History Green Bay Packers

The Packers in 1920.
The Green Bay Packers were founded on August 11, 1919 by Curly Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun.[1] Lambeau solicited funds for uniforms from his employer, the Indian Packing Company. He was given $250 for uniforms and equipment, on the condition that the team be named for its sponsor. Today, "Green Bay Packers" is the oldest team name still in use in the NFL.[2]
The Packers became a professional franchise when they joined the newly formed American Professional Football Association on August 27, 1921. However, the franchise was revoked by the league at the end of the season when the Packers were revealed to have used college players in a game. As it turned out, the man who told the league of this was George Halas of the Chicago Staleys, who changed their name to the Bears the following year. This incident signaled the start of the infamous Packers-Bears rivalry. Lambeau appealed to the league and they allowed the franchise to be reinstated, though Lambeau had to pay the league entry fee of $50 to do so. Further troubles threatened to add more debt to the team, but local businessmen, known as the "Hungry Five," got behind the team and formed the Green Bay Football Corporation in 1923, which continues to run the franchise to this day.

History Computer Part 1

The first computers were people! That is, electronic computers (and the earlier mechanical computers) were given this name because they performed the work that had previously been assigned to people. "Computer" was originally a job title: it was used to describe those human beings (predominantly women) whose job it was to perform the repetitive calculations required to compute such things as navigational tables, tide charts, and planetary positions for astronomical almanacs. Imagine you had a job where hour after hour, day after day, you were to do nothing but compute multiplications. Boredom would quickly set in, leading to carelessness, leading to mistakes. And even on your best days you wouldn't be producing answers very fast. Therefore, inventors have been searching for hundreds of years for a way to mechanize (that is, find a mechanism that can perform) this task.

This picture shows what were known as "counting tables" [photo courtesy IBM]

A typical computer operation back when computers were people.

The abacus was an early aid for mathematical computations. Its only value is that it aids the memory of the human performing the calculation. A skilled abacus operator can work on addition and subtraction problems at the speed of a person equipped with a hand calculator (multiplication and division are slower). The abacus is often wrongly attributed to China. In fact, the oldest surviving abacus was used in 300 B.C. by the Babylonians. The abacus is still in use today, principally in the far east. A modern abacus consists of rings that slide over rods, but the older one pictured below dates from the time when pebbles were used for counting (the word "calculus" comes from the Latin word for pebble).

A very old abacus

A more modern abacus. Note how the abacus is really just a representation of the human fingers: the 5 lower rings on each rod represent the 5 fingers and the 2 upper rings represent the 2 hands.

In 1617 an eccentric (some say mad) Scotsman named John Napier invented logarithms, which are a technology that allows multiplication to be performed via addition. The magic ingredient is the logarithm of each operand, which was originally obtained from a printed table. But Napier also invented an alternative to tables, where the logarithm values were carved on ivory sticks which are now called Napier's Bones.

An original set of Napier's Bones [photo courtesy IBM]

A more modern set of Napier's Bones

Napier's invention led directly to the slide rule, first built in England in 1632 and still in use in the 1960's by the NASA engineers of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs which landed men on the moon.

A slide rule

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made drawings of gear-driven calculating machines but apparently never built any.

A Leonardo da Vinci drawing showing gears arranged for computing

The first gear-driven calculating machine to actually be built was probably the calculating clock, so named by its inventor, the German professor Wilhelm Schickard in 1623. This device got little publicity because Schickard died soon afterward in the bubonic plague.

Schickard's Calculating Clock

In 1642 Blaise Pascal, at age 19, invented the Pascaline as an aid for his father who was a tax collector. Pascal built 50 of this gear-driven one-function calculator (it could only add) but couldn't sell many because of their exorbitant cost and because they really weren't that accurate (at that time it was not possible to fabricate gears with the required precision). Up until the present age when car dashboards went digital, the odometer portion of a car's speedometer used the very same mechanism as the Pascaline to increment the next wheel after each full revolution of the prior wheel. Pascal was a child prodigy. At the age of 12, he was discovered doing his version of Euclid's thirty-second proposition on the kitchen floor. Pascal went on to invent probability theory, the hydraulic press, and the syringe. Shown below is an 8 digit version of the Pascaline, and two views of a 6 digit version:

Pascal's Pascaline [photo © 2002 IEEE]

A 6 digit model for those who couldn't afford the 8 digit model

A Pascaline opened up so you can observe the gears and cylinders which rotated to display the numerical result

Click on the "Next" hyperlink below to read about the punched card system that was developed for looms for later applied to the U.S. census and then to computers..

