In 1958 – The United States successfully entered the space age with the successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt circling the Earth.

In 1961 – The U.S. launched a four-year-old male chimpanzee named Ham on a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital flight to test the capabilities of the Mercury capsule.

In 1971 – Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell lifted off on the Apollo 14 mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.

In 2013 – The Consumer Electronics Association announced it was awarding the Dish Hopper co-winner of Best of CES and would begin searching for a new awards partner. CBS had forced CNET editors not to award Dish a prize due to ongoing litigation between the two companies.

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In 1925 – Doug Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon. He is most famous for his work on the first computer Mouse, but also worked on many other innovations involving graphical user interfaces, hypertext and networks.

In 1975 – Hungarian Interior Design instructor Erno Rubik filed for a patent on his twisty toy cubes. The patent worked out for him. Erno Rubik became the first self-made millionaire from the Communist bloc.

In 2007 – Microsoft released Windows Vista for home use. Though not as many homes would end up using it as other versions of Windows.

In 2013 – RIM announced it was changing its name to BlackBerry and also unveiled BlackBerry OS 10 and the new Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

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In 1886 – Karl Benz submitted a patent for his Benz Patent Motorwagen, a three-wheeler vehicle with a one-cylinder four-stroke gasoline engine. The world’s first patent for a practical internal combustion engine powered automobile. Previous automobiles had been steam-powered.

In 1895 – Charles Proteus Steinmetz received a patent for a “system of distribution by alternating currents.” His engineering work made a widespread power grid practical.

In 1901 – In Brooklyn, Allen B. DuMont was born. He would go on to perfect the cathode ray tube, sell the first practical commercial television and found the first national US TV network to fail. The DuMont network was eventually sold to Fox Television Stations.

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In 1878 – The first commercial telephone exchange in the U.S. was installed at New Haven, Connecticut, and served 21 subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. Only two conversations could be handled simultaneously and six connections had to be made for each call.

In 1960 – The Communications Moon Relay System was inaugurated publicly when a facsimile picture of the USS Hancock was transmitted wirelessly by radio wave to Washington DC, by being bounced off the moon.

In 2001 – The Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants faced off in Tampa Bay, Florida, for Super Bowl XXXV, and facial-recognition surveillance cameras pointed at tens of thousands of fans entering the game. It found 12 false positives.

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In 1948 – IBM dedicated its “SSEC” in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays.

In 1967 – The first US astronauts died in the line of duty. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed on the launch pad when a flash fire engulfed their command module during testing for the first Apollo-Saturn mission.

In 2006 – Western Union discontinued its Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. The company still handles money transfers.

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In 1932 – The US Patent Office received a patent application for the cyclotron by Ernest Orlando Lawrence as a “Method and Apparatus for the Acceleration of Ions.”

In 1949 – The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory saw first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope. Hubble photographed Hubble’s Variable Nebula (NGC 2261).

In 1983 – Lotus began selling its spreadsheet application for Microsoft DOS, called 1-2-3. It would quickly become the most popular spreadsheet software but not make the transition to Windows well and fall behind Excel permanently.

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In 1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company in agreement with the Anglo-Indian Telephone Company Ltd.. The company was licensed to sell telephones in Greece, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, China and several other Asian countries.

In 1915 – AT&T inaugurated transcontinental telephone service with a call made between New York City and San Francisco, Cal. The line had been completed the previous summer too early for the Panama Pacific Exposition, where it was introduced.

In 1921 – A play called Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.) by Karel Capek debuted at the National Theater in Prague. It was the first appearance of the word robot. Spoiler alert, the robots end up killing all the humans but one.

In 1979 – Robert Williams was killed on the job in a Flat Rock, Michigan, casting plant, becoming the first recorded human death by robot.

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In 1935 – Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer went on sale in Richmond, Virginia in cans, developed by the American Can Company. Cans protected beer better than translucent bottles.

In 1950 – Percy LeBaron Spencer received a patent for a “Method of Treating Foodstuffs” which we would recognize as the microwave oven. Spencer was working on an active radar set and accidentally melted a candy bar in his pocket.

In 1984 – The original Macintosh was introduced becoming the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface.

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In 1896 – Wilhelm Roentgen spoke to the Würzburg Physical Medical Society where he demonstrated X-rays by photographing the hand of session chair Dr. Albert von Kolliker, a famous anatomist.

In 1960 – With a crew of two, the bathyscaphe Trieste, descended 10,911 meters in the Pacific Ocean into Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam, the deepest known point in the oceans.

In 2003 – Earth lost communication with space probe Pioneer 10 which was 12 billion-kilometers from Earth.

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In 1939 -John Dunning’s Cyclotron split the uranium atom for the first time at Columbia University in New York City. And the Manhattan Project was on.

In 1968 – Apollo 5 lifted off carrying the first Lunar module into space.

In 1984 – Apple aired the famous “1984” commercial for the Apple Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott.

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