In 1893 – Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1941 – British destroyers captured a German U-110 submarine south of Iceland and recovered a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known as Enigma. The sub was sunk to hide...

In 1790 – The French National Assembly acted on a motion from Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system eventually evolved into the metric system. 1988 –...

In 1895 – The first demonstration of A A Popov’s electromagnetic wave receiver took place at a meeting of the Russian Physical Chemical Society in St.- Petersburg. It was essential to the development of wireless communications. Also In 1895 – Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating machine. Switzerland’s Hans Egli made...

In 1896 – Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. In 1949 – The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, performed its first calculation. It operated ata speed of 714 operations per second. In 2002 – Apple’s Steve Jobs previewed...

In 1961 – First NASA astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 Mercury capsule on its 15-minute 28-second suborbital flight. In 1992 – Id Software released Wolfenstein 3-D. It wasn’t the original first person shooter, but it launched the form into widespread popularity. In 1999 – Microsoft shipped Windows 98 SE to manufacturers. The...

In 1995 – German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before. In 2000 – The “I Love You” virus spread to 55 million computers around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming,...