The Year of Our Lord, 1973
Science
Marty Cooper invented the mobile phone {1}. The “anthropic principle” was proposed by theoretical physicist Brandon Carter during the symposium “Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data” in Kraków celebrating Copernicus’ 500th birthday, as if to proclaim that humanity does hold a special place in the universe after all. In his contribution “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology” Carter remarks: “Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent” {2}. Cohen and Boyer pioneer recombinant DNA techniques. In December, homosexuality was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and hence the sexual orientation was forever depathologized. Nobel Prize, Chemistry: Ernst Otto Fischer (W. Germany) and Geoffrey Wilkinson (UK), for work that could solve problem of automobile exhaust pollution. Nobel Prize, Physics: Ivar Giaever (US), Leo Esaki (Japan), and Brian D. Josephson (UK), for theories that have advanced and expanded the field of miniature electronics. Nobel Prize, Physiology or Medicine: Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz (both Austria), and Nikolaas Tinbergen (Netherlands), for their studies of individual and social behavior patterns Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is designed and in 1983 it becomes the standard for communicating between computers over the Internet. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), the technology behind MRI scanning, is developed. Skylab, the first American space station, is launched (May 14). Bic invents the disposable lighter. Members of the Marin County Canyon in California invents the mountain bike. Don Knuth promises to deliver a dozen volumes on the “Art of Programming”; the first three turn out to be the “bibles” of software development for many years, containing many of the basic algorithms of the field that became known as “data structures” and many of the techniques of programming that would become the basis of “software engineering”. While the concept of a wide area network had been effectively developed as a part of the ARPANet project, the basis for a “local area net” was Ethernet, created at Xerox PARC by Robert Metcalfe. In some ways Metcalfe invented Ethernet three times, the first time as part of his dissertation at MIT (as part of Project MAC), at Xerox PARC, and then again later at 3COM, a company he founded to exploit his invention. Twenty-seven years after the unveiling of the ENIAC, and many years after the US Patent Office had issued the patent for the computer to Eckert and Mauchly, the Judge Earl Larson of the US District Court in Minneapolis invalidated it. In a suit between Honeywell Information Systems and Sperry-Rand Corp. regarding the payment of royalties for the use of the concept of the computer, Larson found that Mauchly had derived his ideas for the computer from “one, John Vincent Atanasoff”. Neither Eckert nor Mauchly ever gave up their opposition to this finding, believing that their invention was true. For many this was the first time they had heard of the work of Atanasoff, or of the ABC. Roger Sperry discovers the bicameral physiology of the human brain (localized thought processing in right and left hemispheres).
Economics & Business
US GDP (1998 dollars): $1,382.60 billion Federal spending:$245.71 billion Federal debt:$466.3 billion Median Household Income (current dollars):$10,512 Consumer Price Index:44.4 Unemployment:5.6% Cost of a first-class stamp: $0.08 Great Britain, Ireland, and Denmark enter European Economic Community (Jan. 1). Federal Express begins operations in April. Oil prices hiked tremendously by Persian Gulf states in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in retaliation for Western countries’ involvement in the Yom Kippur War. The shock waves permanently altered the political landscape, reshaping geopolitical strategies, chief of which was the collapse of the USSR. It ushered in a new era of mass unemployment and of so-called ’stagflation’, and hammered living standards for more than a generation. Above all, the first Oil Shock put an end forever to hopes of true development in the recently-decolonialised Third World. It was realized that oil was the only essential commodity, basic to the world energy system. Because oil is denominated in dollars, one of the immediate effects of an oil shock is therefore to strengthen the USA. After 1973, manipulating the value of the dollar became a key way that the US used to restore its strategic hegemony in the world and to overcome some of its own problems, principally a serious balance of payments deficit.
