28 years ago today
Google Founded in a Garage
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford University PhD students, officially incorporated Google on September 4, 1998, with a $100,000 investment from Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. The name was a play on "googol" — the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros — reflecting the founders' ambition to organize the seemingly infinite information of the internet. Operating out of a garage in Menlo Park, California, the fledgling company had already developed a search algorithm called PageRank that consistently outperformed its rivals. Within a decade Google had become the world's most visited website, and within two decades the parent company Alphabet had grown into one of the most valuable corporations in human history. The founding of Google is widely considered the single most consequential entrepreneurial event of the internet age.
Beyoncé
American singer, songwriter, and actress
Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is one of the best-selling and most acclaimed musicians of all time, with a career spanning her early years in Destiny's Child through a solo catalog that includes Lemonade, 4, and Renaissance. She holds the record for the most Grammy Awards won by any artist, and her cultural influence extends far beyond music into fashion, film, and social activism.
Anton Bruckner
Austrian composer and organist
Anton Bruckner was one of the great symphonists of the Romantic era, whose nine monumental symphonies combined the formal architecture of Beethoven with the harmonic richness of Wagner. He was deeply religious and humble to the point of self-doubt, often revising his symphonies repeatedly over decades at the suggestion of others. His work was initially polarizing but is now considered among the most profound orchestral music ever written.
Tom Watson
American professional golfer
Tom Watson won eight major championships, including five Open Championships, and was the world's dominant golfer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His dramatic chip-in on the 17th hole at Pebble Beach during the 1982 US Open — which he holed to defeat Jack Nicklaus — is one of the most celebrated shots in golf history.
Richard Wright
American novelist, author of Native Son
Richard Wright was a groundbreaking African American author whose novel Native Son (1940) shocked American literature with its unflinching portrayal of racism and the psychology of oppression. His autobiography Black Boy (1945) is equally celebrated. Wright moved to Paris in 1947 where he became part of the existentialist circle around Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Al-Biruni
Persian polymath, scholar of geography and science
Al-Biruni was one of the greatest scholars of the medieval Islamic world, producing major works on mathematics, astronomy, geography, and history. He wrote one of the earliest encyclopedic studies of Indian culture and science after traveling to the subcontinent with Mahmud of Ghazni, and he calculated the circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy.
Fall of the Western Roman Empire
The Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, on this date. Though the empire had been weakening for centuries, historians traditionally mark this moment as the end of ancient Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages in Western Europe.
Los Angeles Founded by Spanish Settlers
44 settlers — a mix of indigenous Californians, Africans, Europeans, and people of mixed ancestry — established El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Ángeles on the banks of the Los Angeles River under Spanish colonial authority. The small agricultural town could scarcely have imagined becoming the entertainment capital of the world.
Edison's Pearl Street Station Powers Lower Manhattan
Thomas Edison's Pearl Street Station in New York City became the first commercial central power plant in the United States, supplying electricity to 85 customers in a one-square-mile area of lower Manhattan. The station's opening marked the beginning of the electrical age and the end of the era of gaslight.
Apache Chief Geronimo Surrenders
After almost three decades of resisting U.S. and Mexican military forces across the Southwest, Apache leader Geronimo surrendered for the final time to General Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. The surrender effectively ended the Apache Wars and marked the close of the Indian Wars era in the American Southwest.
George Eastman Patents the Kodak Camera
George Eastman registered the Kodak trademark and patented his revolutionary roll-film camera, making photography accessible to ordinary people for the first time. His simple design — users sent the whole camera in for processing — launched the consumer photography industry that would transform how humans documented their lives.
Little Rock Crisis — Governor Uses National Guard Against Integration
Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent nine Black students from enrolling at Central High School in Little Rock, in open defiance of the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. President Eisenhower ultimately sent in the 101st Airborne Division to enforce federal law, in one of the most dramatic confrontations of the Civil Rights era.
Mark Spitz Wins Seventh Olympic Gold Medal
American swimmer Mark Spitz won his seventh gold medal at the Munich Olympics, setting a world record in each event — a feat that stood as the single-Games record until Michael Phelps won eight golds at Beijing in 2008. Spitz's achievement remains one of the most extraordinary individual performances in Olympic history.
Buckminsterfullerene Discovered
Scientists at Rice University discovered a new form of carbon consisting of 60 carbon atoms arranged in a sphere resembling the geodesic dome structures designed by architect Buckminster Fuller. The molecule, nicknamed the "buckyball," opened an entirely new field of materials science and nanotechnology, earning its discoverers the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Start a conversation →Albert Schweitzer
French-Gabonese physician, philosopher, Nobel Peace Prize laureate
Albert Schweitzer devoted the second half of his life to running a hospital he founded in 1913 in Lambaréné, in what is now Gabon. A brilliant organist and Bach scholar who also held doctorates in theology and philosophy, he gave up a distinguished academic career to practice medicine in West Africa. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
Edvard Grieg
Norwegian composer and pianist
Edvard Grieg is Norway's most celebrated composer, known above all for his Piano Concerto in A minor and the Peer Gynt suites. His music drew deeply on Norwegian folk traditions and helped establish a distinctly Scandinavian voice in the Romantic repertoire.
Joan Rivers
American comedian and television host
Joan Rivers died following complications from a routine endoscopy procedure. A trailblazing comedian who broke barriers for women in stand-up comedy, she was known for her fierce self-deprecating humor, her work as a red-carpet commentator, and her unflinching willingness to offend anyone in pursuit of a laugh.
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