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Abraham Lincoln the Early Adopter
Hugh Pickens writes "On the 200th anniversary of his birth, President Abraham Lincoln's popular image as a log-splitting bumpkin is being re-assessed as historians have discovered that Lincoln had an avid interest in cutting-edge technology and its applications. During the war, Lincoln haunted the telegraph office (which provided the instant-messaging of its day) for the latest news from the front; he encouraged weapons development and even tested some new rifles himself on the White House lawn; and he is the only US president to hold a patent (No. 6469, granted May 22, 1849). It was for a device to lift riverboats over shoals. 'He not only created his own invention but had ideas for other inventions, such as an agricultural steam plow and a naval steam ram, [and] was fascinated by patent cases as an attorney and also by new innovations during the Civil War,' says Jason Emerson, author of Lincoln the Inventor. But Lincoln's greatest contribution to the war effort was his use of the telegraph. When Lincoln took office the White House had no telegraph connection. Lincoln 'developed the modern electronic leadership model, says Tom Wheeler, author of Mr. Lincoln's T-Mails: The Untold Story of How Abraham Lincoln Used the Telegraph To Win the Civil War. At a time when electricity was a vague scientific concept and sending signals through wires was 'mind boggling,' Lincoln was fascinated by the telegraph and developed it into a political and military tool that allowed him to project himself to the front to monitor and track what was going on. 'If he were alive today, we'd call him an early adopter,' says Wheeler."
If he was alive today, we'd call him a zombie...
Why always the painfully stupid condescension?
Communicating science (or history) well to a general audience doesn't require this. See Carl Sagan. If anything, such unnecessary analogies make things *less* clear.
Eh...Obama's church taught Black Liberation Theology which is an overtly, and unabashedly, racist ideology against whites.
Another positive tick towards my overarching theory: If knowledge is power, then communication is both your greatest weapon and your most vital line of supplies.
Demented But Determined.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bljefferson.htm
Jefferson was a tinkerer who realized that every design could be improved. The same mind he dedicated to helping to create our novel system of government, he applied to physical science.
When Lincoln took office the White House had no telegraph connection. Lincoln 'developed the modern electronic leadership model'
Is that what kids are calling it nowadays? I must be out of date - I was raised to call it micromanagement.
President Abraham Lincoln's popular image as a log-splitting bumpkin is being re-assessed
I doubt any serious Lincoln scholar would ever say Lincoln was a "log-splitting bumpkin". He was a brilliant, self educated man with a ferocious curiosity and probably one of the highest IQs of any president we've ever had. The guy who managed to end slavery, preserve the Union, AND assist in ushering in modern medical techniques on the battlefield a log-splitting bumpkin? Yeah, sure.
It's been said that because he was such a deep and complex personality, our society sees Lincoln not necessarily as who he was, but he is a reflection of our current state of mind as a nation. When we began to focus on racial issues, he was an obvious focal point, when depression became more widely known, he was thought to have been depressed, gay rights bring him up as possibly being our first gay president... and slashdot calls him an early adopter.
He was probably our greatest American president ever.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
By declaring martial law and throwing a lot of the Constitution (Habeas Corpus, for instance) out the window:
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/historicdocuments/a/lincolnhabeas.htm?rd=1
He had a lot journalist in the North jailed for no reason other than he thought should be (no evidence needed).
In fact, a lot of things that took place under Bush would not have been possible if it weren't for Abraham Lincoln.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
and "T-Mails"...really...
Please, just please kill me now...
seriously... this is a TECHNOLOGY blog... we know what the hell a telegraph is... no need to dumb it down.
This looks like another incarnation of the "Lincoln was _______" phenomena. Apparently Lincoln was so awesome that he has to embody every singly significant idea or social event since his death.
he held racist views, but he also said of black persons "but in the right to eat the bread without leave of anybody else which his own hand earns, he is my equal" in other words, he didn't let his prejudice get in the way of policy.
