visits san jose, california. for five years now, we travel to it is across the u.s. to explore their literary and historic sites. you can watch more of our visits at c-span.org/citiestour. >> right now, we are in the revolution exhibit at the computer history museum in mountain view, california. behind me are artifacts telling the history of computing. the exhibit is laid out into 19 focuseds, each of which on a certain theme or object. one of those themes is real-time control. we look at things like pacemakers for hearts. these are computer systems that must function, not like your laptop which can crash once in a while and the worst thing that happens is you lose your work. if a pacemaker crashes, you die.

these are small, ivory counting sticks from the 17th century. the most recent thing we had is an iphone, the first model of iphone. we in the punchcard gallery. what is this? in 1890, the bureau of the thees had just finished 1880 census. the u.s. constitution requires the senses to be taken every 10 years. the 1890 census was not going to theympleted in time, so came up with a method to do this mechanically. typically, the census taker would go out in the field and ask the usual questions and bring those back to the office where they would be transcribed using this device, which converts the handwritten responses into machine-readable form. using this little blank piece of cardboard at the top, the census clerk punches holes which

correspond to the answers in the senses. by doing this, they created the census results moving from human readable form to machine readable form. then you could put the punch cards inside the census machine, which worked by counting each of the holes in the card. this was a real success story, and the 1890 census was completed in about three years, even though there were millions of new immigrants and quite a few more questions. why this is important is because a company called ibm ultimately these patents and dominated computing for most of the 20th century. these punchcards were the main way that people interacted with computers for most of the 20th century. right now, we are in the memory and storage gallery. behind me is the world's first hard disk drive. it was invented in 1956 at ibm

san jose by a team led by ray johnson, a retired schoolteacher who was very good at inventing. no formal engineering training at all. the great advantage of having a hard disk was that it could replace punchcards. rather than having 100,000 punchcards in a tour, you could just have one of these hard disks. the difference between this and punchcards is that you have to sort through them to find what you're looking for, compared to a disk drive where you can jump directly to the information you need. the disk drive is much faster. the device is so well-made that it actually still functions and we have a team of volunteers who demonstrate it once a week. one of the first things they noticed was there were 60-year-old data still on the hard disk. in basic form, the disk drive has not changed. we're still using disk drives today that have a platter and a read/write head and a drive that spins it around. is a computere

that was advertised as the kitchen computer in the 1969 neiman marcus catalog. the cost $10,600 and neiman marcus did not sell any. part of the problem is that to program it, the user -- in this case, the housewife -- would have to know a numbering system and be able to read these and that code and also program the computer using these switches, also in that code, almost an impossible task for most people. generally, you would attach a kind of keyboard to this to make it work. we have it in this gallery to show that even though it was not practical, it shows the beginning of people thinking about putting computers in the home. we are standing in front of the , which came out in about 1970 two and was a revolutionary machine. it had a system that used a desktop metaphor with pulldown menus. it had ethernet, laserjet

printing, email, and spreadsheets and word processing. this is in 1972. steve jobs saw this machine and was inspired to create the lisa at apple, which then became the macintosh. the things that we take for granted, the desktop metaphor, the little garbage can, the pulldown menus, on the mac and now on windows all came from the xerox alto. it's kind of a funny story in the history of computing where steve jobs allegedly complained to bill gates that bill gates had stolen the idea for windows from apple. "well,tes responded, that's not true. e both still from xerox." that shows the intellectual debt .he alto created we are in the personal computing gallery, which shows all the different kinds of microprocessor-based shooters that were for sale mainly in the 1970's and 1980's.

