In 1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company in agreement with the Anglo-Indian Telephone Company Ltd.. The company was licensed to sell telephones in Greece, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, China and several other Asian countries.

In 1915 – AT&T inaugurated transcontinental telephone service with a call made between New York City and San Francisco, Cal. The line had been completed the previous summer too early for the Panama Pacific Exposition.

In 1921 – A play called Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) by Karel Capek debuted at the National Theater in Prague. It was the first appearance of the word robot. Spoiler alert, the robots end up killing all the humans but one.

In 1979 – Robert Williams was killed on the job in a Flat Rock, Michigan, casting plant, becoming the first recorded human death by robot.

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In 1935 – Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer went on sale in Richmond, Virginia in cans, developed by the American Can Company. Cans protected beer better than translucent bottles.

In 1950 – Percy LeBaron Spencer received a patent for a “Method of Treating Foodstuffs” which we would recognise as the Microwave Oven.

In 1984 – The original Macintosh was introduced becoming the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1896 – Wilhelm Roentgen spoke to the Würzburg Physical Medical Society where he demonstrated X-rays by photographing the hand of session chair Dr. Albert von Kolliker, a famous anatomist.

In 1960 – With a crew of two, the bathyscaphe Trieste, descended 10,911 meters in the Pacific Ocean into Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam, the deepest known point in the oceans.

In 2003 – Earth lost communication with space probe Pioneer 10 which was 12 billion-kilometers from Earth.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.