1941 – 80% of US AM radio frequencies were reassigned to new channels as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement.

1945 – German soldiers blew the launch tracks for the V-1 rocket site near Letelle, Netherlands, ending the rocket attacks.

1974 – NASA’s Mariner 10 became the first space probe to cross the orbit of Mercury about 704 km from the surface.

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

1905 – Cornelius Ehret of Rosemont, Pennsylvania received a patent for the “Art of Transmitting Intelligence.” It was the forerunner of the modern fax.

1935 – Robert Goddard launched the first rocket equipped with gyroscopic controls near Roswell, New Mexico. The rocket reached an altitude of 4,800 feet and flew 13,000 feet at a speed of 550 mph.

1979- A combination of equipment malfunction and human error caused a partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. While no injuries or deaths have been attributed to the accident, it changed US nuclear attitudes significantly.

2016 – The first Oculus Rift VR headsets for consumers began being delivered. Co-founder Palmer Luckey hand-delivered the first one the weekend before to Ross Martin in Alaska who had been the first to pre-order.

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

1850 – San José was incorporated as one of the first cities in California and was the site of the first state capital. It would lose the capital to Vallejo in 1852 but eventually become the center of Silicon Valley and the de facto capital of the technology world.

1884 – The first successful long-distance telephone conversation took place. Bell and Watson experimented with a line of two twelve gauge hard-drawn copper wires connecting Boston and New York City. The line worked for about ninety minutes before finally falling.

1899 – Guglielmo Marconi made the first wireless transmission from France to England. A message was sent 32 miles from Wimereaux near Boulogne, France, to the South Foreland lighthouse near Dover, England. This became an important alternative to laying undersea cables for telegraphy.

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

1973 – Larry Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He would go on to help invent and co-found Google.

1976 – Queen Elizabeth II sent the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology.

1999 – The “Melissa” worm showed up in a file on the alt.sex usenet group and became the first successful mass-mailing worm. The worm’s creator, David L. Smith, apparently named the worm after a lap dancer in Florida.

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