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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

1994 – The Sony PlayStation game console went on sale in Japan.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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1847 – The London and North Western Railway along with the Caledonian Railway adopted London Time on instructions from the General Post Office. Other railways followed suit and this was seen as the establishment of the first time zone.

1913 – Henry Ford added the moving-chassis assembly line to produce Model T’s in his Highland Park, Michigan factory. It was the crowning glory in his attempts to increase efficiency and production.

1977 – Time Warner launched QUBE in Columbus, Ohio, the first two-way interactive cable system. One of its channels called “The Pinwheel” would later be relaunched as Nickelodeon.

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1934 – The steam locomotive Flying Scotsman became the first to officially exceed 100 mph.

1955 – A Colorado Springs youngster misdialed a telephone number set up for inquiries about Santa and accidentally called the Combat Operations Center of the Continental Air Defense Command. COC Commander Col. Harry Shoup told the child “There may be a guy called Santa Claus at the North Pole, but he’s not the one I worry about coming from that direction.”

1999 – British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems merged to form BAE Systems, Europe’s largest defense contractor and the fourth largest aerospace firm in the world. Marconi had been founded by Guglielmo Marconi in 1897.

2006 – Microsoft released Windows Vista for business use. Vista improved on security over Windows XP, but took criticism for other features, and never rivaled Windows XP in adoption.

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1777 – The Spanish founded California’s first civilian settlement called Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe. It would become the future state’s first capital and eventually the heart of Silicon Valley.

1910 – The first US patent for a traffic signal system was issued to Ernest E. Sirrine. It switched an illuminated sign between the words “stop” and “proceed.”

1972 – Nolan Bushnell installed a coin-operated arcade game at Andy Capp’s tavern in Sunnyvale, California. It only played Allan Alcorn’s Pong. Within four months there were 10,000 across the country.

1974 – The January issue of Popular Electronics was published featuring the Altair 8800 microcomputer from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems in Albuquerque, New Mexico on the cover. For $439 you got everything you needed to build a computer in one kit boasting 256 bytes of memory!

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1660 – Twelve men, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Sir Robert Moray met after Wren’s astronomy lecture to discuss the formal constitution of a society of philosophers that would become the Royal Society. It still exists and recently opened its archives on the Web.

1814 – For the first time, an automatic steam-powered press printed The Times in London. German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer built the press. The Times quickly pointed out that they would not layoff workers, but instead increase printing, bringing the paper to a wider audience.

1964 – NASA launched Mariner 4 toward Mars where it would conduct the first successful flyby of the red planet.

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1971 – The Soviet Union’s Mars 2 orbiter released its descent module which probably had too steep an angle of entry, and malfunctioned and crashed. But hey, it was still the first manmade object to reach the surface of Mars.

1998 – The Sega Dreamcast game console launched in Japan.

2001 – Scientists announced they had used the Hubble telescope to detect and analyze the atmosphere on an extrasolar planet for the first time. The planet HD 209458 b, unofficially called Osiris was found to have sodium in its atmosphere.

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1894 – Norbert Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri. He would get his BA in mathematics at age 14 but is most remembered for his theory of regulation and of signal transmission which he called “cybernetics.”

1922 – “Toll of the Sea” debuted. It was the first color movie that didn’t require a special projector, the second technicolor film ever, and the first in wide release.

2003 – The final flight of a Concorde ended when the supersonic jet touched down at Filton, Bristol, England, the airfield where it was built.

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