History Telephone

 

In the 1870s, two inventors Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically (the telephone). Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other, Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone, which Bell won.

The telegraph and telephone are both wire-based electrical systems, and Alexander Graham Bell's success with the telephone came as a direct result of his attempts to improve the telegraph.When Bell began experimenting with electrical signals, the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30 years. Although a highly successful system, the telegraph, with its dot-and-dash Morse code, was basically limited to receiving and sending one message at a time. Bell's extensive knowledge of the nature of sound and his understanding of music enabled him to conjecture the possibility of transmitting multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. Although the idea of a multiple telegraph had been in existence for some time, Bell offered his own musical or harmonic approach as a possible practical solution. His "harmonic telegraph" was based on the principle that several notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes or signals differed in pitch.

By October 1874, Bell's research had progressed to the extent that he could inform his future father-in-law, Boston attorney Gardiner Greene Hubbard, about the possibility of a multiple telegraph. Hubbard, who resented the absolute control then exerted by the Western Union Telegraph Company, instantly saw the potential for breaking such a monopoly and gave Bell the financial backing he needed. Bell proceeded with his work on the multiple telegraph, but he did not tell Hubbard that he and Thomas Watson, a young electrician whose services he had enlisted, were also exploring an idea that had occurred to him that summer - that of developing a device that would transmit speech electrically.

While Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson worked on the harmonic telegraph at the insistent urging of Hubbard and other backers, Bell nonetheless met in March 1875 withJoseph Henry, the respected director of the Smithsonian Institution, who listened to Bell's ideas for a telephone and offered encouraging words. Spurred on by Henry's positive opinion, Bell and Watson continued their work. By June 1875 the goal of creating a device that would transmit speech electrically was about to be realized. They had proven that different tones would vary the strength of an electric current in a wire. To achieve success they therefore needed only to build a working transmitter with a membrane capable of varying electronic currents and a receiver that would reproduce these variations in audible frequencies.

History Market

Shopping centers have existed in some form for more than 1,000 years as ancient market squares, bazaars and seaport commercial districts. The modern shopping center, which includes everything from small suburban strip centers to the million-square-foot superregional malls, had its genesis in the 1920s.

The concept of developing a shopping district away from a downtown is generally attributed to J.C. Nichols of Kansas City, Mo. His Country Club Plaza, which opened in 1922, was constructed as the business district for a large-scale residential development. It featured unified architecture, paved and lighted parking lots, and was managed and operated as a single unit.

In the later half of the 1920s, as automobiles began to clog the central business districts of large cities, small strip centers were built on the outskirts. The centers were usually anchored by a supermarket and a drug store, supplemented by other convenience-type shops. The typical design was a straight line of stores with space for parking in front. Grandview Avenue Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, which opened in 1928, included 30 shops and parking for 400 cars.

But many experts consider Highland Park Shopping Village in Dallas, Tex., developed by Hugh Prather in 1931, to be the first planned shopping center. Like Country Club Plaza, its stores were built with a unified image and managed under the control of a single owner, but Highland Park occupied a single site and was not bisected by public streets. And its storefronts faced inward, away from the streets, a revolutionary design.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Sears Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward set up large, freestanding stores with on-site parking, away from the centers of big cities. Nighttime shopping was inaugurated at Town & Country Shopping Center in Columbus, Ohio, when developer Don Casto hired Grandma Carver (a woman who dived from a 90-foot perch into a 4-foot pool of flaming water), to perform her act in the lighted parking lot, bringing shopping center promotion to a new level.

