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...

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...

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...

In 1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man’s first trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurised cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet. In 1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent...