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Baron Shilling von Canstatt successfully demonstrates the first telegraph in history in his room.
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Alexander Bell makes the first long distance phone call between Cambridge and Boston Massachusetts, USA.
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Reginald Fessenden used an Alexanderson alternator and rotary spark-gap transmitter to make the first radio audio broadcast, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.
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John Logie Baird demonstrates the world's first television system to transmit live, moving images in tone graduations, to 40 members of the Royal Institution. The 30-line images are scanned mechanically by a disk with a spiral of lenses at 12.5 images per second.
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John Logie Baird demonstrates a color television system achieved by using a scanning disc with spirals of red, green and blue filters at the transmitting and receiving ends
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The world's first legal TV commercial, for Bulova watches, occurs at 2:29 PM over WNBT (now WNBC) New York before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The 10-second spot displayed a picture of a clock superimposed on a map of the United States, accompanied by the voice-over "America runs on Bulova time."
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The first email is created and sent by Ray Thomlinson, a computer engineer working under ARPAnet.
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The first SMS ever sent was by Brit Neil Papworth who texted ‘Happy Christmas’ to Vodafone director Richard Jarvis at a staff Christmas party. Papworth sent the Short Messaging Service from his work computer to an Orbitel 901 handset.