The early 1950s marked the opening of the first two shopping centers anchored by full-line branches of downtown department stores. Northgate in Seattle, Wash., (two strip centers face-to-face with a pedestrian walkway in between) opened in 1950, and Shoppers World in Framingham, Mass. (the first two-level center), debuted the following year. The concept was improved upon in 1954 when Northland Center in Detroit, Mich., used a “cluster layout” with a single department store at the center and a ring of stores around it. The parking lot completely surrounded the center. Northland was also the first center to have central air-conditioning as well as heating.

In 1956, Southdale Center in Edina, Minn., outside of Minneapolis, opened as the first fully enclosed mall with a two-level design. It had central air-conditioning and heating, a comfortable common area and, more importantly, it had two competitive department stores as anchors. Southdale is considered by most industry professionals to be the first modern regional mall.

By 1964 there were 7,600 shopping centers in the United States. Suburban development and population growth after World War II created the need for more housing and more convenient retail shopping. Most of the centers built in the 1950s and 1960s were strip centers serving new housing developments.

By 1972 the number of shopping centers had doubled to 13,174. Regional malls like Southdale and The Galleria in Houston, Tex., had become a fixture in many larger markets, and Americans began to enjoy the convenience and pleasure of mall shopping. During the 1970s, a number of new formats and shopping center types evolved.

In 1976 The Rouse Co. developed Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, Mass., which was the first of the “festival marketplaces” built in the United States. The project, which revived a troubled downtown market, was centered on food and retail specialty items. Similar projects were built in Baltimore, Md., New York, N.Y., and Miami, Fla., and have been emulated in a number of urban areas.

The Bicentennial year also marked the debut of the country’s first urban vertical mall, Water Tower Place, which opened in Chicago, Ill., on Michigan Avenue. To many experts, Water Tower Place with its tony stores, hotel, offices, condominiums and parking garage, remains the preeminent mixed-use project in the United States. With the opening of Water Tower Place and Faneuil Hall, the shopping center industry had returned to its urban roots.

The 1980s saw an unparalleled period of growth in the shopping center industry, with more than 16,000 centers built between 1980 and 1990. This was also the period when superregional centers (malls larger than 800,000 square feet) became increasingly popular with shoppers. In 1990, a Gallup poll found that people shopped most frequently at superregional malls and neighborhood centers. Americans average four trips to the mall per month.

Between 1989 and 1993, new shopping center development dropped nearly 70%, from 1,510 construction starts in 1989 to 451 starts in 1993. The sharp decline in new center starts was attributed to the Savings and Loan crisis, which helped precipitate a severe credit crunch. While overbuilding occurred among small centers in some regions of the United States, shopping centers remained the most attractive and best-performing real estate category for investors during this difficult period.

The year 1993 was marked by the transition of several privately held, family-run shopping center development companies (Simon, Taubman, etc.) into publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REITs). The access to Wall Street capital provided a financial jolt to an industry that still had not fully recovered from the credit crunch.

One of the newer retail formats that has become increasingly popular in the United States is the power center, which loosely defined is a center between 250,000 and 600,000 square feet, with approximately 75% to 90% of its space occupied by category killers or destination anchor stores. Power centers are often located near regional and superregional malls. San Francisco-based Terranomics is credited with pioneering the concept at 280 Metro Center in Colma, Calif. In 1993, 16 power centers opened in the United States, compared with only four superregional malls.

Factory outlet centers were one of the fastest growing segments of the shopping center industry in the 1990s. In 1990, there were 183 outlet centers. Today, there are over approximately 312 outlet centers in the United States. Outlet malls are tenanted by manufacturers selling their own goods at discounted prices. Some large projects combine outlet stores with traditional off-price stores like Marshalls. One such project, Sawgrass Mills in Sunrise, Fla., is more than 2 million square feet and features outlets, discounters and retail clearance stores.

The largest mall in the United States is currently Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., which includes a seven-acre amusement park, nightclubs, restaurants and covers 4.2 million square feet (with about half that total devoted to retailing). The center has been heralded as a bellwether for its innovative mixture of entertainment and retailing. The forerunner to Mall of America, and the largest mall in North America, is West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which encompasses 5.5 million square feet.

