THE WORLD' FIRST VCR

We all know vedio casset recorder commonly known as VCR.The world's first practical videotape recorder was released in 1956. It was as large as a dining room table and cost a cool $50G. The Ampex VRX-1000 featured an incredibly modern-sounding model number, too.
    The VRX-1000 set off a storm when it was demonstrated on April 14, 1956 at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Convention, sending RCA and all the other VTR developers back to the drawing boards. The VRX-1000 was renamed the Mark IV and sold briskly at $50,000. Ampex dominated the broadcast VTR business for a number of years to come. The fourth person from the left in the above design team group photo is Ray Dolby, later of Dolby Laboratories fame.
    Ampex discovered that the secret to recording video on tape was to use a rotating head. This enabled them to fit 90 minutes onto a single reel, making the VTR practical for TV broadcast use. The tape ran past the head at 15 inches per second, so those reels must have been huge! They obviously hit on the right approach: Modern VHS and dv recorders still use a rotating head mechanism.

MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB

"Mary Had a Little Lamb" is an English language nursery rhyme of nineteenth-century American origin. As a girl, Mary Sawyer (later Mrs. Mary Tyler) kept a pet lamb, which she took to school one day at the suggestion of her brother. A commotion naturally ensued. Mary recalled: "Visiting school that morning was a young man by the name of John Roulstone, a nephew of the Reverend Lemuel Capen, who was then settled in Sterling. It was the custom then for students to prepare for college with ministers, and for this purpose Mr. Roulstone was studying with his uncle. The young man was very much pleased with the incident of the lamb; and the next day he rode across the fields on horseback to the little old schoolhouse and handed me a slip of paper which had written upon it the three original stanzas of the poem..."
          There are two competing theories on the origin of this poem. One holds that Roulstone wrote the first four lines and that the final twelve lines, more moralistic and much less childlike than the first, were composed by Sarah Josepha Hale; the other is that Hale was responsible for the entire poem.
Mary Sawyer's house, located in Sterling, Massachusetts, was destroyed by arson on August 12, 2007.[4] A statue representing Mary's Little Lamb stands in the town center. The Redstone School, which was built in 1798, was purchased by Henry Ford and relocated to a churchyard on the property of Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

JEANS

We all uses jeans. Jeans are trousers made from denim or other materials such as corduroy.Dry goods merchant Levi Strauss was selling blue jeans under the "Levi's" brand to the mining communities of California in the 1850s. One of Strauss' customers was Jacob Davis, a tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth from the Levi Strauss & Co. wholesale house. After one of Davis' customers kept buying cloth to reinforce torn pants, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the top of the button fly. Davis did not have the required money to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Strauss suggesting that they both go into business together. After Strauss accepted Davis's offer, the two men received U.S. Patent 139,121, for an "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings," on May 20, 1873. Jeans are very useful and convenient , especially when we participate in outdoor activities because they are hard to wear out.In 1885, jeans could be bought in the US for $1.50 (approximately $36 in 2010). Today in America, a pair of durable jeans can be purchased in the United States for about 40 dollars. Americans spent more than $14 billion on jeans in 2004 and $15 billion in 2005.

HISTORY OF PEN

Ancient Indians were the first to use the pen. According to ancient text the earliest of pens made in India used bird feathers, bamboo sticks, etc. The old literature of Puranas, Ramayana and Mahabharta used this kind of pen roughly 500 BC. Ancient Egyptians had developed writing on papyrus scrolls when scribes used thin reed brushes or reed pens from the Juncus Maritimus or sea rush. In his book A History of Writing, Steven Roger Fischer suggests that on the basis of finds at Saqqara, the reed pen might well have been used for writing on parchment as long ago as the First Dynasty or about 3000 BC. Reed pens continued to be used until the Middle Ages although they were slowly replaced by quills from about the 7th century. The reed pen, generally made from bamboo, is still used in some parts of Pakistan by young students and is used to write on small boards made of timber.

The Quill pen was used in Qumran, Judea to write some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date back to around 100 BC. The scrolls were written in Hebrew dialects with bird feathers or quills. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans had difficulty in obtaining reeds and began to use quills. There is a specific reference to quills in the writings of St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century. Quill pens were still widely used in the 18th century, and were used to write and sign the Constitution of the United States in 1787.

