Marconi equips two ships to send radio reports to New York on the progress of the yachts racing for the America's Cup

Guglielmo Marconi transmits a radio message in Morse code 2100 miles, from Poldhu in Cornwall to St John's in Newfoundland

US inventor Lee De Forest patents the Audion, a sensitive vacuum-tube radio receiver

Lee De Forest broadcasts Enrico Caruso live from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, but with mixed success owing to the poor quality

Telegraph messages lead to the arrest of Dr Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Neve in mid-Atlantic

The US navy begins transmitting by radio a regular time signal, much used by the nation's watchmakers and menders.

Alexander Graham Bell again summons his assistant Thomas Watson (as in 1876), but this time he is in New York and Watson in San Francisco

Radiotelephone messages are transmitted from Arlington in Virginia to the Eiffel Tower in Paris

John Logie Baird gives the world's first demonstration of television to a group assembled in his attic rooms in London

The British Broadcasting Corporation uses Logie Baird's system for its first trial TV broadcasts

The first communications satellite, Early Bird, is launched from Cape Carnaveral

Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras preside over simultaneous ceremonies, in Rome and Istanbul, revoking the mutual excommunications of 1054

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs design and market a personal computer, calling it the Apple

The US system MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) becomes the industry standard for electronic communication in music

At CERN, in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau build ENQUIRE, a first step towards the future World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN in Geneva, publishes the first formal proposal for the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee, using CERN computers, puts online the first website at http://info.cern.ch

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both Ph.D. students at Stanford University, register the domain name google.com

Wikipedia, the 'Free Encyclopedia', is put online by Jimmy Wales as an empty shell which members of the public are invited to fill with content

Google pays $1.65 billion for the website YouTube, launched less than two years previously

Apple's iPhone goes on sale in the USA and 270,000 are sold in the first thirty hours

The website Wikileaks publlishes more than 90,000 classified internal reports about US involvement in Afghanistan since 2004

Wikileaks publishes another batch of US government documents, this time diplomatic cables of which about 100,000 are maked 'secret' or 'confidential'