1800 – Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, London. We’ve been dealing with battery life ever since.

1886 – The first alternating current power plant in the United States began providing power to Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass.

1916 – The Annalen der Physik received a paper titled ‘Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie’ by Albert Einstein. “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” changed physics and technology dramatically.

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1474 – The Venetian Senate issued a Statute on Industrial Brevets that is widely considered the first patent law. Patents had been issued before, often at the whims of monarchs, but this statute codified the practice and set out a standard 10-year term.

1932 – The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened. It is the world’s largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge with the top of the bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour.

1991 – US patent No. 5,000,000 was issued to microbiologist Lonnie. O. Ingram of the University of Florida for a process of turning garbage into fuel. His method depended on the creation of a new species of bacterium genetically formed from two other bacteria.

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1931 – Jacob Schick began marketing his second electric razor. His first hadn’t caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the more practical design became a hit.

1965 – The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.

1987 – Thousands of physicists crowded a ballroom at the New York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical Society to hear speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname “Woodstock of Physics.”

2015 – Sony launched its Internet TV service called PlayStation Vue in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. For $50 a month subscribers got around 50 channels plus the ability to record shows in the cloud for up to 28 days.

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1948 – William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. His stories are credited with launching cyberpunk literature, named after the phrase he used in the story “Burning Chrome”.

1953 – Australian researcher David Warren came up with the idea for a device to record cockpit noise and instruments during flight. His ARL Flight Memory Unit would eventually be known as the Black Box.

1958 – The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite, achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle to that time.

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1926 – Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

1999 – Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two years after Ultima Online and would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

1999 – Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly-anticipated precursor of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released.

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