1896 – Henri Becquerel discovered images of uranium rocks had appeared on a photographic plate without exposure to the sun. He had discovered natural radiation.

http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/benchmarks-henri-becquerel-discovers-radioactivity-february-26-1896??

1995 – A little over a year after starting the website in January 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporated Yahoo!
http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/and_thats_the_way_it_was_march.php?

2006 – English-language Wikipedia reached its one millionth article, “Jordanhill railway station.”
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/English_Wikipedia_Publishes_Millionth_Article?

2016 – Astronauts Mikhail Kornienko and Scott Kelly landed safely in Kazakhstan after spending a record 340 days aboard the International Space Station.

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-astronaut-scott-kelly-returns-safely-to-earth-after-one-year-mission?

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1947 – The first closed-circuit broadcast of a surgical operation showed procedures to observers in classrooms at Johns Hopkins University.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1928&dat=19470301&id=DJ4gAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Q2gFAAAAIBAJ&pg=2503,4683685?

1954 – The Westinghouse H840CK15 went on sale in the New York area. It is generally agreed to be the first production television receiver using NTSC color offered to the public. Only 30 sets were sold at $1,295 a pop.

http://www.earlytelevision.org/westinghouse_ad.html?
Westinghouse display ad, New York Times, Feb. 28, 1954, p. 57

1959 – Discoverer 1 was launched on a Thor-Agena A rocket and became the first man-made object ever put into a polar orbit.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1959-002A?

2017 – A typo in a command to take some servers offline for maintenance caused an outage in Amazon’s S3 service that took millions of websites offline.

https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/?

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1891 – David Sarnoff was born near Minsk. He would go on to befriend Marconi and rise to the Presidency of RCA and be integral in founding NBC.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/524429/David-Sarnoff

1932 – English physicist James Chadwick published a letter on the existence of the neutron, some say giving birth to modern nuclear physics.

http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/chadwick/index.html

1986 – The United States Senate voted to allow its debates to be televised on a trial basis. The trial was successful.

http://www.archives.gov/legislative/guide/senate/chapter-22.html

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1896 – Hoping to test the sun’s ability to create X-rays, Henri Becquerel placed a wrapped photographic plate in a closed desk drawer, with phosphorescent uranium rocks laid on top. He left it in the drawer for several days until the sun came out. It was cloudy.

http://www.earthmagazine.org/article/benchmarks-henri-becquerel-discovers-radioactivity-february-26-1896

1909 – The first successful color motion picture process, Kinemacolor, was shown to the general public at the Palace Theatre in London.

http://www.cjr.org/the_kicker/and_thats_the_way_it_was_febru_11.php

1935 – Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated Radio Detection And Ranging to Air Ministry officials at Daventry, England. This RADAR proved quite helpful a few years later when war broke out.

http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/ionosondes/history/radar.html

2015 – The US FCC voted 3-2 to implement new Open Internet Rules and classify Internet Service Providers as telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/02/fcc-votes-for-net-neutrality-a-ban-on-paid-fast-lanes-and-title-ii/

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1837 – The US Patent Office approved Thomas Davenport’s application for a patent on an “Improvement in Propelling Machinery by Magnetism and Electro-Magnetism.” We’d call it an electric motor.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=NM0-AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false/

1928 – Charles Jenkins Laboratories of Washington, DC became the first holder of a television license from the Federal Radio Commission.

http://nationalradioclub.org/articles/1stfacts.txt

1930 – A US patent for a photographing apparatus was issued to George Lewis McCarthy, who called it a Checkograph. It was the first bank check photographing device.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=6q9VAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

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

1949 – A modified German V-2 ballistic missile launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reaching an altitude of 244 miles, and putting it well above the Kármán line. It was the first US rocket to reach “outer space.”

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch1-4.htm

1955 – A boy was born to University of Wisconsin graduate students Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali. He was given up for adoption and taken in by a machinist and his wife in Mountain View, California. They named him Steve Jobs.

http://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805/

2011 – The Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Cape Canaveral on its final mission.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts133/main/index.html

2014 – Samsung announced the Galaxy S5 with a heart rate sensor and water and dust proofing.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5441668/samsung-galaxy-s5-announcement-launch/

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1893 – Germany’s Imperial Patent Office granted Rudolph Diesel Patent No. 67207 for “a new efficient thermal engine”. We just call it, the Diesel engine.
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/1295/February-23-1893-Rudolph-Diesel-s-Patent/

1927 – US President Calvin Coolidge signed Public Law no. 632 establishing the Federal Radio Commission which was later replaced by the Federal Communications Commission.
http://www.oswego.edu/~messere/FRCpage.html/

1927 – German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, describing the uncertainty principle for the first time. He submitted a paper on the principle for publication the following March.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200802/physicshistory.cfm/

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1857 – Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. Hertz made key discoveries in optics but also transmitted and received electromagnetic waves. His name has become used for the common unit of frequency, Hz.
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/optics/timeline/people/hertz.html/

1995 – Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett completed the first hot air balloon flight over the Pacific Ocean. At 9600 km it was also the longest balloon flight.

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/22/us/balloonist-is-first-to-cross-pacific-alone.html?src=pm/

1995 – US President Clinton signed an Executive Order directing the declassification of intelligence imagery acquired by the CORONA, ARGON and LANYARD US photo-reconnaissance satellites. More than 860,000 images of the Earth’s surface, collected between 1960 and 1972 were made public.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=51020/

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1937- Waldo Waterman flew the first test flight of the Arrowbile, and found the aircraft easy to fly and virtually spin and stall proof. It is considered the first successful flying car to actually fly.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/waterman-aerobile/

1947 – Edwin H. Land demonstrated his one-step instant camera and film at a meeting of the Optical Society of America. The first Polaroid camera was on sale within two years.

http://www.rowland.harvard.edu/organization/land/instantphoto.php/

1986 – The Legend of Zelda, the first in the ongoing series, was released in Japan for Nintendo’s Famicom console.

http://kasuto.net/zelda1.php?main=zelda1/zelda1.html/

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1900 – John F. Pickering of Haiti received a US patent for his design of an airship.

http://www.google.com/patents/US643975

1962 – Following the USSR, the United States put its first man into orbit. John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft to a successful conclusion of the mission.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/liftoff-of-john-glenns-friendship-7-feb-20-1962

1986 – A Soviet Proton launcher boosted the base block of the Mir space station into orbit.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4225/mir/mir.htm

2004 – Apple’s first iPod Mini arrived in Apple retail stores and online. It was the first size variation of the iPod.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/02/17Apple-Ships-New-iPod-mini.html

2013 – Sony announced the PlayStation 4 without giving out price or even showing what the hardware would look like.

http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2013/02/21/sony-announces-playstation-4/

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