Judy Novotny

In 1947, Chuck Yeager made the first supersonic flight. Yeager broke the sound barrier while flying his plane named “Glamorous Glennis” in honor of his wife. He achieved a speed of Mach 1.06 (807.2 mph or 1299.06 kph) at 43,000 feet (13.11 km). Learn more

In 1994, Netscape Communications Corporation offered its new Netscape Navigator browser free to users via the Internet. Netscape advertised that “the web is for everyone” and stated one of its goals was to “level the playing field” by providing a consistent web browsing experience across

In 1964, the U.S.S.R. launched the Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry multiple crew members. It was also the first mission to carry either a scientist or a physician into space. In the rush to launch the mission before the NASA Gemini flights, the

In 1979, Visicalc was released. VisiCalc was the first computer spreadsheet program and ran on an Apple II computer.  VisiCalc introduced a new level in application software. Learn more at http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa010199.htm. In 1984, several ‘firsts’ occurred during the Space Shuttle Challenger mission. Marc Garneau became

In 1796, according to tradition, the metric system began to be used. The date,  October 10th (10/10), was chosen because it was symbolic of the base 10 method of measuring with metric. Read about efforts to adopt the metric system in the U.S. at http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/usmetric.html.

In 2009, NASA’s LCROSS and a companion rocket stage impacted the Moon’s Cabeus crater. LCROSS stands for Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite.  The dual impact lifted a plume of material, including grains of mostly pure water ice, that traveled nearly ten miles above the

In 1997, Yahoo! acquired Four11. Four11 was the creator Internet-based communications services such as net-phone software tools and RocketMail, a free Web-based service. Yahoo! Mail is based on RocketMail technology. Learn more at http://investor.yahoo.net/releasedetail.cfm?releaseid=173315.

In 1831, mathematician Richard Dedekind was born. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Richard Dedekind “…was one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth-century, as well as one of the most important contributors to number theory and algebra of all time.” Learn more at

In 1995, 
Be introduced the BeBox. The BeBox featured two 66MHz PowerPC 603, up to 256MB RAM, 16-bit CD-quality sound and four serial ports. Despite advanced features in the BeBox operating system, it was unsuccessful mainly because it was not compatible with anything else in

In 1853, French astronomer and physicist François Jean Dominique Arago died. Arago originally supported the particle theory of light. In 1811, he conducted research along with Augustin-Jean Fresnel that changed his mind. They discovered that two beams of light polarized in perpendicular directions do not