Voices of Old Technology - A Museum in the Making Perspectives on Our History Through Technology     Timeline

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As we build our Timeline, we are being eclectic as we include important events in the tech history of QC, CUNY, the Borough of Queens, and other items in order to put our own history into perspective.  Some of the "What else was going on when... " answers are fun to contemplate.

The following information has been culled from many sources, including the following.

The New York Times Historical Database on the Web is one of our sources for general as well as CUNY information.

Among the sources for the Queens College information is the wonderful book The People's College on the Hill,published by the College in 1987 for its 50th anniversary. Student Yearbooks, College Bulletins, student newspapers, faculty-staff newsletters are among other major sources.

Among the sources for the CUNY information are the various CUNY publications on the CUNY web site.

We will be adding more to this timeline shortly.

1833:

• A virtual exhibit on the Museum of the City of New York website identifies Charles Durant, in his June 1833 flight in "Professor Lowe's Mammoth Balloon, The City of New York" as the "first person to set foot on Long Island from the air."  One other source identifies Mr. Durant as a native american.  Professor Lowe was well known for his aerial reconnaissance using balloons for the Union Army during the Civil War.  The NY Times documents that in 1865 Professor Lowe provided balloon rides (for a price) as entertainment in NYC., from his location at 59th Street and Sixth Avenue.
  

1847:

• May 1847 - NY State charters the Free Academy in NYC as a free institution of public higher education; the Free Academy opens in 1849.  In 1866, it becomes City College (CCNY), and is the first college of what later becomes  CUNY. For men only.  See CUNY Matters  Fall 1997 issue, p 12 for a timeline of public higher education in NYC.
  

1870:

• Normal College is founded as the second municipal college in NYC. The Normal School later became Hunter College. For women only.
  

1898:

• Borough of Queens is one of 5 boroughs incorporated into the City of New York.

1903:

• Wright Brothers famous flight, at Kitty Hawk, NC.  ---#### check for date their NYC bicycle shop opened
  

• African-American inventor and patent preparer Lewis Latimer moves to Flushing NY. Lewis Latimer worked with Alexander Graham Bell and with Thomas Edison.  In the 1980s, his house was moved to another area of Flushing, in order to preserve it and make it into a museum.
  

1909:

• NY Parental School for Boys opens on the site that later becomes Queens College. The Parental School was PS 12; passes issued to students were printed in the Parental School Print Shop.  As with other NYC public schools, the doorknobs were beautiful and had a raised design identifying it as being part of one of the NYC public schools.
  
• As part of the Hudson Fulton Celebration, Wilbur Wright flies from Governors Island around New York Harbor.  One report says this was the first flight over NY Harbor.
  

1924:

• NYC's municpal broadcasting radio station WNYC begins broadcasting on July 8, 1924.  Log shows battery problem caused them to go off the air for a short time.  NYC Mayor John F. Hylan said in the first broadcast "The improvement of the people in every walk of life through the educative power of the radio may also be considered one of its paramount purposes."
  

1925:

• EDO Aircraft Corporation founded in College Point, Queens in 1925 by Earl Dodge Osborn. EDO did pioneering work in the area of metal floats for seaplanes.  March 3, 2004: Earl Dodge Osborn inducted into the Long Island Technology Hall of Fame.
  

1929-1930:

• Leroy Grumman and 3 others start Grumman Aircraft Corporation on Long Island.
  

1930:

• Brooklyn College opens.
  

1937:

• Queens College opens Fall 1937 on the former site of the Parental School .  One of the requirements for entering students is a speech test, and the test is recorded using a large recording device.  The student's speech is evaluated, and after a semester of speech class, another recording is made for comparison. Students are given their recordings.
  
• The Crown,first student newspaper at QC, begins publication.
  

• October 22, 1938: Chester Carlson invents new dry copier process and has successful test in Astoria, Queens. The text that he copied was "10-22-38 Astoria."  This invention becomes the basis of the Xerox copying process.  From the Xerox website [pdf format] [html format].
  

• 1939-40 World's Fair in Flushing Meadow Park:
• Willets Point - Shea stadium subway stop built for the 1939-40 Fair, replacing earlier station nearby.  New subway cars put into use for the Fair.
  
