In 1571 – In Well der Stadt, Wurttemberg of the Holy Roman Empire, Johannes Kepler was born. His theories like the laws of planetary motion came in handy for Isaac Newton.
In 1968 – Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first manned orbit of the Moon.
In 2007 – Warner Music Group became the third major music label to begin selling DRM-free MP3s through Amazon.
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In 1791 – At 44 Crosby Row, Walworth Road, London, England, (we think), Betsy and Benjamin welcomed their son Charles Babbage into the world. He would grow up to make a difference– engine.
In 1933 – Edwin Armstrong received a patent for his method of eliminating static in a radio broadcast using frequency modulation. He would license out the technology but many companies would embrace FM radio without his permission and he spent much of his later life battling in court.
In 1982 – Time’s January 3rd issue arrived on newsstands with the computer on the cover as Machine of the Year. It was the first non-human to gain the honor since the Man of the Year concept started in 1927 with Charles Lindbergh.
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In 1741- In Uppsala, Sweden, Anders Celsius first used a Delisle thermometer he had marked up with 100 gradations between boiling and freezing. It was the first use of the centigrade scale of temperature.
In 1959 – Sony announced its first television set, the transistor-based TV-301. It would go on sale in Japan the following May.
In 1990 – Tim Berners-Lee with help from CERN computer scientist Robert Cailliau and others— set up the first successful communication between a Web browser and server via the Internet.
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In 1955 – As NORAD tells the story, a misprinted phone number caused Continental Air Defense Command, CONAD to start getting calls from children for Santa Claus, so Director of Operations Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check the radar for signs of St. Nick. NORAD was created in 1958 and they’ve kept up the tracking tradition ever since.
In 1955 – The Associated Press syndicated a story that Santa Claus was being guaranteed safe passage into the United States. The story reported that, “CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S.”
In 1968 – The crew of Apollo 8 delivered a live, televised Christmas Eve broadcast after becoming the first humans to orbit another space body.
In 1999 – The very seasonal HTML 4.01 was published by the World Wide Web Consortium. HTML 4.01 remained the HTML standard for well over a decade.
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In 1947 – John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated their new discovery, transistor, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. William Shockley, who contributed to the invention, missed the presentation.
In 1968 – Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders made the lunar-orbit-insertion maneuver on their way to becoming the first humans to orbit the Moon.
In 1986 – Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in the experimental airplane Voyager, completing the first non-stop, round- the- world flight without refueling.
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In 1666 – Seven mathematicians and seven physicists gathered by Jean-Baptiste Colbert met in the king’s library to found the French Academy of Sciences.
In 1882 – Edward H. Johnson of the Edison Illumination Company strung a single power cord with red white and blue lights on his Christmas tree becoming the first person to use Christmas tree lights.
In 1885 – A patent for a gravity switchback railway was issued to La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, New York. You and I might call it a “roller coaster.”
In 1968 – At 3:01 PM Eastern time, Apollo 8 transmitted the first U.S. live telecast from a manned spacecraft in outer space.
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In 1898 – Building on Henri Becquerel’s discovery of spontaneous radioactivity two years earlier the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie discovered Radium. Marie particularly figured out how to separate it from its radioactive residues.
In 1937 – Walt Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened in Los Angeles. It ran 83 minutes. It was also the first animated film produced in color.
In 1968 – Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew performed the first ever manned Trans Lunar Injection and became the first humans to leave Earth’s gravity. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer to use integrated circuit logic.
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In 1880 – New York’s Broadway from 14th to 26th street was first lighted by electricity and became known as the “Great White Way.”
In 1951 – In Idaho, the Experimental Breed Reactor no. 1 aka EBR-1 became the first power plant to produce electricity using atomic energy. It would take 2 more years to prove it could create more fuel than it consumed.
In 1996 – Apple announced it would acquire NeXT Computer and bring co-founder Steve Jobs back to the company he left in 1985.
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In 1958 – The first known radio broadcast from outer space was transmitted. US President Eisenhower spoke from a pre-recorded message aboard the Project SCORE experimental satellite. Redundancy paid off as the first recorder failed but the backup worked.
In 1972 – Apollo 17, the last manned lunar flight crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt, returned to Earth.
In 1999 – TIME Magazine announced Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon as its person of the year. The magazine cited online shopping and dot-com mania among the reasons.
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In 1839 – John William Draper took a daguerreotype of the moon, the first lunar photograph.
In 1878 – Joseph Swan demonstrated the electric lamp to the Newcastle Chemical Society in northern England. His bulb would burn for about 40 hours. Edison’s later bulb would burn for closer to 150 hours.
In 1987 – Larry Wall released the Perl scripting language. It would go from being a SysAdmin’s helper to one of the Web’s dominant scripting languages, for good or ill, depending on the coder.
In 1997 – HTML 4.0 was recommended and published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. It offered the strict, transitional and frameset variations, and deprecated many of Netscape’s visual tags in favor of CSS.
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