Tuesday, May 31, 2005

100 years ago

Ten year old George Chambers, the son of a well known Dublin veterinary surgeon, when asked at school to construct a sentence in which the word "cure" appeared, promptly wrote "bile beans cure biliousness". As proof of the wide recognition of this important fact, the schoolmaster accepted the sentence as if the boy had written: "Nature's remedies are the safest cure for Nature's ills." Being purely vegetable, it was claimed that bile beans were unequalled for all cases of biliousness and liver disorder. All chemists stocked them at one and three-halfpence, or two and nine per box.

50 years ago

A new futuristic vogue was sweeping the United States. Its tag word was "automation". The public was waking up to the fact that giant mechanical brain machines could be used not only in atomic laboratories and research bureaux, but could in fact be adapted to do almost all the complex and simple jobs in business and industry. It was recognised that there would be fewer clerks and statisticians, and more "brain machine" installers, repairmen and adapters. What differentiated the machine of the "automation revolution" from that of the "mechanical revolution" of past centuries was that the new machines not only did the work that man assigned to them, but actually checked on their own performance. It would see the human hand become an increasingly superfluous instrument when it came to actually making things.

25 years ago

A York school had joined the computer age. Youngsters at Acomb were computing the success of their fascination with electronics. In four years they had built up a collection, which began with simple gadgets and had ended up with a full-scale computer. The computer had just gone into action at Acomb Secondary School, where members of Acomb Activities Centre had been blazing new trails in youth interests. The centre's thriving electronics club - it had 20 members and a waiting list - helped to raise more than £500 to buy the computer. "Electronics was one of the early interests when the activities centre got going five years ago. They wanted to do the normal physical side of youth club activities but were also interested in more original projects," said the leader in charge, Eric Wrighton. "The computer will be used both in and out of school hours for training in computer programming, and, on a lighter note, for games. We are also hoping it will be used as a bank for storing information." Originally it had just been an interest in school, but it had grown tremendously, added science teacher Graham Chilton.

Updated: 12:07 Monday, May 30, 2005