1910 – Georges Claude, the first person to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas, displayed the first neon lamp to the public at the Paris Motor Show.

http://inventors.about.com/od/qstartinventions/a/neon.htm

1967 – The Concorde, a joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, was unveiled in Toulouse, France. Bigger news than the speed of the jet was the announcement that it was finally agreed that the British and French planes would both be spelled with an “e” at the end.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2050872,00.html

1972 – Apollo 17 became the sixth and last Apollo mission to land on the Moon.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo17/index.html

1998 – The Mars Climate Orbiter was successfully launched on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida. However, the probe disappeared on September 23rd before reaching Mars, apparently destroyed because scientists had failed to convert English measures to metric values.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco981211.html

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1815 – Ada Byron was born in London, England to the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. She would later marry William King and take on his title as Lady Lovelace. But she is best remembered as Charles Babbage’s friend, and writer of the first program for his Difference Engine. She is considered by many to be the first computer programmer.

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html

1942 – Germany conducted the first powered test flight of a V-1 Rocket, launched from beneath an Fw-200.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Sr6JtOoWghkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9781894643054&source=bl&ots=gYyU75QoNf&sig=pOXKx8p7ncyGnBEKmmcEaVwOLRY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kPxQULLhF8mUiAKP2oHADQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=snippet&q=December%2010&f=false

1944 – Paul Otlet died. His theories presciently described a global interlinked “web” of documents, presaging the World Wide Web almost 50 years before its invention.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/434719/Paul-Otlet

1993 – John Carmack and friends at iD Software released the video game Doom. It would launch a million mods and make the first person shooter the dominant form of video game for decades.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/10/5195508/doom-20th-anniversary-retrospective

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1906 – Grace Hopper was born. She would rise to the rank of Rear Admiral but be best remembered for popularizing the term “debugging” for hunting down computer errors. She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL.
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.htm

1968 – Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart gave a legendary product demonstration of NLS that would become known as “the mother of all demos.” Among other things it introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.

http://codinginparadise.org/weblog/2008/02/original-program-announcement-for.html

1987 – Microsoft released Windows 2.0 which among other improvements could run the first Windows versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

http://www.zdnet.com/pictures/windows-1-0-to-10-the-changing-face-of-microsofts-landmark-os/2/

2015 – The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency probe Akatsuki successfully went into orbit around Venus.

http://www.cnet.com/news/japans-akatsuki-orbiter-sends-back-triumphant-venus-images/

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1931 – US Patent No. 1,835,031 for a “concentric conducting system” was awarded to Lloyd Espenschied of Kew Gardens, New York, and Herman A. Affel of Ridgewood, New Jersey, and assigned to the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Coaxial Cable had been patented.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=1835031.PN.&OS=PN/1835031&RS=PN/1835031

1993 – The US Secretary of Defense declared the GPS system a dual use system that had Initial Operation Capability and opened the Standard Positioning System to civilians, which gave accuracy of nine meters horizontally.

http://www.usno.navy.mil/USNO/time/gps/gps-info

2010 – With the second launch of the SpaceX Dragon, SpaceX became the first privately held company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft.

https://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home/spacexfeature.html

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

1962 – Ferranti Ltd. switched on the Atlas, the UK’s first supercomputer. It was the most powerful computer in the world at the time and doubled the UK’s scientific computing capability.

http://googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com/2012/12/remembering-ferranti-atlas-uks-first.html

1963 – The CBS broadcast of the college football game between Army and Navy featured the first use of video instant replay during a sports telecast. Some people got confused and called to complain.
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19727_7-57337961-10170017/the-birth-of-instant-replay/

1972 – The last Apollo moon mission, Apollo 17 was launched. The crew took the famous Blue Marble picture that now graces desktop background everywhere.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo17.html

1999 – The Recording Industry Association of America sued 6-month-old Napster. The Industry refused to settle, thus insuring that digital music sales would remain low for years to come.

http://news.cnet.com/Recording-industry-sues-music-start-up,-cites-black-market/2100-1023_3-234092.html

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1877 – Thomas Edison tested out his new phonograph invention, by recording the first lines of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He recreated the event in 1927.

1957 – Responding to Sputnik, the United States launched the Vanguard TV3. The rocket only made it a little over a meter off the launchpad before it fell back and was destroyed. A fuel leak was thought to have caused the failure.

http://archive.org/details/GPN-2001-000008

2006 – NASA revealed photographs from the Martian Global Surveyor, of two craters called Terra Sirenum and Centauri Montes which appeared to show evidence that water existed on the surface of Mars, as recently as five years before.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/mgs-20061206.html

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1766 – James Christie held his first sale on Pall Mall in London. Christie’s still operates auctions today and is much more civilized than EBAY.
http://www.christies.com/features/welcome/

1901 – At 2156 Tripp Avenue in Chicago, Elias and Flora welcomed their new baby boy into the world. They had no idea at the time that Mickey Mouse had also come into the world along with their son, Walt Disney.

http://www.justdisney.com/walt_disney/biography/w_bio_short.html

1901 – Physicist Werner Heisenberg was born. We may not know both his precise position and precise momentum at the same time, but we are certain he was born in Wurzburg, Germany.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1932/heisenberg-bio.html

2014 – NASA’s Orion space capsule made its first successful test flight. The capsule was unmanned but made two orbits before successfully splashing down in the Pacific.

http://www.nasa.gov/content/orion-performance-showcases-exploration-abilities/#.VISRfqTF8ww

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

1985 – The Cray X-MP/48 began operation at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It almost doubled the speed of other machines with a parallel processing system, which ran at 420 megaflops.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/December/4/

1996 – General Motors began delivery of the EV1, an electric vehicle that would become well-loved by its drivers then be taken back in 2002 and sent to car-crushers.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/12/1204gm-ev1-electric-car/

1998 – The space shuttle Endeavour lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying the first American-built component of the International Space Station, a connecting node, known as Unity.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-88.html

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

1992 – The first text message was sent on Vodafone’s UK network from a PC to a mobile device with the message “Merry Christmas.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57556747-94/father-of-sms-reflects-on-20th-anniversary-of-first-text/

1994 – The Sony PlayStation game console went on sale in Japan.
http://www.economist.com/node/21541164

1999 – NASA lost radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft entered the Martian atmosphere. It just wasn’t a good year for Mars exploration.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/lander/

2001 – In Bryant Park in Manhattan, Inventor Dean Kamen unveiled a secret project with the codename “Ginger” that Steve Jobs reportedly said would cause cities to be re-architected. The Segway Personal Transporter has become iconic for mall cops and mailmen.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1687647/IBOT

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

1942 – Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and their colleagues achieved a successful nuclear fission chain reaction in a squash court underneath the football grandstand of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field. The atomic age had begun.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/dec02.html

1982 – A Seattle dentist named Barney Clark, deemed too sick for a heart transplant, became the first human recipient of a permanent artificial heart, the Jarvik 7. He survived for 112 days.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/12/dayintech_1202jarvikheart/

1993 – NASA launched the Space Shuttle Endeavour on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, turning the Hubble from a late night talk show joke to the source of some of the most beautiful and valuable astronomy yet done.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-61.html

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