In 1931 – Jacob Schick began selling/a> his second electric razor. His first hadn’t caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the more practical design became a hit.

In 1965 – The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.

In 1987 – Thousands of physicists crowded a ballroom at the New York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical society to hear speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname “Woodstock of Physics.”

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In 1948 – William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. His stories are credited with launching cyberpunk literature, named after the phrase he used in the story “Burning Chrome”.

In 1953 – Australian researcher David Warren came up with the idea for a device to record cockpit noise and instruments during flight. His ARL Flight Memory Unit would eventually be known as the Black Box.

In 1958 – The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite, achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle to that time.

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

In 1926 – Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

In 1999 – Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two years after Ultima Online would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

In 1999 – Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly-anticipated precursor of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released.

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

In 1813 – John Snow was born to a labourer’s family in York. He would go on to develop a ‘germ theory’ that helped combat cholera, and made great advances in anesthesiology. You know something John Snow.

In 1959 – The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

In 1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first domain name, symbolics.com. The domain is now owned by an investment company who uses it as a marketing device. The remains of the original Symbolics company survives in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

In 2004 – Nicolas Jacobsen posted to a forum that he had hacked into T-Mobile’s network and stolen information from major celebrities like Paris Hilton. Jacobsen was later charged with with two counts of violating the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

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