1895 – The US Patent office granted George B. Selden the US patent for his road engine, often considered the first car. He made good money licensing the patent, until Henry Ford crushed him in court. Hence the reason none of us drive Seldens.

1994 – Ken McCarthy of the Internet Gazette along with Marc Andreessen of the brand new Netscape (still called Mosaic Communications Corp) and Mark Graham held the first conference to focus on the commercial potential of the World Wide Web.

2007 – China’s first lunar satellite, the Chang’e 1 went into orbit around the Moon. The spacecraft operated until March 2009.

2007 – The Open Handset Alliance introduced a little something called the Android operating system for mobile phones. Few people expected it to seriously challenge the dominance of Blackberry and Palm.

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1879 – James Jacob Ritty patented the first cash register as “Ritty’s Incorruptible Cashier”. He was motivated to invent it by the no-good thieving employees at his saloon.

1939 – Packard Motor Co. exhibited the first air-conditioned automobile at the 40th Automobile Show in Chicago, Illinois.

1952 – Fresh off census duty, the UNIVAC computer projected General Dwight David Eisenhower would defeat Adlai Stevenson for President of the US. All the polls showed Stevenson had a clear advantage so CBS delayed using the projection fearing inaccuracy.

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1957 – The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 carrying the first animal ever to enter orbit, a dog named Laika. It would go on to inspire the saddest Jonathan Coulton song ever, “Space Doggity” and the band Laika and the Cosmonauts.

1973 – NASA launched Mariner 10 towards Mercury. It would become the first space probe to reach the planet.

1992 – Tim Berners-Lee posted a page describing the World Wide Web. It’s the oldest page still served on the Web.

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1815 – George Boole was born in Lincolnshire, England AND he became a mathematician who laid down the foundations for Boolean logic XOR Boolean Algebra. Search engine power users everywhere thank him.

1920 – KDKA in Pittsburgh started broadcasting as the first commercial radio station in the US. The first broadcast? Election results. Actual results, not projections.

1936 – BBC Television Service went on the air with the world’s first regular “high definition” service. Back then high definition meant 200 lines not 1080. The channel became BBC One in 1964.

1988 – The Morris Worm began replicating across 6,000 computers causing slow systems and proving difficult to eradicate. 24-year-old Robert Tappan Morris Jr. at MIT had created the worm in order to see how many computers were hooked up to the Internet.

2015 – Hewlett-Packard split into two companies. HPE handled enterprise services and traded under the stock ticker HPE. HP Inc. kept the PC and printer business and the stock ticker HP.

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1870 – The United States Weather Bureau (now known as the National Weather Service) made its first actual weather report. 24 observers sent reports by telegram to Washington DC.

1963 – The largest radio telescope ever constructed, the Arecibo observatory opened in Arecibo Puerto Rico. It would be used for many major discoveries including the first direct imaging of an asteroid.

1968 – The MPAA and 2 other industry organizations introduced the voluntary ratings system. G meant good for all ages, M meant mature audiences, R was restricted and X… well you know what X means. It would serve as a model for future voluntary systems like that used by the video game industry.

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2000 – The Soyuz TM-31 launched, carrying Expedition 1 the first resident crew to the International Space Station, including Yuri Gidzenko, Sergei Krikalev and William Shepherd. The TM-31 was used as the crew’s lifeboat while on the station.

2000 – Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and Napster agreed to develop a service for swapping and sharing music. The service never materialized.

2007 – Nintendo of Japan finally ended support for the repair of FamiCom game consoles, the Japanese name for NES, citing a shortage of parts. End of an 8-bit era.

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1938 – Orson Welles pwned the US radio audience with his famous broadcast of War of the Worlds. It was correctly introduced as theater but those not paying attention were fooled into thinking the play was the real thing.

1987 – NEC started selling the first 16-bit home entertainment system, called the TurboGrafx-16 Entertainment SuperSystem or in Japan, the shorter catchier PC Engine. It was originally more popular in Japan than the FamiCom, which we North Americans call the NES.

2012 – Disney and George Lucas announced that Disney would acquire 100 percent of LucasFilm, including ILM, LucasArts and Skywalker Sound. The company also announced it intended to release Star Wars: Episode 7 in 2015.

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1675 – Gottfreid Leibniz wrote the integral sign in an unpublished manuscript. It’s a sign that would later haunt the nightmares of students and be widely misapplied on blackboards in movies. So happy Integral Day!

1969 – The first ever computer to computer link was established on the ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline sent the characters l and o to Stanford. The connection crashed before he could finish sending ‘login’. The Internet has been crashy right from the start.

1988 – Sega launched the Mega Drive console in Japan. It would be released elsewhere in the world later as the ‘Genesis.’

1998 – The Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off on STS-95 with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space.

2012 – Apple announced Scott Forstall would leave the company in one year, and that retail head John Browett had left the company as well.

2013 – Motorola announced its modular phone project called Project ARA. It would end up becoming Google’s project after Google sold Motorola.

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1793 – Eli Whitney applied to patent his improved cotton gin, capable of cleaning 50 pounds of lint per day, and powering patent metaphors and arguments for centuries to come.

1955 – A pair of proud Seattle parents welcomed their new son into the world, having no idea he would become one of the most loved and hated men of all time. Happy birthday William Henry Gates the third. You know him as Bill.

1998 – President Bill Clinton signed into law the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, making it illegal for you to use computers the way they were designed to be used, if big companies didn’t want you to.

2014 – The W3C published its recommendation of HTML5, the final version of the standard. It included the video and canvas tags among other improvements.

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1904 – The first underground New York City subway line opened. The line ran from City Hall in lower Manhattan through Grand Central, Times Square and ended north in Harlem. Rides cost five cents.

1994 – HotWired launched bringing with it the first large quantity sales of banner ads. AT&T, Zima, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-COLLECT all plunked down for the privilege.

2005 – The European Space Agency launched its first satellite, a micro-satellite called the SSETI Express Satellite, designed and built by European students.

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