1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the Moon.

1989 – The first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. They ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000.

1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

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1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting the standard for personal computer design.

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1825 – William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol xliii, p.38).

1908 – John Bardeen was born. He grew up to win the Nobel Prize twice, once for inventing the transistor, and once for figuring out superconductivity.

1995 – Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the programming language Java and the accompanying Web browser HotJava at the SunWorld ’95 convention.

2002 – Netflix began selling its stock publicly on the NASDAQ. It rose from it’s initial price, unusual for the time when tech company stocks were generally in poor shape.

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1973 – Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center wrote a memo on an IBM selectric typewriter, outlining how to connect personal computers to a shared printer. Metcalfe says “If Ethernet was invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day, this was it.”

1980 – Namco released an arcade game called Puck-Man. When it was released in the US in October the name was altered to Pac-Man.

1990 – Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It featured big improvements in interface and multitasking. It’s Control Panel feature caught the eye of Apple which sued, and lost.

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1937 – North Pole-1 became the first scientific research station to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean. The Soviet Union established it about 20 km from the North Pole. It operated for 9 months, and travelled 2,850 kilometres.

1952 – IBM announced the Model 701, the first computer designed for scientific calculation. The 701 used electrostatic storage tube memory and kept information on magnetic tape. It sold much better than expected with 19 governments and large companies snapping them up.

2010 – The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched a solar-sail spacecraft IKAROS aboard an H-IIA rocket. The vessel would test out the performance of solar sails, and make a Venus flyby later in the year.

2013 – Microsoft announced its newest game console, the Xbox One at a press conference in Redmond, Washington.

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1875 – 17 nations (including the US) signed the ‘Convention du Mètre’ in Paris, France, establishing the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.

1891 – The first public demonstration of a prototype Kinetoscope was given at Edison’s laboratory, for approximately 150 members of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs. The New York Sun reported on the demonstration.

1958 – Robert Baumann obtained a patent for a satellite. (US. No. 2,835,548). The patent stipulated the government could use the technology without having to pay royalties.

1990 – The Hubble Space Telescope sent its first light image back to Earth, taken with the wide field/planetary camera.

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1857 – William Francis Channing of Boston and Moses Gerrish Farmer, of Salem received the first US patent for an “electromagnetic fire alarm telegraph for cities” (No. 17,355).

1961 – Venera 1 became the first manmade object to fly by another planet, passing within 100,000 KM of Venus. The probe did not send back any data having lost contact with Earth a month earlier.

2006 – Apple opened its 20,000-square foot store at 767 Fifth Avenue. It was the second Apple store in New York City but the iconic glass cube made it the most famous.

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1923 – The first patent application for the rotary-dial telephone was submitted in France by Antoine Barnay.

1953 – Jackie Cochran took off from Rogers Dry Lake, California piloting an F-86 Sabre plane and reached averaged speeds of 652.337 miles per hour, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier.

1969 – Apollo 10 launched, completing all the stages of a moon landing mission without landing on the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Stafford descended in the Lunar Module to within 15KM of the lunar surface.

1998 – The United States Department of Justice and twenty US states filed civil actions against Microsoft, alleging the company abused monopoly power regarding operating system and Web browser sales.

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1902 – While going through objects recovered by divers near Antikythera off the coast of Greece, archaeologist Valerois Stais discovered a strange device with gear-wheels inside. The Antikythera mechanism has been puzzling investigators for more than a hundred years.

1943 – The US Army and the University of Pennsylvania signed a contract to develop ENIAC. It was planned to use vacuum tubes and calculate ballistic firing tables.

1954 – The first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site of the first CERN Laboratory building in Geneva.

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1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc audio recording and reproduction in a lecture he gave to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was printed in the institute’s Journal (vol. 125, no. 60).

1939 – The National Broadcasting Company televised the first sporting event, the second game of a doubleheader baseball game between Columbia and Princeton. About 400 TV sets were capable of receiving the broadcast. Princeton won 2-1 in the 10th.

1946 – At the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, now IEEE) in San Francisco, Jack Mullin demonstrated the world’s first professional-quality tape recorded in the US.

1960 – While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman used an artificial ruby to create the first laser.

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