1895 – French patent No. 245,032 was filed for appareil servant à l’obtention et à la vision des épreuves chrono-photographiques, AKA the Cinématographe, a combined motion-picture camera and projector.

1946 – ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) the first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electronics. The New York Times carried the report the next day.

2001 – Microsoft gave the first public look at their new version of Windows, called Windows XP, formerly codenamed Whistler.

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1877 – Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone for the first time in public at the Salem Lyceum Hall. The demonstration ended with the sending of the first telephone news dispatch which was received by the Boston Globe.

1973 – Along Interstate 71 in Ohio, the first metric distance road signs to be erected in the US were put in place. They informed of the distance between Columbus and Cleveland and Columbus and Cincinnati.

2001 – The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on 433 Eros after transmitting 69 close up pictures. It became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.

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1847 – Proud parents Samuel and Nancy welcomed their seventh and last child into the world. Thomas Edison would grow up to embody the word inventor.

1970 – With the launch of Osumi 5, Japan became the fourth country (after the US, USSR and France) to place a satellite into orbit using its own rocket.

1997 – The Space Shuttle Discovery launched on Mission STS-82 with the objective of making significant upgrades to the scientific capabilities of the Hubble Space Telescope. The upgrades helped turn the Hubble from a punchline, to one of the greatest telescopes ever created.

2004 – Ben Hammersley wrote a column for The Guardian called “Audible revolution” describing a boom in “radio” on the Internet. He proposed three terms for the new wave of shows, Audioblogging, GuerillaMedia, and Podcasting. It was the first known publication of the term podcasting.

2016 – Researchers at LIGO published evidence of the first direct observation of gravitational waves in Physical Review Letters. Einstein predicted such waves as part of General Relativity.

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1958 – Scientists at Lincoln Laboratory at MIT bounced radar signals off the planet Venus, calling it the first measurement of interplanetary distances.

1996 – Chess’s international grandmaster Garry Kasparov began a six game match against IBM’s Deep Blue. Deep Blue won the first game, the first time that a current world champion had ever been beaten by a computer opponent under regular tournament conditions.

2004 – While talking about their forthcoming game, Game Neverending, Ludicorp unveiled a side project called Flickr at the O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference in San Diego. It was a service that melded chat rooms with real-time photo sharing.

2009 – One of Motorola’s communication satellites Iridium 33 collided with defunct Russian satellite Kosmos-2251 destroying both. It was an unprecedented space collision.

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1870 – US President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill authorizing “the Secretary of War to take observations at military stations and to warn of storms on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.” This agency operating under the Signal Service eventually became the National Weather Service.

1969 – The Boeing 747 jumbo jet took flight for the first time. It was the first wide-body plane ever produced.

1995 – Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African-American to walk in space. Joining him, Michael Foale became the first British-born American to walk in space.

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