July 31 · This Day in America
The United States is barely a year into its Constitution when it issues Patent No. 1. It goes to Samuel Hopkins, for a better way of making potash — the homely lye of soap and glass and gunpowder that frontier farmers boiled out of wood ash. The document is signed by President George Washington, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph; the founders personally read and approved the country's first idea worth protecting. It is a small thing, potash. But the principle underneath it was enormous and brand new: that an ordinary person's invention belonged to them, that ingenuity was property the law would defend, that you did not have to be born noble to own what your mind made. Almost every American garage and lab since has run on this one page.
Source: www.govinfo.gov
Also on this day · 1971
On the Apollo 15 mission, astronauts David Scott and Jim Irwin unfold a battery-powered, wire-wheeled buggy and drive it across the foot of the lunar Apennines, past Hadley Rille. The Lunar Roving Vehicle tops out near 9 mph and ranges miles from the lander. For the first time, humans explore another world the way they explore this one — by getting in the car and going for a drive.
Source: www.nasa.gov