The Great Geek Manual

The only way of finding the limits of the possible
is by going beyond them into the impossible.

- The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur Clarke, 1972.

1609
Galileo Galilei first observes the Moon through his telescope, and, noting the irregularities of its crescent face, draws watercolor sketches of his discoveries.

1886
George Westinghouse opens the first commercially successful alternating current power plant in the US in Buffalo, New York to compete against Edison’s direct current ventures. Alternating current power can be transmitted much further than direct current power by using transformers at the source for a higher voltage, which decreases the loss of energy.

1899
Aluminium is first used commercially in the US as an electrical transmission conductor for the Hartford Electric Light Company of Hartford, Connecticut.

1901
Frank Hornby is granted a patent for Meccano, an “Improvements in toy or educational devices for children and young people.” Known at first as “Mechanics Made Easy,” the invention will become a global success. In addition to be an early Geek toy, Meccano is the forerunner of other great Geek toys such as Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Legos, the Erector Set, etc. Read more about “Frank Hornby, the Boy Who Made $1,000,000 With A Toy“.

1924
The first photograph facsimile is transmitted by radio across the Atlantic Ocean as a public demonstration were received in New York, where they will published next day in the New York Herald Tribune. The photos include pictures of British government officials, the Oxford team winning in a relay race in Cambridge, a steamship aground on the banks of the Thames, and the proverb, “one picture is worth a thousand words” written out.

1936
The first coaxial cable is installed between New York and Philadelphia for multi-channel telephone tests. The coaxial cable is demonstrated by Frank B. Jewett, the president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, with an inaugural call to the FCC in Washington, D.C.
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1877
Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates the hand-cranked phonograph that records sound onto tinfoil cylinders for the first time.

1951
The first US underground atom bomb test, designated “Uncle,” is detonated. The low-yield 1.2 kiloton bomb is detonated seventeen feet beneath the surface of Frenchman Flat, in Nevada as part of Operation Buster-Jangle. It leaves an eighteen hundred foot diameter crater one hundred feet deep.

1961
The first US satellite carrying an animal is launched by Mercury-Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral. The passenger, a five-year-old chimpanzee named Enos, orbits the Earth twice over the course of three hours and twenty minutes. During the mission, Enos carries out the lever-pulling performance and psychological tests that he had been conditioned for over the past sixteen months. Enos performs the tasks with a high degree of accuracy, receiving shocks for the minimal number of incorrect answers. Even when the controls malfunction and Enos begins receiving consecutive shocks for correct answers, the frustrated chimpanzee continues to the proper sequence through the end of the flight.

1965
Canadian Space Agency launches the satellite Alouette 2.
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Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be – or to be indistinguishable from – self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

Art

• Mario and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meet, with tragic results.

Film

• Could Twilight Bring About a New Buffy The Vampire Slayer Movie? Only if there’s a god.
• Lenard Nemoy makes a cameo appearance in the New Trek Trailer.
• Sony Pictures has released an awesome animated poster for Terminator Salvation.

Internet

• Fantasy Magazine warns those of you who aren’t teenage girls about Ten Things You Should Know About Twilight.
• io9 points out the monster in the new Star Trek trailer looks very similar to the Cloverfield monster. Is this a sign Abrams, the director of both, is running low on material or that he’s developing the playful habit of inter-linking his works.
• ListVerse runs down the Top Ten Star Wars Spoofs.
• Star Wars: A New Heap Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star is a tour of visual elements of the original Star Wars trilogy.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Bury the Dead” by Ann Leckie at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “Portrait in Ivory” by Michael Moorcock and more at StarShipSofa.
• Free Fiction: Read the romantic fantasy novella “Glad Yule” by Pati Nagle at QuasarDragon.
• Interview: BookSpotCentral interviews Hal Duncan, author of Escape from Hell!
• Interview: The Omnivoracious blog to read Jeff VanderMeer’s interview with Charlaine Harris, best known as author of the “Southern Vampire” book series
• The Crotchety Old Fan counts down the The Top Ten Collectible SF Magazines.
• io9 rounds up a list of the Ten of the Kinkiest Science Fiction Books You’ll Ever Read.
• To mark the Thanksgiving holiday, Cinematical compiled a list of Terrific Turkeys, some of the worst films release in the new millenium.

Television

• Slice of Sci-Fi shares a few theories regarding Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Personally, I don’t think that there is going to be so much depth to this story that fans need to start theorizing on underlying motivations.

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

- The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur Clarke, 1972.

1868
Thomas Alva Edison of Boston, Massachusetts, applies for his first patent. The patent is for an “electrographic vote recorder,” which will enable a legislator to register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to the right or left.

1923
Radio amateur Léon Deloy (call sign 8 AB) in Nice, France, connects on a 109 meter wavelength with F.H. Schnell (call sign 1 MO) in Hartford, Connecticut, USA in the trans-Atlantic radio transmission.

1948
The Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant camera, first goes on sale, at a Boston department store. The camera, invented by Dr. Edwin Land, would produce a sepia-colored photograph in approximately one minute. Price: US$89.75

1964
NASA launches the Mariner 4 probe toward Mars from Cape Kennedy. On July 14, 1965, it will become the first satellite to transmit close-up photographs of the planet.
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1779
The College of Pennsylvania becomes the University of Pennsylvania and the first legally recognized university in America.

1789
Thanksgiving is first celebrated in the United States after Congress requested that President George Washington proclaim a “…day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity to peaceably establish a form of government for their safety and happiness…” After several subsequent US Presidents declared a national Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln finally made it an annual event with his 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation. The official date of the holiday was changed from the fifth Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday in November by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939.

1834
Thomas Davenport invents the first commercially successful electric motor, which he used with great ingenuity to power a number of established inventions. He would receive a US patent February 25, 1837.

1895
Alfred Nobel signed his last will, which established the Nobel Prize.

1963
The Centaur II becomes the first flight of space vehicle fueled by a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen when it is launched at 19:03 from Cape Canaveral.
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