THE HAMILTON WATCH COMPANY & THE ELECTRIC WATCH

Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Hamilton Watch Company, the Swiss manufacturer of wristwatches, that introduced the first electric watch on a day like today in 1957.

The Hamilton Watch Company is a Swiss manufacturer of wristwatches based in Bienne, Switzerland.

Founded in 1892 as an American firm, the Hamilton Watch Company ended American manufacture in 1969, shifting manufacturing operations to the Buren factory in Switzerland. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, the Hamilton Watch Company eventually became integrated into the Swatch Group, the world's largest watch manufacturing and marketing conglomerate.

Hamilton succeeded three watch firms manufacturing timepieces in the same facilities in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, US, including the Adams & Perry Watch Manufacturing Company, Lancaster Watch Company Ltd., Lancaster Watch Company and the Keystone Watch Company.

The precursor to the Hamilton Watch Co., the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, based Keystone Standard Watch Co., was started by Abram Bitner in 1886 with the purchase of Lancaster Watch Company's factory. Lancaster, then Keystone manufactured watches featuring a patented Dust Proof design that used a small mica window to cover the only opening in the plate of the movement. Keystone existed until 1891 when the company was sold to Hamilton Watch Company.

The Hamilton Watch Company was established in 1892 after Keystone Standard Watch Company was purchased from bankruptcy. Aurora Watch Company of Illinois also merged into Keystone during the same year. The name of the new company was originally to be Columbian, but when it was discovered the Waterbury Watch Company had trademarked that name, a meeting of stockholders was called in November 1892 and a new name selected. The company was named after Andrew Hamilton, a Scottish-born attorney who laid out and founded Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was the original owner of the Lancaster site on which the factory was situated.

During the expansion of the railroads in the U.S., Hamilton maintained over 56% of the market. Railroads purchased all of Hamilton's production. The company manufactured wristwatches as the market switched from pocket watches to wristwatches after World War I. During World War II, Hamilton retooled its business model to serve the military, dropping its consumer products.

The Hamilton Watch Company was housed on a 53,000 m2 complex in Lancaster. Hamilton took possession of Aurora Watch Company's machinery shortly after incorporation.

The first watch made under the Hamilton name was an 18-size 17-jewel pocket watch in 1893. During Hamilton's first fifteen years, only two size movements were produced -the 18-size and the smaller 16-size.

The company's first series of pocket watches, the Broadway Limited, was marketed as the Watch of Railroad Accuracy, and Hamilton became popular by making accurate railroad watches. Hamilton introduced its first wristwatch in 1917, designed to appeal to men entering World War I and containing the 0-sized 17-jewel 983 movement initially designed for women's pendent watches.

In 1928, Hamilton purchased the Illinois Watch Company for over $5 million from the heirs of John Whitfield Bunn and Jacob Bunn. Some of the most collectible early Hamilton wristwatches include The Oval, The Tonneau, The Rectangular, The Square Enamel, The Coronado, The Piping Rock, The Spur, The Glendale, The Pinehurst, The Langley, The Byrd, The Cambridge, the Barrel "B", and The Flintridge. Many models came in both solid gold and gold-filled cases, and, though rare, some wristwatches such as the Grant were made of sterling silver.

In horology, the term electric watch is used for the first generation electrically-powered wristwatches which were first publicly displayed by both Elgin National Watch Company and Lip on March 19, 1952, with working laboratory examples in Chicago and Paris. 

The Hamilton Watch Company would be the first to produce and retail an electric watch beginning in 1957, before the commercial introduction of the quartz wristwatch in 1969 by Seiko with the Astron.

Their timekeeping element was either a traditional balance wheel or a tuning fork, driven electromagnetically by a solenoid powered by a battery. The hands were driven mechanically through a wheel train. They were superseded by quartz watches, which had greater accuracy and durability due to their lower parts count. Recent automatic quartz watches, which combine mechanical technology with quartz timekeeping, are not included in this classification.

More information: Hamilton Watch

Time flies over us,
but leaves its shadow behind.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

ISAAC ASIMOV, ONE OF THE GREATEST SCI-FI WRITERS

Today, The Grandma has been talking about Isaac Asimov, the American writer and professor of biochemistry, who was born on a day like today in 1920.