we still use versatile computers today, of course, but the heyday was the 1970's and 1980's. probably the most mythic and is right here, the apple one computer, designed by engineer steve wozniak along with his friend steve jobs. they sold about 220 of these. many were assembled. some you could build in kit form . the apple one was a hobbyist machine, so it was aimed at kind of gearheads, people that like soldering and connecting things to their tv all on their own. on the basis of this, steve jobs said if they made a computer for normal people, rather than nerds, maybe they could sell a lot more, and the computer that resulted from that was called the apple ii. the machine that really put them on the map was this one, the apple ii. it came out in 1977, had 48

kilobytes of memory -- not megabytes or gigabytes -- and provided color, which was quite unusual at the time. very few personal computers at the time offered color. apple actually kept itself afloat for many years. the first few years of sales of the lisa and the mac were very disappointing, and it was only because of strong apple ii sales that apple was able to stay in business. remained the apple ii an apple product for an astounding 17 years. apple took out a full-page ad in the wall street journal that said welcome ibm, seriously. the ibm pc when it came out was not the most advanced computer but have the very important job of legitimizing personal computers for business. until this time, most businessmen looked at these microprocessing-based computers as basically toys suitable for home or educational environments

but not for business. it took for ibm entering the field to finally put a stamp of approval and legitimacy on the pc. ibm's initial strategy being a purveyor of mainframe systems was to protect the mainframe at all costs. that is what was generating billions of dollars. the mainframe computer was computer a room-sized filled with spinning drives and people running around. the ibm pc was initially billed as something that would connect to those and only later was a something that would stand alone and be used by an individual. what we had beside me here is google's first web server. at that time, google was a very small company with limited funds . what they did is they built their equipment on the cheap. they went to a local electronics bunch of got a whole

ibm pc compatible circuit boards and mounted them to this large cabinet. the cabinet itself acted like a search engine, so, in fact, if you did a google search in 1999 or 2000, there's a good chance your search went through this very machine. this system is actually made out .f corkboard if you look underneath all these pc circuit boards, they are actually separated by a very thin layer of cork, like the cork in a wine bottle. that is the only thing that is keeping the whole system from bursting into flames. it is actually remarkably poorly designed in a sense. it is not safe, really, but nonetheless, for starting a business when you are basically running out of your own garage, this was perfect for them. we tell,e things that especially school kids when they come to the museum is that a

computer is a tool like a hammer. with a hammer, you can brain someone over the head with it or build a house, so in one case it is evil and on the other, it is great. it is the same with computers. we are seeing the human or of how everyone having a computer in their pocket is affecting how we live. lots of negative consequences. lonely in spite of being surrounded by cyber friends, the sort of spirit is friendship that occurs on facebook -- the sort of superior's -- the sort of spu friendship that occurs on facebook. the pace of life is i think the greatest risk to human sanity. the desire which we impose on our self to always be on, always be responding to text or emails

or looking up websites. we don't just sit down and watch the sky anymore. >> good morning. i'm bill worthington. i'm a volunteer here at the computer history museum in mountain view, california. thes a programmer for fortune one, which is the laboratory we are in at the museum. back in a timeframe we are looking at, the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, punchcards were keen. in them, eaches card representing a piece of information. a 0, 1, 2, 3, which we see here, or it could be alphabetic information. it was the means of storing information. it was the key for every business back in the 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, and it was when

i started working on the east coast when they were in need of programmers, their business ran on punch cards prior to the 1401's being installed. readyd to get some data for the demonstration. i'm going to need a volunteer also to come in. why don't you give a hand here? what debbie has done is just to ,ype her name into the card making holes for debbie as the name and the card. all i am doing is putting her

card into the deck. what i have here is a program, one that we called big print, but it is a deck of cards. they were called ibm cards at the time because ibm has a monopoly on punch cards. i would then put them into the card reader. getting them ready to be read. just as we do pc's today. you may want to come down to see the print out as it comes forward. little bit noisy.

the printer was a breakthrough as part of the design of the 1401 because it prints 600 lines a minute, which is less than 10 pages a minute. just as not have the formatting capabilities. the ibm 1401 came just after ibm put in an order for the company. the reason for that was getting away from electromechanical devices, which had a high rate of failure. some of the areas we were in in data processing at the time. in differented areas, just outside of paris.