• President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduces television in the first scheduled TV program.
• Aviation Pavilion
  
• October 4, 1939 is Air Transportation Day at the World's Fair; address by Colonel Eddie Rickenbacker, President of Eastern Air Lines.
• According to the New York Times, on May 30, 1939 Mrs. Evelyn Saas of Corona watched the TV demo at the GE pavilion.  Her comment according to the Times was that she hoped that someday deaf people will be able to lip-read messages on a television-telephone.; Mrs. Saas is deaf, and could lip read some of the words spoken in the TV program.
• On June 3, 1939, the American Society for the Hard of Hearing held a conference with earphones at each chair and easy opportunities for lip-reading at the World's Fair.  Dr. E. P. Fowler, Director of the League, says "Earphones should be no more embarrassing thean glasses."  Dr. High Grant Rowell of Columbia Teacher's College asks for "a changed attitude on the employability of the handicapped."  There was a lip reading demo by members of the NY League for the Hard of Hearing.
• Part of Horace Harding Blvd. near the College is renamed World's Fair Blvd.

• Article in the Crown - Jan. 12, 1940: "WNYC to Erect Broadcasting Station Here - Dr. Bradley Will Conduct Adult Education Course"

... WNYC, New York City's radio station, will establish a broadcasting unit at Queens College, The Crown learned yesterday from Dr. Henry Miller of the Economics Department, who has been negotiating for several months with the station.  Professor Phillips Bradley, chairman of the Political Science Department, has been selected to deliver a series of some thirty lectures on "The Problems of Democracy" on an adult education course to be given twice a week from the Queens College campus.

"This is a unique experiment in adult education...", Dr Miller stated.

...Professor Bradley intends to enlist the cooperation of Queensboro Womens Clubs and the principals of the high schools to schedule meetings and assemblies at the time of the broadcasts, which will be given Wednesdays and Fridays at 1 pm.

• Article in the Crown - May 10, 1940: "GMC Efficiency Startles Four Innocents From Queens," by Albert Kraus. Very interesting observations in parts of this article that are not included here.
  

Modern Industrial Efficiency and all its implications were experienced by three Queens College students ... and Professor William Withers... last Monday evening when ... General Motors Corporation undertook to wine and dine us and introduce us to the great and the near great in the automotive industry at a dinner for more than 100 college men at the World's Fair...

• Approximately 400 students listen to a radio in Jefferson Hall to hear FDR tell on December 7th about the attack on Pearl Harbor.

• Queens College begins a pre-engineering program.
• Summer 1942: Some Queens College students work in defense plants.
• Mayor Fiorello La Guardia begins regular radio broadcasts.
  

• Hunter College Uptown (now Lehman College) begins its wartime hosting of a training site for the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) of the US Navy.
• August 1943: Queens College begins its wartime hosting of the ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program), in which members of ASTP unit 3222 lived and studied engineering and foreign languages on campus.
  

• New York Times, March 18, 1944, page 9: "ASTP Classes to Cease - Queens College, Where 283 Were Trained, To Halt Project".

With its 283 men ordered to report for departure... the Queens College unit ... is being inactivated...

.... Representatives of three city colleges Brooklyn, City, and Queens will meet with Army officials in the Board of Higher Education Offices at 695 Park Avenue to discuss a mutual termination of the projects...

...The college is sponsoring a dinner... A motion picture of highlights of their stay at the college will be shown...

• A Victory Ship is named Queens Victory as a result of Queens College's ASTP role.
• Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reads comics on the radio during a newspaper strike in NYC>
  

• Queens College Speech and Hearing Center helps returning veterans.
• (recheck year?) George Capel hired by Physics Department to provide Audio Visual services to Music Department and to campus.
  

• Queens College's Rampart begins publishing - college's 2nd student newspaper.
  

• Spring 1950: President John J. Theobald circulates "mimeographed letter" on campus about the Teachers Union, and why disciplinary probation was appropriate for students who distributed leaflets.  "The People's College on the Hill," Queens College 50th Anniversary - 1987.
  

• Unit of Air force ROTC established at Queens College; disbanded in 1960.
• New QC power plant built.
  

• Joe McCarthy hearings on TV; ends in censure of McCarthy.  McCarthy and related red scare witch hunts resulted in a number of QC and other CUNY faculty losing their jobs. 
  

• Queens College student newspaper Knightbeat begins publication; later changes name to Newsbeat.
  

• Both Crown and Rampart student papers are suspended at Queens College.
• Phoenix begins publication as a student newspaper at Queens Colllege.
• May 19, 1959: QC student Bianca Covelli Stewart is among four blind students given $ 500 awards by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for superior academic achievement.  The awards are given as part of a celebration of the 8th anniversary of Recordings for the Blind.
  

• in a ceremony in Washington.

• colleges in NYC joined to become CUNY - the City University of NY.
  

1962:

• Historical Documents collection of NYS and NYC documents is started at Queens College by Professor Leo Hershkowitz.
  

1964:

• 1964-1965 World's Fair in Flushing Meadow Park. 
  
• NY Panorama (NYC scale model) debuts, with model helicopters and other planes.
  
