1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

http://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/samuel-morse

1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

http://www.opnmagazine-digital.com/opn/200911?pg=19#pg19

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting the standard for personal computer design.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/24/

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1825 – William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol xliii, p.38).

http://www.archive.org/stream/lecturesonelectr00thomrich/lecturesonelectr00thomrich_djvu.txt

1908 – John Bardeen was born. He grew up to win the Nobel Prize twice, once for inventing the transistor, and once for figuring out superconductivity.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/53122/John-Bardeen

1995 – Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the programming language Java and the accompanying Web browser HotJava at the SunWorld ’95 convention.

http://books.google.com/books?id=W6bomXWB-TYC&pg=PA14&lpg=PA14&dq=may+23+1995+SunWorld&source=bl&ots=4sKeTPyltP&sig=8Q61Ev3lBux67R2FXV7hWj828O8&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ul6UUbikPMGZiQLjuIGgCA&ved=0CHoQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=may%2023%201995%20SunWorld&f=false

2002 – Netflix began selling its stock publicly on the NASDAQ. It rose from it’s initial price, unusual for the time when tech company stocks were generally in poor shape.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1022168821804716360

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1973 – Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center wrote a memo on an IBM selectric typewriter, outlining how to connect personal computers to a shared printer. Metcalfe says “If Ethernet was invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day, this was it.”

http://www.digibarn.com/collections/diagrams/ethernet-original/

1980 – Namco released an arcade game called Puck-Man. When it was released in the US in October the name was altered to Pac-Man.

http://history1900s.about.com/od/1980s/qt/Pac-Man.htm

1990 – Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It featured big improvements in interface and multitasking. It’s Control Panel feature caught the eye of Apple which sued, and lost.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/The-Day-Microsoft-Went-Hollywood-with-Windows-30-292510/

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1937 – North Pole-1 became the first scientific research station to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean. The Soviet Union established it about 20 km from the North Pole. It operated for 9 months, and travelled 2,850 kilometres.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Swr9BTI_2FEC&pg=PA512&lpg=PA512&dq=may+21+1937+North+Pole-1&source=bl&ots=juN39sLxUk&sig=mGHw2UrlgfkTJ6gIpMWcIrrBmwE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjClrzbsLzMAhUT4GMKHb8sBiwQ6AEITDAJ

1952 – IBM announced the Model 701, the first computer designed for scientific calculation. The 701 used electrostatic storage tube memory and kept information on magnetic tape. It sold much better than expected with 19 governments and large companies snapping them up.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/701/701_1415bx01.html

2010 – The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched a solar-sail spacecraft IKAROS aboard an H-IIA rocket. The vessel would test out the performance of solar sails, and make a Venus flyby later in the year.

http://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/ikaros/

2013 – Microsoft announced its newest game console, the Xbox One at a press conference in Redmond, Washington.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4352404/microsoft-xbox-one-everything-you-need-to-know

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1875 – 17 nations (including the US) signed the ‘Convention du Mètre’ in Paris, France, establishing the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.

http://www.bipm.org/utils/common/documents/official/metre-convention.pdf

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.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhist.html

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

http://www.google.com/patents?id=3G9oAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

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

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1990/04/

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

http://www.google.com/patents?id=fGdWAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

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

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=1961-003A

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.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/05/18The-Apple-Store-Fifth-Avenue-to-Open-on-Friday-May-19.html

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=JTYPKxug49IC&pg=PA252&lpg=PA252&dq=Antoine+Barnay+1923&source=bl&ots=C6QeWA_CR4&sig=mjX1XffckJdqC_f1Uj85C7o2pQM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Bu-RT6jEAYWMigLVwLHRDQ&ved=0CB8Q6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=Antoine%20Barnay%201923&f=false

1953 – Jackie Cochran took off from Rogers Dry Lake, California piloting an F-86 Sabre plane and reached averaged speeds of 652.337 miles per hour, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/today-in-history-jackie-cochran-breaks-the-sound-barrier-130780022/?no-ist

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

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-10/apollo-10.html

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

https://www.justice.gov/archive/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.htm

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1902 – While going through objects recovered by divers near Antikythera off the coast of Greece, archaeologist Valerois Stais discovered a strange device with gear-wheels inside. The Antikythera mechanism has been puzzling investigators for more than a hundred years.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/05/17/antikythera-mechanism-discovered-115-years-ago/

1939 – The National Broadcasting Company televised the first sporting event, the second game of a doubleheader baseball game between Columbia and Princeton. About 400 TV sets were capable of receiving the broadcast. Princeton won 2-1 in the 10th.

http://www.gocolumbialions.com/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=9600&ATCLID=3738874

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

http://www.nww2m.com/2013/05/70th-anniversary-eniac-contract-signed/

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

https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-history-of-CERN

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1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc audio 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).

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/berlhtml/berlgramo.html

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.

http://www.pavekmuseum.org/jmullin.html

1960 – While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman used an artificial ruby to create the first laser.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201005/physicshistory.cfm

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1905 – 110 acres of land in southern Nevada were 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.

http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/portal/faces/home/our-city/oc-then-now?_adf.ctrl-state=o1bpgew0l_4&_afrLoop=1042646663388628

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.

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1241842

1997 – Amazon stock went public on NASDAQ.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/amazon

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.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1MTcYrbTdsUC&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=may+15+2004+41st+Mersenne+prime,+224,036,583&source=bl&ots=9F92FdSlZa&sig=KP-aMfsLahUdnkaB9TtyKHRDX0I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=M66KUeSEFMPKiwK3hoH4Bg&ved=0CGcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=may%2015%202004%2041st%20Mersenne%20prime%2C%20224%2C036%2C583&f=false

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