According to Russian folklore, people born on this day of the year are believed to become Werewolves.
1818
The classic Christmas carol, “Silent Night” is composed by Franz Joseph Gruber and Josef Mohr and performed for the first time the very next day.
1877
Thomas Alva Edison applies for a patent for Phonographs which use tin foil cylinders to write and playback music. (US Patent No. 200,521)
1893
Henry Ford completes the construction of his first usable gas motor, and he and his wife test the small one-cylinder engine in their kitchen. At the time, Ford was chief steam engineer at the main Detroit Edison Company plant with responsibility for maintaining electric service in the city. Because he was on call with no regular hours, he could experiment to his heart’s content. His wages barely paid his living expenses, but his wife was very supportive. A later two cylinder version of the engine powers Ford’s first complete automobile when it takes its inaugural drive on June 4, 1896.
1906
Reginald A. Fessenden transmits the world’s first (public) radio broadcast from Brant Rock Station, Massachusetts. He had been working since 1898 on being able to transmit audio, rather than just Morse code, since 1898. The transmitter’s 2kW 100kHz high-frequency alternator (US Patent No. 1,008,577) was built by Ernst F. W. Alexanderson. The world’s first radio broadcast includes a religious service which includes a violin solo of Gounod’s “O Holy Night” and a scripture reading from the Gospel of Luke. Three days earlier, Fessenden demonstrated his transmitter to representatives of several organizations, including American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T). Fessenden and his financiers had hoped that AT&T would buy the rights to the patents covering the new system; however, while AT&T believed that the system was “admirably adapted to the transmission of news, music, etc.”, the company felt that the system was not yet refined enough for commercial telephone service.
1953
The NBC television network airs the first network-sponsored television program, Dragnet. The sponsor of the program is Fatima cigarettes.
1968
The crew of the Apollo 8 broadcast a live program from orbit around the Moon in a program which will famously become known as the Christmas Eve Broadcast, and it is one of the most watched programs in history. The broadcast proves to be one of the most emotional moments in the history of space flight as American astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William Anders read verses from the Book of Genesis and call for “Peace on Earth” before a global audience.
1979
The European Space Agency (ESA) launches the first Ariane rocket.
1984
Tom Jennings announces in FidoNews that the first intercontinental FidoNet message was sent from Jakarta, Indonesia, to St. Louis, United States. FidoNets had already previously been sent internationally, appearing in Canada nearly immediately after the network’s founding.
1995
CompuServe and Unisys announce that they expect companies developing software that creates or displays images in the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) to license the technology for a modest fee. Software developers react to the announcement with something on the order of hysteria. Many developers threaten to stop using the format altogether. The League for Programming Freedom was particularly vehement in their protest, launching a “Burn All GIFs” campaign. The announcement leads to the later development of the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format which will be released on October 1, 1996.
1997
The first commercial spy satellite, built by Earthwatch of Colorado, United States, is launched from Russia. The company believes that will be able to sell images for anywhere from US$300 to US$725.
Shareholders of Hayes Microcomputer Products approve the merger with Access Beyond, a manufacturer of rack-mount modems and terminal servers for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The merged resulting company will be called Hayes Communications The merger is the company’s method of taking the company public. However, the new company’s stock value will plummet from US$12 to just pennies in October of the following year, and in 1999 the company’s assets will be liquidated.
1998
The website of the MP3 Site is hacked by “HcV”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
2000
Exigent International, a US government contractor, acknowledges that hackers have breeched a restricted federal computer system at the United States Naval Research Laboratory and stolen the source code for OS/COMET, the company’s proprietary satellite command and control software, which allows ground-control personnel to communicate with satellites and rockets. The US Air Force has plans to use the OS/COMET software to control the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System from its Colorado Springs Monitor Station, which is part of the Air Force Space Command. Visit the official website of OS/COMET.
2002
Version 1.6.8 of the Ruby programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.
2003
The Sven Co-op Team releases version 3.0 of the multiplayer mod Sven Co-op for the first-person shooter (FPS) Half-Life for Windows. The mod is a cooperative game in which players must work together to kill enemies and solve puzzles as a team. Visit the game’s official website.
2004
The Huygens probe begins a twenty-two day descent towards Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, where it will land January 14, 2005. It was launched as part of the Cassini spacecraft in 1997, and together, the two space probes entered Saturn’s orbit in June 2004. Visit the probe’s official website.
2005
The first stable version of the Fox Linux operating system, version 1.0, is released in Lite and PRO editions. FoX Linux is a free Italian Linux distribution based on the Fedora Core optimized for the i686 architecture. Visit the system’s official website.
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