In 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.

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.

In 1987 – Thousands of physicists crowd 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.”

In 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”.

In 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.

In 1958 – The United States launched the Vanguard 1 satellite, achieving the highest altitude of any man-made vehicle to that time.

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

In 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 would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

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

In 1813 – John Snow was born to a labourer’s family in York. He would go on to develop a ‘germ theory’ that helped combat cholera, and made great advances in anesthesiology.

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

In 1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first 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 survives in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

In 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’.

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

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

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

In 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.

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

In 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.

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

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

In 105 – Ts’ai Lun demonstrated his process for making paper to the Han emperor in China. He probably didn’t invent it, but he certainly turned it into an industry for the first time. And the industry still survives 20 centuries later even int he face of the computers that plot its doom.

In 1985 – The Southern New England Telephone Company turned on ConnNet, the nation’s first local, public packet-switching network. Customers could access CompuServ, NewsNet and other services at a blistering 4,800 to 56,000 bits per second. The service’s X.25 protocol went obsolete in the 1990s with the popularity of the Internet Protocol.

In 2011 – Apple began selling the iPad 2, a thinner version of the first iPad, that also included a camera.

In 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell spoke the immortal words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” over the a telephone in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant from the next room. It is widely considered the first instance of someone using technology when they bloody well could have just got up and spoke to someone in person. It is also widely considered the first phone call.

In 1891 – Almon B. Strowger was issued a U.S. patent for his electromechanical switch to automate a telephone exchange. Strowger wasn’t the first to think of of automatic switching but he was the first to make a practical switch.

In 2000 -The Nasdaq hit 5,048.62, the highest point of the dot-com boom. The bust began the next day.

In 1948 – The University of California at Berkeley and the Atomic Energy Commission announced the artificial production of mesons using the 184-inch cyclotron at the university’s Radiation Laboratory.

In 1961 – Sputnik 9 successfully launched, carrying a human dummy and and the dog Chernushka. It completed 1 orbit and was successfully recovered upon return.

In 2011 – Space Shuttle Discovery on Mission STS-133 made its final landing after 39 flights.