In 1902 – A strange device was discovered near Antikythera off the coast of Greece. The device is later found to be a sophisticated calculating mechanism dating from 150 BC.

In 1943 – The U.S. Army and the University of Pennsylvania signed a contract to develope ENIAC. It was planned to use vacuum tubes and calculate ballistic firing tables.

In 1954 – The first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site of the first CERN Laboratory building in Geneva.

In 1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc recording and reproduction in a lecture he gave to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was printed in the institute’s Journal (vol. 125, no. 60).

In 1946 – At the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, now IEEE) in San Francisco, Jack Mullin demonstrated the world’s first professional-quality tape recorded in the US.

In 1960 – While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman used a synthetic-ruby crystal to create the first laser.

In 1905 – 110 acres of land in southern Nevada are auctioned off, founding a new city. They would become downtown Las Vegas which would grow to become the host for major tech events like Comdex, CES and more.

In 1987 – The Soviet Union launched the Polyus prototype orbital weapons platform from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 250 in Kazakhstan. It failed to reach orbit. Polyus was designed to destroy SDI satellites with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser.

In 2004 – Using a computer with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor, Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 224,036,583 – 1. Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are equal to the sum of their proper divisors.

In 1973 – The United States launched Skylab, the country’s first space station as part of the Apollo space program.

In 1984 – According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook.

In 1992 – Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel’s dominance.

In 1884 – A group of people interested in the new field of electricity met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

In 1939 – Franklin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

In 1958 – The trademark Velcro was registered, protecting the name of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere.

In 1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

In 1939 – The first appropriation was made to begin construction of the Harvard Mark I. When completed in 1944 the Mark I became the first successful fully automatic computing machine.

In 1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse unveiled the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

In 1951 – Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.

In 1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular with businesses.

In 1997 – Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in match play.

In 1946 – The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles uprange.

In 1960 – The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine, arrived in Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged circumnavigation of Earth.

In 2011 – Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the Google Music service which would eventually become Google Play Music.

In 1893 – Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

In 1941 – British destroyers captured a German U-110 submarine south of Iceland and recovered a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known as Enigma. The sub was sunk to hide its capture and the machine taken to Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other cryptographers broke the naval code.

In 1967 – The National Center for Atmospheric Research dedicated its new building in Boulder Colorado. Funded by a a $100,000 grant from the Max C. Fleishmann Foundation and designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei., the center pioneered investigation of weather patterns and other atmospheric phenomena.

In 1790 – The French National Assembly acted on a motion from Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system eventually evolved into the metric system.

1988 – A fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was considered at the time to be the ‘worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history.’

In 1995 – The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect local online news services into a national service on the Web.