The Great Geek Manual

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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Remember that accumulated knowledge, like accumulated capital, increases at compound interest: but it differs from the accumulation of capital in this; that the increase of knowledge produces a more rapid rate of progress, whilst the accumulation of capital leads to a lower rate of interest. Capital thus checks its own accumulation: knowledge thus accelerates its own advance. Each generation, therefore, to deserve comparison with its predecessor, is bound to add much more largely to the common stock than that which it immediately succeeds.

- The Exposition of 1851: Or Views of the Industry, The Science and the Government of England by Charles Babbage, 1851.

Read the text of The Exposition of 1851 at Google Books.

1631
The transit of Venus occurs as predicted by Johannes Kepler. He correctly predicted that an ascending node transit of Venus would occur in December 1631, but it passed unobserved in part because his prediction wasn’t sufficiently accurate to predict the exact time it would occur and in part because it occurred after sunset for most of Europe.

1768
The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which will eventually become the oldest continuously published English-language encyclopedia, is published under the title, “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A dictionary of arts and sciences, compiled upon a new plan.” The first edition is published in one hundred installments, which were later bound in three volumes. Each installment costs sixpence or eight pence for an edition printed on finer paper and was delivered in weekly installments. It will also be published under the pseudonym “A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland,” a title which refers to the many gentlemen who had purchased subscriptions. The three bound volumes will be sold for twelve pounds sterling apiece. The set runs 2,391 pages and includes 160 copperplate illustrations. However, one set of illustrations, a three page depiction of female pelvises and fetuses in the midwifery article will be torn from every copy by order of King George III.

1877
Thomas Alva Edison records his own recitation of “Mary had a Little Lamb” onto a cylinder wrapped with tin foil using his newly completed prototype hand-cranked phonograph at his Menlo Park Laboratory. For all intents and purposes, it is the first recording of a human voice. The word “Halloo” may have been recorded in July on an earlier, paper model derived from his 1876 telegraph repeater, but if such a recording was made, it was destroyed before this recording was made. John Kruesi built the phonograph December 1 – 6, from a sketch Edison made on November 29 (not on August 12 as Edison mistakenly wrote on another sketch in 1917). When Kruesi heard Edison’s first recording later the same day, he exclaims “Gott in Himmel!” (“God in Heaven”). Edison will be granted a patent for the phonograph on February 19, 1878. (US No. 200,521)
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Douglas “Ask a Ninja” Sarine has declared December 5th Ninja Day! He’s asking people to plan Ninja Day activities with a wiki, and encouraging photo sharing with the unique tag “NinjaDay2007.” So go out and enjoy death-tivities near you!

1776
Phi Beta Kappa, America’s first academic honor society, is founded at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Organized by a group of enterprising undergraduates, members meet regularly to debate, socialize, and write. They institute an oath of secrecy, a code of laws, mottoes in Greek and Latin, and an elaborate initiation ritual. When the Revolutionary War will later forces William and Mary to close in 1780, newly-formed chapters at Harvard and Yale direct Phi Beta Kappa’s growth and development.

1879
The first US patent for an automatic telephone switching system is issued to Daniel Connolly of Philadelphia, Thomas A. Connolly of Washington, D.C., and Thomas J. McTighe of Pittsburgh. (US No. 222,458) The system consists of a single-line wire, a battery of cells located at each telephone, and a dial switching mechanism for each line.
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