Trillion Dollar Apples, Spiderman, The World Wide Web, And The Most Important Thing We Have

August 1, 1774

It's always been there. We've always needed it to survive. What is interesting is that over 2500 years ago, the ancient Greeks identified it as one of the four elemental pieces of creation-along with earth, water, and fire. It is of course the air we breathe. While it is a charming, yet primitive notion, it lasted for centuries because there was little reason to argue the point until the late 1700s.

Joseph Priestly (1733-1804) was a very productive researcher and notorious philosopher. His inventions, carbonated water, and the rubber eraser identified key chemical compounds and wrote and he published an important early paper about electricity. His unorthodox teachings and out-of-the-box thinking about religion lead to his countrymen forcing him to flee from England in 1794 to settle in Pennsylvania, where he continued his research until his passing in 1804.

So it would be, in a series of experiments leading up to August 1st, 1774, Priestly found that air is not an elementary substance but a composite, or mixture of different gases. Among those was the colorless and highly reactive gas he named "dephlogisticated air", which was later named oxygen by a French chemist named Antoine Lavoisier.

August 1, 1962

After the success of Marvel's The Fantastic Four, The Great One, Stan Lee, was looking for another idea for a superhero and hoped to give teenagers that were clamoring for more and more comics, the idea of Spider-Man was born. Spider-Man first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15, (August 1962). The adventures of young Peter Parker, an orphan raised by his Aunt May and Uncle Ben in New York City, have lived on in the comics, television series, video games, and through the Sony Pictures and Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Spider-Man series broke ground by moving the teenage characters in comics to the status of the main character, giving teenagers inclusion in the superhero world.

August 1, 1990

If you consider that a brainiac and a computer met somewhere then this is the day that it became possible for you all to be sitting and reading stories, playing games, watching movies, reading emails, using social media, and surfing for porn. Sure, the project came to fruition later, but the birth of the idea was there and on Christmas Day, 1990, the first successful communication between a server and a web browser, via the internet, occurred. However, we haven't exactly used it to its' full potential. It was originally thought of for government use, instead of a worldwide approach, as a way to send information around the world to different places, to protect it from being lost to catastrophes like a nuclear explosion.

August 2, 2018

Apple Inc. is one of the true American success stories. The multi-national tech giant specializes in consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. They are the world's largest tech company, bringing in an impressive 325 Billion dollars last year and since January of 2021, the world's most valuable company. Founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, it was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak in 1977, as Apple Computer, Inc. Their success is a fantastic example of the American dream as they were officially the first publically traded company to be worth over a trillion, beating their success by becoming the first to be valued at over 2 trillion, just two years later. Apple has changed over the years, and I'm sure their stellar success story has much to do with the iPhone, which many of you on the internet are probably enjoying right now.