Lincoln held opinions not very different from those of the majority of his racist countrymen. Even if slavery was wrong, "there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will for ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality." His solution was a form of ethnic cleansing: shipping blacks off to Liberia, or Haiti, or Central America â" anywhere as long as it wasnâ(TM)t the United States.
Lincoln's views may have started to change once he saw how bravely black troops fought for the Union cause, but even at the time of his death, he was willing to leave the fate of emancipated slaves in the hands of bigoted state legislators. "Whether Lincoln ever went beyond being an anti-slavery white supremacist," George Fredrickson writes, "is a question that is difficult to resolve."
So should we tear down his memorial on the National Mall? The answer to this question may surprise you.
*** "What hath god wrought" is considered to be the first documented telegraph message.
The closest thing to instant messaging in the days of Lincoln was talking face-to-face. Telegraph, optical, electronic or otherwise, doesn't really have an equivalent today, because it had a ridiculously low bandwidth and slower transmission times.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
...unless you read the wikipedia on Thomas Jefferson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson
There are none of Thomas Jefferson's patents on the page. In fact it doesn't even mention his involvement in the patent act of 1790, http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH40/walter40.html
He invented a Moldboard Plow Of Least Resistance, Wheel Cipher, Portable Copying Press, and an improved polygraph for copying handwritten text.
http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~meg3c/classes/tcc313/200Rprojs/jefferson_invent/invent.html
If Obama's church were so hostile towards whites, it wouldn't have a fairly large amount of whites in attendance every Sunday.
by the Spanish Inquisition!!!!!!!
He was a product of his times. Everyone was some sort racist back then. Sort of like how you're a troll.
Is 1863 the year of the Linux desktop?
Thomas Jefferson invented things, yes, but did he file for patents on his inventions? no. He was the first commissioner of patents, and probably did not because it was a conflict of interest.
"It is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers." -- 4 days before he was assassinated
I myself, would have gone a step further and stripped the right from the very stupid (joe six-packs)
...for possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia. He even wrote a letter to the Hohner Harmonica company stating how he loved to sit on his porch, smoking "sweet hemp" from a corncob pipe and playing his harmonica. He very likely smoked it even while in the Whitehouse, or on or about the Whitehouse grounds, since hemp smoking was rather commonplace in the mid-1800's.
On the other hand, this post should be modded in the "downward direction" because he is not quite trolling, but it is a huge lump of flamebait flung in your face. Don't stand for it.
Yeah, but really all those white people in the church are all played by Eddie Murphy.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/10356/saturday-night-live-white-like-me
At the time, "nigger" was not a descriptive term, not an insult.
Heh.. So, you've never met one of the lefties who loves to wallow in guilt, eh?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If my car didn't use gasoline, I wouldn't like peas. Huh?
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
NIGGERS SCARE ME!
there are far more freepers who are so busy slobbering Rushes knob they don't don't stop to see if the crap they spew makes any sense.
I know I am going to be crucified for this, as /. is the last Republi-nazi haven in the world, besides Fox News.
But Obama was the first president to adopt a Blackberry, so another parallel with Lincoln and his telegraph thing.
Now, crucify me Republi-nazis with all your partisan hatred!
(thanks God I am posting as anonymous coward...)
If you think the government's current attacks on free speech over the internet are bad, you should read up on Lincoln's crackdown on telegraph lines (not to mention all the newspapers he closed, etc.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You call a 160 character SMS message high bandwidth? Hell, you could send longer telegrams!
WTF!? it's not like the guy invented it. can we please be real about this?
There was no such thing as conflict of interest back then. The real reason Jefferson did not patent is likely the same reason inventor Benjamin Franklin did not patent. They chose to share their ideas for the benefit of all - what we would call public domain. Franklin was already the wealthiest man in America, so he didn't need the cash.
And Jefferson was very very poor, the equivalent of $100,000 in debt in today's terms, but he still preferred to give things away. Jefferson's personal library was donated as the foundation for the Second Library of Congress. (The first was burned to the ground by the British.)
