Today in Tech History with Tom Merritt

In 1971 – 10 years after the SEC suggested automation could solve the problem of fragmentation in over-the-counter stocks, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations or NASDAQ index began trading, the world’s first electronic stock market. In 1996 – The U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of…Read more →

In 1817 – The first public gas streetlight in the US was lit in Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets. In 1915 – The first completely successful tests of the wireless telephone from a moving train were conducted on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Spoken messages were clearly heard 26…Read more →

In 1957 – MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The Cryotron paved the way for the integrated circuit which used semiconductivity. In 1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call integrated circuits.…Read more →

In 1850 – The first U.S. patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, N.Y. In 1944 – At Bletchley Park in Great Britain, the Colossus Mk I attacked its first Lorenz-encrypted message. Enigma had been cracked but Lorenz was a tougher cipher used in communications…Read more →

In 1890 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity. In 1998 – Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pie-ing rich…Read more →

In 1879 – Joseph Wilson Swan demonstrated the first practically usable incandescent filament electric light bulb to 700 people at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1966 – The Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft landing and…Read more →

In 1046 – English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” Their analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age. In 1931 – Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St.…Read more →

In 1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada. In 1972 – Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the famous HP-35 for $395. It was the first handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and…Read more →

In 1958 – The United States successfully entered the space age with the successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt circling the Earth. In 1961 – The U.S. launched a four-year-old male chimpanzee named Ham on a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital…Read more →

In 1925 – Doug Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon. He is most famous for his work on the first computer Mouse, but also worked on many other innovations involving graphical user interfaces, hypertext and networks. In 1975 – Hungarian Interior Design instructor Erno Rubik filed for a patent on his twisty toy cubes. The…Read more →

In 1886 – Karl Benz submitted a patent for his Benz Patent Motorwagen, a three-wheeler vehicle with a one-cylinder four-stroke gasoline engine. The world’s first patent for a practical internal combustion engine powered automobile. Previous automobiles had been steam-powered. In 1895 – Charles Proteus Steinmetz received a patent for a “system of distribution by alternating…Read more →

In 1878 – The first commercial telephone exchange in the U.S. was installed at New Haven, Connecticut, and served 21 subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. Only two conversations could be handled simultaneously and six connections had to be made for each call. In 1960 – The Communications Moon Relay System was…Read more →

In 1948 – IBM dedicated its “SSEC” in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays. In 1967 – The first US astronauts died in the line of duty. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed on…Read more →

In 1932 – The US Patent Office received a patent application for the cyclotron by Ernest Orlando Lawrence as a “Method and Apparatus for the Acceleration of Ions.” In 1949 – The Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory saw first light under the direction of Edwin Hubble, becoming the largest aperture optical telescope. Hubble photographed Hubble’s…Read more →

In 1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company in agreement with the Anglo-Indian Telephone Company Ltd. The company was licensed to sell telephones in Greece, Turkey, South Africa, India, Japan, China and several other Asian countries. In 1915 – AT&T inaugurated transcontinental telephone service with a call made between…Read more →