1888 – Mr. George Gouraud introduced the Edison phonograph to London in a press conference, including the playing of a piano and cornet recording of Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord,” one of the first recordings of music ever made.
http://diamond.boisestate.edu/GaS/sullivan/html/historic.html

1894 – The first wireless transmission of information using Morse code was demonstrated by Oliver Lodge during a meeting of the British Association at Oxford. A message was transmitted about 50 meters from the old Clarendon Laboratory to the lecture theater of the University Museum.
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0262313421

1940 – John Atanasoff finished a paper describing the Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC, the computer he designed with Clifford Berry to solve simultaneous linear equations.

http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/courtcase.php

1989 – Sega launched the Genesis console in the US. It had been released in Japan the previous October as the ‘Mega Drive.’
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-true-16-bit-experience-segas-genesis-turns-25

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1888 – John Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland. He would grow up to invent the first working television system in the world.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/baird_logie.shtml

1912 – The US Department of Commerce issued its first experimental radio license in compliance with the International Radio Convention and Radio Act of 1912. St. Joseph’s College received a license with serial number 1 to operate 2 kilowatts station 3XJ.

http://www.nrcdxas.org/articles/1stfacts.txt

2004 – Adam Curry launched an RSS feed of audio recordings called “Daily Source Code” and podcasting became a thing.

http://radio-weblogs.com/0001014/categories/dailySourceCode/2004/08/13.html

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1877 – Thomas Edison sketched his idea for the phonograph, and may have even completed a model. The first working model wasn’t completed until December 6.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/recon/jb_recon_phongrph_1.html

1960 – The first NASA communications satellite, Echo 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral. The satellite was a balloon of mylar polyester film.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=1960-009A

1977 – The space shuttle Enterprise carried out its first free flight test, when the orbiter was released from the back of a 747 in flight.

http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/aug-12-1977-shuttle-enterprise-test-9563114

1981 – IBM introduced the model 5150 personal computer. It had a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html

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

1942 – Hedy Markey and composer George Antheil received a US patent for a frequency-hopping device. The technique has led to many advancements in wireless technology including Wi-Fi. Markey was better known under her stage name of Hedy Lamarr.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=R4BYAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1950 – Steve Wozniak was born in San Jose, California. He would grow up to invent the first successful personal computer, and revolutionize desktop computing.
http://mashable.com/category/steve-wozniak/

1965 – Shinji Mikami was born in Japan. He grew up to become a video game designer for Capcom, revolutionizing survival-horror games with his popular series, Resident Evil.
https://www.giantbomb.com/shinji-mikami/3040-32999/

1994 – Net Market founder Dan Kohn watched his friend buy a Sting CD online from Net Market using his credit card. This is sometimes considered the first ecommerce transaction.
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2015/11/26/the-first-ecommerce-transaction-wasnt-a-pizza-hut-pizza-or-weed-it-was-a-sting-cd/

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

1519 – Ferdinand Magellan set sail to find that pesky trade route that Columbus was looking for, and instead circumnavigated the globe. Well, at least his ship did.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-08-10/news/9808100080_1_serial-killings-james-smithson-new-brunswick

1990 – The Magellan space probe, named after Ferdinand Magellan, reached Venus, beginning its mission to map the planet’s surface.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/magellan.html

2004 – The iTunes Music Store library passed the mark of 1,000,000 songs available.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/08/10iTunes-Music-Store-Catalog-Tops-One-Million-Songs.html

2015 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced a new company called Alphabet had been created to oversee a slimmed down Google as well as other companies Google owned like Calico, Nest and more. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of the new Google. Alphabet continued to be traded under the stock tickers GOOG and GOOGL.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/google-alphabet.html

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