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.

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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 – John Perry Barlow posted “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written in Davos, Switzerland. He foresaw a “civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”

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.

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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

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

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