September 22 Illinois History Minute

It’s September 22nd, the day in 1952 that the University of Illinois put its ILLIAC One computer online. The two-ton computer --- powerful for its time --- was the twin of the ORDVAC computer the U of I had built for the U-S Army. ILLIAC One was the first computer built and owned by an American educational institution.

On this day in 1956, Governor William Stratton officially broke ground near Rockford on Illinois’s first modern toll road. It’s known today as the Jane Addams Memorial Tollway.

Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter was born on this day in 1959 in Champaign-Urbana. Perlmutter shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for finding evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, under the influence of dark energy.