When What
1477 William Caxton published the first printed book in England, Earl Rivers’s ‘Sayings of the Philosophers.’ Books, we have read a few.
1838 Scottish businessman and chairman of the South Australian Company, George Fife Angas, sponsored twenty-one German Lutherans who arrived in South Australia. More followed in short order. Some settled in Hahndorf which we visited in August 2018.
1865 Mark Twain published his first story, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.’ Read it in high school.
1883 At noon American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. US Congress enacted time zones in 1918. It ended the distinction between town time and railroad time in thousands of places. See Jo Barnett’s ‘Times Pendulum’ (1999) tells some of this story. I found the book unfocussed and did not discuss it on the blog.
1963 Bell Telephone in the US began to market push button telephones to replace rotary dial phones. The charm of the pulse dial was lost, replaced by tone. No doubt Luddites mourned its passing.
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