F.Y.I. - 42.09°N 76.81°W - Chemung County, NY
For your information,
this is from the
Finger Lakes.
11 glacial lakes - west to east - taller = longer - darker = deeper - hover for names
618 ft
depth of Seneca Lake, deepest in New York State
1970
birthplace of the first low-loss optical fiber in Corning
1848
first Women's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls
150+
wineries across the eleven lakes
Things worth knowing
Keuka is the only lake in the country that flows both north and south, owing to its Y-shape. Locals call it the Lady of the Lakes.
The name Chemung comes from the Seneca language, meaning big horn; for the wooly mastodon tusks found along the river.
Mark Twain spent his summers in Elmira and wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn here. He is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, just up the road.
Skaneateles Lake is so clean that Syracuse draws its drinking water from it unfiltered; one of the last lakes in the US where that is still permitted.
The region is an historic powerhouse of American invention. Corning routinely ranks as one of the top small towns in the US for patents per capita, and Rochester leads the nation in optics and imaging patents. IBM also traces its roots right to Binghamton.
The world's first "text message" to a moving train happened here. In 1913, the Lackawanna Railroad built massive wireless Marconi towers in Binghamton and Scranton to send the world's first wireless telegraphs early text messages to a train barreling down the tracks at 60 mph.
The world's largest pancake griddle hangs on a building in Penn Yan. In 1987, Birkett Mills built a 28-foot griddle to cook a mammoth buckwheat pancake. It took 2,000 pounds of batter and 15 gallons of maple syrup. The colossal pan is still mounted on the outside of their factory today.
Jell-O was invented in the Finger Lakes. In 1897, a carpenter named Pearle Bixby Wait in Le Roy, NY, mixed fruit syrup into granulated gelatin. His wife named it Jell-O, and they eventually sold the recipe to a local company for just $450.
The internet's backbone was born in Corning with a "Whoopee." In August 1970, three Corning scientists successfully created the world's first low-loss optical fiber, finally making long-distance digital telecommunications possible. When physicist Donald Keck measured the signal and realized they had broken the barrier, he logged the historic breakthrough in his lab notebook with a single word: "whoopee."
The region built its own grassroots internet in the 90s. Long before modern broadband monopolies, locals got online via the Southern Tier Online Community (STOC). It functioned as a homegrown regional ISP and digital community hub before eventually being absorbed into what became Time Warner's Road Runner.
Mark Twain invented the scrapbook in Elmira, but famously passed on the telephone. While summering in Elmira, Twain didn't just write; he patented a wildly successful "self-pasting" scrapbook. His tech foresight wasn't perfect, though. When Alexander Graham Bell offered him an early investment in his new voice system, Twain passed, believing the analog telephone had no real market value.
Elmira changed how the world drinks milk. Before the 1880s, local milkmen distributed milk by scooping it out of open, often unsanitary metal buckets. Dr. Hervey Thatcher invented the first sanitary glass milk bottle, and the Thatcher Glass Manufacturing Company in Elmira Heights mass-produced them, revolutionizing food safety worldwide.
Elmira College was a global pioneer for education. Founded in 1855, it was the first college in the entire world to grant women baccalaureate degrees that were academically and functionally equal to those given to men.
Elmira's hydrants protect cities around the globe. If you walk the streets of almost any major city and look down at the fire hydrants or municipal water valves, there is a very good chance you are looking at heavy iron forged by Kennedy Valve, which has been manufacturing them right in Elmira since 1907.