Old and new…

Photo by Galen C. Dalrymple, copyright 2024. All Rights Reserved.

Surely, when people think of Egypt they think of the golden age of the pharaohs and the magnificent structures their culture left behind that still captivate us today.

But one would be wrong if they think that that is all there is to see. Egypt is modernizing in many ways and is working hard to become a thoroughly modern country, and they’ve done a pretty remarkable job if you ask me. The construction of the new Aswan dam permitted much of the development by providing power to the developing country.

Today’s photo is one that I shot inside the Abdeen Presidential Palace in Cairo. Construction started in 1863 and concluded in in 1874. Many of the rooms and furnishings are trimmed in pure gold, some of which you can see in today’s photo. It served as the center of government until the 1950’s, after which it became on of the palaces of Egypt’s president. Today, it serves mostly as a museum, or more properly, 5 distinct museums. It is a magnificent place to see.

The palace takes up 24 acres of space. When first built, it contained 500 rooms and halls.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY: in 2012, Facebook, the world’s largest social network, held its initial public offering (IPO) and raised $16 billion. It was the largest technology IPO in American history to that date, and the third-largest IPO ever in the United States, after those of Visa and General Motors. At the time it went public, Facebook was valued at $104 billion and had some 900 million registered users worldwide.

Facebook was founded as The Facebook in February 2004 by Harvard University sophomore Mark Zuckerberg and fellow classmates Chris Hughes, Eduardo Saverin and Dustin Moskovitz. The site originally was only for students at Harvard; however, it soon opened up to other universities. In June 2004, Zuckerberg moved Facebook to Palo Alto, California, and by the end of the year several Silicon Valley entrepreneurs had invested in the business and it had almost a million registered users. In 2005, Facebook (as it officially became known that year when “the” was dropped from its name) spread to American high schools and foreign schools, and the following year, anyone who was at least 13 years old was allowed to sign up. (Facebook always has been free to join; at the time of its IPO, the bulk of the company’s revenues came from advertising.)

As the site’s user base grew rapidly and its functionality expanded (the “news feed” was added in 2006 and the “like” feature in 2009), Facebook helped change how people communicate and share information. During the 2008 U.S. presidential race, Barack Obama used Facebook to build a following, especially among young voters, a constituency that helped him win the White House. Additionally, during the political uprisings in the Middle East that began in late 2010 and came to be called the Arab Spring, activists used Facebook (and other social media tools, notably Twitter) to share photos and videos of atrocities their governments were committing against citizens, and also to organize protest events.

In 2010, The Social Network, a feature film about the founding of Facebook, made its debut. The movie, which earned eight Academy Award nominations, chronicled the 2004 lawsuit filed by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra, Harvard students at the same time as Zuckerberg, who claimed he stole the original idea for Facebook from them. Facebook countersued, and in 2008, the Winklevosses and Narendra agreed to a $65 million settlement from the company.

Facebook made the Dobbs Ferry, New York, native Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist, a billionaire. At the time of the company’s much-anticipated IPO on May 18, 2012, Zuckerberg was worth some $19 billion. However, despite all the fanfare surrounding Facebook’s IPO, its shares closed the first day of trading at $38.23, only slightly above the $38 IPO price, which many investors considered a disappointing performance. – The History Channel

TRIVIA FOR TODAY: Oppenheimer learned Dutch in six weeks so he could deliver a lecture in the Netherlands. While he was in Denmark, he was first nicked named “Oppie.”