1807
Pall Mall in London becomes the first street in the world to be lit by gaslight.
1878
The first commercial telephone exchange in the world is installed in New Haven, Connecticut to serve twenty-one subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. For the first six weeks, the exchange won’t be operated at night. The first experimental message sent over the system is “Ahoy, ahoy.” The first operator is George W. Coy. A Bell franchise had been awarded for New Haven and Middlesex Counties to Coy on November 3, 1877, paid for by incorporating the system into a company with two financial partners. Coy improvised the first crude switchboard, building it from carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire. The concept of interconnecting phone wires had been tried before by three other men, but none of them had operated commercially. Click here to view the original patent application for the telephone exchange.
1930
Austrian-Hungarian physicist Dr. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld is issued a patent in Canada for the first solid-state amplifying transistor.
1952
The Bank of America and SRI sign a contract for the development, construction, and testing of a pilot model Electronic Recording Machine – Accounting (ERMA) to provide service to the bank’s twelve branches at a cost of US$850,000 over four years, with an additional US$25,000 for subcontracts. However, engineers will later estimate that the final total of the project was closer to US$10 million.
The EDVAC, one of the earliest electronic computers, runs its first production program.
1958
Construction begins on the first privately owned thorium-uranium atomic reactor in Buchanan, New York. The Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point 1 nuclear generating station is designed to utilize Uranium-235 supplemented with Thorium-232. Built at a cost of one hundred million dollars on the former site of an amusement park, the power plant will produce 275,000kW of power for New York City. However, it will be decommissioned on October 31, 1974 due to a lack of an emergency cooling system for the reactor core.
The Lego company patented their design of Lego bricks, still compatible with bricks produced today.
1960
The first photograph transmitted by radio waves bounced off the Moon is transmitted between Hawaii and Washington, D.C. by the US Navy, using an eighty-four foot diameter parabolic antenna. The image transmitted is of the aircraft carrier Hancock with sailors on the deck spelling the words “Moon Relay.” The system operates in the ultra-high frequency range at approximately 400MHz, so as to avoid interference from geomagnetic storms or ionospheric disturbances.
1978
Apple Computer moves from an office suite at 20863 Steves Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, California into an office building built at 10260 Bandley Drive, dubbed “Bandley One.”
1983
According to Twin Galaxies, David Plummer, age 14, scores a record-setting 623,720 points playing Atari’s Space Duel for an hour and fifty-five minutes at Midtown Amusements in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
1984
Ottumwa, Iowa official holds “Tim McVey Day,” in honor of McVey’s record setting one billion point, one quarter game. It is the first day held to honor a video gamer. Read the official declaration at Twin Galaxies.
1986
The Space Shuttle Challenger explodes seventy-three seconds after its lift-off from the Kennedy Space Center, approximately nine miles up, killing all seven of the astronauts on board, including mission commander Francis R. Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, mission specialist Ronald E. McNair, mission specialist Ellison S. Onizuka, mission specialist Judith A. Resnik, payload specialist Gregory B. Jarvis, payload specialist Christa McAuliffe, and Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first teacher in space, as part of the Teacher In Space Program (TISP). (STS-51-L) The failure will later be blamed on a Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster which leaked due to seal thathad become fragile in the previous night’s low temperatures. The Space Shuttle Challenger previously flew nine successful missions. To read more about the disaster, visit Aerospaceweb.
1988
Atari Games enters into an agreement with Nintendo to become a licensed producer of game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).
1991
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Wounded” first airs. (No. 412) In it, the Enterprise is dispatched on a mission to intercept a rouge Federation ship that has gone rogue, jeopardizing a peace treaty with the Cardassians. Memory Alpha entry
1997
Ian Goldberg, a Berkeley graduate student, takes part in the RSA Data Security challenge and cracks the 40-bit code by linking together 250 idle workstations to test one hundred billion possible “keys” an hour. In just three and a half hours, Goldberg decoded the message, which read, “This is why you should use a longer key.”
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concludes an eight-month undercover investigation which resulted in a series of raids on homes and businesses across the country. “Operation Cyber Strike” focused on individuals and groups who had passed illegal copies of computer and video game software by any one of a number of means, primarily bulletin board systems (BBS).
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