1956 IBM publicly unveiled the IBM 305 RAMAC. It was the first commercial computer that used a moving head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. RAMAC stood for “Random Access Method of Accounting and Control”. Its design was motivated by the need for real-time accounting in business.
1898 American priest and inventor Hannibal Goodwin was granted a patent for celluloid photographic film (Patent number: 610861). The film was used in Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, an early machine for viewing animation.
1886 English organic chemist Robert Robinson was born near Chesterfield, Derbyshire. He was awarded the 1947 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on plant dyestuffs (anthocyanins) and alkaloids. He invented the symbol for benzene whilst working at St Andrews University in 1923. He is known for inventing the use of the curly arrow to represent electron movement, and he is also known for discovering the molecular structures of morphine and penicillin.
1851 American Army physician Walter Reed was born in Belroi, Virginia. In 1900, he led the team that postulated and confirmed the theory that yellow fever is transmitted by a particular mosquito species, rather than by direct contact. This insight gave impetus to the new fields of epidemiology and biomedicine, and most immediately allowed the resumption and completion of work on the Panama Canal (1904–1914) by the United States.
