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.

In 1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

In 1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

In 1996 – AT&T announced they finally had a system that would allow computers to make and receive video phone calls over standard telephone lines. It was not called Skype. It did not catch on.

In 1919 – The observation of starlight bending as it passed through the sun’s gravitational field during a total solar eclipse allowed the first experimental test of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The test was later used to confirm the relativistic effect.

In 1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

In 1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.

In 1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

In 1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

In 1971 – The U.S.S.R. launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.