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.
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dtx/november_8th_1870.php
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.
http://inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/gramophone.htm
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.
http://www.bl.uk/learning/cult/bodies/xray/roentgen.html
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen-bio.html
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.