Tech History Today

In 1958 – Scientists at Lincoln Laboratory at MIT bounced radar signals off the planet Venus, calling it the first measurement of interplanetary distances.

In 1996 – Chess’s international grandmaster Garry Kasparov began a six game match against IBM’s Deep Blue. Deep Blue won the first game the first time that a current world champion had ever been beaten by a computer opponent under regular tournament conditions. But Kasparov took the match 4-2.

In 2009 – One of Motorola’s communication satellites Iridium 33 collided with defunct Russian satellite Kosmos-2251 destroying both. It was an unprecedented space collision.

In 1870 – US President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill authorizing “the Secretary of War to take observations at military stations and to warn of storms on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.” This agency operating under the Signal Service eventually became the National Weather Service.

1969 – The Queen of the Skies, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet took flight for the first time. It was the first wide-body plane ever produced.

1995 – Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African-American to walk in space. Joining him, Michael Foale became the first British-born American to walk in space.

In 1971 – 10 years after the SEC suggested automation could solve the problem of fragmentation in over-the-counter stocks, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations or NASDAQ index began trading, the world’s first electronic stock market.

In 1996 – “24 hours in cyberspace” event inspired by photographer Rick Smolan, took place, with 150 photojournalists documenting how people around the world used the Internet.

Also In 1996 – The U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. It attempted to hold website operators responsible for anyone younger than 18 seeing porn on the Internet. That provision was later struck down by the Supreme Court, however Section 230 which provides safe harbor to service providers is still in force.

In 1817 – The first public gas street light in the U.S. was lit in Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets.

In 1915 – The first completely successful tests of the wireless telephone from a moving train were conducted on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad when spoken messages were clearly heard twenty six miles from Lounsberry to Binghamton, NY.

In 1984 – The first untethered spacewalks were made by Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart

In 1957 – MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The Cryotron paved the way for the intergrated circuit which used semiconductivity.

In 1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call integrated circuits.

In 1971 – Apollo 14’s Lunar Module lifted off from the moon returning astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to the Command Module. Shepard had made extra history by becoming the first human to hit a golf ball on the moon.

In 1850, the first U.S. patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, N.Y.

In 1974, the U.S. space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it reach another.

In 1999: The first Victoria’s Secret online fashion show became the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers worldwide. Proving even back then the Internet is for shopping.

In 1890, Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity.

In 1998 Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pieing rich and famous people struck a pie against the face of Bill Gates. Gates did not press charges.

In 2004 Mark Zuckerberg and a few other guys at Harvard launch TheFacebook so Harvard students can look up and hook up with each other. Theyw ould eventually expand the service to the world. And drop the “the”.

In 1879, the first practically usable incandescent filament electric light bulb was demonstrated to an 700 people by Joseph Wilson Swan at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne.

In 1966, the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft landing and first transmission of photographic data from the Moon to Earth.

In 2011 The Number Resource Organization announced that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was fully depleted. The IANA allocated the last of the blocks equally between the five Regional Internet Registries.

In 1046: English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” They’re analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

In 1931, Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St. Radegund, Austria.

In 1935: Detective Leonarde Keeler, co-inventor of the Keeler polygraph, tried out the lie detector on two suspected criminals in Portage, Wisconsin. Both suspects were convicted of assault.

Come back tomorrow for more history.

In 1951: TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.

In 1972, the first scientific hand-held calculator the famous HP-35 was introduced for $395 by Hewlett-Packard. It was the first handheld caluclator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke.

In 1985 Shortly after it’s founding the November before, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence kicked off. SETI Institute began operations.