

The wide-ranging act forbids any government agency from funding or participating in any action that may “jeopardize the continued existence” of any endangered or threatened species. There are also provisions for private citizens to take legal action against the government to make sure the act is enforced.

Individual plant and animal species are added to a protection list and categorized as either “endangered” or “threatened” based on a number of factors, including population figures and the condition of the habitat. If conditions improve significantly, they can be downgraded from “endangered” to “threatened,” or even removed from the lists. Currently, there are nearly 2,000 plant and animal species on the lists.

Two agencies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, are responsible for administering the act.

There have been a number of well-publicized legal challenges as a result of the Endangered Species Act, resulting in the delay of some projects and the complete scrapping of others.

The ESA suffered considerably under the George W. Bush administration, while the Barack Obama administration has received higher marks.

Source: Various

Photo: Panda Gao Gao in the San Diego Zoo.
Aaron Logan

An earlier version of this article appeared on Wired.com Dec. 28, 2007.

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Dec. 27, 1831: Beagle Sets Sail With a Very Special Passenger

1831: HMS Beagle, a 10-gun, Cherokee-class brig sloop of the Royal Navy’s survey service, sets sail from Plymouth, England on its second voyage as a survey vessel.

On board, at the invitation of Beagle captain Robert FitzRoy, is a young biologist called Charles Darwin. Darwin’s account of The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839, establishes him as one of the foremost naturalists of his time.

Darwin accepted the invitation over the objections of his father, who saw the proposed two-year voyage as a chance for his son to continue idling, something he had become pretty good at since graduating from Cambridge.

What became a five-year voyage was intended primarily to continue exploring the coastline of South America, many parts of which remained uncharted. Coasting in this fashion enabled Darwin to spend long periods of time ashore as the Beagle meandered around South America and the Galapagos Islands, taking depth soundings and charting coastlines. The ship also visited numerous islands in the South Pacific and Indian oceans before setting sail for home.

The young naturalist was fascinated by the seemingly endless variety of plant and animal life he encountered. His ruminations on the source of that variation resulted in his theory of evolution by natural selection, published in an 1858 paper and a year later in his paradigm-shaping The Origin of Species.

Darwin’s observations of other societies, particularly the natives of Tierra del Fuego, would also provide the basis for The Descent of Man, in which Darwin further elaborates on natural selection. It was published in 1871, four decades after the start of the voyage.

The Beagle finally returned to England, reaching Falmouth on Oct. 2, 1836. She would undertake a third survey voyage to Australia, then see duty as a coast-guard watch vessel before being laid up. The Beagle was broken up in 1870.

Source: AboutDarwin.com

Image: HMS Beagle lies at anchor at Tierra del Fuego during its second survey voyage, 1831 to 1836.
Painting by Conrad Martens/The Illustrated Origin of Species

This article first appeared on Wired.com Dec. 27, 2007.

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