two competing designs, european and the new york state line. the majority of the functions that came with the new york design were incorporated with a lot of the technology the french and germans put together. the fortune 01, as i said, the sonar and card reader were roughly the same time. it was a perfect white storm gathering. one was the card reader design. printerign behind the being four times faster than any printer up to that time, and the processing unit staying true and going to transistors. what we see here are four transistors on the card. germanium transistors was a breakthrough in the 1958

timeframe to have these transistors available, and the price frame came down, so we could put this into a business computer. the business computer i defined as one which does payroll, accounts receivable, general , not necessarily the product of product development, so we had that came through. another piece of equipment that eachat the same time was of the black dots that you may be able to see here, as far asng one bit fortunate one is concerned. it is a bit of memory, and there are roughly 140 characters or 140 bytes of memory. what do we think of when we talk about 140 bytes? good, a tweet.

what i have done is i am holding a tweet in my hand. it is an interesting breakthrough that we went through. unit meansocessing roughly 3000 of the current transistor cards we just looked at. there were 3000 in this unit. it has the control information for hatching devices to it. the printer, card reader all come through the 1401 processing unit. the minimum memory of the fortune 01 was 1400 characters of memory. can you imagine a system with 1400 positions. i cannot even write linkage in

windows with less than 1700. the boxthis unit, and right behind where i'm standing holds an additional 4, 8, or 12,000 positions of memory -- 4000, 8000, or 12,000 positions of memory. back in the day when i was programming this, 16 k was , not what we think of in binary, so it is a different environment. the system we are dealing with is very simplistic. i can look and see what is happening here. i know from the one we are waiting to see the next card. what we are going to do or what i'm going to do is to reset the computer, and one of the things that was another breakthrough as far as the 1401 was concerned was the tape drives that were

there for storing data. i could take one reel of tape such as we see here, and door 72,000 boxes of punchcards as we see here, so this was where i would get started with the punchcards. there's roughly 2000 cards in this box. that was the are here. 2000 cards, one box. i could store roughly 72,000 boxes of cards on one reel of tape. torun the tape, i'm going hit start, and we see the tape running. as far as the system is concerned. notice since we're dealing with

a vacuum column in terms of keeping the tape stretched, so the vacuum column is designed to minimize the weight of the tape and the same reason as it goes down. if i get all the way down to the whole which you see there, the tape drive will pick up some of the tape. one of the things we see what the 1401 system is there's no display. .here's no operating system it does not have windows or mac os to slow things down. the program was designed to contain everything. is called the

boot stamp card. today, we boot stamp our pc's and go from there. the 1401, as we said, had core memory, and they do not reset if i turn the machine off. i could shut it down, power it back up, and the program that was running is still there, so it is a nice capability. one of the other things we are dealing with is how do i connect things together? i have a usb cable in my hand, but it was not there in the 1401 timeframe and has to pick up the cable from it. this is yesterday's usb cable. represents a path for one bit of data coming across, so the pins and wires that you see are all part of the system.

we have to have a way to store those cables as they are going fived because i have cables coming from the card reader to the processing unit, three going to the printer, and what i'm going to do is i have to hide them under the floor, so the black cables you see there are power cords. great ones are data cords to get information back and forth. .t is much different today we do everything in parallel. here, one bit at a time. so it is a different environment. from what we had. one of the things that was unique about the 1401 is it was announced in 1959. 1960.were shipped in

ibm's guest at the number of machines sold was probably in the 2000 to 3000 range. customers in the field were just waiting for this machine to be announced, chomping at the bit. in the first month, ibm's salesforce managed to sell 3000. in the overall life of her, there were roughly 3000 of these machines sold. if i took a population study of all the machines in the world in 1965, roughly one out of two of these would be a 1400 class machine. it was a marvelous success as far as ibm was concerned. the 1401 lived on with emulators and the 360 processors.