• NY Hall of Science --- space capsules shown by student guides.
• New subway cars (later known as "redbirds") put into service on the #7 line starting 1963 and featured at the Fair. Cars retired and placed into position off the NJ shore as artificial reefs in 2003 - 2004.
  
• NY Times / September 11, 1964, p. 38:  Computers Turn to Poetry Study; Special to the New York Times. Report on a three-day conference at IBM on "literary data processing."
  

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, Sept.10 - Resemblances between Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" have been turned up through a computer analysis that was reported at a conference here today at the International Business Machines Corporation research center...

... The computer studies... were described by Joseph Raben, a Professor of English at Queen College.  Associated with him in the analysis were Seymour Goodman of the Queens Department of Chemistry and Raymond D. Villani of I.B.M. ...

... Physical scientists have become computer conscious, or in some cases, even computer oriented.  It is now hoped by computer scientists that many students of the humanities will follow this lead.

• New York Times, April 27, 1965, p 23: University Sets Up Complaint Center.  Describes new complaint center for admissions problems established by the University Applications Processing Center in Brooklyn.  Quotes Professor Louis Heil, director of the center.

• February 25, 1966 at 1:30 pm: Queens College Computer Center sponsors public seminar "Computers and the Humanities," in the Queens College Theatre.  Publicity indicates "partial support from the National Science Foundation," and presenters including: Professor Louis T. Milic (Literature), Columbia University; Professor Lejaren A. Hiller (Music), University of Illinois; James Humphrey III (Art), Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Dr. Edmund Bowles (General), IBM Corporation.  Phone number for the Computer Center, for further information, is listed as "212 HI 5-7500, ext 435."
  

• New York Times, Nov. 3, 1968, p 1: Colleges Offer Admissions Help to City's Strikebound Seniors. In a paragraph regarding important issues relared to the teachers' strikes that Fall and what college-bound seniors can do, they are advised that transcripts are available for students applying to City University of New York units "... in the data processing bank, set up by the University Application Processing Center,,,"

• March 17, 1970: Article in the Phoenix: "Government Will be Reorganized - Students Will Receive IBM Ballots"
  
• QC inaugurates a degree program in computer science and the Computer Science Department; Dr. Seymour Goodman is its founder and first Chair.
  

• QC inaugurates a degree program in accounting and the Accounting and Information Systems Department; Professor Louis Geller is its founder and first Chair.  Department is a spin-off from the Economics Department. (check year)
  
• The QC Center for Instructional Development (CID) is created in September.
  

• Out-and-About Video Club formed at Queens College.

CUNY's University Computer Center founded based on a plan by 3 campus computer center / computer science dept faculty who felt the campuses needed central support for academic computing. User services area had keypunch machines.

• Ray Kurzweil, who grew up in Queens, demonstrates his new Kurzweil Reading Machine at a televised press conference January 13, 1976.  The Kurzweil reading Machine was the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. Kurzweil Readers are soon found in libraries.  [In 1991, Ray Kurzweil was awarded an honory degree by Queens College.]
• New for FALL 1976 - Tuition for all at CUNY!  There are many unfortunate affects of this.  One of them is that billing and financial aid processes become more complicated at CUNY.
  
• UAPC and UAPC director George Finn provide part of the solution to the new problem of how to handle new financial aid issues created by the imposition of tuition for all CUNY students, effective Fall 1976.  Previously, New York City residents paid only small fees to attend CUNY.  Undergraduate NYC residents who are full time now have a tuition charge of $ 387.50 per semester for freshmen and sophomores, and $ 462.50 for juniors and seniors. - in addition to the fees.

Aid applications will now go thru more central CUNY processes, and a multi-copy pre-printed Tuition Assistance Voucher (TAV), each approximately 8 1/2" x 14") for each aid recipient with is made available to colleges, showing TAP and Pell award estimates. Many heavy boxes of these pre-printed TAVs are picked up and delivered to each campus.  Decwriter printer terminals (dialup - 300 baud) are placed on each campus for campuses to check information on-line for late filers and late award estimates. 

• For the Fall 1976 registration period, Queens College Financial Aid Office opens an outpost during registration period in the I Building, formerly the college's student center. The financial aid area is in the area most recently occupied by the Candy Store and in front of it, and "preprinted TAVs" from UAPC are pulled and given to early filers at a financial aid station in front of the stage.  Bursar also opens an outpost for registration in the I Building.  Financial Aid selects and circles student's eligible awards, and uses numbering stamps to validate prepreinted TAVs; later filers have "manual TAVs" written.   Validated Financial Aid Office copies of TAVs are used to create paper transaction lists, with batch controls, for central input to the CUNY Student Financial Aid payroll system to specify how much has to be paid toward the bill and not to the student.
• From the November 1976 issue of the THE Journal (Technological Horizons in Higher Education), article "The On-Line Classroom":
  

Queens College of the City University of New York has installed a new system of teaching terminals.  It was pioneered by Professor Louis Geller, chairman of the Department of Accounting and Information Systems.  Professor Geller put 16 keyboards on line to an interactive computer to teach the application of computers to accounting and financial problm areas. Professor Geller states: "The basic idea of the DIGI-LOG ON-LINE CLASSROOM is to provide the students with hands-on experience so they can be positively reinforced before leaving the classroom"...

