Tech History Today

In 1965 – NASA launched Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes. Ranger 9 slammed into the Moon sending back high-resolution pictures of the Lunar surface before impact.

1999 – Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Briton Brian Jones landed their Breitling Orbiter 3 just after 8 A.M. local time 300 miles southwest of Cairo, Egypt. They became the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon.

In 2006 – Jack Dorsey sent the first Twitter post which read “just setting up my twttr”. Twttr was the original spelling of the site which was used internally at Odeo.com for the first 4 months.

In 1800 – Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, London. We’ve been dealing with battery life ever since.

In 1886 – The first alternating current power plant in the United States began providing power to Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass.

1916 – The Annalen der Physik received a paper titled ‘Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie’ by Albert Einstein. “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” changed physics and technology dramatically.

In 1474, the Venetian Senate issued a Statute on Industrial Brevets that is widely considered the first patent law. Patents had been issued before, often at the whims of monarchs, but this statute codified the practice and set out a standard 10-year term.

In 1932 – The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened. It is the world’s largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge with the top of the bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour.

In 1991 – U.S. patent No. 5,000,000 was issued for a process turning garbage into fuel to microbiologist Lonnie. O. Ingram of the University of Florida. His method depended on the creation of a new species of bacterium genetically formed from two other bacteria.

In 1931 – Jacob Schick began marketing his second electric razor. His first hadn’t caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the more practical design became a hit.

1965 – The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.

In 1987 – Thousands of physicists crowd a ballroom at the New York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical society to hear speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname “Woodstock of Physics.”

In 1948 – William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. His stories are credited with launching cyberpunk literature, named after the phrase he used in the story “Burning Chrome”.

In 1953 – Australian researcher David Warren came up with the idea for a device to record cockpit noise and instruments during flight. His ARL Flight Memory Unit would eventually be known as the Black Box.

In 1958 – The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite, achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle to that time.

In 1926 – Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

In 1999 Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two years after Ultima Online would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

In 1999 – Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly-anticpated precursor of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released.

In 1813 – John Snow was born to a labourer’s family in York. He would go on to develop a ‘germ theory’ that helped combat cholera, and made great advances in anesthesiology.

In 1959 – The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

In 1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first domain name, symbolics.com. The domain is now owned by an investment company who uses it as a marketing device. The remains of the original Symbolics company survives in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

In 1839 – Sir John Herschel presented his ‘Note on the Art of Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the purposes of Pictorial Representation’ to the Royal Society, likely the first use of the word ‘photography’.

In 1879 – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Württemberg, Germany. He would grow up to work in the Swiss patent office. And reinvent physics.

In 1994 – Linus Toirvalds posted to comp.os.linux.announce that Linux kernel release 1.0. had arrived.

In 1781 – English astronomer William Herschel observed what he initially thought was a comet but turns out to be the planet Uranus. It was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope.

In 1882 – At the Royal Institution, Eadweard J. Muybridge demonstrated his zoopraxiscope, an optical apparatus that exhibited photographs of moving animals. It is sometimes considered the first movie projector.

In 1969 – Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after orbital testing of the first crewed Lunar Module.

In 1790 – John Frederic Daniell was born. He would grow up to invent the Daniell cell, a battery that supplied an even current during continuous operation, thus making battery power practical.

In 1889 – Almon B. Strowger of Kansas City filed his patent for the first automatic telephone exchange.

In 1923 – Inventor Lee De Forest demonstrated The Phonofilm for the press. It was the first motion picture with a sound-on-film track.