for all i know, there may be simulators running today with or onno one programs, running every impulse mainframe from their 360 architecture machines. james lick was a wealthy businessman in the san francisco bay area back in the 1800s. his fortune was over $300 million back in the 1860's, and he wanted to be remembered. george davidson, the president of the california academy of sciences, and george madeira, an astronomer who showed him what saturn look like through a small telescope were some of the factors that convinced him that a scientific monument that would make great discoveries was the right way to go, so he decided he wanted the greatest telescope, superior to any in existence constructed as his memorial, and he gave about form000 of his fortune to

the observatory, and this telescope is his monument. the construction of this observatory took quite a long time and started in the 1870's. mount hamilton was an unoccupied mountain. sore was no road to the top, they built a first-class road to the top of mount hamilton, and that started in 1876. by 1888, the road construction was done, and they could start tilting this building. then by 1886, they finally knew how big the telescope would be. the lenses were done being made and ground to their final figure, so they could start constructing this dome, and this dome is large diameter. i do not know exactly how large it is, but approximately 108 in diameter, and it houses this 60 foot long telescope, and you will notice the telescope is high up and you cannot reach the

eyepiece easily, but they worked around this problem because the floor i'm standing on was a huge elevator, and this floor would go up to the telescope so the astronomer could ride the floor up to whatever place the telescope was an easily look through the eyepiece or take the photographic late data that they in the lateback 1800s and early 1900s. astronomy in the late 1800s and early 1900s was really going through a heyday of discovery. this telescope was the largest of its kind in the world in 1888, and with it, they were able to make some great early discoveries just in the first few years of this observatory. just the first night of science observations with this telescope in january 1888, a young astronomer here looked at saturn and actually discovered a new gas -- a new gap in the rings of

saturn. a couple years later, edward emerson barnardo used this telescope to discover the fifth moon of jupiter. when mr. barnardo looked through the telescope and discovered a fifth moon, that was a huge discovery. people did not know there were more moons around jupiter, and it was, in fact, the last moon discovered an hour solar system using just a techniques. all subsequent moons in our solar system that have been discovered have an discovered photographically. is the observatory's plate vault or photographic late archive. in thevery influential early days of astronomical photography. we have on the order of 150,000 photographic plates covering over 100 years of astronomical research. today, we do not use photographic plates.

we use digital cameras instead, and this observatory was also a key organization in moving to using digital cameras for astronomical research instead of the old photographic plates. i'm going to put -- pull a few photographic plates just so you can see what they looked like. we have many, many plates of the moon from the early 1800's and 1900's. this is a plate from 1908. this is a negative image so you can see the moon looks dark and

the sky looks white. when it's printed out it would look like a white moon with a dark background. these moon plates taken at lick observatory are some of the finest images of the moon in existence. particularly from that time period. and are routinely used in textbooks even today when you are learning about the moon. lick observatory was not only doing research on the moon back in the 1800's and 1900's but we had a key part to play in the apollo 11 mission. neil armstrong and buzz aldrin put on the moon in their first trip a reflector, that if light came in it would be sent back along the same path. we here at lick observatoryudes our largest telescope, the 120-inch diameter telescope, to shoot a laser at the moon to hit that reflector and send that

light back to us which we detected with that same three-meter telescope that yielded the most accurate measurement of the distance to the moon ever done to that point. james lick unfortunately didn't get to see his monument finish hesmed died in 1876 and was originally buried in san francisco at the masonic cemetery. his final wish was to be buried at the monument. he was disinterred from san francisco and re-interred here at the base of the telescope. his tomb is literally at the base of the telescope and the telescope itself is his tombstone. >> so we are at the casa grande quicksilver mining museum in santa clara county, california this museum interprets the 4,000-acre park across the

street, the quicksilver park. the boundaries of the park are home to what was the largest mercury mine on the north american continent and it fueled exeavel's gold rush wits supply of mercury as well as nevada's comstock load. so the rocks they were mining in the hill back here was cinnabar. cinnabar is mercury's ore. when you cook cinnabar to about 1,500 degrees fahrenheit and condense the vapor you get liquid mercury. that mercury was used to separate gold from its ore. >> what i have here is a beautiful piece we call a potato ore. it is mercury and sulfur, it's called cinnabar. a gentleman by the name of andre castilero came through from mexico to kick sutter at of his