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The parent post certainly expresses what we today consider racist opinions, but they are what Lincoln thought, they are a direct response to its parent post, and it is not a troll.
Mods -- just because history is racist does not make reports on history racist.
Infuriate left and right
>>>If Obama's church were so hostile towards whites, it wouldn't have a fairly large amount of whites in attendance every Sunday.
Question:
How do you post such blatant (and easily debunked) lies like that, and still live with yourself? I just youtubed not one but several different videos, and I did not see one single white face in the audience. Not one.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
P.S. I just reviewed the video again. I did see ONE white face. Still not a "large amount" as the grandparent falsely claimed. Check it out for ye self. Listen to the hate speech (and yes that is the proper term): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwQWuQVE6sw
"Can't we all just...get along?"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
let people see another facet of live in 19th century
Read radical news here
I'm white. I've listened to it before and find no reason why I wouldn't attend. You just don't understand (or want to understand) what they're talking about.
I don't agree with everything they say, but trying to paint them as people who hate whites is flat-out wrong.
What in the hell do Republicans have to do with your post? And Obama is just one in a long line of presidents who adopt something that's maybe on the cutting edge (Bush or Clinton at the end of his career adopting a blackberry would've been more cutting edge as they came out in 99). This is similar to presidents that have had plumbing, electricity, etc, installed. And I'm curious, are Republi-nazis similar to Left-wing Hate-Mongers? I love how hypocritical liberals are. Republicans are Nazis, but Liberals are just misunderstood. Yeah, like Nancy Pelosi, who is the worst Speaker of the House the Congress has ever had, hands down.
Is Heaven overwhelmingly populated by racists?
>>>Telegraph, optical, electronic or otherwise, doesn't really have an equivalent today, because it had a ridiculously low bandwidth and slower transmission times.
The average telegraph could be transmitted at 30 words per minute (55 for exceptionally fast telegraphers). That's equivalent to a 2400 bit/s modem. Not bad for nearly 200 year old technology. It's faster than you can type an IM into your cellphone.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Agreed. I hate the fact that my 93 year old grandfather still uses that term (he grew up in middle Georgia), but as you said it was more of a descriptive term and not an insult. At some point it used to be acceptable to use the term "colored" as well. Not sure when all that changed. Now only black people can call each other the "N" word. Boggles the mind...
At night I drink myself to sleep and pretend I don't care that you're not here with me
Bandwidth isn't length of message but throughput.
Wait, I know what to do!
We'll need Optimus Prime, Indiana Jones and a Carebare to take him out.
proof or it didn't happen
killing millions. yea. in a civil war. a war. honorably.
beats the hell outta what the shitfaces in the south doing. living a life that is built by the most despicable forms of exploitation known to mankind - slavery.
sorry pal. bud. guy.
i cant bear myself to have any kind of pity for the fuckfaces that fought for the slaving south. well deserved, i say.
* this 'flamebait' message with strong language social messages was brought to you from antalya, mediterranean, turkey *
Read radical news here
At some point it used to be acceptable to use the term "colored" as well. Not sure when all that changed.
It occurs to me as strange every time I hear the letters "NAACP". I understand that it would have been strange to re-name the org "NAAAAP" when the P.C. terms shifted from "colored" to "African American", but I think that's the only remaining place where the term "colored" is still appropriate when referring to race...
(As a side note, there are a few interesting scenes in Steven King's dark tower series where a "modern" white guy is conversing with a black woman from a few decades back. As would likely be the case, she's very upset when he calls her "black" and insists on the term colored, making him somewhat uncomfortable.)
What does all this have to do with Lincoln being an early adopter of tech again?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
No surprise it that's true. Lots of white people still think they own black people something that happened before any of our great grandparents were born. The world's a big place. Pick any stupid idea and you'll be able find a lot of unlikely believers.
Personally I would call him 'Mr President'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Hysterical. It seems like every story with even the slightest political bent brings out all the reactionaries who want to bash Slashdot's supposed liberal bias. Now this guy says Slashdot is a haven for "Republi-nazis." Surely we can't have it both ways ... can we?? Why, that would be almost as if ... as if ... nah, I dare not say it.
