In 1675 – Britain’s King Charles II established the observatory at Greenwich with the main purpose of determining precise longitudes to aid in navigation. This purpose led to Greenwich being marked as the prime meridian and later Greenwich Mean Time. In 1799 – The first definitive prototype metre bars (mètre des Archives) and kilograms...

In 1948 – The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM took 52 minutes to run its first program, written by Professor Tom Kilburn. SSEM was the first computer to store programs electronically. In 1981 – IBM retired the last of its “STRETCH” mainframes. These mainframes were part of the 7000 series that made up the company’s...

In 1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code. 1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become...

In 240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong. In 1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator,...