Dec. 12: Inventor Guglielmo Marconi amazes a London assemblage in 1896 with a demonstration of wireless communication across a room. Five years later to the date, Marconi sends the first signal across an ocean.

Marconi was the son of an Italian country gentleman and Irish whiskey heiress Anne Jameson. He took an early interest in physics, especially electricity. His neighbor in Bologna, physics professor Augusto Righi, encouraged Marconi to study the work of Heinrich Hertz.

In the attic of his villa, Marconi replicated Hertz’s experiments on “Hertzian waves,” detecting sparks in one circuit ...

The Mobile MIM app for the iPad and iPhone. It took the FDA two years to clear this software, and it's one of only a handful of apps that have gone through this process. (Photo: MIM Software)

Mark Cain got his big break on June 9, 2008. The chief technology officer at a little-known medical software company, MIM Software, Cain was invited onstage at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference to promote his company’s iPhone app, a way for doctors to view incredibly detailed scans of their patients.

It was a cool demo of what the iPhone’s great graphics and touchscreen interface could really do. With ...