Isaac Asimov  (January 2, 1920-April 6, 1992) was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the Big Three science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.

A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.

Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot series, creating a unified future history for his works. He also wrote more than 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette Nightfall, which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

Most of his popular science books explain concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage. Examples include Guide to Science, the three-volume Understanding Physics, and Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery. He wrote on numerous other scientific and non-scientific topics, such as chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, history, biblical exegesis, and literary criticism.

He was the president of the American Humanist Association. Several entities have been named in his honor, including the asteroid (5020) Asimov, a crater on Mars, a Brooklyn elementary school, Honda's humanoid robot ASIMO, and four literary awards.

Asimov's family name derives from the first part of озимый хлеб (ozímyj khleb), meaning winter grain (specifically rye) in which his great-great-great-grandfather dealt, with the Russian surname ending -ov added. Azimov is spelled Азимов in the Cyrillic alphabet. When the family arrived in the United States in 1923 and their name had to be spelled in the Latin alphabet, Asimov's father spelled it with an S, believing this letter to be pronounced like Z (as in German), and so it became Asimov. This later inspired one of Asimov's short stories, Spell My Name with an S.

Asimov refused early suggestions of using a more common name as a pseudonym, believing that its recognizability helped his career. After becoming famous, he often met readers who believed that Isaac Asimov was a distinctive pseudonym created by an author with a common name.

Asimov was born in Petrovichi, Russian SFSR, on an unknown date between October 4, 1919, and January 2, 1920, inclusive. Asimov celebrated his birthday on January 2.

In 1977, Asimov had a heart attack. In December 1983, he had triple bypass surgery at NYU Medical Center, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. His HIV status was kept secret out of concern that the anti-AIDS prejudice might extend to his family members.

He died in Manhattan on April 6, 1992, and was cremated.

More information: DePauw University

 People who think they know everything
are a great annoyance to those of us who do.

Isaac Asimov

ARPANET CHANGES TO TCP/IP CREATING THE INTERNET

Today, The Grandma has been reading about ARPANET, that officially changes to using TCP/IP, the Internet Protocol, effectively creating the Internet, on a day like today in 1983.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite.

Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the request for proposal to build the network. He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran on dynamic routing.

In 1969, ARPA awarded the contract to build the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) for the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN). The design was led by Bob Kahn who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology.

The first computers were connected in 1969 and the Network Control Protocol was implemented in 1970, development of which was led by Steve Crocker at UCLA and other graduate students, including Jon Postel and others. The network was declared operational in 1971. Further software development enabled remote login and file transfer, which was used to provide an early form of email. The network expanded rapidly and operational control passed to the Defense Communications Agency in 1975.

Bob Kahn moved to DARPA and, together with Vint Cerf at Stanford University, formulated the Transmission Control Program for internetworking. As this work progressed, a protocol was developed by which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks; this incorporated concepts pioneered in the French CYCLADES project directed by Louis Pouzin. Version 4 of TCP/IP was installed in the ARPANET for production use in January 1983 after the Department of Defense made it standard for all military computer networking.

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In the early 1980s, the NSF funded the establishment of national supercomputing centers at several universities and provided network access and network interconnectivity with the NSFNET project in 1986.

The ARPANET was formally decommissioned in 1990, after partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry had assured private sector expansion and commercialization of an expanded worldwide network, known as the Internet.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.

IP has the task of delivering packets from the source host to the destination host solely based on the IP addresses in the packet headers. For this purpose, IP defines packet structures that encapsulate the data to be delivered. It also defines addressing methods that are used to label the datagram with source and destination information. 

IP was the connectionless datagram service in the original Transmission Control Program introduced by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974, which was complemented by a connection-oriented service that became the basis for the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The Internet protocol suite is therefore often referred to as TCP/IP.

The first major version of IP, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4), is the dominant protocol of the Internet. Its successor is Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), which has been in increasing deployment on the public Internet since around 2006.

The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. 

The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, internet telephony, and file sharing.

More information: Tech Target

The Internet gave us access to everything;
but it also gave everything access to us.

James Veitch