Breakfast served all day!
Why? This reminded me of the "Best Friends Forever" episode of South Park. Just because his motives weren't (aren't?) apparent doesn't mean the end result wasn't a net gain. If it weren't for him, what would the world look like today?
If Obama's church were so hostile towards whites, it wouldn't have a fairly large amount of whites in attendance every Sunday.
You've never seen the legions of white kids who listen to Public Enemy, have you?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He was a dumb jackass just like Joseph Stalin - keep that union preserved at all costs. Rapes & murder didn't matter. He got many people killed in this country.
And he didn't even like blacks. He didn't want them freed either. Thats what they DON'T teach in public schools because of the propaganda by the government.
He was a pure murdering phony with aggrandizing historians helping his legacy.
People think Lincoln was a log splitting bumpkin? WTF?
he hotheads in the south who seceded before he even took the oath of office, and the even hotter heads in South Carolina who started the fighting -- those are the idiots who started the war.
My question is this: why is it treason for a state to want to secede? I mean, it's a shitty thing, but, if the elected leaders of a state wanted to secede, then wouldn't it make the USA a sort of an empire to trample that state into remaining in the union?
As far as Fort Sumter goes, Lincoln was given the choice of removing the troops and letting the South have the base. He told, rightly, the south to go pound sand and organized a relief mission of the fort and a federal blockade instead.
The fact of the matter is this, the Civil War was a blatant act of imperialism by the north, upon the south, a war that was pushed into all of its horrors by Abraham Lincoln, and he was right to do it. The great lesson of the civil war is that there are times when sovereignty must be set aside for a greater good, and that some imperialism is justifiable.
IT was right for Abraham Lincoln to destroy the South and end slavery, and, if anyone is like the Lincoln of our day, it may well be that it was right for George Bush to invade Iraq and destroy the Baath Party.
This is my sig.
Lincoln led the country into a bloody war and killed 600,000 of his own people.
I've been kinda comparing Lincoln and Bush and of course the biggest crack against Bush is the Iraq War and with it comes the off-repeated slogan, freedom cannot be brought by the barrel of a gun. The fact is, freedom did come by the federal gun in the civil war, and, it came again during the Civil Rights Era when the US Government would send soldiers and federal agents to ensure that black children could go to the same schools as whites.
This is my sig.
Lincoln violated the constitution numerous ways and suspended habeas corpus! Lincoln authorized the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of aiding the rebels.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig5/young-andrew7.html
Lincoln helped destroy the constitution and make the US government what it is today!
Once again, the ends don't justify the means. I am pro freedom and anti prejudice. Abraham Lincoln helped enslave us, and because the north won, they made him look great all through the rest of history.
Because of Abraham Lincoln, no state is allowed to recede for any reason.
When Lincoln took office the White House had no telegraph connection.
When Obama took office, he only found oldest computing equipment.
See http://www.earlyamerica.com/review/winter2000/jefferson.html for info on Jefferson and patents. Note in particular:
"Jefferson, a strong proponent of equality among all people, was not sure if it was fair or even constitutional to grant what was essentially a monopoly to an inventor, who would then be able to grant the use of his idea only to those who could afford it. His feeling that all should have total access to new technology was one of the reasons he never took out a patent on his own inventions."
US Patent #6469
(you will need a TIFF viewer or plugin)
Afraid of the truth?
"..."What hath god wrought" is considered to be the first documented telegraph message..."
Is it? This seems like yet another Americocentric boast. Cooke and Wheatstone were demonstrating their telegraph invention in London about ten years earlier. I'll bet you can find some documented messages from that time.
Cooke and Wheatstone used a 6-wire parallel bus. Perhaps we could claim them as the precursors of a computer architecture?
