We know that Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call to his assistant Thomas Watson in 1876. Bell also made the first transcontinental phone call to Watson in 1915.
Thomas Watson, the assistant to Alexander Graham Bell, was only 24 years old in 1876 when he was on the receiving end of the first telephone call. After leaving Bell Telephone Company in 1881, Watson pursued a number of other careers, including farming, geology, and acting, as well as founding a successful shipbuilding company.
IBM Watson is a computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. It was named after IBM’s founder, Thomas J. Watson. The system was initially developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy!, and, in 2011, it competed on the show against champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, winning the first-place prize of 1 million dollars.
Jeopardy! has been parodied more than any other game show on the late-night comedy/variety show, Saturday Night Live, with fifteen episodes of “Celebrity Jeopardy!” featuring Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek and Darrell Hammond as a celebrity contestant (often as Sean Connery, who acts as foil to Ferrell’s Trebek). The last “Celebrity Jeopardy!” sketch appeared in the Saturday Night Live 40th Anniversary Special on February 15, 2015. The sketch continued in the form of “Black Jeopardy!” beginning in 2014, with Kenan Thompson as host Darnell Hayes asking a mostly Black panel of contestants questions of a stereotypical nature; categories include “They out here sayin’”, “I’ma pray on this’”, “I don’t know”, and as always, “White People.”
Chadwick Boseman appeared on SNL’s “Black Jeopardy”, in character as King T’Challa. He answered one question correctly, in the category, “White People”.
James Chadwick won the 1935 Nobel prize for Physics for his discovery of the neutron, and went on to head the British team working on the Manhattan Project. When he started at Victoria University of Manchester, he meant to study mathematics, but enrolled in Physics by mistake.
In mathematics, the numbers can be written with their symbols or by their words (or names). For example there is 1 and one, or 2 and two.
In the names of the first 1,000 numbers the letter a appears exactly once, and only once:
One thousand.
The letter a does not appear from 0 until you get to 1,000.
During his run for the U.S. Presidency in 1998, and then during his term in office, George H.W. Bush regularly used the phrase “a thousand points of light” to describe clubs, volunteer and community organizations, and individuals who worked to improve their communities, and the country. His frequent use of the phrase was often ridiculed by his critics.
Among his phrases ridiculed by his critics, when he campaigned for the Presidency for 1988, George H. W. Bush said he would never raise taxes. One specific phrase he used was, “Read. My. Lips. — No New Taxes.” He uttered this phrase at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans as he accepted the Republican Party’s nomination. It was Bush’s most prominent sound bite from his speech.
But this would come back to haunt him. Although Bush opposed the creation of new taxes as President, the Democratic-controlled Congress proposed increases in existing taxes as a way to reduce the national budget deficit. Bush negotiated with Congress for a budget that met his pledge, but was unable to make a deal with a Senate and House that was controlled by the opposing Democrats. Bush agreed to a compromise, which increased several existing taxes as part of a 1990 budget agreement.
In the 1992 presidential election campaign, Pat Buchanan repeatedly cited the pledge as an example of a broken promise in his unsuccessful challenge to Bush in the Republican primaries. In the general election, Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, running as a moderate, also cited the quotation and questioned Bush’s trustworthiness.
Bush lost his bid for re-election to Clinton, prompting many to suggest his failure to keep the “no new taxes” pledge as the primary reason for his defeat.
Other prominent factors from the 1992 Presidential Election were the emergence of Ross Perot as a third-party candidate, and the nascent rise of cable television which the Clinton campaign used to bolster their candidate’s appeal to younger and urban voters.
On June 3, 1992, the night after he had secured enough delegates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Bill Clinton appeared on The Arsenio Hall Show; during his appearance, he played the saxophone on the song “Heartbreak Hotel.” The appearance was widely seen as a key moment in his campaign, enhancing his visibility and appeal, particularly among younger and minority voters.
Bill Clinton gave the nomination speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention. It was long and not very good. Many late-night host ridiculed it during their monologues and a lot of political pundits said Clinton had thrown away a golden opportunity and destroyed his political future.
Bill Clinton had a very successful 2-term presidency. He was the first president ever who was born after WWII. Under his leadership the country experienced tremendous growth which led to a budget surplus and welfare reform. Clinton also appointed two Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.
Bill Clinton’s aforementioned saxophone solo was later parodied in the opening theme of Animaniacs.
We’re Animaniacs
Dot is cute, and Yakko yaks
Wakko packs away the snacks
While Bill Clinton plays the sax
We’re Animaniacs!
Hillary Clinton ran for the Senate seat of New York in 2000, thus becoming the first wife of the President of the USA to be a candidate for elected office. She won the election in November of 2000, and, when she was sworn in, became the first former First Lady to hold an elected position.
In May 1953 when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first to summit Mt. Everest and return alive, Norgay wrote in his 1955 autobiography that Hillary took the first step onto the summit, and then he soon followed.
The first photo of a person standing on the summit who returned alive is of Norgay. Hillary took the photo. Hillary declined to have his picture taken.
There is no photo of Edmund Hillary on the summit of Everest.
The Hillary Step was a 40-ft vertical rock face between the South Summit and the final approach to the summit of Mt. Everest. Named for the leader of the first expedition to successfully reach the summit, Sir Edmond Hillary, it was the most difficult part of the climb to surpass. In 2015 the step was destroyed by an earthquake, with climbers reporting the step was now 12 to 15 feet high.
In 2024 there were 861 successful summits of Mt. Everest, which was short of the record of 876, set in 2019. Of those 861, 787 were from the Nepal side of the mountain, while 74 were from the Tibet side. There were 8 deaths reported in 2024.
All Elite Wrestling professional wrestler Darby Allin became the first pro wrestler to successfully reach Everest’s summit on May 18, 2025. While he was there, he set a record for the highest-elevation skateboard kickflip.
The Nepali name for what’s called Mt. Everest in English is Sagarmatha or Sagar-Matha. British Surveyors used to call it Peak XV until changing it to Mount Everest, after Sir George Everest, a surveyor, who protested the idea.