September 26, 1887
Émile Berliner receives a patent for the Gramophone. The patent described recording sound using horizontal modulation of a stylus as it traced a line on a rotating cylindrical surface coated with an unresisting opaque material such as lampblack, subsequently fixed with varnish and used to photoengrave a corresponding groove into the surface of a metal playback cylinder. In practice, Berliner opted for the disc format, which made the photoengraving step much less difficult and offered the prospect of making multiple copies of the result by some simpler process such as electrotyping, molding or stamping.
September 26, 1914
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is established to regulate interstate commerce when President Woodrow Wilson signs the Federal Trade Commission Act into law. The FTC opened its doors on March 16, 1915. The FTC's mission is to protect consumers and promote competition.
September 27, 1905
The journal Annalen der Physik publishes the physics paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” by Albert Einstein, which first introduces the famous mass–energy equivalence equation E=MC2.
September 28, 1997
Apple Computer launched the “Think different” marketing campaign. The campaign’s television commercials featured black-and-white footage of 17 iconic 20th century personalities and a free-verse poem read by Richard Dreyfuss, starting with the words “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.” These turned out to be the opening lines in the second act of Steve Jobs and Apple.
The campaign’s slogan, “Think different,” was probably a play on the much earlier slogan “THINK,” coined by Thomas J. Watson, Sr. In the winter of 1911, Watson ordered that signs with just one word–THINK–be put all over the NCR factory in Dayton, Ohio. Frederick L. Fuller recounts in his 1938 memoir, My Half Century as an Inventor, how Watson, later CEO of IBM, ordered in the winter of 1911 that signs with just one word–THINK–be put all over the NCR factory in Dayton, Ohio. Fuller:
When later I heard the story of how this slogan came to life…I realized gradually that it represented a fine bit of applied psychology… [at a daily sales meeting Watson said]: “The trouble with all of us is that we don’t THINK enough. We are not paid for working with our feet–we draw salaries for working with our heads. Feet can never compete with brains… thought is the keynote of success in this business and in every other business. Every man on the selling force of this business today would make two dollars where he now only makes one, if he would but THINK along the right line. ‘I didn’t think’ has cost the world millions of dollars.…Today there is no IBM office, service department or other workshop, without the THINK sign… Mr. Watson’s company now publishes Think Magazine, which goes out every month to tens of thousands of thoughtful readers.
In 2011, Google started publishing Think Quarterly, “to prepare you for what happens next.”
One final thought from the creator of the Bear With a Very Little Brain who used to tell himself “think, think, think” whenever he got into trouble: “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” He also said: “A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.”
September 29, 1936
Franklin Delano Roosevelt opened his campaign for re-election with a speech to the New York State Democratic Convention. This was the first U.S. presidential campaign in which both parties used radio broadcasts to deliver their messages and present their candidate to a national audience.
September 30, 1915
David Sarnoff, Chief Inspector for The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America (and later CEO of RCA and NBC) wrote to his superiors: “I have in mind a plan of development which will make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the home by wireless. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple ‘Radio Music Box,’ placed on a table in the parlor or living room.” Sarnoff may have actually written this memo in 1920, but later claimed it was written before 1916, the year Lee De Forest and others started broadcasting news and transmitting music over the wireless to multiple recipients.
