May 9 1850: Edward Weston, founder of the Weston Electrical Instrument Company, was born. 1865: A patent was issued to Richard Gatling for his Gatling gun. 1882: William Ford was issued a patent for his now-familiar stethoscope. 1893: Thomas Edison exhibited the first public motion picture (kinetoscope) to an audience in Brooklyn, NY. 1914: Paul-Louis-Toussaint Héroult, inventor of the electric arc furnace, died. 1926: Americans Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first men to fly an airplane over the North Pole. 1927: Canberra replaced Melbourne as the capital of Australia. 1931: Nobel physicist Albert Michelson, who first accurately measured the speed of light, died. 1961: Then FCC chairman Newton N. Minow condemned television programming as a "vast wasteland" in a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters. 1962: A laser beam was successfully bounced off the Moon for the first time. |