1 December 1913 The Ford automobile company launches the production system based on the assembly line
1 December 1958 RAI inaugurates wire broadcasting to listen to Italian radio programs via telephone cable; the actual broadcasts will begin on January 4th
3 December 1967 South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard performs first heart transplant at Cape Town's Groote Schuur hospital
6 December 1768 The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, or, A dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled upon a New Plan, is published in Edinburgh, Scotland
11 December 1910 French chemical engineer Georges Claude displays the first neon lamp to the public by installing "tubes" at the Paris Motor Show
12 December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi successfully carries out the first transatlantic transmission of radio signals from Cornwall to Canada
10 December 1963 Italian chemical engineer Giulio Natta, known as the "father" of plastics, receives the Nobel Prize for the discovery of stereospecific polymerization, a process that ushered in a new era in the chemistry of materials
17 December 1903 For the first time, the Wright brothers are able to fly for 12 seconds in the airplane they invented, covering a distance of 36 meters
21 December 1913 The New York World Sunday supplement "Fun" publishes a new game called "word-cross puzzle": it is the first crossword puzzle invented by the British puzzler Arthur Wynne
23 December 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invent the transistor, a semiconductor device widely used in both analog and digital electronics
27 December 1612 Galileo Galilei notes the first known observation of the planet Neptune: the astronomer, however, did not distinguish it from the fixed stars and did not realize that he had observed a hitherto unknown planet
30 December 1953 The first color TV for domestic use is presented: it is a 15” and costs $1.175
31 December 1879 Thomas Edison inaugurates the incandescent lamp lighting developed the previous October in Menlo Park, California