1817 – The first public gas streetlight in the US was lit in Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets.

1915 – The first completely successful tests of the wireless telephone from a moving train were conducted on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Spoken messages were clearly heard 26 miles from Lounsberry to Binghamton, NY.

1984 – Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks.

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1957 – MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The Cryotron paved the way for the integrated circuit which used semiconductivity.

1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call integrated circuits.

1971 – Apollo 14’s Lunar Module lifted off from the moon returning astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to the Command Module. Shepard had made extra history by becoming the first human to hit a golf ball on the moon.

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1850 – The first US patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, NY.

1944 – At Bletchley Park in Great Britain, the Colossus Mk I attacked its first Lorenz-encrypted message. Enigma had been cracked but Lorenz was a tougher cipher used in communications between Hitler and his generals in World War II.

1974 – The US space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it reach another.

1999 – Victoria’s Secret’s online fashion show became the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers worldwide. Proving even back then, the Internet is for shopping.

1890 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity.

1998 – Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pie-ing rich and famous people struck a pie against the face of Bill Gates. Gates did not press charges.

2004 – Mark Zuckerberg and a few other guys at Harvard launched TheFacebook so Harvard students can look up and hook up with each other. They would eventually expand the service to the world. And drop the “the”.

2014 – Microsoft named 22-year employee Satya Nadella its new CEO replacing Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates stepped down as Chairman of the Board at the same time and was replaced by John Thompson.

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