1944 – Lt. Carter Harman of the 1st Air Commando Group rescued four men from the jungle in Burma, flying a Sikorsky YR-4 helicopter. It was the first combat rescue by helicopters in the US Army Air Forces.

1953 – Watson and Crick presented their findings on the double helical structure of DNA in the publication Nature. They noted that the structure “suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” 50 Years later the Human Genome Project had concluded sequencing the genome and published a follow-on in Nature on their vision for genetic research.

1961 – Robert Noyce received the US patent for the silicon-based integrated circuit. He went on to found the Intel Corporation with Gordon E. Moore in 1968. Noyce fought a long patent rights battle with Jack Kilby who invented a germanium based integrated circuit.

2014 – Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia’s handset business. Nokia retained its mapping, research and network infrastructure business. Microsoft gained most of the mobile phone parts of the company.

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1970 – The Chang Zheng-1 rocket launched, carrying the first Chinese satellite, the Dong Fang Hong-1.

1981 – At a meeting called “Apple II Forever“, Apple introduced the portable Apple IIc. The machine came with 128 kilobytes of RAM and a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive.

1990 – The Space Shuttle Discovery launched with the Hubble Space Telescope on board. The following day, Hubble was released into space.

2015 – The Apple Watch started shipping. It could be bought in some high-end fashion stores but Apple Stores had none in stock. Only online orders could be taken through Apple.

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

1827 – Mathematics student William Rowan Hamilton presented his “Theory of Systems of Rays” at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. It led to the development of the wave theory of light which led to the development of quantum mechanics.

1940 – A patent was granted to Herman Anthony for a leak-proof dry-cell battery. The patent was assigned to Ray-o-Vac.

1941 – Ray Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York. In 1971 he would expand SNDMSG to work between computers on the Arpanet, which would become email. He chose the @ symbol to separate the recipient’s name from the computer domain.

1982 – Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum which popularised home computing in the UK.

2005 – At 8:27 PM, Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, uploaded the video Me at the zoo making it the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube.

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1592 – Wilhelm Schickard was born. He would grow up to create an early form of calculating machine called the “calculating clock”, that could add and subtract up to six-digit numbers.

1993 – NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released, becoming the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public.

2000 – The Big Number Change took place in the United Kingdom, changing how phone numbers were dialed in many areas. With the boom in mobile devices, the UK had almost exhausted all possible numbers, and needed the change to increase the pool of numbers to be assigned.

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