In 1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc recording and reproduction in a lecture he gave to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was printed in the institute’s Journal (vol. 125, no. 60).
In 1946 – At the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, now IEEE) in San Francisco, Jack Mullin demonstrated the world’s first professional-quality tape recorded in the US.
In 1960 – While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman used a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser.