Today in History – December 31, 1968 – The Russian TU-144 is the first commercial supersonic airliner flown. Building on their supersonic military jets, the Russians developed the first supersonic commercial airliner called the Tupolev 144. Decades later the U.K. developed the Concorde supersonic passenger jet. Athough successful as a collaborative technical effort, it did [...]

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Today in History – December 30, 1924 – Edwin Powell Hubble announces his discovery of a galaxy outside the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble was one of the leading astronomers of the twentieth century. His discovery that not only one, but countless galaxies, exist beyond our own Milky Way galaxy forever changed our understanding of the [...]

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Today in History – December 29, 1891 – Thomas Alva Edison patents “transmission of signals electrically” by radio. Close to a year later, on August 9, 1892, he received a patent for a two-way radio. Also on this date in 1952, the first transistor hearing aid went on sale by the Sonotone Corporation.  This hearing [...]

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Today in History – December 28, 1886 – Josephine Cochrane is issued patent for a commercially successful dishwasher. Josephine Cochrane received the patent for the first commercially successful dishwasher. A mechanical device, turning a crank would provide a continuous flow of either soap suds or hot water to a rack of dishes. She founded a [...]

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Today in History – December 27, 1571 – Birth of Johannes Kepler.  When Kepler made his calculations from measurements taken by Tycho Brahe and himself, at the turn of the seventeenth century, they had to create many of the instruments that they used.  The types of tedious observations and measurements taken by Brahe and Kepler [...]

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