1929 -The movie In Old Arizona was released. It was the first full-length talking motion picture in the US to be filmed outdoors.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020018/

1934 – Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., the photographic and electronics company known today as Fujifilm, was founded in Tokyo, Japan.
http://www.fujifilmholdings.com/en/about/factsheet/index.html

1981 – The inauguration of US President Ronald Reagan became the world’s first broadcast to feature live teletext subtitles for the hearing impaired.

http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1981/12081a.htm

2017 – The inauguration of US President Donald Trump became the most widely-streamed news event to that time. According to Akamai. live video streaming of the inauguration peaked at 8.7 Tbps at 12:04 ET during the opening of President Trump’s speech. At its peak, 4.6 million concurrent viewers watched the inauguration.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/23/trumps-inauguration-broke-live-video-streaming-records/

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1883 -The first electric lighting system using overhead wires went into service in Roselle, New Jersey.
http://www.boroughofroselle.com/History/

1983 – Apple released the Lisa, the second commercial computer with a graphical user interface (after the Xerox Star). It only cost $9,995 too!

http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/19/happy-birthday-lisa/

1986 – Brain became the first computer virus released into the wild. It was a boot sector virus transmitted by floppy disks. The Farooq Alvi Brothers of Lahore, Pakistan created the virus.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/19/pc_virus_at_20/

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1902 – Nikola Tesla filed a patent application for wireless energy transmission. The patent was granted 12 years later. We’re still waiting for the kinks to get worked out.
http://www.tfcbooks.com/patents/1119732.htm

1903 – The first two-way transatlantic communication, and first wireless telegram was sent between North America and Europe. US President Teddy Roosevelt and King Edward VII. They wrote to each other how awesome the wireless telegraph was.

http://www.nps.gov/caco/forteachers/upload/Marconi.pdf

2012 – Many websites, led by Reddit, Wikipedia and others, conducted an Internet “blackout” to protest the US SOPA/PIPA bills.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wikipedia-blackout-websites-wikipedia-reddit-dark-wednesday-protest/story?id=15373251#.UFonko1lRG0

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1871 – Andrew S. Hallidie received a patent for an “endless wire rope way” which he would put into practice as the cable car system in San Francisco, California.
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/recon/jb_recon_cablecar_1.html

1882 – Thomas Edison received a patent for adding a carbon microphone to the telephone. The patent described finely divided conducting material, like carbon, between metal cups mounted on arms that attached to the mouthpiece diaphragm.
http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents/00252442.PDF

1928 – Anatol M. Josepho received a the first US patent for a fully automatic photographic film developing machine. The Photomaton better known as a PhotoBooth in the US still survives as an app and in dark corners of subway stations.

http://www.google.com/patents/US1656522?printsec=drawing&dq=1,656,522&ei=OIoUT5K0O-Pz0gH3nYSsAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

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1969 – The Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 spacecraft successfully docked in orbit. Yevgeny Khrunov moved from Soyuz-5 to Soyuz-4 and Alexei Yeliseyev went from 4 to 5, marking the first time spacefarers went up in one craft and returned to Earth in another.

https://www.wired.com/2009/01/jan-16-1969-a-rendezvous-and-a-rough-ride-home-2/
http://www.svengrahn.pp.se/trackind/soyuz45/soyuz45.html

1986 – The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) met for the first time in San Diego to supervise the design and deployment of Internet protocol.

http://www.ietf.org/25years

2007 – Blizzard released the first expansion to its wildly successful World of Warcraft game. The Burning Crusade raised the level cap and allowed players flying mounts, at least when they were in Outland.

https://www.macworld.com/article/1053831/burning.html

2007 – Netflix announced it would begin offering a streaming movies service in addition to its DVD rental service. Movies would initially stream to Windows PCs for customers with at least 3 Mbps Internet service and roll out slowly to all subscribers by July.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2007/01/8627/

2015 – The Royal Society announced that the Beagle 2 lander had been found intact on the surface of Mars. The European Space Agency had lost contact with it Dec. 19, 2003 and it had been thought destroyed.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/01/16/space-beagle-idUKKBN0KP15F20150116

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1759 – The British Museum, in Bloomsbury, London, the world’s oldest public national museum, opened to the public. Entry was free and given to ‘all studious and curious Persons’.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/the_museums_story/general_history.aspx

