1857 – Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. Hertz made key discoveries in optics but also transmitted and received electromagnetic waves and gave his name to the common unit of frequency, Hz.

1995 – Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett completed the first hot air balloon flight over the Pacific Ocean. At 9600 km it was also the longest balloon flight.

1995 – US President Clinton signed an Executive Order directing the declassification of intelligence imagery acquired by the CORONA, ARGON and LANYARD US photo-reconnaissance satellites. More than 860,000 images of the Earth’s surface, collected between 1960 and 1972 were made public.

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1937- Waldo Waterman flew the first test flight of the Arrowbile, and found the aircraft easy to fly and virtually spin and stall proof. It is considered the first successful flying car to actually fly.

1947 – Edwin H. Land demonstrated his one-step instant camera and film at a meeting of the Optical Society of America. The first Polaroid camera was on sale within two years.

1986 – The Legend of Zelda, the first in the ongoing series, was released in Japan for Nintendo’s Famicom console.

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1900 – John F. Pickering of Haiti received a US patent for his design of an airship.

1962 – Following the USSR, the United States put its first man into orbit. John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft to a successful conclusion of the mission.

1986 – A Soviet Proton launcher boosted the base block of the Mir space station into orbit.

2004 – Apple’s first iPod Mini arrived in Apple retail stores and online. It was the first size variation of the iPod.

2013 – Sony announced the PlayStation 4 without giving out price or even showing what the hardware would look like.

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1856 – Professor Hamilton L. Smith of Gambier, Ohio received the first US patent for the tintype photographic picture process. It described a method for “the obtaining of positive impressions upon a japanned surface previously prepared upon an iron or other metallic or mineral sheet or plate by means of collodion and a solution of a salt of silver.”

1878 – Thomas Edison received a US patent (No. 200521) for the phonograph. His first recording was of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” spoken into a large horn which transmitted vibrations to a needle that cut the recording on a hand-rotated cylinder.

1990 – John and Thomas Knoll launched a small software package for manipulating images meant to be bundled with scanners. It was called Photoshop.

2002 – Odyssey, the first of six current operational Mars vehicles began its mission to map the planet.

2014 – Facebook announced it was acquiring messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion.

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