Today in Tech History: June 1, 2008 Video

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Created: 05/30/2008

Video description: How to win a Nobel Prize in medicine: catheterize your own heart!

Today in Tech History: June 1, 2008 Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Molly Wood. It's June 1, 2008, and here's what happened today in technology history. On this date in 1869, Thomas Edison received his FIRST patent ... for an electric voting machine that would speed up vote-counting in the legislature. Interestingly, it was never used. Reportedly, Congress didn't WANT to count votes faster. They wanted time to filibuster, and, by some accounts, they just plain didn't want accurate recording of their votes. Whaddya know. Some notable birth- and death-dates today. In 1907, Frank Whittle was born. He was an English Royal Air Force officer who invented the jet engine. Today marks the passing, in 1979, of German physician Werner Forssmann. Forssmann won the Nobel Prize for the first catheterization of the human heart. His own, heart, in fact. In 1929, he made an incision in his OWN arm, and fed a catheter into the right atrium of his OWN heart. And then he walked downstairs to the radiology department and got an X-Ray of it. Do NOT try that at home. And finally, Christopher Sydney Cockerell died on this date in 1999. He was British engineer and the inventor of ... the hovercraft. SWEET. That's it for today, inventors and vote-counters. See you back here tomorrow for more tech history.

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