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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In 1957 – NBC taped and broadcast President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second inauguration address, further popularizing the taping of video.
In 1981 – The first DeLorean DMC-12 sports car rolled off the production line in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. This one made no use of gigawatts in any way.
In 2004 – The Mars Rover Spirit abruptly stopped transmitting. Apparently too many files had been written to the flash memory and it went into fault mode.
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In 1929 -The movie In Old Arizona was released. It was the first full-length talking motion picture in the U.S. to be filmed outdoors.
In 1934 – Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., the photographic and electronics company known today as Fujifilm, was founded in Tokyo, Japan.
In 1981 – The inauguration of US President Ronald Reagan is the world’s first broadcast to feature live teletext subtitles for the hearing impaired.
In 2009 – The inauguration of US President Barack Obama became the most widely-streamed Presidential inauguration to that date. According to Akamai’s Net Usage Index, web traffic peaked at 5.4 million requests per minute — and 2 terabits per second.
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In 1883 -The first electric lighting system using overhead wires went into service in Roselle, New Jersey.
In 1983 – Apple released the Lisa, the second commercial computer with a graphical user interface (after the Xerox Star). It only cost $9,995 too!
In 1986 – Brain became the first computer virus released into the wild. It was a boot sector virus transmitted by floppy disks. The Farooq Alvi Brothers of Lahore, Pakistan created the virus.
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In 1902 – Nikola Tesla filed a patent application for wireless energy transmission. The patent was granted 12 years later. We’re still waiting for the kinks to get worked out.
In 1903 – The first two-way transatlantic communication, and first wireless telegram was sent between North America and Europe. US President Teddy Roosevelt and King Edward VII. They wrote to each other how awesome the wireless telegraph was.
In 2012 – Many websites, led by Reddit, Wikipedia and others, conducted an Internet “blackout” to protest the US SOPA/PIPA bills.
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In 1871 – Andrew S. Hallidie received a patent for an “endless wire rope way” which he would put into practice as the cable car system in San Francisco, California.
In 1882 – Thomas Edison received a patent for adding a carbon microphone to the telephone. The patent described finely divided conducting material, like carbon, between metal cups mounted on arms that attached to the mouthpiece diaphragm.
In 1928 – Anatol M. Josepho received a the first U.S. patent for a fully automatic photographic film developing machine. The Photomaton better known as a PhotoBooth in the US still survives as an app and in dark corners of subway stations.
In 1949 – The first synchrotron installed at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, reached its design energy of 300 MeV.
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In 1969 – The Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 spacecraft successfully docked in orbit. Yevgeny Khrunov moved from Soyuz-5 to Soyuz-4 and Alexei Yeliseyev went from 4 to 5, marking the first time spacefarers went up in one craft and returned to Earth in another.
In 1986 – The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) met for the first time in San Diego to supervise the design and deployment of Internet protocol.
In 2007 – Blizzard released the first expansion to it’s wildly successful World of Warcraft game. The Burning Crusade raised the level cap and allowed players flying mounts, at least when they were in Outland.
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In 1759 – The British Museum, in Bloomsbury, London, the world’s oldest public national museum, opened to the public. Entry was free and given to ‘all studious and curious Persons’.
In 2001 – Wikipedia, the free Wiki content encyclopedia, went online as a feeder project for Nupedia, an expert-written online encyclopedia.
In 2005 – Thanks to a solar flare, ESA’s SMART-1 lunar orbiter discovered calcium, aluminium, silicon and iron – in Mare Crisium on the moon.
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In 1878 – Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone to Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight. He reached out and touched her, a faux pas which made him the first commoner in years to lay hands on the royal person.
In 1973 – Elvis Presley’s concert, “Aloha from Hawaii” was broadcast live via satellite, and set a record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.
In 2005 – The Huygens space probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It was the first landing in the outer solar system, and the furthest from Earth.
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In 1910 – The first public radio broadcast took place with a live performance of the opera Cavalleria rusticana sung by Enrico Caruso and others was broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The transmitter had 500 watts of power.
In 1928 – Three television sets were installed by GE in homes in Schenectady, New York in order to demonstrate the first home television receiver. The picture was 1.5 inches long by 1 inch wide and 24 lines at 16 frames per second.
In 1976 – Raymond Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind announced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first text-to-speech machine. Walter Cronkite used it to deliver his signature sign-off, “And that’s the way it was, January 13, 1976.”
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