CHRISTMAS TREE

           The Christmas tree is a decorated evergreen coniferous tree, real or artificial, traditionally associated with the celebration of Christmas. It is brought into the home and decorated with Christmas lights (originally candles), ornaments, garlands, tinsel, and candy canes during the days around Christmas. An angel or star may be placed at the top of the tree, representing the host of angels or the Star of Bethlehem from the Nativity.

The earliest accounts of decorating an evergreen tree at Christmas were recorded in Livonia (modern-day Estonia and Latvia) in the 15th century.

The Christmas tree is sometimes called a Yule tree, particularly by those who wish to avoid Christian connections, but others explicitly distinguish between the two or identify the Yule tree with an undecorated evergreen tree

The custom of erecting a decorated Christmas tree can be historically traced back at least as far as 15th century Livonia and 16th century Northern Germany. According to the first documented uses of a Christmas tree in Estonia, in 1441, 1442, and 1514, the Brotherhood of Blackheads erected a tree for the holidays[clarification needed] in their brotherhood house in Reval (now Tallinn). At the last night of the celebrations leading up to the holidays,[clarification needed] the tree was taken to the Town Hall Square where the members of the brotherhood danced around it. In 1584, the pastor and chronicler Balthasar Russow wrote of an established tradition of setting up a decorated spruce at the market square where the young men “went with a flock of maidens and women, first sang and danced there and then set the tree aflame”. The Christmas tree became widely adopted by the Estonians themselves only in the 19th century.

CHRISTMAS CAROL

         A Christmas carol (also called a noël) is a carol (song or hymn) whose lyrics are on the theme of Christmas or the winter season in general and which are traditionally sung in the period before Christmas.
The first specifically Christmas hymns that we know of appear in fourth century Rome. Latin hymns such as Veni redemptor gentium, written by Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, were austere statements of the theological doctrine of the Incarnation in opposition to Arianism. Corde natus ex Parentis (Of the Father's love begotten) by the Spanish poet Prudentius (d. 413) is still sung in some churches today.

In the ninth and tenth centuries, the Christmas "Sequence" or "Prose" was introduced in North European monasteries, developing under Bernard of Clairvaux into a sequence of rhymed stanzas. In the twelfth century the Parisian monk Adam of St. Victor began to derive music from popular songs, introducing something closer to the traditional Christmas carol.

In the thirteenth century, in France, Germany, and particularly, Italy, under the influence of Francis of Asissi a strong tradition of popular Christmas songs in the native language developed. Christmas carols in English first appear in a 1426 work of John Awdlay, a Shropshire chaplain, who lists twenty five "caroles of Cristemas", probably sung by groups of 'wassailers', who went from house to house. The songs we know specifically as carols were originally communal songs sung during celebrations like harvest tide as well as Christmas. It was only later that carols begun to be sung in church, and to be specifically associated with Christmas.

HOW THE SANTA CAME..?

        THE CHRISTMAS IS COMING. AND THE SANTA IS COMING WITH GIFTS. DON'T YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO IS SANTA...?

        Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas, Kris Kringle, and simply "Santa", is a figure with legendary, historical and folkloric aspects who, in many western cultures, is said to bring gifts to the homes of the good children during the late evening and overnight hours of Christmas Eve, December 24. The modern figure was derived from the Dutch figure of Sinterklaas, which, in turn, may have part of its basis in hagiographical tales concerning the historical figure of gift giver Saint Nicholas. A nearly identical story is attributed by Greek and Byzantine folklore to Basil of Caesarea. Basil's feast day on January 1 is considered the time of exchanging gifts in Greece.

Santa Claus is generally depicted as a plump, jolly, white-bearded man wearing a red coat with white collar and cuffs, white-cuffed red trousers, and black leather belt and boots (images of him rarely have a beard with no mustache). This image became popular in the United States and Canada in the 19th century due to the significant influence of Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" and of caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Nast. This image has been maintained and reinforced through song, radio, television, children's books and films. The North American depiction of Santa Claus as it developed in the 19th and 20th century in turn influenced the modern perceptions of Father Christmas, Sinterklaas and Saint Nicholas in European culture