Hey, tech history fans, the continuing project Scott Johnson and I hatched to put out a Kindle single every month is 2 for 2! Tech History December has the first and last trip around the Moon, the first text message, the first drunk test and more! The best part is the illustrations by Scott.
Get the Kindle Single right here at the Amazon store.
In 1904 – Sir John Ambrose Fleming went “scudding down Gower Street” in London on his way to patenting the “oscillation valve” which we fondly call the Vacuum Tube. His patent was later invalidated by the US supreme court, but that didn’t stop Fleming from being Knighted and receiving a medal of honor from the Institute of Radio Engineers.
In 1965 – The Soviet Union launched the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus. It would become the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet, though it failed to return data.
In 2000 – ICANN announced its decision to include 7 new top-level domains giving birth to the .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro, TLDs.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1926 – The National Broadcasting Company radio network opened with 24 stations. It was a joint creation of RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse. AT&T provided the spark for the network by selling WEAF to RCA.
In 1971 – Intel released the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004 with an advertisement in Electronic News, though the chip may have been delivered earlier in the spring to some customers. It was the first complete CPU on one chip.
In 2001 – Microsoft entered the game console war with the first Xbox going on sale in North America. It pitted Microsoft against Sony’s PS2 just three days before Nintendo’s GameCube went on sale.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1922 – The BBC sent its first daily transmission from station 2LO at Marconi House London. Arthur Burrows, first Director of Programmes, read the first newscast.
In 1971 – The American space probe Mariner 9 began orbiting Mars becoming the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another planet.
In 2007 – The last Direct Current electrical distribution system in the US was shut down by Con Edison in New York.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1851 – The first public message was sent on the submarine telegraph cable under the English Channel between Dover, England and Calais, France.
In 1982 – 15-year-old Scott Safran of Cherry Hill New Jersey set the world record score on Asteroids. His record stood for 27 years, the longest-running high score in videogame history.
1983 – The MIT TX-0, an experimental transistorized computer, was brought back to life for the last time at The Computer Museum in Marlboro, Massachusetts.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1946 – The US Army held a contest between an abacus used by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki from Japan’s postal ministry and an electric calculator operated by Private Thomas Nathan Wood. The abacus won 4 to 1.
In 1970 – The Oregon Highway Divisions made an ill-advised attempt to destroy a dead whale by blowing it up with explosives. The results, documented by local news, eventually became Internet gold as the “exploding whale” video.
In 1990 – Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for a hypertext project. The proposal referred to a “web of information nodes” and implementing “browsers” The project eventually became the World Wide Web.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1675 – Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of good ol y=f(x). That is, if you believe what he wrote in his notebooks.
In 1930 – Albert Einstein, yes that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard received a US patent for a refrigerator that required no electricity, just a heat source. Electrolux bought up the patents.
In 2006 – The Sony PS3 went on sale with a built-in Blu-ray player and hard drive.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1983 – Fred Cohen demonstrated a way to insert code into a Unix command in order to gain control of systems. His academic adviser, Len Adelman (the A in RSA) compared the self-replicating code to a virus. It wasn’t the first code of it’s kind, but it’s the one that inspired the name.
In 1983 – At the plaza hotel in New York, Bill Gates announced Windows. It originally was called Interface Manager until Rowland Hanson convinced Gates to change the name. It would take two years before Microsoft would put it on sale.
In 2001 – The first Apple iPod went on sale. Analysts agreed that the price of $399 was too high, and Apple was too inexperienced in consumer electronics to make it a success.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1967 – NASA launched a Saturn V rocket carrying Apollo 4, a test craft launched from Cape Kennedy. It was the first launch in the Apollo program and the first time using the Launch Control Center at Kennedy Space Center.
In 1979 – The NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet Nuclear Strike. Thankfully raw data from satellites were reviewed along with early warning radar, proving it was a false alarm. A technician had loaded a test tape but failed to switch the system status to “test”. Oops!
In 2004 – The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0. It featured tabbed browsing and a popup blocker.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.
In 1870 – The US Weather Bureau (someday to become the National Weather Service) issued its first weather warning for a storm on the Great Lakes. It was accurate, but there was no high-pitched beep yet.
1887 – German immigrant Emile Berliner patented a successful system of sound recording that used flat disks instead of cylinders. The first versions were made of glass. Talk about your broken records.
In 1895 – German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen, working in his lab in Wurzburg noticed a strange effect while studying vacuum tubes covered in black cardboard. He eventually saw his own skeleton and went on to publish a paper “On a new kind of rays.” The rays would end up being called X-Rays.
Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.