O Canada!
Today is Canada Day, which celebrates the country’s birth as the Dominion of Canada more than 150 years ago. To that point, the country consisted of three British colonies: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada. But on July 1, 1867, the British North America Act was passed, uniting them into one country. The act included provisions for other colonies and territories to join, which made possible the growth of Canada into its present form.
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A Trio of Anniversaries
What do the Sony Walkman, ZIP codes, and the Philadelphia Zoo have in common? Today’s date.
Walk this way
The Sony Walkman was introduced 45 years ago today. Sony engineers were skeptical about designing a device that could only play and not record, and company insiders doubted there would be demand for it. But it was an instant sensation upon release, changing the way people listened to music, and eventually sold hundreds of millions of units.
America’s first zoo
Today the Philadelphia Zoo—the first zoo in the United States—celebrates its 150th birthday. The zoo opened with an animal inventory of several hundred native and exotic specimens and was run by the Zoological Society of Philadelphia (founded in 1859), which still operates the site. The zoo developed the first zoo laboratory and the first children’s zoo in the country. It was also the first zoo to formulate specific diets for its animals.
ZIP it
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) instituted the Zone Improvement Plan Code, otherwise known as the ZIP Code, on this day in 1963. The public balked at the idea at first, but after an extensive publicity campaign, the USPS succeeded in eliciting a widespread acceptance of the five-digit code, which was expanded to nine digits in 1983.
Courtesy of Sony Electronics Inc.
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