In 1876 – The first two-way telephone conversation occurred over outdoor wires between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Watson. They used a two-mile telegraph line linking Boston and East Cambridge.

In 1947 – Eckert-Mauchly Computer Co. signed a contract with Northrop to develop the BINary Automatic Computer. BINACwas the only computer ever built by the company founded by ENIAC pioneers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.

In 2009 – The first lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS spacecrafts kicked up some dust as part of NASA’s Lunar precursor Robotic program. The impact has led to greater certainty that there is water on the moon.

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In 1841 – Edmund C. Berkeley, an actuary at the Prudential Insurance Company, wrote a report about possible applications of electro mechanical calculation to large commercial data-processing needs.

In 1860 – Telegraph lines opened between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This allowed gold miners to tell backers farther south that they still hadn’t found any gold.

In 1921 – KDKA radio in Pittsburgh conducted the first live broadcast of a football game from Forbes Field. The University of Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University.

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In 1806 – Englishman Ralph Wedgwood received the first patent on carbon paper, which led to the initials cc to indicate a carbon copy which led to the email option to “cc” somebody.

In 1954 – IBM sounded the death knell of vacuum tubes, building the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors. It was an experimental version of the IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, that was desktop-sized and slow just like it’s vacuum-tube powered brother, but it used 5% of the power!

In 1959 – The Soviet Space Probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the dark side of the moon. You’re welcome Pink Floyd.

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In 1969 – The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC. The show created the Spam sketch that would eventually inspire the slang term for unsolicited email.

In 1991 – Linux Kernel, version 0.02 was released, attracting a lot of attention. Author Linus Torvalds felt this version was at least usable and worth a wider release.

In 1992 – IBM announced the ThinkPad line of Notebook computers at offices in New York City.

In 2002 – “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released. The code was a result of Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joining the Xbox Media Player team. The project was later changed to Xbox Media Center and then just XBMC.

In 2011 – Steve Jobs died at his home surrounded by family. The co-founder and CEO of Apple has fought pancreatic cancer for years.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.