1046 – English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” Their analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

1931 – Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St. Radegund, Austria.

1935 – Detective Leonarde Keeler, co-inventor of the Keeler polygraph, tried out the lie detector on two suspected criminals in Portage, Wisconsin. Both suspects were convicted of assault.

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

1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.

1972 – Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the famous HP-35 for $395. It was the first handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke.

1985 – Shortly after its founding the November before, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute kicked off operations.

1997 – Dave Winer changed how he displayed ‘Scripting News’ so that it always showed the last ten days of posts. In other words, the way every blog does it now. Whether this makes it the ‘first blog’ or not, it was extremely influential and is definitely one of the oldest blogs out there, predating the term blog, of course.

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

1958 – The United States successfully entered the space age with the successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt circling the Earth.

1961 – The US launched a four-year-old male chimpanzee named Ham on a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital flight to test the capabilities of the Mercury capsule.

1971 – Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell lifted off on the Apollo 14 mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.

2013 – The Consumer Electronics Association announced it was awarding the Dish Hopper co-winner of Best of CES and would begin searching for a new awards partner. CBS had forced CNET editors not to award Dish a prize due to ongoing litigation between the two companies.

2015 – Troy Bradley of the US and Russian Leonid Tiukhtyaev landed the Two Eagles Balloon off the Baja coast near La Poza Grande, Mexico. They beat the world distance and duration record. They stayed aloft for 6 days, 16 hours and 37 minutes traveling 6,646 miles.

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