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June 7 is VCR Day

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vcr day

Ampex VRX-1000, 1956

Today is VCR Day. It commemorates the date in 1975 when Sony Corporation supposedly released the Betamax videocassette recorder (VCR) made specifically for home use. Some historians place the release in November 1975. In any case, it beat JVC’s Video Home System (VHS) to market by a year.

A VCR records the analog audio and video of a television broadcast or other signal source onto a removable, magnetic tape videocassette for subsequent playback. A programmable timer allows the user to schedule the recording to initiate, run, and conclude while unattended. It can also play back prerecorded tapes.

The history of the VCR dates back to the Ampex VRX-1000, which was released in 1956. Due to its substantial size and prohibitive cost of $50,000, it was affordable only to television networks and the largest individual stations. Toshiba, Philips, and RCA joined the fray; Sony partnered with Ampex for a while to share technology.

In 1965, Sony introduced the reel-to-reel type CV-2000, which stands for Consumer Video, as its first home-use model. (One ad shows the price as $695.) Despite Sony’s marketing efforts, it was primarily used for medical and industrial applications. Companies jockeyed for position for another decade.

There are many theories about why Sony won the battle to beat JVC to market in 1975, only to lose the war. One irrefutable fact is that each videocassette format was compatible only with its own VCR, ensuring that VHS and Betamax would never be able to play nice.

Sony may have gambled on its customers’ desire for quality over quantity, offering higher-definition tapes that could only record up to one hour of programming. While we value that today, it was much less of a selling point in 1975, when simply being able to record a show and watch it was more of a priority than being able to parse every speck of dust on M*A*S*H in hallucinatory detail.

When JVC released its VCR a year later, it used VHS tapes that held two hours. By the time Sony caught up, it was too late. VHS had become the standard. In 1981, Betamax had only a 25% market share. By 1986, it had dropped to 7.5% and continued to decline. Although it began selling VHS recorders in 1988, Sony continued to manufacture Betamax recorders until 2002 and only stopped producing Betamax tapes as of March 2016.

Of course, VHS didn’t stay on top forever. JVC stopped manufacturing standalone VCRs in 2008, long after DVD and Blu-Ray players had supplanted them. Streaming services put another nail in the VCR’s coffin.

Can a direct neural interface be far behind? As long as it doesn’t require the skull drilling we see in science fiction movies and the monthly fee is good, we say bring it on!

Until then, let’s celebrate our technological past and have a happy VCR Day!

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Heimlich Maneuver Day

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June 1st is Heimlich Maneuver Day. You may think you know everything you need to know about this procedure and the man who may or may not have invented it. But, stick around because this one gets weird.

In 1974, the journal Emergency Medicine published Dr. Henry Heimlich’s article about a method to combat choking that has saved countless lives.

heimlich maneuver day 1

At the time, a series of blows to the back was the treatment of choice. Thoracic surgeon Heimlich said he set out to find a better way and realized that when choking, air is trapped in the lungs. When the diaphragm is elevated, the air is compressed and forced out along with the obstruction.

He anesthetized a beagle to the verge of unconsciousness, plugged its throat with a tube, then conducted experiments to find an easy way to get the dog to expel it. After succeeding, he reproduced the result with three other beagles.

Refined for use on humans, his technique entails standing behind the choking person, making a fist below the sternum but above the belly button, and pulling it in and up to dislodge the blockage.

In 1976, the Heimlich maneuver became a secondary procedure to be used only if back blows were unsuccessful. In 1986, the American Heart Association (AHA) revised its guidelines, recommending the Heimlich maneuver as the primary option for rescuers.

heimlich maneuver day

Heimlich was a fierce proponent of using the procedure to rescue drowning victims, but the AHA warns it can lead to vomiting, aspiration pneumonia, and death.

But his most controversial theory is “malariotherapy,” the practice of infecting a patient with malaria to treat another ailment. Although he had no expertise in oncology, Heimlich was convinced it could treat cancer.

In 1987, after the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) refused to supply him with infected blood, he went to Mexico City and convinced the Mexican National Cancer Institute (MNCI) to allow him to treat five patients with malariotherapy. Four of the patients died within a year. The project was abandoned with no follow-up studies.

In 1990, The New England Journal of Medicine published Heimlich’s letter proposing malariotherapy as a treatment for Lyme disease. Before long, sufferers around the world began to ask for the treatment. But lack of supporting evidence and poor patient reviews spelled the end of the exercise.

Within a few years, he decided it could tackle AIDS. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), labeled the idea “quite dangerous and scientifically unsound.” However, Heimlich was able to secure financing from Hollywood donors and establish a clinic in China.

In 1994, his Heimlich Institute paid four Chinese doctors between $5,000 and $10,000 per patient to inject at least eight HIV patients with malarial blood. At the 1996 International Conference on AIDS, he announced that in two Chinese patients, CD4 counts that decrease as HIV progresses to AIDS, had increased after malariotherapy and remained elevated two years later.

When experts reviewed the studies, they found that the test used by Chinese doctors to measure CD4 levels was notoriously unreliable, rendering the results useless. Heimlich pressed on, but this time had a difficult time finding sponsors.