fort to save california from mexico. and on the way he stopped at mission santa clara, saw this beautiful red rock, cooked it that night, put a glass on top of the fumes, paw water on that put his finger inside and said aha, i'm a millionaire. this is mercury. and then this particular operation here became a gold mine from 1845 until 1976. they made $ 0 million in profits. out of here. when a visitors -- when a visitor comes through, we try to explain to them what a tunnel is and how a working, looking for the red rock, you made -- you may dig into the side of the hill and you made a tunnel and the tunnel goes horizontal into the hillside. and then you put up big beams to

protect it from the rocks falling on you and bring out the it tock into ore and take retort to cook it or a furnace. >> we are in the restored period rooms of casa grande quicksilver mining museum. we've take three rooms of the museum and restored them to resemble an 1890 remodel that the one of the mine manager's initiated. so this house, in addition to being the mine manager's home for him and his family was also a place to entertain investors. so it's a $10,000 square feet home with three stories. upstairs there were eight bedrooms. the two rooms we're standing in, we've got the parlor, the parlor was where they would have received guests at casa grande, where the lady of the house, the mine manager's wife, would have entertained her lady friends

with tea. and behind me we have the mine manager's office. the mine manager's office is where the mine manager would have met with investors and conducted business meetings. >> once you have cooked the cinnabar and gotten your liquid metal, and you would take a glass and pour into it, cleaned, pour into it 76 counts of mercury and then the flask, the top was screwed tightly. most of our flasks we put a big a on it for almadin and they would put it on the ore carts that head off to the sailing ships up toward the goal gold country until -- to amalgam gold. >> the fact that this mine was discovered three years before gold was discovered in california at sutter's fort has

huge implications on california's history and how it turned out. because you need mercury to recover gold and silver from their ores. and without this local source of mercury that the new almandin mines provided, california probably would have relied on spain's mercury to access our own gold. so what's significant about this site is that without it, california's gold rush would not have been economically independent. and it's interesting to consider what implications that would have had on how california's gold rush history and therefore how california's history turned out.

>> this part of the museum, we for camp, force removal, we were forced to move out. if we had 1/16th japanese blood in us, we had to pack up and leave. that was the order by the army. so it was -- there was no chance or anybody to escape being nonjapanese. if you were mixed marriage, there was very few then, husband was a nonjapanese, then he could stay in the home, the majority of them all moved with the family to the camp. when the order was written and then we were unsure what was going to happen to us. hen this instruction to report

here, my brother and i went to sign up we were given a time limit. report may 23. on may 30 will be put on a train and taken off. what you can carry, you can take, but that's it. nothing more than that. .o that was the whole thing until then we were unsure what was going to happen to us, whether we stay, like myself, born here, we will be allowed to stay and our parents born in japan, aliens will be going to the camp. that was the idea that we had. but when this came out, we were all classified as one. and that's when we lost our citizenship rights and then were

tag there, r, the we were all identified by the number. like my family number was 3242 0-d, because i was the fourth in the family. e went to camp, our number was 3242-osks. yamachi. ytime, but our destination was still not known. went -- santa in anita was getting full. we were in one room for about three to four months. living in the atmosphere before we went to camping before the

war started, discrimination we had, we couldn't get a job, i went through myself, i went to trade school, took up carpentry, working as et a job a carpenter. -- they saident to we don't allow people like you. we don't serve. keep on going. at the time i really realized my schoolteacher, mr. morgan , he told me when i first went to class , he said, he was an old -- i ction man, he said remember to this day, he said, i'll teach yoy you what i can, you can learn what you can, get

what you get, then it daubed on you at's when he said, leave high school with carpentry class, whatever status you are, i can't help you. that really stuck with me. he knew himself yet was willing to teach me as much as he can about construction and so forth, which was huge, huge help for my survival in camp because i always kept everything the best i can. do the best you can, nobody can expect any more. this is the back room recreation , a 20 by 20, five people would ive in here.

