In 1519 – Ferdinand Magellan set sail to find that pesky trade route that Columbus was looking for, and instead circumnavigated the globe. Well, at least his ship did.

In 1990 – The Magellan space probe, named after Ferdinand Magellan, reached Venus, beginning its mission to map the planet’s surface.

In 2004 – The iTunes Music Store library passed the mark of 1,000,000 songs available.

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In 1859 – US Patent no. 25,076 was issued to Nathan Ames of Saugus, Mass. for the first escalator-type moving staircase.

In 1927 – Computer pioneer Marvin Minsky was born in New York City. Minsky grew up to become a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research and wrote the book “The Society of Mind.”

In 1995 – Netscape Communications staged an IPO. Shares opened at $28 and shot up to $75 per share in one day, becoming one of the indicators of the beginning of the dot-com boom.

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In 1876 – Thomas Edison received a US patent for a mimeograph, which combined with an invention by A. B. Dick led to the first widely successful mimeograph machine.

In 1908 – For the first time in public, Wilbur Wright showed off the Wright Brothers’ flying machine at the racecourse in Le Mans, France. French doubts about the Wright Brothers’ claims to flight were put to rest for the time being.

In 2007 – Barbara Morgan became the first educator to safely reach space on the U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour.

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In 1944 – IBM officially presented the Mark I computer, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, to Harvard. The computer produced reliable results and ran continuously.

In 1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released Japan’s first commercially produced transistor radio, the TR-55, sold under the company’s new name, Sony.

In 1966 – Jimmy Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He grew up to co-found Wikipedia.

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In 1943 – Jon Postel was born in Altadena, California. He created the Internet’s address system, and administered it for 30 years as director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

In 1963 – Skilled hacker, future government prisoner, and eventual famous security expert Kevin Mitnick was born in Van Nuys, California.

In 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of his WorldWideWeb Project to alt.hypertext and pointed to a simple browser and a Web page describing the project. Thus the WWW became a publicly available service on the Internet.

In 1997 – At MacWorld in Boston, Microsoft announced it would invest $150 million in Apple, and continue to make Microsoft Office for Mac for at least five years. The two companies also ended their lawsuit.

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In 1858 – The west end of the first transatlantic cable was completed when the ship Niagara anchored at the Newfoundland coast having laid 1,016 miles of telegraph cable.

In 1914 – The American Traffic Signal Co. installed their first electric traffic light at East 105th street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.

In 1921 – The first radio broadcast of a baseball game happened on KDKA from Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. Harold W. Arlin announced the game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies.

In 2012 – The Mars Science Laboratory, known as the Curiosity Rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars in one of the most complicated automated landings ever, involving a sky crane.

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In 1921 – The first facsimile was transmitted by radio across the Atlantic Ocean using the Belinograph invented by Edouard Belin. A message written by C. V. Van Anda, managing editor of The New York Times and addressed to the Matin in Paris, was sent in seven minutes.

In 1988 – A computer halted an engine test in preparation for the launch of the space shuttle Discovery. The flight would be the first since the Challenger explosion in 1986.

In 2007 – NASA’s Phoenix spaceship launched on its mission to survey the Martian Arctic in search of water, geological discoveries, and evidence of conditions for biological life.

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In 1811 – Elisha Otis was born. He invented a safety brake that prevented elevators from falling if the hoisting cable broke. Thank him every time you get in an elevator.

In 1958 – The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus became the first watercraft to reach the geographic North Pole. Commanding Officer, Commander William R. Anderson, announced to his crew, “For the world, our country, and the Navy – the North Pole.”

In 1977 – Tandy Corp of Texas held a New York press conference to announce that it would manufacture the TRS-80.

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In 1870 – The world’s first underground tube railway, (the Met had been the first underground non-tube railway) Tower Subway, opened in London, running from Lower Thames street to Vine Street. It closed after 4 months of operation.

In, 1880 – Parliament officially adopted Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the official time of Great Britain.

In 1902 – Mina Spiegel Rees was born in Ohio and became one of the earliest female computer pioneers. She ran the Office of Naval Research, where she organized work on early computers like the Harvard Mark I.

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In 1873 – Andrew Smith Hallidie took his San Francisco cable car for its first test run. The tracks ran from Clay and Kearny Streets for 2800 feet to a hill 307 feet above.

In 1967 – The US Navy recalled Captain Grace Murray Hopper to active duty to help develop the programming language COBOL.

In 1981 – MTV began broadcasting in the United States, playing The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star”, and changing how we view music forever.

In 2013 – Motorola announced the Moto X Android phone with multiple customization options. It was the first phone designed entirely after Google bought Motorola.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.