1802 – Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane of Camborne Parish in the County of Cornwall, enrolled a patent for a steam engine that could power a full-sized road locomotive. He had previously demonstrated it by driving up a hill in a car he called the “Puffing Devil”.

1896 – A. S. Popov made the first radio transmission in human history. Popov is said to have transmitted the words “Heinrich Hertz” from one building to another on the campus of St. Petersburg University, though the assertion was not published until years later because of the need for military secrecy.

2001 – Apple released its new operating system Mac OS X, code named Cheetah, with a retail price of $130.

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1857 – The first department store elevator for passengers was installed at E.V. Haughwout & Co. in New York City. This was a significant development towards the building of skyscrapers.

1882 – Amalie “Emmy” Noether was born in Erlangen, Germany. Albert Einstein called her a mathematical genius. She broke ground in theories of rings, fields and algebra and developed Noether’s theorem which explained the fundamental connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

1996 – The US space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the third time, and for the first time dropped off a US astronaut. Shannon Lucid began her record-breaking stay on the space station.

2001 – The final commands to light the engines of the Progress supply ship were sent to the Russian Mir space station, which then broke up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

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1895 – The Lumiere brothers showed their first film to an audience. It was a romantic comedy about a crowd of mostly women leaving a building.

1960 – Arthur Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes were granted the first patent for a laser (US. No. 2,929,922) under the title “Masers and Maser Communications System.”

1981 – RCA’s first SelectaVision VideoDisc the SFT100W went on sale. The machine used Capacitance Electronic Discs to fit a couple hours of video programming on a 12-inch vinyl disc that sold for around $15.

1993 – The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips featuring 60 and 66 MHz CPUs.

2016 – Sony began taking orders for its Playstation VR headset. The first pre-orders were for a $499 bundle including the headset as well as Move controllers and a camera.

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