2001 – Wikipedia, the free Wiki content encyclopedia, went online as a feeder project for Nupedia, an expert-written online encyclopedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

2005 – Thanks to a solar flare, ESA’s SMART-1 lunar orbiter discovered calcium, aluminium, silicon and iron – in Mare Crisium on the moon.

http://www.esa.int/esaMI/SMART-1/SEM4711DU8E_0.html

2013 – Facebook announced its ‘Graph Search’ improvements to internal search and recommendations.

https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2013/01/introducing-graph-search-beta/

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1878 – Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated the telephone to Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight. He reached out and touched her, a faux pas which made him the first commoner in years to lay hands on the royal person.

http://books.google.com/books?id=EqgFnAZEPhgC&pg=PA62&lpg=PA62&dq=january+14+1878+Bell+Queen&source=bl&ots=mPKok_L6Wk&sig=SZ49ClI0TVRvZbfRrIvPniwEtZM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=OQxZULiHLOeLiwLA3YGQCA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=january%2014%201878%20Bell%20Queen&f=false

1973 – Elvis Presley’s concert, “Aloha from Hawaii” was broadcast live via satellite, and set a record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.

https://www.npr.org/2013/01/06/168747077/when-elvis-said-aloha-from-hawaii-the-world-watched

2005 – The Huygens space probe landed on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It was the first landing in the outer solar system, and the furthest from Earth.

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=12

2014 – US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of Verizon regarding two FCC net neutrality rules that prevented blocking of applications and discriminating against traffic.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-14/verizon-wins-net-neutrality-court-ruling-against-fcc.html

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1910 – The first public radio broadcast took place with a live performance of the opera Cavalleria rusticana sung by Enrico Caruso and others was broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. The transmitter had 500 watts of power.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Radio-Activity-The-100th-Anniversary-of-Public-Broadcasting.html

1928 – Three television sets were installed by GE in homes in Schenectady, New York, in order to demonstrate the first home television receiver. The picture was 1.5 inches long by 1 inch wide and 24 lines at 16 frames per second.
http://books.google.com/books?id=tyurXyEBPxkC&pg=PA66&dq=January+13+1928+television&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MILuTs_qEemqiALS7YXYBA&ved=0CEoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=January%2013%201928%20television&f=false

1976 – Raymond Kurzweil and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind announced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first text-to-speech machine. Walter Cronkite used it to deliver his signature sign-off, “And that’s the way it was, January 13, 1976.”

http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raybio.html

2014 – Google announced it would acquire smart appliance maker Nest.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/01/13/google-acquires-nest-3-2-billion/

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1908 – Lee de Forest, an engineer and scientist, broadcast a phonograph record show from the Eiffel Tower for an audience of less than 50 people. The show was also heard over 500 miles from the tower, becoming the first long-distance radio message transmission.
http://www.ontheshortwaves.com/Wavescan/wavescan121125.html

1964 – Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He would grow up to study computer science at Princeton, and set the standard for online shopping with his company, Amazon.com.
http://www.biography.com/people/jeff-bezos-9542209

2005 – Deep Impact launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta 2 rocket, headed to an impact with comet 9P/Tempel.

http://science.nasa.gov/missions/deep-impact/

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

1954 – BBC TV broadcast their first ‘in-vision’ weather forecast. George Cowling of the Meteorological Office presented from the BBC’s Lime Grove studios with two hand-drawn weather charts pinned to an easel.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/01_january/06/weather_50th.shtml

2001 – AOL and Time Warner completed their merger. At the time it was seen as a signal of the victory of the Internet over old media. Time Warner would eventually come out on top and spin AOL back out as separate company.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-250781.html

2001 – Dave Winer revealed “Payloads for RSS” which allowed among other things, enclosures. One example was an RSS feed which would deliver a different Grateful Dead song each day. It was the proto-podcast.

http://scripting.com/davenet/2001/01/11/payloadsForRss.html

2005 – Apple introduced the first iPod Shuffle, a music player with no screen and flash memory.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/01/11Apple-Introduces-iPod-shuffle.html

2013 – RSS 1.0 and Reddit Developer Aaron Swartz was found dead after committing suicide.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz-suicide_n_2462819.html

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