Columns

This week, the Internet’s ascent hits a milestone, and scientists continue to claim each other’s ideas.

12 March, 1894: In the small and otherwise unassuming city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Coca-Cola was bottled and sold for the first time. It had originally enjoyed a career as a coca wine, and then as a medicinal elixir after it was made non-alcoholic due to Prohibition, reportedly used to treat ailments like headache, nausea, and morphine addiction. Called “habit-forming” and “deleterious” for its caffeine content, it is now one of the most recognisably advertised products in the world, and is available everywhere except Cuba and North Korea. The Coca-Cola Company is even known to change its traditional red-themed advertising to fit into any niche: there is an Argentinian football club called Boca Juniors whose rivals, River Plate, play in red and white, and so the stadium in La Boca is one of only a few places in the world where Coke is advertised in black and silver. (I walked through La Boca with someone who was wearing a red-and-white scarf, and we only got out intact because we were obviously tourists. They take these things very seriously.)

14 March, 1942: Penicillin was first used to successfully save a patient’s life, which was not bad for a drug that Alexander Fleming discovered by accident when he left a Petri dish open. Other scientists had previously noticed the antibacterial properties of some moulds, but it was luck and terrible lab procedure that got Fleming the Nobel Prize in the end. Penicillin was the first effective treatment available for syphilis, among other things, and some US researchers proceeded to do some incredibly unethical experiments with it. One of these was conducted in Guatemala because it wouldn’t have been allowed in the States, and another was apparently done for “the glory of science,” which Fleming probably did not have in mind when he left a staphylococcal plate culture out.

15 March, 1985: The now-defunct Symbolics Computer Corporation registered the first ever domain name, symbolics.com. The website now consists of an extensive infographic about the Internet, which claims that the domain changed hands for an “undisclosed sum.” This suggests that it was either enough to be on the list of the most expensive domain names ever, or it was a tiny amount in comparison and the investors just want to keep up a sense of mystery. Given that the two most expensive domains sold for $16 million and $14 million (insure.com and sex.com, respectively), the latter may be likely. The domain name has since given rise to such phenomena as domain hacking and typosquatting, which are about as nefarious as they sound.