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Space Shuttle Columbia is launched

Shuttle flight STS-93 was the Columbia’s 23rd mission. Main payload was a collection of experiments inside a European Spacelab Long Module. STS-94 was flown by the same crew that flew STS-83, the only time in the history of human spaceflight that two missions with more than one crewmember had the same crew.

Sony introduces the Walkman

The original Walkman cassette player by Sony changed music listening habits by allowing people to listen to their music whilst on the move. This could turn everyday tasks like commuting and running into pleasurable experiences, give commuters a sense of privacy, and add a soundtrack to urban surroundings.

Laurens Hammond, the inventor of the Hammond organ, dies

Laurens Hammond was an American engineer and inventor. His inventions include, most famously, the Hammond organ, the Hammond clock, and the world's first polyphonic musical synthesizer, the Novachord. During his life, he held 110 patents. He was married to Roxana Scoville and had one daughter. He died in Cornwall, Connecticut, aged 78.

The US drops atom bomb on Bikini atoll

The bomb was named Gilda after Rita Hayworth's character in the 1946 film Gilda, and was dropped from the B-29 Superfortress Dave's Dream of the 509th Bombardment Group. It detonated 520 feet (158 m) above the target fleet and caused less than the expected amount of ship damage because it missed its aim point by 2,130 feet (649 m).

'SOS' distress signal becomes the worldwide standard for help

This distress signal was first adopted by the German government radio regulations effective 1905, and became the worldwide standard under the first International Radiotelegraph Convention, which was signed in 1906, and became effective in 1908.

Albert Einstein introduces his theory of relativity

Albert Einstein published the theory of special relativity in 1905, building on many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski, and others did subsequent work.

Evolutionary theory is published for the first time

Many people don’t know that evolution was discovered not only by Charles Darwin but also by Welsh naturalist Alfred Wallace. Wallace had independently developed a theory which was almost identical to Darwin's. The theory was published at the meeting of the Linnaean Society in London. Neither Darwin nor Wallace were present.

Anniversaries of the (in)famous