In 1908 – Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting...

In 1862 – During the US Civil War, W.H. Fancher and C.M. French of Waterloo, New York, received a patent for the “New and Improved Ordnance Plow,” a horse-drawn plow with a gun attached. In 1936 Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then...

1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM. In 1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman...

1869, John Wesley Hyatt and Isaiah Hyatt received a U.S. patent for pyroxylin plastic, which they called “Improved Method of Making Solid Collodion” (No. 91,341). The process was slightly flammable, but was essential to the development of plastics. In 1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos...