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.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/06/0602first-chicago-el-runs-indoors/

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

http://marconisociety.org/about/marconi-family/

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.

http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars_Express/SEMFU55V9ED_0.html

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.

http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-targets-google-wwdc-2014-os-x-mavericks-ios-8-1593874

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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.

http://www.ci.glendale.ca.us/library/this_week_in_reading_0601-0607.asp

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=gfL4ky-TQOMC&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=june+1+1944+colossus&source=bl&ots=LZ3i_tbzIt&sig=8RKO7B38Hpxplje8ydxyToLLB8E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mr6iT5WVLuqciALEgaWMBw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw

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

http://www.oldapps.com/napster.php

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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.

http://books.google.com/books?id=9iYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q&f=false

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.

http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/Eniac.htm

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

http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-five-years-after-the-raid-110531/

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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.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1966-045A

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.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/06/12/capcom-marks-25th-anniversary

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.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080821194759/http://www.comsoc.org/e-news/2005/may/index.html

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/30/business/intel-plans-pc-video-phone-technology.html

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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.

http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2006/locations/einstein.php

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.

http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/hoover_dam/

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

http://techland.time.com/2012/06/01/newton-reconsidered/

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

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-96.html

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.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2928372/this-smart-fabric-from-google-can-change-the-music-and-turn-off-the-lights.html

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1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/tp2-ie.pdf

1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/09/1959.idg/

1971 – The USSR launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

http://spider.seds.org/mars/mars-l.html

2014 – Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion. Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine would join the company with the titles of ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Dre.’

http://recode.net/2014/05/28/apple-buys-beats-for-3-billion/

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1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took the first manned trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurized cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

http://books.google.com/books?id=rh3YOHLvUv8C&pg=PT30&lpg=PT30&dq=may+27+1931+Auguste+Piccard+and+Charles+Knipfer&source=bl&ots=xO1JisUKos&sig=kl1iga6vBsdejUaq2558cXndkjY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hr-aUda2IeGriALCloCgBw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ

1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/27/

1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combined the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

http://www.giantbomb.com/dragon-warrior/3030-16305/

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

1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo10.html

1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first US patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

http://patents.justia.com/1981/04270182.html

1995 – Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave” calling the Internet the most important development since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own Web browser.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1818989,00.html

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

1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4407/vol3/cover.pdf

1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20engressia.html

1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the Moon.

http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html

1989 – The first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. They ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000.

http://mashable.com/2014/05/25/commercial-gps-25-anniversary/

1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

http://www94.web.cern.ch/WWW94/

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1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

http://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/samuel-morse

1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

http://www.opnmagazine-digital.com/opn/200911?pg=19#pg19

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting the standard for personal computer design.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/24/

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