In 1817 – The first public gas street light in the U.S. was lit in Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets. In 1915 – The first completely successful tests of the wireless telephone from a moving train were conducted on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad when spoken messages were...

In 1957 – MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The Cryotron paved the way for the intergrated circuit which used semiconductivity. In 1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call integrated...

In 1850, the first U.S. patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, N.Y. In 1974, the U.S. space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it...

In 1890, Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity. In 1998 Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pieing rich and...

In 1879, the first practically usable incandescent filament electric light bulb was demonstrated to an 700 people by Joseph Wilson Swan at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1966, the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft...

In 1046: English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” They’re analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age. In 1931, Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St. Radegund,...

In 1951: TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada. In 1972, the first scientific hand-held calculator the famous HP-35 was introduced for $395 by Hewlett-Packard. It was the first handheld caluclator to perform...