...The ON-LINE CLASSROOM is a teaching terminal system that consists of an interactive CRT display for on-line operation and control by the instructor, auxiliary keyboards that are used by the students, large cideo display monitors to facilitate easy viewing in the classroom or lecture hall, a printer interface for keeping a record of the class's transactions. and an instructor control module which is used to enable the individual keyboards...

...The company feels that many more applicaitons will emerge through the innovation of the teachers that use the system and the further development of the computer aided instruction concept...

• New York Times, Aug 28, 1977, p. 126: Systems Programmers.  Ad for systems programmers positions to work on Queens College's Sigma 7, with a reply to Dr. Seymour Goodman, Computer Center, Queens College.
• Marian Freeland, Coordinator of Programmers in the QC Administrative Data Center, and Syd Lefkoe, Assistant Director of Financial Aid Services, develop a computer vouchering system to each student's estimated aid as it comes in on a new "FAP Merge" tape toward the tuition bill at Spring 1977 registration, after verifying the student's eligible registration status.   The same edits are applied to a new computer edit system run each financial aid payroll cycle.  At this point, any needed computer tapes as well as many large printouts are hand carried by hand between the college and the various university computer centers.
• QC's Klapper Library begins the computerized Zebra tracking system.
  

• BITNET founded by CUNY and Yale; BITNET becomes an important precursor on the way to the Internet.
  
• Financial Aid Office begins to control financial aid check holds using a Wylbur file on CUNYVM.

• QC Council for Media Research approved.
• NAS 5000 acquired as gift for administrative data center.
  

• CUNY advertises in the NY Times for systems programmers for new BITNET support center and growing BITNET network.
• QC Quad founded as new QC student newspaper.
  

• QC Gertz Speech and Hearing Clinic enlarged.

• "Journal of Urban Technology" begins publication in Fall 1992 at NYC Technical College; editor is Dr. Richard Hanley. CUNY Matters - Summer 1996, page 11.
  

• Fall 1993 - CUNY's Open Systems Center opens for faculty and staff training at CUNY.
  

• Carmen  Dorf receives $ 5000 Career Achievement Award in Spring 1995 from the Lighthouse.  In addition to her work at CUNY Central Office / Office of Academic Affairs since 1982, she graduated from Juilliard School of Music, played on the Arthur Godfrey Show, does braille proofreading, and plays the piano and harpsichord.  Ms. Dorf is blind and uses a Vert Plus speech sythesizer with her word processor.  CUNY Matters - Winter 1995-1996 issue, page 11.
  

• Northeast Regional Technology Consortium NetTech initiated with CUNY as the lead institution, per CUNY Matters - Winter 1995-1996 issue, page 3: "US Dept of Education 5-year grant / New Educational Technology Consortium."
• "CUNY's Windows on the World / The Computer and Information Systems Center" published in CUNY Matters - Winter 1995-1996 issue, pages 6-7 gives some of the history of the computer center.
• Fall 1995, Richard Lieberman of LaGuardia CC publishes a book on the Queens paino makers Steinway & Sons.  The book is namesd "Steinway & Sons."  Per CUNY Matters - Spring 1996 issue.
• Fall 1995 issue of NYC Tech's "Journal of Urban Technology" is devoted to "information technologies and inner-city communities."  CUNY Matters - Summer 1996, page 11.

• May 1997: US Postal Service issues new stamp with picture of City College., for CCNY's 150th anniversary.
• May 1997: CUNY celebrates 150 years of public higher education in NYC, with exhibit opening at Baruch on the history of CUNY.
• May 1997: Dr. Elaine Hall graduates summa cum laude with a Ph.D.  from the CUNY Graduate School; Dr. Hall is blind, and her area of research is vision research.  CUNY Matters of Fall 1997 identifies her as "the first totally blind woman scientist to become a vision researcher."  Her work was done at Hunter College.
• November 5, 1997: Queens College presents "1937 Night in NYC - A Sentimental Journey Celebrating Queens College's 60th Anniversary;"  lectures with slide illustrations, audio/video/photo montages, memorabilia, dance mini-concert, in Kiely 170, 7-9 pm.  Related programs: 60th anniversary website, and exhibit in the Rosenthal Library, and sale of 60th anniversary memorabilia.