Tech History Today

In 1891 – The first public demonstration of a prototype Kinetoscope was given at Edison’s laboratory for approximately 150 members of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. The New York Sun reported on the demonstration.

In 1958 – Robert Baumann obtained a patent for a satellite. (U.S. No. 2,835,548). The patent stipulated the government could use the technology without having to pay royalties.

In 1990 – The Hubble Space Telescope sends its first light image back to Earth, taken with the wide field/planetary camera.

In 1857 – William Francis Channing of Boston, Mass. and Moses Gerrish Farmer, of Salem, Mass. received the first U.S. patent for an “electromagnetic fire alarm telegraph for cities” (No. 17,355).

In 1961 – Venera 1 became the first man-made object to fly-by another planet by passing within 100,000 KM of Venus. The probe did not send back any data having lost contact with Earth a month earlier.

In 2006 – Apple opened its 20,000-square foot store at 767 Fifth Avenue. It was the second Apple store in New York City but the iconic glass cube made it the most famous.

In 1923 – The first patent application for the rotary-dial telephone was submitted in France by Antoine Barnay.

In 1969 – Apollo 10 launched, completing all the stages of a moon landing mission without landing on the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Staford descended in the Lunar Module to within 15 KM of the lunar surface.

In 1998 – The United States Department of Justice and twenty U.S. states filed civil actions against Microsoft, alleging the company abused monopoly power regarding operating system and Web browser sales.

In 1902 – A strange device was discovered near Antikythera off the coast of Greece. The device is later found to be a sophisticated calculating mechanism dating from 150 BC.

In 1943 – The U.S. Army and the University of Pennsylvania signed a contract to develope ENIAC. It was planned to use vacuum tubes and calculate ballistic firing tables.

In 1954 – The first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site of the first CERN Laboratory building in Geneva.

In 1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc recording and reproduction in a lecture he gave to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was printed in the institute’s Journal (vol. 125, no. 60).

In 1946 – At the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, now IEEE) in San Francisco, Jack Mullin demonstrated the world’s first professional-quality tape recorded in the US.

In 1960 – While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman used a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser.

In 1905 – 110 acres of land in southern Nevada are auctioned off, founding a new city. They would become downtown Las Vegas which would grow to become the host for major tech events like Comdex, CES and more.

In 1987 – The Soviet Union launched the Polyus prototype orbital weapons platform from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 250 in Kazakhstan. It failed to reach orbit. Polyus was designed to destroy SDI satellites with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser.

In 2004 – Using a computer with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor, Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 224,036,583 – 1. Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are equal to the sum of their proper divisors.

In 1973 – The United States launched Skylab, the country’s first space station as part of the Apollo space program.

In 1984 – According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook.

In 1992 – Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel’s dominance.

In 1884 – A group of people interested in the new field of electricity met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

In 1939 – Franklin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

In 1958 – The trademark Velcro was registered, protecting the name of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere.

In 1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

In 1939 – The first appropriation was made to begin construction of the Harvard Mark I. When completed in 1944 the Mark I became the first successful fully automatic computing machine.

In 1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse unveiled the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

In 1951 – Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.

In 1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular with businesses.

In 1997 – Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in match play.