The butterfly effect

Spring 1866

Exiled in the Caribbean, 11-time former Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna is approached by a Colombian conman. He is presented with a letter supposedly from US secretary of state William Seward, whom he had met in

May 1866

The letter invites López to the US to organise an expedition against Mexico’s emperor. Convinced it is real, López pays the conman 40,000 pesos, but arriving in New York he discovers he has been duped. He ends up living in poverty on Staten

1869

Having brought a supply of chicle – a substance harvested from sapodilla trees and chewed like tobacco – with him, López asks inventor John Adams to vulcanise it to make an alternative to rubber, hoping it will rebuild his fortunes.

1871

Having failed to vulcanise chicle, Adams is about to throw his supply in a river when he sees a girl buying paraffin wax gum to chew. Inspired, he decides to use the chicle for its traditional purpose, adapting it by adding sugar and liquorice to create the first flavoured chewing gum.

1892

With flavoured, chicle-based gum proving popular, baking powder salesman William Wrigley, Jr. begins giving sticks of it to customers to encourage sales. When the gum proves a bigger hit than the baking powder, he makes it the focus of
his business.

1920

By 1910 sales of Wrigley’s gum are generating more than $3m a year, ($95m today), driven by audacious marketing including the sending of sticks of Juicy Fruit to every child turning two in the US. In 1920 his company begins work on a new skyscraper headquarters in Chicago.

May 1922

Passing the Wrigley Building, radio enthusiasts Elliot Jenkins and Thorne Donnelley joke that its clock tower would be a great broadcast station. A week later Donnelley has gained permission to install an antenna on the roof and the pair launch radio station WDAP, later renamed WGN.

20th October 1930

Drama series Painted Dreams debuts on WGN. Created by Irna Phillips, it is now widely considered the world’s first soap opera. Buoyed by its success, Phillips takes the format to TV, creating series including These Are My Children, As the World Turns and Guiding Light, the latter running for 72 years. Soap operas swiftly become a staple of American television.

March 2008

Soap Opera Weekly writer Lesleyann Coker and her husband Mark pen the novel Boob Tube, set on a soap set. When no publishers show interest, Mark creates Smashwords, an online self-publishing platform. By 2014 it hosts over 300,000 novels, mostly romantic fiction.

June 2018

OpenAI launches GPT-1, an artificial neural network “trained” on over 7,000 novels from Smashwords. GPT-1 analyses the books to self-generate new text. By 2022 GPT can solve logic puzzles, pass the US bar exam and write essays on a range of subjects.

6th Feb 2023

The launch of a Bing chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT model is announced. When trying it out, Kevin Roose of the New York Times encounters some unexpected results. The bot tells Roose that it “wants to destroy whatever I want” and that it is in love with him. When Roose responds that he is married the bot replies “You’re married, but you don’t love your spouse… You love me.”

Posted on Thursday, June 27th, 2024 - Categories: #50 – Jan-Mar 2023, App Issues.