1965 – NASA launched Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes. Ranger 9 slammed into the Moon sending back high-resolution pictures of the Lunar surface before impact.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=1965-023A/

1999 – Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Briton Brian Jones landed their Breitling Orbiter 3 just after 8 AM local time 300 miles southwest of Cairo, Egypt. They became the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/22/world/voyage-end-brings-crew-back-down-to-earth.html

2006 – Jack Dorsey sent the first Twitter post which read “just setting up my twttr”. Twttr was the original spelling of the site which was used internally at Odeo.com for the first 4 months.

https://twitter.com/#!/jack/statuses/20/

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

1800 – Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, London. We’ve been dealing with battery life ever since.
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200603/history.cfm

1886 – The first alternating current power plant in the United States began providing power to Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass.

http://edisontechcenter.org/GreatBarrington.html

1916 – The Annalen der Physik received a paper titled ‘Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie’ by Albert Einstein. “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” changed physics and technology dramatically.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/andp.19163540702/abstract

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

1474 – The Venetian Senate issued a Statute on Industrial Brevets that is widely considered the first patent law. Patents had been issued before, often at the whims of monarchs, but this statute codified the practice and set out a standard 10-year term.

http://books.google.com/books?id=L0hhubDCGksC&pg=PA187&lpg=PA187&dq=who+makes+any+new+and+ingenious+contrivance+not+made+heretofore+in+our+dominion&source=web&ots=fA-8X6pIYT&sig=jI3fsoVOkEz7egRqsN8WPsE5V5U&hl=en#v=onepage&q=who%20makes%20any%20new%20and%20ingenious%20contrivance%20not%20made%20heretofore%20in%20our%20dominion&f=false
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venetian_Patent_Statute_1474.png

1932 – The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened. It is the world’s largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge with the top of the bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour.

http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/blogs/on-this-day/2010/03/on-this-day-in-history-sydney-harbour-bridge-opens/

1991 – US patent No. 5,000,000 was issued to microbiologist Lonnie. O. Ingram of the University of Florida for a process of turning garbage into fuel. His method depended on the creation of a new species of bacterium genetically formed from two other bacteria.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=5000000.PN.&OS=PN/5000000&RS=PN/5000000

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

1931 – Jacob Schick began marketing his second electric razor. His first hadn’t caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the more practical design became a hit.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/march-18/

1965 – The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1965-022A

1987 – Thousands of physicists crowded a ballroom at the New York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical Society to hear speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname “Woodstock of Physics.”

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/03/science/power-line-makes-use-of-a-miracle-of-physics.html

2015 – Sony launched its Internet TV service called PlayStation Vue in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. For $50 a month subscribers got around 50 channels plus the ability to record shows in the cloud for up to 28 days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/business/media/sonys-playstation-vue-is-introduced-in-3-cities.html

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

1948 – William Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina. His stories are credited with launching cyberpunk literature, named after the phrase he used in the story “Burning Chrome”.

https://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/233297/William-Gibson

1953 – Australian researcher David Warren came up with the idea for a device to record cockpit noise and instruments during flight. His ARL Flight Memory Unit would eventually be known as the Black Box.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4429502/Unexplained-crashes-inspire-the-first-black-box–March-17–1953

1958 – The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite, achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle to that time.
http://www.nrl.navy.mil/accomplishments/rockets/vanguard-project/

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

1926 – Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/about/dr_goddard.html

1999 – Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two years after Ultima Online and would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/everquest/

1999 – Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly-anticipated precursor of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released.

http://osxbook.com/book/bonus/ancient/whatismacosx/history.html

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

1959 – The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY.

http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/BMRR.asp

1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first dot-com domain name, symbolics.com. The domain is now owned by an investment company who uses it as a marketing device. The remains of the original Symbolics company survived in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

http://www.symbolics-dks.com/
http://www.networksolutions.com/whois-search/symbolics.com

2004 – Nicolas Jacobsen posted to a forum that he had hacked into T-Mobile’s network and stolen information from major celebrities like Paris Hilton. Jacobsen was later charged with two counts of violating the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-7349_3-5534323.html
http://hackstory.net/Hack_de_T-Mobile

2016 – DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI program defeated 18-time Go champion Lee Se-dol in the 5th match of a five-match series for a series win of four matches to one. Lee won only the fourth game. The Korea Baduk Association gave an honorary ninth-dan ranking to AlphaGo.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35810133

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

1839 – Sir John Herschel presented his ‘Note on the Art of Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the purposes of Pictorial Representation’ to the Royal Society, likely the first use of the word ‘photography’.

http://www.midley.co.uk/articles/14march1839.htm

1879 – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Württemberg, Germany. He would grow up to work in the Swiss patent office. And reinvent physics.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html

1994 – Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.linux.announce that Linux kernel release 1.0. had arrived.

http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/382v-s08/papers/moon.pdf

2006 – Amazon announced its S3 storage service, designed to provide Web developers with cheap fast storage for their online services. Amazon charged $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=830816

2013 – Samsung announced the Samsung Galaxy S IV phone would come out in April. Their broadway-influenced presentation received much criticism.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/samsung-galaxy-s4-announced-control-phone-waves-tilts/story?id=18732190#.UUtSI1tAQsg

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

1781 – English astronomer William Herschel observed what he initially thought was a comet but turned out to be the planet Uranus. It was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope.

http://www.universetoday.com/18886/discovery-of-uranus/

1882 – At the Royal Institution, Eadweard J. Muybridge demonstrated his zoopraxiscope, an optical apparatus that exhibited photographs of moving animals. It is sometimes considered the first movie projector.

http://www.archive.org/details/attitudesofanima00muyb

1969 – Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after orbital testing of the first crewed Lunar Module.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo9.html

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

1790 – John Frederic Daniell was born. He would grow up to invent the Daniell cell, a battery that supplied an even current during continuous operation, thus making battery power practical.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/151016/John-Frederic-Daniell

1889 – Almon B. Strowger of Kansas City filed his patent for the first automatic telephone exchange.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Cq2zRb4FMgYC&pg=PA299&lpg=PA299&dq=march+12+1889+strowger&source=bl&ots=TCfyPya_By&sig=CCNHRMxK71BWOcNhQpP7dncGshY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj90-_355HZAhWiqlQKHeCBDyUQ6AEIPTAI#v=onepage&q=march%2012%201889%20strowger&f=false

1923 – Inventor Lee De Forest demonstrated the Phonofilm for the press. It was the first motion picture with a sound-on-film track.

http://books.google.com/books?id=yV4nAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA3-PA115&lpg=RA3-PA115&dq=march+12+1923+lee+de+forest&source=bl&ots=A_yIgcZUDF&sig=RYXpo6cFuQFcTDpOodOCiWrTRsU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=0MQMU6iJKdjmoAS6qoL4AQ&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=march%2012%201923%20lee%20de%20forest&f=false

1989 – Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper proposing an “information management” system that became the foundation of the World Wide Web. He called it the Mesh at the time.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/the-web-at-25-in-the-u-s/

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