The Great Geek Manual

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

- The Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Martin Luther King, Jr., December 11, 1964.

Read the speech in its entirety at Nobelprize.org.

1901
Guglielmo Marconi attempts to transmit a Morse Code signal via radio telegraph across the Atlantic Ocean, from Poldhu in Cornwall, England to Percy Wright Page in Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland. The attempt fails, but the following night, December 12th, he will succeed.

1911
Marie Curie receives a Nobel prize in Chemistry for isolating Radium by electrolyzing molten radium chloride, becoming the first person to be awarded a second Nobel prize.

1946
Frederic Calland (F.C.) Williams patents a way to “memorize” or store digital data on the cathode ray screen of specially designed television sets. The Williams Tube memory is another approach experimented with by early computer engineers, which made use of a cathode ray tube (CRT), the type commonly used for oscilloscope, radar, and television view screens, to store binary data.

1964
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivers a lecture at the University of Oslo the day after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. He argues that progress in science and technology is not equaled by “moral progress”; instead, mankind suffers from a “moral and spiritual lag.”

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.
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1684
De motu corporum in gyrum (Latin: “On the motion of bodies in an orbit”), written by Isaac Newton and derived from Kepler’s laws, is read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.

1799
A second legal definition of the metre is made by the French National Assembly to be 3 feet and 11.296 lines of the toise of Paris, 0.144 of a line shorter than the 1795 definition. This new definition also doesn’t rely on the length of a meridian as part of the definition. The metric system is made compulsory by law in France.

1889
George Eastman received a patent for the first flexible celluloid film, which he developed in cooperation with chemist Henry M. Reichenbach. Soon after being granted the patent, Eastman will introduce roll film, which will vault photography into the mainstream.

1899
George Safford Parker is issued a US patent for the first fountain pen he developed.

1901
The first Nobel Prizes are awarded in the fields of chemistry, literature, medicine, peace, and physics. The prizes are awarded by the King of Sweden in Stockholm, Sweden, in accordance with the will of inventor Alfred Nobel.
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1793
American lexicographer Noah Webster establishes New York City’s first daily newspaper, The Minerva.

1805
Comet 3D/1805 V1 also known as Comet Biela, passes within 0.0366 astronomical units (AU) of Earth.

1879
A patent for the first automatic telephone switching system is issued to M.D. Connolly of Philadelphia, T.A. Connolly of Washington, D.C., and T. J. McTighe of Pittsburgh. (US No. 222,458)

1908
George Albert Smith demonstrates the Kinemacolor motion picture process for the first time to the Royal Society of Arts in London, England. Kinemacolor is a two-color additive color process for photographing and projecting a black-and-white film behind alternating red and green filters.

1940
The Longines Watch Company signs the first FM radio advertising contract, with experimental station W2XOR in New York City. The advertisements will run for twenty-six weeks, promoting the Longines time signals.
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1903
The Boston-based National Bell Telephone Company is dissolved by court decree.

1929
The first commercial ship-to-shore mobile telephone service is launched.

1931
Lloyd Espenschied and Herman A. Affel receive the first US patent for coaxial cable. (US No. 1,835,031) The patent, describes the invention as a “concentric conducting system,” is assigned to the American Telegraph and Telephone Co. (AT&T) of New York City.

1943
Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer, is delivered to Bletchley Park, Britain’s secret cryptanalysis headquarters during World War II. It was designed by engineer Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, north London with input from mathematician Max Newman. It incorporates 1,500 thermionic valves (vacuum tubes), and is capable of optically reading a paper tape and applying a functions to each character, at a rate of five thousand characters a second.

1947
J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly incorporate the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to design and build computers for commercial and military applications following a dispute with the administration of the University of Pennsylvania over ENIAC patent rights.
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The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere,
heavy, melancholy, standing still.

- Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys, 1934.

1877
At the offices of the Scientific American magazine, Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates his improved phonograph, using a cylinder wrapped with tinfoil instead of wax-coated paper. Just the day previous, he had made the first recording using the device to demonstrate it to John Kruesi, the machinist who built it from Edison’s sketches.

1909
Leo Baekeland of Yonkers, New York, receives the first US patents for a thermosetting artificial plastic. (US No. 942,699) The patent for “an improvement in methods of making insoluble condensation products of phenol-formaldehyde” covers the creation of what Baekeland dubbed Bakelite. Bakelite is the beginning of the plastics industry. It is a nonflammable material cheaper and more versatile than other known plastics. It will be used in a wide variety of application, from inexpensive jewelry to sophisticated electronics.

1930
W1XAV in Boston, Massachusetts broadcasts video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers. The broadcast features the first television commercial in the United States, an advertisement for I.J. Fox Furriers, the radio show’s sponsor.

1938
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper begins a two-year experiment to deliver an abbreviated version of the paper by UHF radio to fifteen households equipped with special receivers.

1945
Universal Pictures releases the horror film House of Dracula, directed by Erle C. Kenton and starring Lon Chaney Jr., John Carradine, Martha O’Driscoll, and Lionel Atwill, to US theaters. It is a sequel to House of Frankenstein and features Universal’s three most popular monsters: Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and The Wolf Man. IMDB listing
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