The King of Rock and Roll teamed up with TV’s reigning variety
program, as Elvis Presley appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show”
for the first time on September 9, 1956.

After earning big ratings for “The Steve Allen Show,” the
Dorsey Brothers “Stage Show” and “The Milton Berle Show,”
Sullivan finally reneged on his Presley ban, signing the
controversial singing star to an unprecedented $50,000 contract
for three appearances.

With 60 million viewers—or 82.6 percent of TV viewers at the time—tuning in, the appearance garnered the show’s best
ratings in two years and became the most-watched TV
broadcast of the 1950s.

   Ed Sullivan

WW1 British first prototype tank called Little Willie. It was an
Armored Personnel Carrier. It can be found at the Tank
Museum, Bovington, Wareham, United Kingdom.

On September 6, 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie
rolled off the assembly line in England. Little Willie was far from
an overnight success. It weighed 14 tons, got stuck in trenches
and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour.

However, improvements were made to the original prototype
and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields.

The British developed the tank in response to the trench
warfare of World War I. In 1914, a British army colonel named
Ernest  Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee
for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armored vehicle   
with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break 
through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory.        

The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill,
who believed in the concept of a “land boat” and organized a
Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype. To keep
the project secret from enemies, production workers were
reportedly told the vehicles they were building would be used
to carry water on the battlefield (alternate theories suggest the
shells of the new vehicles resembled water tanks). Either  
way, the new vehicles were shipped in crates labeled “tank”
and the name stuck.

On September 2, 1969, America’s first automatic teller
machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing
cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville
Centre, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the
banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank
to conduct basic financial transactions.  

By the 1980s, these money machines had become
widely popular and handled many of the functions
previously performed by human tellers, such as
check deposits and  money transfers between
accounts. 

Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people
as cell phones and e-mail.

Donald C. Wetzel (93) is an American businessman known
for holding the USA patent to the automatic teller machine.

On August 31, 1955, William G. Cobb of the General Motors Corp.
(GM) demonstrated his 15-inch-long “Sunmobile,” the world’s first
solar-powered automobile, at the General Motors Powerama auto
show held in Chicago, Illinois.

Ransom Eli Olds (June 3, 1864 – August 26, 1950)

Olds of Lansing, Michigan was a pioneer of the American
automotive industry who founded Olds Motors Works—
which would later become Oldsmobile—on August 21, 1897.

 He claimed to have built his first steam car as early as 1887
and his first gasoline-powered car in 1896.

The modern assembly line and its basic concept is credited
to Olds, who used it to build the first mass-produced auto, 
the Oldsmobile Curved Dash, beginning in 1901.