1946 – The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles uprange.

1960 – The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine arrived in Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged circumnavigation of Earth.

2011 – Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the Google Music service which would eventually become Google Play Music.

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1893 – Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

1941 – The British Royal Naval ship HMS Bulldog 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 its capture and the machine taken to Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other cryptographers broke the naval code.

1989 – Apple previewed its new System 7 operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. It was announced users would need at least a Mac Plus to run it as well as 2 megs of RAM.

2006 – Nintendo announced that its next game console, previously referred to as the Nintendo Revolution, would be called the Nintendo Wii.

2012 – Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel wrote the first blog post about Snapchat which had launched in the iOS app store in September 2011 after changing it’s name from Picaboo.

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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 – A fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was considered to be the ‘worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history.’

1995 – The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect local online news services into a national service on the Web.

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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.

1895 – Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating machine. Switzerland’s Hans Egli made 4,700 of the 120-pound things. The Millionaire’s chief feature was the ability to do direct multiplication with a single rotation of the handle!

1952 – British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduced the concept of the integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, DC.

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.