In a time before radio or telephone, the only way to communicate over long distance was by letter. At the time, it typically took a a few weeks to a month for a letter to get from the eastern US to California.

The Pony Express used relay teams to deliver mail between the east and the west coast. They were able to get delivery time down to about 10 days, traveling from St. Joseph, MO to Sacramento, CA.

There were stations located about 5 to 25 miles apart all along the route where the riders would change horses. The riders would ride about 100 miles before passing the mail to the next relay rider.

It was costly to mail items through the Pony Express, $5 for a half ounce in the beginning, $1 per half ounce in the end. (That would have been about $130 and $26 in today’s dollars.) The company had hoped to get a US government contract but it went to a stagecoach company instead and private business wasn’t enough to keep them solvent.

After a little less than a year – March 1861 – the only route they were running was between Salt Lake City, UT and Sacramento, CA. In October of that year the transcontinental telegraph line was completed. Two days later, the Pony Express announced it was closing.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has named it as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. (The others are The Chunnel, CN Tower, Empire State Building, Itaipu Dam, Delta Works, and the Panama Canal.)

When it was built it had the longest suspension bridge main span in the world. It held this record until 1964.

Today you can cross the bridge by foot, bicycle, or car. Pedestrians and bicycles can cross toll-free. Vehicles must pay when traveling south into San Francisco.

Along with being a well-known symbol of San Francisco, the bridge is popular with people who want to commit suicide. It’s the second most popular suicide bridge in the world. It’s not a pleasant way to die. A New Yorker article describes it like this:

[T}he impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

Those who survive the impact usually die soon afterward. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water—which reaches a depth of three hundred and fifty feet—that they drown. (The rare survivors always hit feet first, and at a slight angle.) A number of bodies become trapped in the eddies stirred by the bridge’s massive stone piers, and sometimes wash up as far away as the Farallon Islands, about thirty miles off. These corpses suffer from “severe marine depredation”—shark attacks and, particularly, the attentions of crabs, which feed on the eyeballs first, then the loose flesh of the cheeks.

There’s a volunteer group called Bridgewatch Angels who walk the bridge looking for people considering suicide. The bridge is also randomly patrolled by California police.

It also means you get less lather from your soap and the calcium bonds with the soap to make soap scum, that icky white residue that coats the inside of your tub or shower.

By the early 1920s, a young man named Emmett Culligan had already made and lost a fortune in real estate. It was the “losing” part that made him move his young family back home to live with his parents. There he ran into an old friend who had been experimenting on making a water “conditioning” machine. It filtered the hard water through sand and zeolite to filter out the magnesium and calcium. The zeolite had sodium ions that would change places in the water with the calcium and magnesium ions.

Culligan recognized a good idea when he saw it and borrowed a bag of zeolite from his friend. He took it home and put it into a coffee can that had holes poked in the bottom. Then he poured hard water through it. He used the water to wash his baby’s diapers and was amazed at their softness. (Okay, show of hands here, who believes he washed the diapers and who thinks he had his wife do it?)

He launched his business selling water softener filters in 1924 for $200 each. That would be about $2700 each in today’s dollars. People wanted them, even at that price. That’s how much hard water sucks.

Unfortunately, just as things were going well for him again, the stock market crashed in 1929. Culligan was nothing if not resourceful. He began leasing the water softeners instead of just selling them outright. A homeowner could rent one for $2 a month.

In 1938 Culligan had franchises throughout the Northeast US, and nationally within another 10 years.

Now there are many other brands of water filters and softeners on the market: Kinetico, Pelican, GE, Fleck, EcoWater, Kenmore, Whirlpool, and others. If you’re interested in how they work, Popular Mechanics has an easy-to-understand article about it – How It Works: Water Softener.

The Manhattan Project test.

Three weeks later on August 6, 1945 the first atomic bomb used in a war was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. 66,000 people died and 4 1/2 square miles of the city was completely destroyed.

Three days later a second bomb was dropped, this time on Nagasaki, Japan. It killed 36,000 people and destroyed 40% of the city. Neither of these were the deadliest bombing attacks on Japan. Over 100,000 people died as a result of the Operation Meetinghouse bombing on Tokyo on March 9, 1945. The biggest difference is that the Tokyo bombing used 330 B-52s and they used incendiary bombs carrying napalm.

The dates of the first atomic bomb tests by other countries are:

USSR – August 29, 1949
United Kingdom – October 3, 1952
France – February 13, 1960
China – October 16, 1964
India – May 18, 1974
Israel – September 22, 1979…maybe
Pakistan – May 28, 1988
North Korea – October 9, 2006 but that one was a bit weak. They had a for realsies one on February 12, 2013

Time lapse map showing all of the nuclear explosions from 1945 through 1998 – that’s 2053 nuclear explosions.

Here’s the tl;dw version.

How atomic bombs work.

Compared to what ATMs can do now, the original one was not very complicated. It would give out a set amount of cash when a user put in a special card.

In December 1972 an ATM that is closer to what we have now was installed at a LLoyds Bank in Essex, England. The bank customer could withdraw variable amounts of money and that amount would be debited from their account immediately.

By 1979 ATMs were being networked so that customers of different banks could conduct their banking business from the same ATMS (for a small fee if it wasn’t your home bank.)

The first ATMS had been located on the banks’ properties but during the 1980s they began showing up at shopping malls, near bars and restaurants and other places where people might want quick cash. These had more limited function than the ones connected to banks – mostly just dispersing cash in $20 increments.

Note from the Repetition Department Dept.: ATM means Automatic Teller Machine, do not say ATM machine because that would be redundant (machine machine). You enter your PIN (Personal Identification Number) when you use it, not your PIN number (number number). Your cooperation in this matter is appreciated.

We didn’t get a full view photo of the Earth for almost 30 more years. On December 7, 1972 the crew of Apollo 17 sent back this photo of Earth. It became known as “The Blue Marble”. (Apollo 17 was also the last manned mission to the Moon.)

The photo shows the South Pole, or rather, clouds over the South Pole, Africa, and parts of Asia.

Finally, in 2015, we’ve gotten another sunlit Earth photo. This one is from a satellite that is one million miles away and shows the best part of Earth, North America. Just kidding! North America isn’t the best part, it just contains the best part – the USA! Totally not kidding about that.