1898 – Building on Henri Becquerel’s discovery of spontaneous radioactivity two years earlier the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie discovered Radium. Marie particularly figured out how to separate it from its radioactive residues.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/12/1221curies-discover-radium/

1937 – Walt Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened in Los Angeles. It ran 83 minutes. It was also the first animated film produced in color.

http://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2011/12/opening-night-1937-snow-white-and-the-seven-dwarfs-premieres-at-carthay-circle-theatre/

1968 – Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew performed the first ever manned Trans Lunar Injection and became the first humans to leave Earth’s gravity. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer to use integrated circuit logic.

http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/as08/a08sum.htm

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1880 – New York’s Broadway from 14th to 26th street was first lighted by electricity and became known as the “Great White Way.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-grand-union-flag-free-at-last-and-lighting-up-broadway-110762522/?all&no-ist

1951 – In Idaho, the Experimental Breed Reactor no. 1 aka EBR-1 became the first power plant to produce electricity using atomic energy. It would take two more years to prove it could create more fuel than it consumed.
http://www.inl.gov/ebr/

1990 – The first web server and page went live at CERN. It was only available internally. The first public web page wouldn’t be available until the following August.

http://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-World-Wide-Web

1996 – Apple announced it would acquire NeXT Computer and bring co-founder Steve Jobs back to the company he left in 1985.

http://news.cnet.com/Apple-acquires-Next,-Jobs/2100-1001_3-256914.html

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1958 – The first known radio broadcast from outer space was transmitted. US President Eisenhower spoke from a pre-recorded message aboard the Project SCORE experimental satellite. Redundancy paid off as the first recorder failed but the backup worked.

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/thismonth/this_month_dec08.html

1972 – Apollo 17, the last manned lunar flight crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt, returned to Earth.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo17.html

1999 – TIME Magazine announced Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, as its person of the year. The magazine cited online shopping and dot-com mania among the reasons.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bezos-itime-is-person-of-year/

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1839 – John William Draper took a daguerreotype of the moon, the first lunar photograph.
http://www.fotoart.gr/photography/history/historyphotos/onephotoonestory/thefirstphotoofthemoon.htm

1878 – Joseph Swan demonstrated the electric lamp to the Newcastle Chemical Society in northern England. His bulb would burn for about 40 hours. Edison’s later bulb would burn for closer to 150 hours.
http://books.google.com/books?id=6jgRWR1F7X8C&pg=PA49&lpg=PA49&dq=joseph+swan+1848&source=bl&ots=0KlFOPDQxv&sig=womCrG8fAAj-61N8N-PnxENyj-0&hl=en&ei=WlvYTr3mCIXYiALFwPWjCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=joseph%20swan%201848&f=false

1926 – In a letter to Nature, physicist Gilbert Newton Lewis used the word photon to describe a carrier of radiant energy. It eventually was used to apply to Einstein’s light quantum as well.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201212/physicshistory.cfm

1987 – Larry Wall released the Perl scripting language. It would go from being a SysAdmin’s helper to one of the Web’s dominant scripting languages, for good or ill, depending on the coder.

http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2013/12/perl-is-26-today.html

1997 – HTML 4.0 was recommended and published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. It offered the strict, transitional and frameset variations, and deprecated many of Netscape’s visual tags in favor of CSS.

http://www.w3.org/Press/HTML4-REC

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1880 – The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York was incorporated to install a central generating station in New York City. New Yorkers know it now as ConEd.

http://edison.rutgers.edu/list.htm

1903 – Orville Wright successfully made a flight in a heavier-than-air machine that took off from level ground under its own power and was controlled during flight. It’s generally considered the first airplane flight.

http://www.wright-house.com/wright-brothers/wrights/1903.html

1997 – John Barger coined the term ‘weblog’ to describe his list of links on his site, Robot Wisdom. Peter Merholz would later shorten it to just ‘blog’.
http://firstsiteguide.com/robot-wisdom-and-jorn-barger/

2012 – The W3C announced it had completed the definition of HTML 5.

http://www.w3.org/2012/12/html5-cr

2015 – Star Wars: The Force Awakens premiered, causing noticeable dips in Internet traffic as fans flocked to theaters and avoided spoilers.

http://www.newsweek.com/star-wars-bring-european-nerds-offline-temporarily-406709?rx=us

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1935 – A Time magazine article described the use of the pattern of capillaries in the retina as a means of identification called eye prints. Hello biometrics!

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755453,00.html

1947 – John Bardeen and Walter Brattain applied two closely-spaced gold contacts held in place by a plastic wedge to the surface of a small slab of high-purity germanium. It was the next step in the development of the Transistor.

http://www.pbs.org/transistor/science/labpages/labpg3.html

2002 – Creative Commons formally launched, unveiling Machine-Readable Copyright Licenses and a revamped website.

https://creativecommons.org/2002/12/16/creativecommonsunveilsmachinereadablecopyrightlicenses/

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1953 – Dudley Buck entered the idea for the Cryotron into his MIT notebook. The cryotron is a four-terminal superconductive computer component.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Cryotron

1965 – Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it achieved the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1965-104A

1994 – Netscape shipped version 1.0 of the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_mrTMHwTrGwC&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=december+15+1994+netscape&source=bl&ots=Sy7G8GTqVz&sig=euKOXIILquJ_UwbRLFax5m6O9_I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=meCkUqz2E9DaoASE1YG4AQ&ved=0CGgQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=december%2015%201994%20netscape&f=false

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

1900 – German physicist Max Planck published his theory that radiant energy is made up of particle-like components, known as “quantum.” And quantum physics was born.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-birth-of-quantum-theory

1972 – Eugene Cernan ended a 7 hour and 15 minute EVA, climbed back aboard the Apollo 17 Lunar Module and became the last person to walk on the moon.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/14/newsid_4104000/4104387.stm

1996 – John Tu and David Sun, the founders of Kingston Technology took $100 million from the sale of their privately held enterprise and gave it to employees, a spontaneous gesture to those who had helped make the memory-module company a market leader.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/12/1214kingston-technology-christmas-bonus/

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1962 – NASA “Relay 1” launched, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1962-068A

1977 – Young Bill Gates was arrested for a traffic violation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, leading to one of the most famous mugshots ever.

http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/gallery/MicrosoftTheEndofTheBillGatesEra?pg=3

1977 – Robert Metcalfe et. al were awarded a patent for “Multipoint data communication system with collision detection” also known as ethernet.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=Szg6AAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

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1896 – Guglielmo Marconi amazed a group at Toynbee Hall in East London with a demonstration of wireless communication across a room. Every time Marconi hit a key a bell would ring from a box across the room being carried by William Henry Preece.

http://www.wired.com/2011/12/1212marconi-radio-demo-transatlantic/

1973 – Founder of LinkExchange, CEO of Zappos, and promoter of customer-centric business, Tony Hsieh was born.

http://www.eduinreview.com/blog/tag/tony-hsieh/

1980 – Apple’s stock was initially offered for sale. Regulators in Massachusetts prohibited individual investors in the state from buying the stock, as it was deemed too risky.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4403276/Apple-IPO-makes-instant-millionaires–December-12–1980

1991 – Paul Kunz set up the first website in North America. It searched particle physics literature at Stanford.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2001/december12/webturns10-1212.html

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