1850 – San José was incorporated as one of the first cities in California and was the site of the first state capital. It would lose the capital to Vallejo in 1852 but eventually become the center of Silicon Valley and the de facto capital of the technology world.

1884 – The first successful long-distance telephone conversation took place. Bell and Watson experimented with a line of two twelve gauge hard-drawn copper wires connecting Boston and New York City. The line worked for about ninety minutes before finally falling.

1899 – Guglielmo Marconi made the first wireless transmission from France to England. A message was sent 32 miles from Wimereaux near Boulogne, France, to the South Foreland lighthouse near Dover, England. This became an important alternative to laying undersea cables for telegraphy.

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1973 – Larry Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He would go on to help invent and co-found Google.

1976 – Queen Elizabeth II sent the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology.

1999 – The “Melissa” worm showed up in a file on the alt.sex usenet group and became the first successful mass-mailing worm. The worm’s creator, David L. Smith, apparently named the worm after a lap dancer in Florida.

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1925 – John Logie Baird gave his first public demonstration of his ‘Silhouette Television’ at the Selfridges department store, Oxford Street, London. It was part of the store’s birthday celebration.

1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its first launch.

1995 – Ward Cunningham installed the First Wiki, WikiWikiWeb on a $300 computer someone gave him. He connected it to the Internet, using a 14.4-baud dial-up modem.

2014 – Facebook announced it would purchase Oculus VR, makers of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, for $2 billion.

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1802 – Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane of Camborne Parish in the County of Cornwall, enrolled a patent for a steam engine that could power a full-sized road locomotive. He had previously demonstrated it by driving up a hill in a car he called the “Puffing Devil”.

1896 – A. S. Popov made the first radio transmission in human history. Popov is said to have transmitted the words “Heinrich Hertz” from one building to another on the campus of St. Petersburg University, though the assertion was not published until years later because of the need for military secrecy.

2001 – Apple released its new operating system Mac OS X, code named Cheetah, with a retail price of $130.

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1857 – The first department store elevator for passengers was installed at E.V. Haughwout & Co. in New York City. This was a significant development towards the building of skyscrapers.

1882 – Amalie “Emmy” Noether was born in Erlangen, Germany. Albert Einstein called her a mathematical genius. She broke ground in theories of rings, fields and algebra and developed Noether’s theorem which explained the fundamental connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

1996 – The US space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the third time, and for the first time dropped off a US astronaut. Shannon Lucid began her record-breaking stay on the space station.

2001 – The final commands to light the engines of the Progress supply ship were sent to the Russian Mir space station, which then broke up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

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1895 – The Lumiere brothers showed their first film to an audience. It was a romantic comedy about a crowd of mostly women leaving a building.

1960 – Arthur Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes were granted the first patent for a laser (US. No. 2,929,922) under the title “Masers and Maser Communications System.”

1981 – RCA’s first SelectaVision VideoDisc the SFT100W went on sale. The machine used Capacitance Electronic Discs to fit a couple hours of video programming on a 12-inch vinyl disc that sold for around $15.

1993 – The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips featuring 60 and 66 MHz CPUs.

2016 – Sony began taking orders for its Playstation VR headset. The first pre-orders were for a $499 bundle including the headset as well as Move controllers and a camera.

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1965 – NASA launched Ranger 9, the last in a series of unmanned lunar space probes. Ranger 9 slammed into the Moon sending back high-resolution pictures of the Lunar surface before impact.

1999 – Dr. Bertrand Piccard, a Swiss psychiatrist, and Briton Brian Jones landed their Breitling Orbiter 3 just after 8 AM local time 300 miles southwest of Cairo, Egypt. They became the first people to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon.

2006 – Jack Dorsey sent the first Twitter post which read “just setting up my twttr”. Twttr was the original spelling of the site which was used internally at Odeo.com for the first 4 months.

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1800 – Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, London. We’ve been dealing with battery life ever since.

1886 – The first alternating current power plant in the United States began providing power to Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass.

1916 – The Annalen der Physik received a paper titled ‘Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie’ by Albert Einstein. “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” changed physics and technology dramatically.

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1474 – The Venetian Senate issued a Statute on Industrial Brevets that is widely considered the first patent law. Patents had been issued before, often at the whims of monarchs, but this statute codified the practice and set out a standard 10-year term.

1932 – The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened. It is the world’s largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge with the top of the bridge standing 134 metres above the harbour.

1991 – US patent No. 5,000,000 was issued to microbiologist Lonnie. O. Ingram of the University of Florida for a process of turning garbage into fuel. His method depended on the creation of a new species of bacterium genetically formed from two other bacteria.

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1931 – Jacob Schick began marketing his second electric razor. His first hadn’t caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the more practical design became a hit.

1965 – The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.

1987 – Thousands of physicists crowded a ballroom at the New York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical Society to hear speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname “Woodstock of Physics.”

2015 – Sony launched its Internet TV service called PlayStation Vue in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. For $50 a month subscribers got around 50 channels plus the ability to record shows in the cloud for up to 28 days.

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