1642 – Sir Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe in England and would go on to describe universal gravitation and the three laws of motion as well as star in Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. It was December 25th at the time now as the calendar had not yet been reformed.

1958 – Sputnik I the first manmade object to orbit the earth, fell back into the atmosphere and disintegrated, after 92 days in space.

2004 – One half of NASA’s Mars Rover team, Spirit, landed on Mars to analyze the planet’s rocks, looking for evidence of water. Its partner rover Opportunity was 21 days behind. Spirit is no longer active, but Opportunity keeps on chugging along.

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1957 – Hamilton Electric held a press conference to announce the World’s First Electronic Watch. The Hamilton Electric 500 never needed winding, just batteries.

1977 – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak incorporated Apple Computer Company. Ron Wayne famously backed out, selling his shares for $800. Ouch.

1999 – The US Mars Polar Lander was launched. It would spend most of the year wending its way towards Mars before it lost communication with Earth in December, presumably after crashing.

2009 – “Satoshi Nakamoto” created a virtual currency called Bitcoin posting an announcement and 31,000 lines of code on the Internet.

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1959 – Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the Moon, was launched by the USSR.

1979 – Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston incorporated Software Arts for the purpose of developing VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet program.

2004 – NASA’s Stardust spacecraft successfully flew past Comet Wild 2, collecting samples it brought back to Earth two years later.

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1939 – In a garage in Palo Alto, California, William Hewlett and David Packard founded Hewlett-Packard a little company that made audio oscillators– and later TouchPads.

1983 – A new Internet and Transmission Control Protocol (Yep called IP/TCP by some at the time, weird I know) went into effect on the ARPANet, replacing the Network Control Protocol. The result was a new ARPA Internet combining ARPA hosts of the time.

1985 – The Nordic Research Network NORDUnet registered the first domain name NORDU.NET.

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1923 – The chimes of Big Ben were broadcast on radio for the first time by the BBC, beginning a new year’s tradition.

1938 – Cops in Indianapolis put Indiana University professor Rolla Harger’s drunkometer to its first practical New Year’s Eve test as a breath analyzer. Suspected drunks blew into a balloon and the air was mixed with a chemical solution that turned darker the more alcohol was present. The more portable Breathalyzer replaced the drunkometer in 1958.

2001 – Microsoft provided its last day of support for Windows 95 making it officially “obsolete” according to the Microsoft Lifecycle policy, after only six years.

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1873 – A number of gentlemen in New York City founded the American Metrological Society, feeling that a change to the Metric System was needed by civilized nations. 100 years later they’re defunct and gallons, miles, and Fahrenheit rule the US.

1913 – Dr William David Coolidge received his patent for improvements in tungsten and methods for making filaments in incandescent lights. It made light bulbs last a lot longer. Too bad that in 1928, GE got a court to declare the patent was not an invention.

1924 – Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced that he had found stars in the spiral nebula Andromeda, and using Leavitt’s formula measured them as 860,000 light years away proving Andromeda was a separate galaxy. He would go on to find a dozen more galaxies.

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1949 – TV station KC2XAK of Bridgeport, Connecticut became the first ultra high frequency (UHF) television station to operate a daily schedule.

1952 – The first hearing aid using a junction transistor went on sale, the model 1010 was manufactured by the Sonotone Corporation in Elmsford, New York, US.

1959 – Physicist Richard Feynman gave a talk called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom“, in which he suggested it should be possible to make nanoscale machines that can arrange atoms the way we want.

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1886 – Josephine Garis Cochrane of Shelbyville, Illinois received the first US patent for a commercially successful dishwasher. Dishes fit in compartments in a wheel that turned inside a copper boiler. Her company eventually became KitchenAid.

1895 – The first commercial presentation of the famous Lumière Cinématographe took place at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris. Invited payees got to see ten films.

1969 – In Helsinki, Finland Nils and Anna Torvalds gave birth to their son Linus. He would start out dabbling on his grandfather’s Commodore Vic-20 and end up developing the open source Linux operating system.

2005 – The European Space Agency and the Galileo Joint launched GIOVE-A the first test-bed satellite for the Galileo geo-location system.

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1571 – In Well der Stadt, Wurttemberg of the Holy Roman Empire, Johannes Kepler was born. His theories like the laws of planetary motion came in handy for Isaac Newton.

1968 – Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first manned orbit of the Moon.

2007 – Warner Music Group became the third major music label to begin selling DRM-free MP3s through Amazon.

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1791 – At 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England, (we think), Betsy and Benjamin welcomed their son Charles Babbage into the world. He would grow up to make a difference– engine.

1933 – Edwin Armstrong received a patent for his method of eliminating static in a radio broadcast using frequency modulation. He would license out the technology but many companies would embrace FM radio without his permission and he spent much of his later life battling in court.

1982 – Time’s January 3rd issue arrived on newsstands with the computer on the cover as Machine of the Year. It was the first non-human to gain the honor since the Man of the Year concept started in 1927 with Charles Lindbergh.

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