The Great Geek Manual

1847
New York and Boston are linked by telegraph wires.

1885
Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter apply for a patent which will be granted on May 4, 1886 for a phonograph-type apparatus called the graphophone. (US No. 341,214) The device improves on Thomas Edison’s principles by specifying cardboard discs coated with wax in which a vibrating style cuts a narrow spiral groove. Bell and Tainter decide to use cylinders rather than discs while still employing hill-and-dale inscribing rather than the lateral-cut.

1898
The first solo circumnavigation of the globe is completed by Joshua Slocum from Briar Island, Nova Scotia aboard his sloop-rigged fishing boat that he named Spray.
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Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?

- “Epigrams in Programming,” SIGPLAN, Association for Computing Machinery, September 1982

What is the use of a house
if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
— If you cannot tolerate the planet that it is on?

- Henry David Thoreau
From a letter to Harrison Blake May 20, 1860 later published in “Familiar Letters,” 1865

1870
Christmas is declared a federal holiday in the United States.

1894
Karl Benz of Germany is granted the first US patent for a gasoline-driven automobile.

1948
William Shockley files the original patent for his grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.

1970
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announces its plans to regulating the cable television industry. Most notable among the regulation is the ban on the three major broadcasting networks from entering the cable television market and a prohibition on the joint ownership of cable and broadcast television operations in the same community.
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• 25 Reasons Why Cable Technicians Hate You. ‘Nough said.
• Bind your own pages together to make your own journal or scrapbook with this tutorial on How to Make a Hardcover Book from Simon Fraser University.
• College@Home’s listing of 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of provides a number of useful alternatives to the all-encompassing Google search.
• Lifehacker already has a Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3 available.
• The movie hasn’t hit theaters yet, but there’s already an adorable Lego version of Wall-E.
• My Two Dollars explains Thirty-five ways to watch television without cable or satellite.
• Techcult explains The top twenty-five best high-tech pranks.
• This 3,800-Piece Death Star Diorama is even fun to look at!

Art

• Once in while, you just find a bit of fan art that tickles your funny bone. Spidey vs. Hulk is one of those pieces.

Comics

• Cracked presents their choices for The 7 Most Hilariously Mismatched Superhero Battles, but I don’t think that the Flash, who is frequently stymied by Guerrilla Grod, outmatches anyone.
• Terry Pratchett’s Discworld has been released as a two-part graphic novel, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic.

Film

• Damn. When MTV give notice that DC has lost out to Marvel in the movie game, you know the situation is bad.
• The first poster for “The Day the Earth Stood Still” has hit the net.

Internet

• The Anime Laws of Physics are numerous but open to discussion.
• Gizmodo has posted a pointless but fascinating video of the helmets of Imperial Troopers being painted at the LEGO factory.
• Interview: Guys Lit Wire has an interview with Rob Heinsoo, lead designer of the D&D Fourth Edition.
• J.J. Abrams’ upcoming science fiction series, Fringe, which is scheduled to air this fall on Fox, has been leaked and you can now find it on Pirate Bay and practically any other torrent site. Is this becoming a trend? I seem to remember the same thing happening last summer.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Audible is offering up The Disappeared by Kristin Kathryn Rusch for free.
• Free Fiction: The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski is now available as a free e-book.
• The List Universe offers an opinion on who qualifies as the Top 10 Most Influential Science Fiction Writers.

Television

• i09 explains the argument behind the belief that the planet that the planet Galactica discovered in the mid-season finale wasn’t Earth.

1638
A lunar eclipse becomes the first astronomical event recorded in the United States.

1783
Antonie Lavoisier announces to the French Academy of Sciences that water is the product of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen. However, this discovery was made earlier by the English chemist Henry Cavendish.

1876
The first public demonstration of Bell’s speaking telephone is given at the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1925
Warner Bros. forms the Vitaphone Company in partnership with Western Electric to develop and exploit sound-on-disc technology for cinemas. Development work takes place at the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn, New York, under an eleven person team from Bell Telephone Labs under British-born Stanley S A Watkins.
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Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking.

- Richard Stallman, “On Hacking”

I thought what I’d do was, I’d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn’t have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody. If anybody wanted to tell me something, they’d have to write it on a piece of paper and shove it over to me. They’d get bored as hell doing that after a while, and then I’d be through with having conversations for the rest of my life.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Chapter 25

1881
Sir William Huggins makes the first photographic spectrum of a comet (1881 III) and discovers Cyanogen (CN) emission at violet wavelengths.

1930
The first radar detection of an aircraft takes place in Anacostia, DC.

1938
Scores of eyewitnesses observe the explosive roar of a huge fireball streaking over Butler County, Pennsylvania. A cow is struck and injured by a falling stone, which turns out to be an olivine-hypersthene chondrite (amphoterite). Two pieces of the stone meteorite, named the Chicora for the region in which it fell, are found. The two halves have masses of 242g and 61g and are discovered several miles short of the calculated point of impact of the main mass, which isn’t found. The original total mass is an estimated 519 tons before it explodes about twelve miles up.

1947
The first known sighting of an unidentified flying object, or UFO, is recorded when pilot Kenneth Arnold reports noticing nine luminous disks he describes as “saucers” as he flies near Mount Rainier, Washington.
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Anime

• Death Note, Vol. 5 (Jun 24)
• Kujibiki Unbalance, Vol. 2: Love Rikkyouin
• Maburaho: Complete Collection
• Shattered Angels, Vol. 2: Kyoshiro and the Eternal Sky

Books

• The House of Many Ways by Diana Wynne Jones
  A young adult fantasy novel set in the world of Howl’s Moving Castle.
  HarperCollins/Greenwillow. (ISBN: 978-0-06-147795-9) Hardcover. Length: 404pp
• The Summer Palace by Lawrence Watt-Evans
  The third volume in the Annal of the Chosen fanasy trilogy.
  Tor. (ISBN: 978-0-7653-1028-6) Hardcover. Length: 316pp

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1775
The first American-made book, entitled Impenetrable Secret, is advertised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The book is printed and sold by Story and Humphreys. Their advertisement in the Pennsylvania Mercury announces that the book is “printed with types, paper and ink manufactured in this Province.”

1868
Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule of Milwaukee, Wisconsin are granted a patent for the “Type-Writer.” (US No. 79,265) The device is only equipped with capital letters and typists can’t tell if they were making errors because the paper can’t be seen as one is typing; however, it is the first practical device of its kind. It is described as an improvement upon their earlier type-writing machine, which they had filed an application for on October 11, 1867. The new features are “a better way of working the type-bars, of holding paper on the carriage, of holding, applying, and moving the inking-ribbon, a self-adjusting platen, and a rest or cushion for the type-bars to follow.” The device also features the QWERTY keyboard which will be used for typing for decades to follow.

1928
In Germany, a rocket-powered automobile built by Opel crashed during testing after reaching a speed of 156mph.
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It’s a truism in technological development that no silver lining comes without its cloud.

- Bruce Sterling on the “National Research and Education Network”
A speech before the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and Finance, April 29, 1993