This week in 1857 – Elisha Otis installed his first elevator at 488 Broadway in New York City.
1931 – Schick, Inc., the razor company, displayed the first electric shaver — in Stamford, CT.
1981 – RCA put its Selectavision laser disc players on the market. Soon, the product was called “the Edsel of the entertainment field.” – After the Ford Edsel automobile that failed miserably. The units cost $500 and the videodisks about $15 each. The units failed to catch the consumer’s fancy.
1985 – IBM announced that it was planning to stop making the PCjr consumer-oriented computer. The machine had been expected to dominate the home 
computer market but didn’t quite live up to those expectations. In the 16 months that the PCjr was on the market, only about 240,000 units were sold.
2001 – The Russian Mir space station was disposed of, breaking up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.
And this week in 2006 – The social media site Twitter is founded. Now, after only 12 years, the popular social media platform has over 330 million active users