In 1884 – Construction began in Chicago on the Home Insurance Building, generally acknowledged as the first steel-frame high-rise skyscraper. 1959 – Shortly after construction had begun, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland was officially named in honor of the pioneering rocket scientist. 1964 – Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth...

In 1916 – Claude Elwood Shannon was born. He is considered the father of information theory and is the man who coined the term bit for the fundamental unit of both data and computation. In 1939 – RCA began regularly scheduled television service in New York City, with a telecast of President Franklin D....

In 1882 – Ernst Werner von Siemens presented his “trackless trolley” called the Elektromote in a Berlin suburb. The system pulled electricity from overhead wires, but used road wheels instead of tracks. 1953 – KECA-TV an ABC affiliate in Losa Angeles, California broadcast the first U.S. experimental 3D-TV. An episode of Space Patrol required...

In 2001 – Dennis Tito became the first “space tourist” in human history paying his own way to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. In 2003 – Apple opened the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs at 99 cents a piece. Songs could play back on any iPod and up to...