In 2005, Heimlich determined that a rebranding was in order. Reasoning that the word “malaria” might scare people off, he changed the name to “immunotherapy.” When speaking to a journalist, he refused to disclose the exact location of his latest clinical trial in Africa. Due to its ethically dubious practice of initially denying treatment for malaria, the study had been conducted without governmental permission.

That same year, the AHA undertook a de-branding effort: its guidelines no longer refer to the Heimlich maneuver by name. It is now simply referred to as an “abdominal thrust.” Since 2002, Heimlich’s son Peter has worked to pierce the myth surrounding his father, labeling him a fraud and exposing alleged human rights abuses, including experimentation on unwitting people in violation of international ethical standards regarding informed consent.

On Monday, May 23, 2016, the 96-year-old reportedly performed his maneuver on 80-year-old Patty Ris, a fellow resident at Deupree House, a senior living community in Cincinnati, Ohio. He told a reporter it was the first time he’d used his invention to save a life. (In 2003, he told BBC Online News that he’d saved someone at a restaurant three years earlier.) While many news outlets reported it as fact, some came to question its veracity.

While it’s an understatement to say that Dr. Henry Heimlich was a complex and problematic individual, there is no denying that he created a life-saving procedure. Unless he didn’t. According to emergency room physician Edward Patrick, he helped develop the maneuver before Heimlich took sole credit and slapped his name on it.

Patrick’s backstory is bizarre, including a possible scam involving “saving” a girl from drowning to help Heimlich convince the AHA to recommend it. (As mentioned earlier in the post, AHA rejected it. And in reality, the girl slipped into a coma and died four months later.)  We’re not saying any of this is true, of course. Along with every other allegation, Patrick is allegedly quite litigious.

However you decide to celebrate it, have a happy day free of the need for the Heimlich maneuver!

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May 27 is National Grape Popsicle Day

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grape popsicle dayToday is National Grape Popsicle Day. In 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson was sitting on his porch, stirring powdered drink mix into water, when he was called inside and forgot to bring the cup with him.

His hometown of San Francisco, CA, was hit with record-low temperatures that night. When Epperson ventured outside the next morning, he discovered that the drink had frozen to the stick, creating a tasty ice pop.

In 1923, Epperson began to sell the treat he called “a frozen drink on a stick” at Neptune Beach Amusement Park in Alameda, CA. Children loved them, and parents were happy that the stick helped prevent messes and gooey hands.

In 1924, Epperson applied for and was granted a patent for the frozen confectionery, which he called the “Epsicle.” His children called it “Pop’s sicle, ” which inspired him to change the name to “Popsicle.”

Not long afterward, Epperson sold the patent to pay debts and regretfully missed out on the financial success of his creation. “I was flat and had to liquidate all my assets,” he later said. “I haven’t been the same since.”

We’re not sure why this holiday occurs on May 27th, a date that doesn’t correspond to Epperson’s birthday or the day the patent was filed or granted. Nor can we explain why today is devoted to the grape variety alone. (Of more than two billion Popsicles sold each year, cherry is the most popular flavor.) We did uncover an interesting fact:

Do you remember the Popsicle with two sticks? It was introduced during the Great Depression so two children could split it for 5¢, the same price as a single stick. It was discontinued in 1987 because parents complained it was hard to break and too messy for one child to eat without dripping.

All this time, we’ve been thinking it was just out of stock….

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May 8 is Have a Coke Day

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have a coke day

John S. Pemberton

Today is Have a Coke Day. The first glass was sold for five cents at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, GA, on May 8, 1886. The story of one of the most popular beverages on Earth began at the end of the American Civil War.

Confederate officer and Freemason John Stith Pemberton was slashed across the chest by a Union soldier’s saber and treated with morphine, to which he became addicted. When he returned after the war to his job as a druggist, he became obsessed with finding a substitute.

In 1885, he formulated French Wine Coca, using coca leaves and caffeine-rich kola nuts. When the mixture of cocaine and alcohol was ingested, it created a third substance called cocaethylene, which heightened the euphoria experienced from the use of cocaine alone. This may be the first successful attempt to “tighten the buzz.”

But Pemberton didn’t invent the drink himself; he used the two-year-old formula of a Parisian chemist named Angelo Mariani, whose Vin Mariani was so beloved that Pope Leo XIII awarded him a gold medal.

Pemberton marketed his version as a nerve tonic ideal for “scientists, scholars, poets, divines, lawyers, physicians, and others devoted to extreme mental exertion” as well as “a most wonderful invigorator of the sexual organs” and a cure for morphine addiction.

When early prohibition laws were passed in Atlanta, he removed the alcohol and developed Coca-Cola as a patent medicine to be mixed at pharmacy soda fountains, which were popular because of the belief that carbonated water was good for health.

Not long after Coca-Cola’s debut, Pemberton became ill. Ironically, he was nearly bankrupt due to the high cost of his ongoing morphine addiction; as a result, he began to sell the rights to his formula but tried to retain a share of ownership to pass on to his son, Charles. But his son wanted the money instead, so they sold what was left to business partner Asa Candler for $300.

John Pemberton died of stomach cancer on August 16, 1888, at age 57. Charles attempted to sell and popularize an alternative to his father’s formula but died six years later of opium addiction.

So, happy Have a Coke Day . . . I guess?

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