1870 – US President Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill authorizing “the Secretary of War to take observations at military stations and to warn of storms on the Great Lakes and on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts.” This agency operating under the Signal Service eventually became the National Weather Service.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/signal.php

1969 – The Boeing 747 jumbo jet took flight for the first time. It was the first wide-body plane ever produced.

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&File_Id=1181

1995 – Dr. Bernard Harris became the first African-American to walk in space. Joining him, Michael Foale became the first British-born American to walk in space.

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/harris.html
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/foale.html

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1971 – 10 years after the SEC suggested automation could solve the problem of fragmentation in over-the-counter stocks, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations or NASDAQ index began trading, the world’s first electronic stock market.

http://www.nasdaqomx.com/aboutus/company-information/whatisnasdaq

1996 – The US Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In part, it attempted to hold website operators responsible for anyone younger than 18 seeing porn on the Internet. That provision was later struck down by the Supreme Court, however Section 230 which provides safe harbor to service providers is still in force.
https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/legislative-history

1996 – John Perry Barlow posted “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written in Davos, Switzerland. He foresaw a “civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

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1817 – The first public gas streetlight in the US was lit in Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets.

http://monumentcity.net/2010/02/18/monument-to-the-first-gas-street-lamp-in-america/

1915 – The first completely successful tests of the wireless telephone from a moving train were conducted on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Spoken messages were clearly heard 26 miles from Lounsberry to Binghamton, NY.

http://books.google.com/books?id=9mNMAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA648&lpg=PA648&dq=lackawanna+railroad+wireless+february+7+1915&source=bl&ots=nq8K3PVm_f&sig=joNVzIMVQHzYmBFC4940bwY3WeA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AIotT7aWLqOSiQKBiZXLCg&sqi=2&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

1984 – Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0207.html

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1957 – MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The Cryotron paved the way for the integrated circuit which used semiconductivity.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201202/physicshistory.cfm

1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call integrated circuits.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=O89pAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1971 – Apollo 14’s Lunar Module lifted off from the moon returning astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to the Command Module. Shepard had made extra history by becoming the first human to hit a golf ball on the moon.

http://www.nasm.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/as14/a14sum.htm

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1850 – The first US patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, NY.

http://www.google.com/patents/US7074

1944 – At Bletchley Park in Great Britain, the Colossus Mk I attacked its first Lorenz-encrypted message. Enigma had been cracked but Lorenz was a tougher cipher used in communications between Hitler and his generals in World War II.

http://www.zdnet.com/colossus-celebrates-70th-anniversary-at-national-museum-of-computing-7000026002/

1974 – The US space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it reach another.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1973-085A

1999 – Victoria’s Secret’s online fashion show became the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers worldwide. Proving even back then, the Internet is for shopping.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/05/vicweb.idg/

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1890 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Quadruplex_Telegraph
http://www.google.com/patents?id=SV9BAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1998 – Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pie-ing rich and famous people struck a pie against the face of Bill Gates. Gates did not press charges.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-207832.html

2004 – Mark Zuckerberg and a few other guys at Harvard launched TheFacebook so Harvard students can look up and hook up with each other. They would eventually expand the service to the world. And drop the “the”.

https://www.facebook.com/facebook?v=info

2014 – Microsoft named 22-year employee Satya Nadella its new CEO replacing Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates stepped down as Chairman of the Board at the same time and was replaced by John Thompson.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/feb14/02-04newspr.aspx

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1879 – Joseph Wilson Swan demonstrated the first practically usable incandescent filament electric light bulb to 700 people at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5197568&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F5176125%2F5197544%2F05197568.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5197568

1966 – The Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft landing and first transmission of photographic data from the Moon to Earth.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1966-006A

2011 – The Number Resource Organization announced that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was fully depleted. The IANA allocated the last of the blocks equally between the five Regional Internet Registries.

http://www.nro.net/news/ipv4-free-pool-depleted

2014 – Facebook launched its ‘Paper’ app for iOS in the US. Paper provided a more magazine like format for viewing Facebook content.

http://recode.net/2014/01/30/meet-paper-facebooks-answer-to-browsing-and-creating-mobile-media/

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1046 – English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” Their analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/657

1931 – Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St. Radegund, Austria.
http://www.astronautix.com/s/schmiedl.html

1935 – Detective Leonarde Keeler, co-inventor of the Keeler polygraph, tried out the lie detector on two suspected criminals in Portage, Wisconsin. Both suspects were convicted of assault.

http://www.wired.com/2012/02/0202polygraph-leads-conviction/

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

1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/02/0201ktla-atomic-test/

1972 – Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the famous HP-35 for $395. It was the first handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke.
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/the_hp-35_calculator.html

1985 – Shortly after its founding the November before, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute kicked off operations.
http://www.seti.org/about-us

1997 – Dave Winer changed how he displayed ‘Scripting News’ so that it always showed the last ten days of posts. In other words, the way every blog does it now. Whether this makes it the ‘first blog’ or not, it was extremely influential and is definitely one of the oldest blogs out there, predating the term blog, of course.

http://scripting.com/stories/siteChanges.html

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1958 – The United States successfully entered the space age with the successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt circling the Earth.

http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/expinfo.html

1961 – The US launched a four-year-old male chimpanzee named Ham on a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital flight to test the capabilities of the Mercury capsule.

http://www.californiasciencecenter.org/Exhibits/AirAndSpace/HumansInSpace/MercuryRedstone2/MercuryRedstone2.php

1971 – Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell lifted off on the Apollo 14 mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_14/

2013 – The Consumer Electronics Association announced it was awarding the Dish Hopper co-winner of Best of CES and would begin searching for a new awards partner. CBS had forced CNET editors not to award Dish a prize due to ongoing litigation between the two companies.

https://gigaom.com/2013/01/31/ces-severs-ties-with-cbs-over-dish-hopper-coverage/

2015 – Troy Bradley of the US and Russian Leonid Tiukhtyaev landed the Two Eagles Balloon off the Baja coast near La Poza Grande, Mexico. They beat the world distance and duration record. They stayed aloft for 6 days, 16 hours and 37 minutes traveling 6,646 miles.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-31073490

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