To illustrate how commonplace the telegraph was in the UK when Morse was 'inventing the first one' in the US, this site has a documented message of the railway telegraph in England being used to catch a murderer on Jan 1st 1845:
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/8341/telegraf.htm
My favorite invention from Lincoln by far is Lincoln Logs.
Lincoln was an early adopter for something else too. After receiving as a gift a harmonica from the Hohner harmonica company he wrote in a letter to them, "Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica." Yes, Honest Abe toked up. My admiration for our 16th president increases.
Lincoln was so badass that he makes Chuck Norris look like a schoolgirl and Bruce Schneier look like a remedial math student.
... and then they built the supercollider.
A wpm is (within a order of magnitude) approximately equal to a bit/s. When doing rough bandwidth comparisons they're often considered equivalent (since a wpm isn't precise anyway)
If you've ever read text coming from a 300bps modem you know that even that is coming at a clip well beyond what a human telegrapher could signal. At 2400bps (that's 300 8-bit bytes every SECOND!) there's no way a telegrapher could keep up
In response to this story, John McCain said that he doesn't really get this newfangled "telegraph" technology and he relies on his wife and aides for that kind of thing.
As a side note, there are a few interesting scenes in Steven King's dark tower series where a "modern" white guy is conversing with a black woman from a few decades back.
Surely you mean a modern uncoloured guy ?
Any person who has any hint of "colour" is "black" in the US. This is very strange.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
because the article appears at usnews.com. Grandma's news portal of choice, so you have to provide these types of analogies.
Best. Grammar. Nazi. Ever.
I would mod you up, good sir!
To explain to those who don't know for lack of education or lack of native ability, the correct statement is "If he were alive today . . ."
Here is an explanation. I am trying to perfect my use of the subjunctive in speech. I'm typically a descriptive grammatist, but when writing formal documents, I become a prescriptive grammatist.
Assuming that our slashdot numbers are the primary key/id of the users table in the database, it would be impossible to have an ID of zero I'm afraid...
I wonder what it would be like if everyone started using the word as a general insult. Would it become disassociated from black people? I know there's some sort of reclamation of the word (like "nerd" and "geek" have been reclaimed by their respective populations) as a term of empowerment, but what if the word became just a general insult and lost all ties to being black?
It would be an interesting linguistic and social experiment from a scientific point of view. I'm not sure how it gels socially with everyone, though.
There is a folk (and false) etymology of the word that it derives from "niggard" meaning, basically "a scrooge." That might help it along to becoming a general insult.
Because I fear for my future employment, I'd like to clarify that I'm not glorifying its use and am merely posing a question about what the world might look like if the word became a general insult completely unaffiliated with its former racist connotations or even just asking aloud whether this would even be possible.
This has, of course, been muddied by the extremely popular usage of "I have limited bandwidth. I only get 20GB of download a month."
My university IT department uses "bandwidth" in this way. This is at The University of Texas, which has prestigious computer science and computer engineering faculties, I believe.
The IT department on campus puts caps on bandwidth usage, and if you go over each week, you have to more "bandwidth."
http://resnet.utexas.edu/support/more-bandwidth.html
There, the residential network seems to be conflating the throughput and dictionary usages of the word.
Find some documentation for that quote. It's source is a Huffington Post article praising pot, but the author gives no documentation for it. No one else seems to have a genuine source for it either, all of them circling back to that HuffPuff piece as a reference. Until I see actual proof this quote is genuine, I'm calling it just another Internet urban legend.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
John McCain jokes are as old as the man himself..
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
subjunctive is a mood, not a voice!
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Buying into racist philosophy is, ironically, not limited to any race.
McCain uses a cellphone so he can't be too dumb.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Are you just jealous of a man who in his 70's still probably has more fun than you do?
Well, for most hardcore liberals (not necessarily calling the Parent a liberal), because they insist that Bush is a moron (last I checked, having trouble talking in public != stupidity, but another debate for another time), then all Republicans must be idiots and blind to technology. Last I checked, my Unix Bible didn't mention a requirement to lean to the left.
Here's proof.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
so is it real? those fallout3 guys were on to something!!!