1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.

1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.

2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.

2014 – Apple announced OS X Yosemite and iOS8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Among the features were the ability to answer phone calls on your OS X computer, the ability for iOS apps to talk directly to each other, third=party keyboards for iOS, and a new programming language called Swift.

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1890 – The US Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM.

1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy.

1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released.

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1941 – Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high-jumping height. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, Patrolmen’s Association used equipment designed by General Electric, comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes.

1943 – Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new computer ENIAC. They would take one year to design the computer and 18 months to build it.

2006 – Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay website and shut it down. The site relaunched from servers outside Sweden.

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1966- NASA launched Surveyor 1. It achieved the first soft landing on the Moon by the United States and demonstrated the technology necessary to achieve landing and operations on the lunar surface for the manned missions to follow.

1979 – IRM was founded in Japan with the purpose of selling electric applied game machines. Two years later they started a subsidiary called Japan Capsule Computer. They eventually spun that division off as Capcom.

1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

1996 – Intel planned to announce a video phone. Frank Gill, executive vice president of Intel’s Internet Communications Group, said he expected hundreds of thousands of video-phone ready computers would be sold that year. Video phones didn’t take off then.

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1919 – Sir Arthur Eddington led a team in Africa to observe the total eclipse, while another team observed it in Brazil, to measure how the sun bent star light during a solar eclipse. The results confirmed Einstein’s theory of Relativity.

1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

1992 – John Sculley introduced the Apple Newton at CES. The first one unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn’t work.

1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.

2015 – Google announced Levi’s as the first partner for Project Jacquard, a way of weaving electronics into clothing to do things like turn cloth into a touchscreen controller.

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