1886 – Karl Benz submitted a patent for his Benz Patent Motorwagen, a three-wheeler vehicle with a one-cylinder four-stroke gasoline engine. The world’s first patent for a practical internal combustion engine powered automobile. Previous automobiles had been steam-powered.

1895 – Charles Proteus Steinmetz received a patent for a “system of distribution by alternating currents.” His engineering work made a widespread power grid practical.

1901 – In Brooklyn, Allen B. DuMont was born. He would go on to perfect the cathode ray tube, sell the first practical commercial television and found the first national US TV network to fail. The DuMont network was eventually sold to Fox Television Stations.

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1878 – The first commercial telephone exchange in the US was installed at New Haven, Connecticut, and served 21 subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. Only two conversations could be handled simultaneously and six connections had to be made for each call.

1960 – The Communications Moon Relay System was inaugurated publicly when a facsimile picture of the USS Hancock was transmitted wirelessly by radio wave to Washington DC, by being bounced off the moon.

1986 – The Space Shuttle Challenger experienced an O-ring failure in the right solid rocket booster during flight. 73 seconds after liftoff a catastrophic explosion claimed crew and vehicle.

2001 – The Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants faced off in Tampa Bay, Florida, for Super Bowl XXXV, and facial-recognition surveillance cameras pointed at tens of thousands of fans entering the game. It found 12 false positives.

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1948 – IBM dedicated its “SSEC” in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays.

1967 – The first US astronauts died in the line of duty. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed on the launch pad when a flash fire engulfed their command module during testing for the first Apollo-Saturn mission.

2006 – Western Union discontinued its Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. The company still handles money transfers.

2010 – Apple announced the iPad, a tablet computer running the same operating system as the iPhone.

2016 – Google’s DeepMind researchers published a paper in Nature announcing that their machine intelligence AlphaGo had defeated Fan Hui, a three-time European Go champion. The computer won five games of Go without a defeat.

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1926 – John Logie Baird gave his first public demonstration of a broadcast television picture that delivered a recognizable human face. Previously he could only broadcast silhouettes.

1932 – The US Patent Office received a patent application for the cyclotron by Ernest Orlando Lawrence as a “Method and Apparatus for the Acceleration of Ions.”

1949 – The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory saw first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope. Hubble photographed Hubble’s Variable Nebula (NGC 2261).

1983 – Lotus began selling its spreadsheet application for Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3. It would quickly become the most popular spreadsheet software but not make the transition to Windows well and fall behind Excel permanently.

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