1884 – Geographers and astronomers adopted Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, making it the International standard for zero degrees longitude. Today the Greenwich observatory shoots a laser northwards at night to indicate the meridian. It is not a dangerous laser.
1983 – Bob Barnett, president of Ameritech Mobile communications, called Alexander Graham Bell’s nephew from Chicago’s Soldier Field using a Motorola DynaTAC handset. It marked the launch of the first cellular telephone network in the US.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10064633-94.html
1985 – The first observation of a proton-antiproton collision was made by the Collider Detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/milestones/interactive-timeline.html
2000 – Tristan Louis suggested sound and video tags be added to the 0.92 spec for RSS feeds. This led to enclosures which allowed media files to be delivered through RSS and paved the way for podcasting.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/syndication/conversations/topics/698
2016 – The PlayStation VR headset began shipping.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/12/13255384/playstation-vr-launch-availability-where-how-to-buy
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.