1950 – Mitch Kapor, American computer programmer and businessman, founded Lotus Software and Electronic Frontier Foundation is born.
Mitchell David Kapor, born November 1, 1950, is an entrepreneur best known for promoting the first spreadsheet VisiCalc, and later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes, like the Hidden Genius Project, The College Bound Brotherhood, and Advancement Project. As Partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, Mitch, along with his wife Freada Kapor Klein, invests in social impact tech startups that seek to narrow gaps in opportunity and access for underrepresented communities and attempt to eliminate barriers to full participation across the tech ecosystem.
1952 – The United States successfully detonates Ivy Mike, the first thermonuclear device, at the Eniwetok atoll. The explosion had a yield of ten megatons TNT equivalent.
Ivy Mike was the codename given to the first test of a full-scale thermonuclear device, in which part of the explosive yield comes from nuclear fusion. It was detonated on November 1, 1952 by the United States on the island of Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll, in the Pacific Ocean, as part of Operation Ivy. It was the first full test of the Teller-Ulam design, a staged fusion device.
Due to its physical size and fusion fuel type (cryogenic liquid deuterium), the Mike device was not suitable for use as a weapon; it was intended as an extremely conservative proof of concept experiment to validate the concepts used for multi-megaton detonations. A simplified and lightened bomb version (the EC-16) was prepared, and scheduled to be tested in operation Castle Yankee, as a backup in case the non-cryogenic “Shrimp” fusion device (tested in Castle Bravo) failed to work; that test was cancelled when the Bravo device was tested successfully, making the cryogenic designs obsolete.
1953 – Jan Davis, American engineer and astronaut is born.
Nancy Jan Davis (born Nancy Jan Smotherman, November 1, 1953) is a former American astronaut. A veteran of three space flights, Davis logged over 673 hours in space. She is now retired from NASA.
1960 – Tim Cook, American businessman and engineer, current CEO of Apple Inc. is born.
Timothy Donald “Tim” Cook (born November 1, 1960) is an American business executive, industrial engineer and developer. Cook is the current and seventh Chief Executive Officer of Apple Inc., previously serving as the company’s Chief Operating Officer, under its founder Steve Jobs.
Cook joined Apple in March 1998 as senior vice president of worldwide operations and then served as Executive Vice President of worldwide sales and operations. He was made Chief Executive on August 24, 2011. During his tenure as the Chief Executive he has advocated for the political reformation of international and domestic surveillance, cybersecurity, corporate taxation both nationally and abroad, American manufacturing, and environmental preservation.
In 2014, Cook became the first Chief Executive of a Fortune 500 company to publicly identify as gay. Cook also serves on the boards of directors of Nike, Inc. and the National Football Foundation. In early 2012, he was awarded compensation of one million shares, vesting in 2016 and 2021, by Apple’s board of directors, and in March 2015, he said he planned to donate his entire stock fortune to charity.
1963 – The Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, with the largest radio telescope ever constructed, officially opens.
The Arecibo Observatory is a radio telescope in the municipality of Arecibo, Puerto Rico. This observatory is operated by SRI International, USRA and UMET, under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation (NSF). The observatory is the sole facility of the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC), which refers to the observatory, and the staff that operates it. From its construction in the 1960s until 2011, the observatory was managed by Cornell University.
The observatory’s 1,000-foot (305-metre) radio telescope was the largest single-aperture telescope from its completion in 1963 until July 2016 when the Five hundred meter Aperture Spherical Telescope was completed. It is used in three major areas of research: radio astronomy, atmospheric science, and radar astronomy. Scientists who want to use the observatory submit proposals that are evaluated by an independent scientific board.
The observatory has appeared in film and television productions, gaining more recognition in 1999 when it began to collect data for the SETI@home project. It has been listed on the American National Register of Historic Places starting in 2008. It was the featured listing in the National Park Service’s weekly list of October 3, 2008. The center was named in IEEE Milestone in 2001. It has a visitor center that is open part-time.