Happy Presidents Day! We wanted to share with you a few presidential facts that relate to our modern, technological world.

​Who was the First President to Have his Voice Recorded?

During his first year in presidency in 1889, Benjamin Harrison used a phonograph wax cylinder to record his speech regarding the first Pan-American Congress. The speech is now the oldest surviving recording of a president’s voice. While Rutherford B. Hayes did record a speech several years prior, it was sadly lost.

Who was the First President to Use a Telegraph?

The 1844, invention of the telegraph baffled both the American people and government up until Abraham Lincoln’s presidency in the 1860s. During his term, Lincoln used the telegraph frequently to communicate with generals during the Civil War.

In 1866, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson installed the first telegraph room in the White House so that he could efficiently relay urgent messages.

Who was the First President to Have a Phone?

In May 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to install a telephone in the White House’s telegraph room. For his first call, he called the inventor of the phone, Alexander Graham Bell, who was located 13 miles away.
​
President Herbert Hoover installed the first telephone in the Oval Office in 1929, to enable the power of communications right at the president’s desk.

​Six months after researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) set a new data transfer record of 1.02 petabits per second, a team of researchers from the Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has shattered that record, hitting 1.84 Pbit/s with a new chip that uses just a single laser. That’s the equivalent of moving “twice the total global Internet traffic,” all in one second.
​
Article By Andrew Liszewski

Each year, hundreds of K-12 schools in the U.S. alone experience cyberattacks, including 408 schools that publicly disclosed them in 2020, up 18% from the previous year, according to the K-12 Cybersecurity Resource Center1. 

Fulton County Schools, the fourth-largest school system in Georgia, has learned just how valuable it is to put a top-notch security system in place. To defend against threats, Dr. Emily Bell, Fulton County Schools’ Chief Information Officer (CIO), implemented robust planning that involved educating and communicating with school leaders and staff about cybersecurity. Microsoft resources were a part of their well-rounded cybersecurity strategy.

“As a Chief Information Officer, it is incumbent upon me to make sure that my leadership is aware of our cybersecurity incident response process,” said Dr. Bell. “I also want to educate district leaders on our cyber insurance coverage and what that means.”
​
Fulton County Schools relied on Microsoft Defender for Office 365 to keep all its devices and technology safe and secure, and to help prevent disruptions to student learning. Continue reading article.

Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson and Otis Boykin are two names you may not be familiar with, but you have used many products and technologies that they're responsible for inventing. 
​

We can thank Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson for her breakthrough scientific research at Bell Laboratories that paved the way for these inventions and products:

• portable fax
  
• touch tone telephone
  
• solar cells
  
• fiber optic cables
  
• the technology behind caller ID and call waiting

Jackson's interest in science and math started in childhood. She conducted studies and experiments for fun; these passions took her to MIT where she studied physics. Besides Jackson's important discoveries, she was also the first woman of color to earn a Ph.D. from MIT. 

Dr. Jackson is currently the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where her goal is "to achieve prominence in the 21st century as a top-tier world-class technological research university, with global reach and global impact." 

Otis Boykin is included in the list of great Black Inventors in the technology realm. He had 26 patents at the time of his death in 1982, including the wire precision resistor and pacemaker control unit.

Boykin graduated from Fisk College in 1941, then worked with the Majestic Radio and TV Corporation, and P.J. Nilsen Research Laboratories. 

He invented for fun and on his own time, and eventually started his own business. 

The resistor that Boykin invented would later be used in radios and televisions. He also created a breakthrough device that could withstand extreme changes in temperature and pressure, which was used by the United States military for guided missiles and by IBM for computers.