1935 – Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer went on sale in Richmond, Virginia in cans, developed by the American Can Company. Cans protected beer better than translucent bottles.

1950 – Percy LeBaron Spencer received a patent for a “Method of Treating Foodstuffs” which we would recognize as the microwave oven. Spencer was working on an active radar set and accidentally melted a candy bar in his pocket.

1984 – The original Macintosh was introduced becoming the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command line interface.

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1896 – Wilhelm Roentgen spoke to the Würzburg Physical Medical Society where he demonstrated X-rays by photographing the hand of session chair Dr. Albert von Kolliker, a famous anatomist.

1960 – With a crew of two, the bathyscaphe Trieste, descended 10,911 meters in the Pacific Ocean into Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench near Guam, the deepest known point in the oceans.

2003 – Earth lost communication with space probe Pioneer 10 which was 12 billion-kilometers from Earth.

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1939 – John Dunning’s Cyclotron split the uranium atom for the first time at Columbia University in New York City. And the Manhattan Project was on.

1968 – Apollo 5 lifted off carrying the first Lunar module into space.

1984 – Apple aired the famous “1984” commercial for the Apple Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott.

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1957 – NBC taped and broadcast President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second inauguration address, further popularizing the taping of video.

1981 – The first DeLorean DMC-12 sports car rolled off the production line in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland. This one made no use of gigawatts in any way.

2004 – The Mars Rover Spirit abruptly stopped transmitting. Apparently too many files had been written to the flash memory and it went into fault mode.

2015 – Microsoft announced more details about Windows 10, the Microsoft Surface Hub, an 84-inch 4K whiteboard TV, and Windows Holographic. Using HoloStudio and HoloLens, Windows Holographic promised to bring holograms into everyday use.

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

1934 – Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., the photographic and electronics company known today as Fujifilm, was founded in Tokyo, Japan.

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

2009 – The inauguration of US President Barack Obama became the most widely-streamed Presidential inauguration to that time. According to Akamai’s Net Usage Index, web traffic peaked at 5.4 million requests per minute — and two terabits per second.

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1883 -The first electric lighting system using overhead wires went into service in Roselle, New Jersey.

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

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.

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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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

1949 – The first synchrotron installed at the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, reached its design energy of 300 MeV.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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’.

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

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

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

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