1790 – August Ferdinand Mobius was born in Schulpforta, Saxony. The mathematician, astronomer and physicist is most well remembered for the discovery of the Mobius strip, a 2-dimensional object with only one side when embedded in 3D space. Poor Johann Benedict Listing also discovered it at the same time but Listing strip just doesn’t have the same ring.
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Mobius.html
1947 – Walter Brattain dumped a semiconductor experiment into a thermos of water and unexpectedly saw a large amplification of electricity. Working with John Bardeen they developed it into a new amplifier that would eventually be called the transistor.
http://www.pbs.org/transistor/background1/events/miraclemo.html
1970 – The Soviet Union landed Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium on the Moon. It was the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world.
http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/538-Lunokhod-1-Revisited.html
1971 – The Kenbak-1 desktop computer was advertised for sale in ComputerWorld for $750 It had first been advertised in Scientific American in September. The 8-bit computer had 256 bytes of memory and was dubbed the world’s first commercially available personal computer by a panel of experts involving Steve Wozniak.
https://books.google.com/books?id=wCl2yLDv2bAC&pg=PT42&dq=Kenbak-1&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bEPqTsXUG4GwiQKO1sC-BA&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Kenbak-1&f=false
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34639183
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.