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