1874 – Woodward and Evans Light filed a patent for “Artificial light by means of electricity” with the Canadian Department of Agriculture. Woodward later sold the patent to Thomas Edison, who patented a different and more successful version of the incandescent lamp in the US.

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cool/002027-2003-e.html

1950 – The Bumper 8, made of a German V-2 missile lower stage and WAC-Corporal upper stage launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was the first launch from what would become the Kennedy Space Center.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/first-launch-cape-canaveral-florida-july-24-1950

1969 – Apollo 11 arrived safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first manned mission to land on the Moon.

http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/imagery/apollo/as11/a11facts.htm

2013 – Google announced the Chromecast, a $35 HDMI stick, powered by USB, that streamed video from the Internet and other devices to a TV.

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/24/google-announces-chromecast-a-dongle-to-stream-online-videos-to-your-tv/

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1903 – Ford sold its first car to Dr. Ernst Pfenning of Chicago. The two-cylinder Model A was assembled at Mack Avenue Plant in Detroit.

https://corporate.ford.com/history.html

1985 – Commodore introduced the Amiga personal computer at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York’s Lincoln Center. Amiga cost $1,295 and shipped with a base configuration of 256K of RAM.
http://technologizer.com/2010/07/23/amiga/

1996 – The first commercial HDTV signal was broadcast in North Carolina by WRAL channel 32 operating at 100 kilowatts with an antenna 1,750 feet above the ground. 200 members of the press watched the broadcast at WRAL.

http://www.wral.com/wral-tv/story/1069461/

2016 – Russian Fyodor Konyukhov set a new record flying around the world in a balloon from Northan, Australia in 11 days and 6 hours. He broke Steve Fossett’s record by 2 days.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-36873594

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1933 – Wiley Post returned to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes after leaving, becoming the fastest person to circumnavigate the Earth by air and the first to do it solo.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/wiley-post-flies-solo-around-the-world

1962 – The first Mariner space probe to Venus had to be destroyed shortly after lift-off because of “improper operation of the Atlas airborne beacon equipment.” The error was caused by a missing overbar in the program that must have disappeared during hand transcription.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0A16F63C59137B93C1AB178CD85F468685F9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overbar

1997 – Apple announced OS 8 for Macintosh computers. It added easier Internet integration and a 3D look to the OS.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1997_articles/sep97/applesep97.html

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1975 – Xerox announced its withdrawal from computer mainframe manufacturing. The company did indicate it would continue activities in other computer-related businesses like computer disk drives, serial printers, and apparently giving away secrets to companies like Apple and Microsoft.
http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/profess/SDSigma7.htm

2002 – WorldCom filed for the largest Chapter 11 bankruptcy in US history. It was the number two long-distance phone company, at a time when that still meant something. It would end up changing its name back to MCI, and its remains exists as Verizon’s business division.

http://money.cnn.com/2002/07/19/news/worldcom_bankruptcy/

2011 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility, Runway 15, ending the US space shuttle missions.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts135/launch/sts-135_mission-overview.html

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1960 – In a first for missiles, a Polaris A1 test vehicle was successfully launched from the USS George Washington submarine off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida.

http://www.public.navy.mil/subfor/underseawarfaremagazine/Issues/Archives/issue_55/StratDeter.html

1969 – In a first for humans, Neil Armstrong and Edwin A. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. successfully landed the Lunar Module “Eagle” on the surface of the Moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission and became the first humans to ever set foot on Earth’s satellite.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo11.html

1976 – In a first for robots, the Viking 1 lander successfully set down on on Mars in the Chryse Planitia and performed its mission.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/viking.html

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1961 – Trans World Airlines began offering regular in-flight movies on scheduled flights. The first film shown, only in the first class cabin, mind you, was “By Love Possessed,” starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

https://travelersunited.org/today/81-years-since-the-first-inflight-movie-was-shown/

1983 – Michael W. Vannier and his co-workers J. Marsh and J. Warren published the first three-dimensional reconstruction of single computed tomography (CT) slices of the human head.
http://radiology.rsna.org/content/150/1/179.full.pdf

2004 – Apple announced the fourth-generation iPod with 12-hour battery life and the ability to shuffle songs. HP announced they would sell an HP branded version of this model of the iPod.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/07/19Apple-Introduces-the-New-iPod.html

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1968 – Robert Noyce, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore incorporated Moore and Noyce electronics, swiftly renamed at Noyce’s daughter’s suggestion to Integrated Electronics Corporation, or Intel for short.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1031210/secret-intel-revealed http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/General/15yrs.pdf

1992 – Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at CERN took a picture of the singing group ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’ who sang mostly about physics. Tim Berners-Lee would later use that picture as a test, making it the first photo uploaded to the World Wide Web.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9391110/How-the-first-photo-was-posted-on-the-Web-20-years-ago.html

2001 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first update to OS X.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/07/18Apple-Previews-Next-Version-of-Mac-OS-X.html

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1899 – Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company.

http://www.nec.com/en/global/about/history.html
http://www.nec.com/en/global/about/history.html http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/664589/NEC-Corporation

1995 – The US Air Force announced the Global Positioning System had met requirements for Full Operational Capability. The navigation system was strictly the province of the US Department of Defense operated by the 2nd Space Operation Squadron of the 50th Space Wing at Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado.

http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/gps/foc.txt

1997 – DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.
http://scripting.com/davenet/stories/DNSOutage.html

2002 – Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and dropped the prices.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/07/17Apple-Unveils-New-iPods.html

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1945 – The United States detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age.

http://www.osti.gov/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/trinity.htm

1951 – VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/July/16/

1969 – Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-11/apollo-11.html

1995 – Amazon.com opened for business selling books online. Shipments were packed into boxes from a desk made out of a spare door in a two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington.

http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2004089,00.html

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1928 – The Polish Cipher Bureau picked up enciphered radio signals from the German Reicswehr for the first time. The messages were encoded with Germany’s ENIGMA machine. Cracking the EMIGMA during World War II brought together some of the finest minds in computer science at Bletchley Park in England.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hfWTDr_bvMwC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=july+15+1928+enigma&source=bl&ots=9M41qBR6P2&sig=uvtGXuu4q3DeZol6pbJs3rfzq28&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GYjMUYSBIOWciQKOv4GoDg&ved=0CFwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=july%2015%201928%20enigma&f=false

1983 – Nintendo released the Family Computer or Famicom, along with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye cartridges. It would later be released in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1437208/Nintendo-console

2003 – AOL Time Warner disbanded the Netscape browser development team. In conjunction, Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation giving the project its first independent legal existence.

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3434

2006 – After a few months being used internally at Odeo, the Twttr service launched for public use. They later added some vowels and spun Twitter out as its own company.

http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/

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