Entertainment quickly became an industry buzzword in the early 1990s as technological advances allowed shopping center developments to foster the same magical experiences that were once only seen in national amusement parks such as Disney World. Since the start of the entertainment wave, retailers have focused on keeping their presentations exciting and shopping center owners have striven to obtain tenant mixes that draw traffic from the widest audience possible. Under one roof or in an outdoor retail format, consumers enjoy children’s playscapes, virtual reality games, live shows, movies in multiplex cinemas, a variety of food in either the food court or themed restaurants, carousel rides, visually stunning merchandising techniques, robotic animal displays, and interactive demonstrations. Many shopping centers are also focused on added service-oriented tenants, which offer today’s busy consumer an opportunity to complete weekly errands or to engage in a variety of other activities. Among the many services found in today’s malls are churches, schools, postal branches, municipal offices, libraries, and museums.

As the 1990s drew to a close, Internet retailing was heralded as the wave of the future and a threat to the stability of the shopping center industry. In July of 1998, Time magazine predicted the demise of the shopping mall. In bold type, Time’s cover advised its readers to, “Kiss Your Mall Good-Bye: Online Shopping is Cheaper, Quicker and Better.” While the cover was purely sensational, the tone was clear. The shopping center industry was under attack, yet again, from an alternative shopping format. Several years earlier similar claims were made about the impact home television shopping would have on the industry. In fact, the cover of BusinessWeek magazine in July of 1993 read, “Retailing Will Never Be the Same: The Home Shopping Revolution.”

Unlike home television shopping, Internet retailing quickly captured the attention of the public, the media and Wall Street as companies rushed to develop websites that would sell directly to consumers. In the euphoria it mattered little that many of these Internet companies had little or no retail experience. Fearing the cannibalization of store sales, brick-and-mortar retailers at first were hesitant to sell directly to the public via the Internet. However, when it became apparent that they had some clear advantages over pure Internet retailers (brand name recognition, distribution facilities, supplier relationships, ability to accept returns at stores, etc.) brick-and-mortar retailers launched their own websites. These advantages quickly paid off for brick-and-mortar retailers. In fact, in 1998, brick-and-mortar retailers’ websites captured 60% of online sales.

In addition to buying online, brick-and-mortar retailers discovered that their consumers were using the web as a research vehicle. Consumers were logging on to retailers’ websites to search for goods, and services, and armed with product information, were making purchases at stores. Thus the Internet has transformed a large and growing number of retailers into “multi-channel” retailers with all sales channels (stores, web, and catalog) working as one to help retailers maximize the value of their brands.

Understanding that there is great synergy between the Internet and brick-and-mortar stores, shopping centers owners have created their own websites and are working with their retail tenants to create distribution channels to satisfy the consumer, whether the consumer decides to shop at a shopping center, on the Internet or both.

In 1999, Simon Property Group, the nation’s largest shopping center developer, created two separate business units, clixnmortar.com and TenantConnect. Through TenantConnect, Simon is installing broadband Internet connections inside its own malls and those of other developers, so that stores can have high-speed access to the Internet. Also, retailers at Simon malls can take part in two clixnmortar initiative: FastFrog.Com and YourSherpa. In both programs, consumers carry handheld scanners through the mall, and scan items they are interested in buying. When shoppers are finished, the information is loaded into computer kiosks. From the FastFrog kiosk, shoppers can have their list of items forward to friends or relatives. At the YourSherpa kiosk, users can type in their credit card number and check out immediately, or delay the final purchase until they go home. Mall employees pick-up scanned items at stores in the mall and customers have the option of picking-up the items at the mall or having them delivered.

General Growth Properties, the nation’s second-largest mall developer is also incorporating the Internet into their malls. General Growth’s Mallibu.com website links retailers in each of the company’s malls, allowing consumers to buy online directly from those retailers and have their purchases delivered to them.

Other shopping center developers are also working with their retailers to incorporate the Internet into their businesses model. Many shopping centers have their own websites and have added their web address to their advertising and promotional vehicles. Most shopping center websites have maps and directions to the center, a list of tenants and a calendar of events. Some shopping centers are even providing free Internet access for their customers. The center can e-mail the customer information on sales and special events that are taking place at the center.

As we enter the 21st century, shopping centers continue to evolve and serve communities’ social and economic needs. With the combination of fashion, food, entertainment, and services, shopping centers have greatly expanded their role in the communities they serve.