In 1923 – The first patent application for the rotary-dial telephone was submitted in France by Antoine Barnay.

In 1969 – Apollo 10 launched, completing all the stages of a moon landing mission without landing on the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Staford descended in the Lunar Module to within 15 KM of the lunar surface.

In 1998 – The United States Department of Justice and twenty U.S. states filed civil actions against Microsoft, alleging the company abused monopoly power regarding operating system and Web browser sales.

In 1902 – A strange device was discovered near Antikythera off the coast of Greece. The device is later found to be a sophisticated calculating mechanism dating from 150 BC.

In 1943 – The U.S. Army and the University of Pennsylvania signed a contract to develope ENIAC. It was planned to use vacuum tubes and calculate ballistic firing tables.

In 1954 – The first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site of the first CERN Laboratory building in Geneva.

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.