there's another building on the outside of this, so you can't see how the outside is, except in the barracks, you see the door that came from two. from the outside it looked like outside of a barak. but inside, this isn't -- this is kind of unique how the material, like the ceiling joist 20-foot wide. we used two 10-foot and spliced it so they can use a 10-foot two by four, same as the studs. a seven-foot ceiling. 14-footer, cut it in half, made it ceiling height.

normally studs are eight-foot high because of standard length. but this was quite the money ving for the army to use the seven-foot studs. when we moved in here, all we had was the cots, the mattress, the blankets. two blankets per bed. you had to bring your own sheets. whatever you need. they decided to make blankets -- they didn't have anything to blake blankets out of so they -- you can't see it too well but you get the idea. this is an army uniform from world war i, army uniform they unraveled, this is the trouser

hat the soldiers wore. an they made blankets. they made 10,000 blankets. but then again, there was 11,000 people so it didn't go very far. so you had three blankets. but i myself, i know, even three blankets when it's below zero it's too cold. usually i take a shower, come back, and put my street clothes back on again, one more layer of insulation and two blankets. so that's how we survived. it was cold but we made it through. over there, that was another world war i navy reject and i couldn't get one to fit myself ecause the average navy guys

about my size. i got one for my brothers and sisters, everyone had pea coats on. a lot of old army pants and shirts, not too many pants, but the -- a lot of ladies would unravel the pants. make skirts out of them. army blanket -- army pants. they didn't care. everybody else was in the same boat. they wore skirts made out of all army pants. that's how they survived. money was not easy to come by. you only got paid $16 a month, per person and $12 the low

end. they allowed material allowance but you have to get your -- you have to work for your allowance. or you have to apply to get a clothing alouns. i think you look back at that time of my life and look at oday how it's changed you shut your eyes, going to make that goal. that's all it is. self-preservation. >> in november of 1777, a group of 66 settlers moved down from the presidio in san francisco and came here to san jose to , it was the pueblo moved from its original location to this location here in proper

downtown san jose. the adobe that you see behind us is the last remaining structure of that pueblo that was built in 1797. in the mid 1770's, california at that time was settled by the spaniards. and they had two different establishments at the time. presidios which were operated and founded by the military and then you had missions that were establish -- established by the francis can priests. they were up and down the california, from san diego all the way up to san francisco at the time. until that time you had no civil, basically a city type of establishment. so during that time, you had a lot of native americans still running throughout california and it was the intent of the spaniards to try and settle and

christianize the original settlers, the native americans who were alreadiest tab learned here. at this time you also had intrusions from the french, british, and also russian interests that were coming in to the pacific coast. so the spaniards were looking at a way of settling and kind of controlling the region that we now of california at the time. sea travel going up the coast was against the trade winds from mexico so the thought was if they establish an overland trail method that would help solidify their hold on california. batista diaz, an early soldier for the spanish government, created his own trail from basically southern arizona up into california and

up as far north as monterey, california. bautistautista, -- mr. went back to the spanish government and got permission to lead an expedition following the trail. mr. diaz led a grup of 240 people, this is a mix of different native americans, different spaniards, people of mixed races, across on this overland trail and they ended up in monterey. a couple months later, his lieutenant led the remaining group up to the presido san francisco where they settled for the next six months. at that time, the governor of california was looking for a way of having a civil establishment beyond just the presidios and missions, but a civil type

farming community that would act as a station for these different establishments. so with the known, at the time he had mission santa clara founded here in the early 17 -- late 1776, that is known by the missionaries at that time, it was a rich agricultural -- had rich agricultural potential for farming. so that's where, in november of 177 , a grup of 66 settlers moved down from the presido in san francisco and came here to san jose to establish the pueblo . now we've come into the inside of the atobe. there's only two rooms in this structure. for our interpretive purposes we have set up the rooms to represent the two different eras

