1899
John S. Thurman of St. Louis, Missouri patents the motor-driven vacuum cleaner as a “pneumatic carpet renovator.” (US No. 634,042) He offers the services of his gasoline-powered vacuum from a horse-drawn wagon at US$4 per visit in St. Louis, but by 1906, Thurman will begin offering built-in central vacuum systems.
1901
Victor Talking Machine Company is founded by Eldridge R Johnson and Emile Berliner.
1906
In Berlin, the second international conference on wireless telegraphy adopts SOS as the international distress signal to replace the previous CQD call sign.
1922
A photo is sent via facsimile over public telephone lines for the first time. Th image is sent between 1519 Connecticut Ave and the US Navy Radio Staion NOF at Anacostia in Washington D.C.
1942
An A4-rocket (a modified V-2) from is successfully launched from the Test Stand VII in Peenemünde, Germany, becoming the first man-made object to reach space.
1947
At the California Institute of Technology, a two hundred inch diameter telescope lens created for the Mount Palomar Observatory is finally completed after eleven years of grinding and polishing. The lens is the first of its size ever manufactured in the US. It began as twenty tons of glass heated to 2,700º Fahrenheit cast in a ceramic mold on December 2, 1934. The lens will later be mounted in the Hale Telescope, named for the late Dr. George E. Hale.
1950
The US Patent Office issues a patent for the transistor to AT&T Bell Laboratories researchers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. The transistor had begun a revolution in the computer industry that lead to integrated circuits, microprocessors, and semiconductors.
1952
The United Kingdom successfully tests its first atomic bomb, “Hurricane,” four hundred yards off the coast of Monte Bello, Australia, becoming the world’s third nuclear power. In order to test the potential threat of a bomb smuggled in ship, the bomb was detonated inside the hull of the frigate HMS Plym. Despite the explosion beginning in a ship and nine feet below the water line, the explosion created a crater twenty feet deep and a thousand feet across.
1957
Judge Clayton W. Horn rules that the poem Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg does not meet the criteria for obscenity. The ruling comes in a case brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the operator of City Lights Bookstore, the poem’s publisher largely due to the line “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.” The ruling will become one of the most prominent victories against censorship, and the poem will go one to become the most iconic poem of the “Beat Generation.”
1962
Sigma 7 is launched from Cape Canaveral, with astronaut Wally Schirra aboard, on a mission that will orbit the Earth six times over the course of nine-hours.
1963
The X-15 rocket plane achieves a world record speed of Mach 6.7, or about 4,520 mph, piloted by US Air Force pilot Pete Knight. The internal structure of the X-15 is titanium with a skin of Inconel X, a chrome-nickel alloy. It reaches an altitude of 58,552km (192,100 feet).
1982
The science fiction television series Voyagers! premieres on the NBC network with the episode “Pilot.” The series follows the adventures of a society of time travelers called Voyagers who take it upon themselves to ensure that history unfolds as it was meant to with the help of a 12-year old orphan from 1982. The series will run for one season of twenty episodes until July 31, 1983. TV.com entry
1985
The Space Shuttle Atlantis,the fourth operational shuttle, embarks on its maiden flight. (STS-51-J) It’s mission is undertaken on the behalf of the Department of Defense.
1986
The Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) superconducting cyclotron at the Chalk River Laboratories opens. It is the world’s first Tandem Accelerator.
1988
The Turner Network Television (TNT) cable network is launched in US with a starting subscriber base of seventeen million homes, the largest base of any cable channel launch to date. The network’s first program is the 1939 file Gone with the Wind. Visit the official TNT website.
1990
Nintendo sends letter to its licensees, extending to them the opportunity to manufacture their own game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System game console.
1995
Be introduces the BeBox, featuring two 66MHz PowerPC 603, up to 256MB RAM, a SCSI II bus, 16-bit CD-quality sound, three PCI slots, four MIDI ports, four serial ports, and five ISA slots. The hardware of the system will generally fail to achieve any popularity, however the company’s multithreaded, memory-protected, object-oriented, preemptively multitasking operating system will be a success. Price: US$1,600 – US$3,000.
2002
Scott Dudley of Lanius Corporation releases the final version (3.02) of Maximus BBS Software under a GNU Public License.
2004
A new version of Beast, a backdoor trojan horse or RAT (Remote Administration Tool), released. Originally, written in Delphi by “Tataye” in 2002, the popular trojan is capable of infecting all Windows operating systems from 95 through XP.
2006
Defective by Design, an initiative organized by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) launches a campaign against Digital rights management (DRM), declaring October 3rd a “Day Against DRM.” As a part of the campaign protests are organized outside several Apple Stores across the UK and US. Protesters wear hazmat suits to picket and hand out fliers explaining iTune’s DRM.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announces it decision to award the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly to John C. Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and George F. Smoot of the University of California “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation,” which supports the Big Bang Theory and helps explain the origins of stars and galaxies. Read more at the Nobel Prize website.
Version 11.0 of the Slamd64 Linux distribution is released. Slamd64 is the first unofficial port of Slackware to the x86-64 architecture. Visit the official Slamd64 website.
2007
Russia and the United States mark the fiftieth anniversary the launch of Sputnik I, the first satellite, by forming a pact under which Russian scientific instruments will be used on future NASA missions in an attempt to locate water on Mars and the Moon. Specifically, NASA engineers want to use the Russian Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND) during their Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission to the Moon in October 2008 in order to explore the potential for a permanent manned lunar station in the future and aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, an unmanned mission scheduled to land on Mars in 2010 to analyze the planet’s surface. Read more at Reuters.
2008
Miramax Films releases the science fiction thriller Blindness, directed by Fernando Meirelles and starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Danny Glover, to 1,690 US theaters. Produced on a budget of US$25 million, it will gross US$1,950,260 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 58 mins
Universal Pictures releases the biographical film Flash of Genius, directed by Marc Abraham and starring Greg Kinnear and Alan Alda, to 1,098 US theaters. Based on a 1993 New Yorker article, the film tells the true story of the legal struggles of inventor Robert Kearns against the Ford Motor Company, which incorporated an intermittent windshield wiper into its cars rather than license the device from Kearns. Produced on a budget of US$4,626,050, it will gross US$2,251,075 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 59 mins
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