The Great Geek Manual

It came to me then, as if I was making it up; but I may have heard it long ago. Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,” he used to say. “You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to. Do you realize that this is the very path that goes through Mirkwood, and that if you let it, it might take you to the Lonely Mountain or even further and to worse places?”

- Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

1837
Charles Goodyear obtains his first rubber-processing patent. (US No. 240) India rubber would become sticky in the summer heat. Goodyear resolved this problem by devising a process to treat the rubber with metallic solutions such as copper nitrate and strong acid for a few minutes, before washing it with water. His patent explains the method and the use of a water paste of quicklime to bleach the rubber for various purposes. He obtains additional patents as he continued to revise his process using sulphur and oil of turpentine.

1867
Joseph Lister of Glasgow, Scotland becomes the first surgeon to perform surgery under antiseptic conditions.

1922
The idea of a radio network, conceived of as a public service, is proposed in a letter from David Sarnoff to E.W. Rice Jr., Honorary Chairman of the Board ofGeneral Electric Company. Rather than a public service, the first network will evolve into the National Broadcasting Company (NBC).
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Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science.

- Henri Poincaré, French mathematician

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It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, “Good Omens“

1657
The first practical pendulum clock is patented by Christiaan Huygens. Huygens’ works towards building an accurate time-keeping device to assist in his astronomical observations.

1884
The first commercially successful gravity-powered American roller coaster goes into operation at Coney Island, New York. Park guests can ride a train with seats facing sideways that rolls over undulating tracks on top of a wooden structure six hundred feet long. The train begins its circuit at a height of 50 feet at one end and is pulled downhill by gravity until its momentum dies. Passengers then disembark and the train is pushed by attendants over a switch to a higher level. The passengers then return to their seats to ride back to the original starting point.. Admission on the Thompson Switchback Railway is five cents, and it will gross an average of US$600 a day.

1888
After allegedly working for five days and nights without rest, work, Thomas Alva Edison and his associates finish a prototype of an improved Phonograph. The new Phonograph features an electric motor and uses wax cylinders like the graphophone invented by Chichester Bell and Charles S. Tainter. The completion of the device is commemorated by one of the most famous photographs ever associated with spirit of innovation.
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763 BC
Assyrians record a solar eclipse that will be used to fix the chronology of Mesopotamian history.

1667
The first human blood transfusion is administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys, the personal physician to King Louis XIV. The patient is a fifteen year old boy, bled too many times to count by other doctors in attempts to treat a fever, who is given nine ounces of lamb’s blood. The boy will recover from the fever, but other attempts at transfusion will fail and the practice will soon be outlawed by the Parisian municipal council.

1752
Benjamin Franklin confirms his theory that lightning is electrical when he and his son conduct an experiment in which they fly a kite with a key attached to it during a thunderstorm. He will publish a article on the experiment in the October 19th 1752 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette.
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To be nobody-but-myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make me everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.

- E.E. Cummings, Poet

Today is the seventieth anniversary of the 1938 release of Action Comics Number 1, which was the comic that introduced Superman, the Man of Steel.
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1648
Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts colony.

1822
Charles Babbage announces his invention of a small mechanical difference engine able to carry out complex operations at a rate of about twelve calculations a minute mechanically in a paper entitled, “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables,” which he reads to the Royal Astronomical Society in London, England. In 1823, he will begin constructing an industrial strength calculator, which he will be abandon in 1834 due to a series technical and bureaucratic problems.

1834
The first US patent for a practical underwater diving suit is issued to Leonard Norcross of Dixfield, Maine. Calling it a “Diving Armor,” he designed an airtight leather outfit with a brass helmet connected via a rubber hose to an air bellows pump on a boat. To reduce buoyancy, the feet of the suit are weighted with lead shot. In May 1834, one month earlier, he tested the diving suit in the Webb River. Norcross will later name his son Submarinus in honor of the achievement. The first truly effective diving suit with a pump is attributed to Englishman Augustus Siebe, in 1829.
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Source: The Onion

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