spaniard eraad the om 19 -- from 1797 to 1823 when, after 1823, you had the mexican independence. so you actually had a different era. so that's represented in these two rooms. this in here that we're in is the former bedroom for the, both the gonzalez and peraltas. it's rather sparse. there's the floor is an adebee type floor. plaster. lls are just in the spaniards every remark the spaniards wanted to heavily tax the citizens. so as a result, the citizens were limited in terms of what trade they could do with other countries. so they -- they traded primarily only with the spaniards -- within the spanish empire, they

were very resourceful and using items from the local environment for their needs. one of the interesting things here is that the -- if you look at the bed here that bed frame, the springs, are actually made of raw hide. stretched between the wooden beams here to give that spring effect. of course the animal skins for your bedding material. also notice here on this crib, hold ey used rawhide to things from the roof. rope dded a little wire here to help support the structure, but that's -- give you a general idea of how they were resourceful using the items within their local community to furnish their home. another remarkable thing in this house is, this chair, if you

notice, a rather unique shape. that's actually made out of a whale bone. they would find whale carcasses along the coast and they would use, of course, the rubber -- the blubber for oil, but they also used the skeleton of the whale to build different structures. in this case, you see how the rib bones are used for the arms backbone r, and the is actually used for the seat. also along the ocean shore, they had access to abalone, which provided also, you know, the meals, but also provided shells like this. that the settlers would use this to -- for different storage techniques. they would put beads or they'd put food, they would serve their food in shells like this once again using the resources that they had available to them in

the area. that was from the spanish era. when we give tours of this structure, explain to the groups the different eras. going across here, enter the econd room of the structure. this is used as maybe meeting space for -- perhaps serving food in incomplement weather. but it's really, the food preparation was done outside and the gardening area and the yard. you notice in this area, off lot more furnishings that are more recognizable from european nterests or even the far east. that's because after 1823 when the area fell under mexican control, the mexican government allowed trade with international countries. the local people would meet

ships in the harbor, either monterey or san francisco, trade with people on the ships. for different items. so they would trade the rawhide or some of the oats and grains that they had here grown locally the ships for china. or trade for furnishings. for different types of wood. as you go through here, you'll e also some pots and pans, metal items. that was -- the idea here for the mexican government is they wanted to encourage the trading with other parties. that was also a down fall for california in terms of mexican rule that that also encouraged people to settle into the california area, primarily

americans coming across the untry, overland, through the sierra pass, down through the deserts, settle california. so that led to an influence of more than americans in this area. and one of those party, of course, was the donner-reed party that we hear of so much, the tragedy that occurred up in the sierra nevadas. a member of that party was the reed family that did not partake in some of the gruesome stories we hear that occurred in that tragedy but the reed family, they settled here in san jose. because he was a survivor of the donner party, he was a well then and was a well known name at that time so when california became -- when people were meeting to discuss statehood for california, james reed had a prominent voice here in california when they met in

monterey and at that time, in october of 1849, he promoted san jose to be the capital of california. and so because of his prominence, they voted in favor of locating the first capital of the state of california here in san jose under the promise that james reed would encourage the local citizens and they could build a state house. for their first meeting of the legislature in december of that year. but when the legislators came here to san jose in december of 1849, it was raining. and it continued to rain. one of their first acts because they were so despondent with the amount of rain falling that year, that one of their first acts as a legislature was to

start the motion to move the capital to another location. and that time, two years later, the capital of california moved venecia, up to farther north between the bay and the delta region of california. so san jose, ironically, this plays an important part of history here. first the rain washed out the original site, about a mile orth of here, in 17 -- in 1778. and also washed out the dreams of the -- of san jose being the capital of california in the rains of december, 1849. >> our visit to san jose, california, is an american history tv exclusive. and we showed it today to introduce you to c-span cities

tour. for five years now, we have traveled to cities across the u.s. to explore their literary and historic sites. you can watch more of our visits at c-span.org/citiestour. >> tonight on c-span, justice sonia sotomayor or talks about her life growing up. from new york university and the american association of university women, a discussion about sexism in the workplace. secretary ons end-of-life care for to minnelli -- end-of-life care for terminally ill patients. soanya spoke to students about her experiences as