In 1889 – The first long-distance transmission of electricity took place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 miles west to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Portland, Oregon.

In 1948 – Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby airfield and taxi over to the theater.

In 1965 – Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performed the first US spacewalk.

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In 1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.

In 1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.

In 2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.

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In 1890 – The U.S. Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM.

In 1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy.

In 1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released.

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In 1941 – Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high-jumping height attained. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, Patrolmen’s Association used equipment designed by General Electric, comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes.

In 1943 – Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new computer ENIAC. They would take one year to design the computer and 18 months to build it.

In 2006 – Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay website and shut it down. The site relaunched from servers outside Sweden.

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