The Great Geek Manual

1839
In New York City, John Draper makes a daguerreotype of the Moon, becoming the first person in the U.S. to photograph a celestial body, the Moon.

1926
In a letter published in the journal Nature, American chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis coins the term “photon.” In the letter, he writes that it “would seem inappropriate to speak of one of these hypothetical entities as a particle of light, a corpuscle of light, a light quantum, or a light quant, if we are to assume that it spends only a minute fraction of its existence as a carrier of radiant energy, while the rest of the time it remains as an important structural element within the atom. It would also cause confusion to call it merely a quantum, for later it will be necessary to distinguish between the number of these entities present in an atom and the so-called quantum number. I therefore [propose for this] which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.”

1958
The world’s first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment), is launched aboard an Atlas B missile, and it will shortly thereafter record a Christmas message to the world from President Eisenhower to be transmitted the next day.

1965
Gemini VII splashes down in the western Atlantic Ocean with command pilot Frank Borman and pilot Jim Lovell Jr. on board. The mission was launched on December 4 for the purpose of physiological testing and spacecraft performance evaluations.
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Comics

• Dark Roasted Blend has compiled a directory of Steampunk Art & Gear photo galleries.

Comics

• Mental Floss shares the true stories behind 5 Comic Superheroes Who Made a Real-World Difference.

Film

• Cinematical chooses The Best Sci-Fi Remakes.
• Cracked.com has posted the script that would have been used If ‘Twilight’ Was 10 Times Shorter And 100 Times More Honest.
• Film School Rejects runs down a list of 10 Sci-Fi Films That Should Never Be Remade, and 5 That Probably Should Be.
• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is one of the most hilariously bad films ever made. It also happens to now be in the public domain. [Found via TorrentFreak]

Internet

• Topless Robot lists The 10 Most Awesome Sci-Fi Themed Music Videos Ever.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “How to Deal With Your Daughter and Her Crabs” by Brian Salyards at Clonepod.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow at The Internet Archive.
• Free Fiction: Read the classic pulp short “Gold” by Isaac Asimov
• Free Fiction: Read “Demons Without, Demon Within” by Scott M. Sandridge by Mindflights.
• AMC’s Future of Classic blog counts down the top Evil Corporate Overlords, starting with Dick Jones, the head of Omni Consumer Products.

Video Games

• Jason Hill of Australia’s Brisbane Time lists The Most Influential Games Ever, beginning with the arcade classic, Pong.
• Wired runs down The 10 Most Disappointing Games of 2008, though they might have expanded it out to twenty for all the bomb that hit the shelves this year.

Writing

• Lou Anders talks about the Author-Editor Relationship at The Swivet.

All week I’ve been looking for a Christmas t-shirt. Checked the local Wal-Mart. Checked the mall. Checked the local Wal-mart clones. Got sick as hell of fighting through the holiday mobs. Then I stumbled across this t-shirt. And know what? It perfectly embodies the spirit of the season that I’m experiencing.

Why the hell would I ever wade through the deranged mobs of clawing, freenzied holiday shoppers again when I could just buy my shirts online? Get your heart-warming red-and-green t-shirt of holiday horror in sizes ranging from small to xx-large from Split Reason. Price: US$18.95

Source: Split Reason

1880
The Edison Electric Illuminating Company is incorporated to provide electric light to New York City with one million dollars in capital. Within fourteen months, the service will have 508 subscribers and power 12,732 bulbs. The company will become the prototype for all other local illuminating companies established in the eighties.

1903
The first powered flight is made by the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright on the sands of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina using a gasoline engine. The flight, made in the in the Wright Flyer lasts twelve seconds and spans a distance of 120 feet (or 36.5 meters.)

1953
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approves the revised RCA all-electronic colour television system and discontinues the CBS sequential color system. Color broadcasts will begin thirty days later. Radio Corporation of America (RCA) transmits its new NBC Chimes logo at 5:32pm to celebrate.

1958
Universal Pictures releases the science fiction film Monster on the Campus, directed by Jack Arnold and starring Arthur Franz and Joanna Cook Moore, to US theaters. IMDB listing
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Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations.
What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

- A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, 1988.

While I don’t normally list births in “This Day in Geek History,” today’s births are so amazingly coincidental that they deserve a mention. December 16th is the birthday of renowned science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke (1917) and Philip K. Dick (1928). Peter Dickinson (1927) and Randall Garrett (1927) also share this birthday.

1897
The first US submarine with an internal combustion engine, the Argonaut, is demonstrated on the Patapsco River. During the demonstration, twenty-two members of the press made descents up to four hours long. It was built in 1897 at the Columbian Iron Works and Dry Dock Company of Baltimore, Maryland for its inventor, Simon Lake. The submarine is thirty-six feet (11m) long and nine feet (2.7m) in diameter with wheels to travel on the sea floor. Lake was issued patents for the submarine on April 7, 1896 (US No. 557,835) and on April 20, 1897 (US No. 581,213).

1907
The first radio broadcast of a singer in the US, featuring Eugenia H. Farrar, is transmitted by Lee De Forest from the Brooklyn Naval Yard in Brooklyn, New York to mark the departure of Admiral Robley Dunglison Evans (”Fighting Bob Evans”), commanded the US Navy’s “Great White Fleet,” on its world-wide cruise.

1915
Albert Einstein publishes the definitive form of the General Theory of Relativity.

1925
The silent film Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is released in the US. It is one of the earliest werewolf films. In it, a grievously injured logger must accept a blood transfusion from a Wolf, and after his recovery, he and his fellow lumberjacks believe that he is transforming into a werewolf. IMDB profile Running time: 1 hr 8 mins
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Fantasy, if it’s really convincing, can’t be-come dated, for the simple reason that it represents a flight into a dimension that lies beyond the reach of time.

- Walt Disney in an interview in the April 1960 issue of Reader’s Digest.