In 1857 – The first department store elevator for passengers was installed at E.V. Haughwout & Co. in New York City. This was a significant development towards the building of skyscrapers.

In 1996 – The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the third time, and for the first time dropped off a U.S. astronaut. Shannon Lucid began her record-breaking stay on the space station.

In 2001 – The final commands to light the engines of the Progress supply ship were sent to the Russian Mir space station, which then broke up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

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In 1895 – The Lumiere brothers showed their first film to an audience. It was a romantic comedy about a crowd of mostly women leaving a building.

In 1960 – Arthur Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes were granted the first patent for a laser (U.S. No. 2,929,922) under the title “Masers and Maser Communications System.”

In 1981 – RCA first SelectaVision VideoDisc the SFT100W went on sale. The machine used Capacitance Electronic Discs to fit a couple hours of video programming on a 12-inch vinyl disc that sold for around $15.

In 1993 – The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips featuring 60 and 66 MHz CPUs.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1965 – NASA launched Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes. Ranger 9 slammed into the Moon sending back high-resolution pictures of the Lunar surface before impact.

In 1999 – Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Briton Brian Jones landed their Breitling Orbiter 3 just after 8 AM local time 300 miles southwest of Cairo, Egypt. They became the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon.

In 2006 – Jack Dorsey sent the first Twitter post which read “just setting up my twttr”. Twttr was the original spelling of the site which was used internally at Odeo.com for the first 4 months.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.