u/LegalPear2114

On this day, 1886, pharmacist John Stith Pemberton first served Coca-Cola at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta.

At the time, it wasn’t marketed as a soft drink, but as a kind of patent medicine meant to help with fatigue, headaches, and nerves. The syrup was mixed with carbonated water and sold for 5 cents per glass.

The original formula also contained coca leaf extract and kola nut caffeine - which is where the name came from.

60 years ago, on May 5, 1966, Manfred Mann reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart with “Pretty Flamingo”. It was their second chart-topper after “Do Wah Diddy Diddy”.

Unlike their earlier R&B-influenced hits, “Pretty Flamingo” had a lighter, almost whimsical feel - with sound effects and a more laid-back, observational style.

50 years ago, right in the middle of the disco era, NASA launched giant discoball to the space LAGEOS-1 - the Laser Geodynamic Satellite. It didn’t have cameras, engines, sensors, or onboard electronics. It was basically a dense metal sphere covered with hundreds of retroreflectors.

Its job was simple: ground stations fire laser pulses at it, the reflectors send the light back, and scientists measure the travel time with extreme precision. That helped study Earth’s shape, tectonic plate motion, and changes in the planet’s rotation.

It also carries a small plaque designed as a message to the future. It includes a binary key (numbers 1–10 and a unit of time defined as one Earth year) and three maps of Earth’s continents: one showing the past (about 268 million years ago), one at the time of launch (marked as “now,” with a simple depiction of LAGEOS in orbit), and one projecting the future at the time the satellite is expected to re-enter (in over 8 million years), with a diagram of its descent.

Long before it became internet conspiracy fuel, the Illuminati was a real secret society started in Bavaria.

On May 1, 1776, Adam Weishaupt, a professor at the University of Ingolstadt, founded the Order of the Illuminati in Bavaria. The group was influenced by Enlightenment ideas and opposed religious and political control over public life. Its members promoted reason, secular thinking, and reform - which quickly made authorities suspicious.

The order was banned in the 1780s and disappeared as an organization. The name, however, lived on.

Sorry, the video is in Russian, but it shows the instrument and the workflow pretty well. English wiki page for context

Developed by Evgeny Murzin in the USSR and completed around the late 1950s / early 1960s. What makes it unusual is the input method: instead of playing a keyboard, composers drew patterns onto glass plates, and the machine read them optically to generate sound.

Here is an album  Musical Offering [youtube], recorded in 1971 with this synthesizers,  pretty abstract, eerie and experimental

Recorded in 1971, released by Melodiya in 1990.

The ANS [YT/ru] was a photoelectronic synthesizer where sound could be created by drawing on glass plates, so it has a very different feel from more familiar keyboard-based synth music.

The composer lineup is also notable: Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Oleg Buloshkin, and Eduard Artemyev all appear here. So it’s not just a technical curiosity, but part of a more serious experimental music scene. The result is abstract, eerie, and often closer to sound design or avant-garde composition than pop or rock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPnrFF4xQS4
Recently stumbled upon a Soviet-era song called “Pesenka Velosipedistov” by Poyushchie Gitary (“Cyclists’ Song” by Singing Guitars)
It’s actually a cover of a song by Joe Dassin, It’s surprisingly wholesome and catchy — all about the simple joy of riding, wind in your face, freedom, that kind of vibe.

I’ll drop a rough translation below for anyone curious 🙂