In 1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper ““The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

In 1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

In 1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

In 1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting th standard for personal computer design.

In 1825, William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol xliii, p.38).

In 1908 – John Bardeen was born. He grew up to become to win the Nobel Prize twice, once for inventing the transistor, and once for figuring out superconductivity.

In 1994 – Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the programming language Java and the accompanying Web browser HotJava at the SunWorld ’95 convention.