The Great Geek Manual

1878
The first commercial telephone exchange is the world is installed in New Haven, Connecticut to serve twenty-one subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. For the first six weeks, the exchange will not be operated at night. The first experimental message sent over the system is “Ahoy, ahoy.” The first operator is George W. Coy. A Bell franchise had been awarded for New Haven and Middlesex Counties to Coy on November 3, 1877, paid for by incorporating the system into a company with two financial partners. Coy improvised the first crude switchboard, building it from carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire. The concept of interconnecting phone wires had been tried before by three other men, but none of them had operated commercially. Click here to view the original patent application for the telephone exchange.

1930
Austrian-Hungarian physicist Dr. Julius Edgar Lilienfeld is issued a patent in Canada for the first solid-state amplifying transistor.

1952
The Bank of America and SRI sign a contract for the development, construction, and testing of a pilot model Electronic Recording Machine – Accounting (ERMA) to provide service to the bank’s twelve branches at a cost of US$850,000 over four years, with an additional $25,000 for subcontracts. However, engineers will later estimate that the grand total of the project was closer to US$10 million.

The EDVAC, one of the earliest electronic computers, runs its first production program.

1958
Construction begins on the first privately owned thorium-uranium atomic reactor in Buchanan, New York. The Consolidated Edison Company’s Indian Point 1 nuclear generating station is the plant designed to utilize uranium-235 supplemented with thorium-232. It will be built at a cost of one hundred million dollars on the former site of an amusement park. It will produce 275,000kW of power for New York City. It will be decommissioned on October 31, 1974 due to a lack of an emergency cooling system for the reactor core.
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1785
The University of Georgia, the first public university in the United States, is founded. Visit the official University of Georgia website.

1880
Thomas Edison receives a patent for “an electric lamp for giving light by incandescence” which he first invented on November 21, 1879. (US No. 223,898) Edison’s invention will have a tremendous impact on the electronics industry. In the course of developing the light bulb, one of Edison’s assistants discovered the flow of energy from one electrode to another in what will later come to be known as the “Edison effect,” which will later be fundamental principal of the electron tube, which will be, in turn, the foundation of electronics industry. To view a high resolution scan of the patent application, or to read a transcript of the patent application, visit US News online.

1888
In Washington, D.C., the National Geographic Society is founded as a non-profit organization for the purpose of disseminating geographical knowledge.

1926
This date is often incorrectly cited as the day John Logie Baird first publicly demonstrated the television. The date will be accidentally given to reporters during a series of talks in 1931 by Baird himself. The actual date is January 26, 1926.
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To make a great program there’s got to be at least one person at the center who is breathing life into it. In a ferocious way.

- Andy Hertzfeld in Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg, 2007.

1697
Isaac Newton receives and solves Jean Bernoulli’s brachistochrone problem. The swiss mathematician Bernouilli had challenged his colleagues to solve it within six months. Newton not only solved the problem before going to bed the night after the challenge had been issued, but in doing so, he invented the new branch of mathematics called “calculus of variations.” Newton will publish the solution anonymously, but the brilliant work makes his identity obvious, and when Bernoulli saw the solution he is famously quoted as saying, “We recognize the lion by his claw.”

1886
Karl Benz patents the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. The first public test-drive of the actual vehicle will be on July 3, 1886 in Mannheim, Germany. The one-cylinder engine has a top speed of 16km/h (10 mph).

1926
The Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gives the first public demonstration of a modern television system in London, England. Baird’s invention, called a “televisor,” uses mechanically rotating disks to scan moving images into electronic impulses. The impulses are then transmitted by cable to a screen where images appear low-resolution patterns of light and shadow. Baird’s first televised demonstration depicted the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which were operated in front of the camera, while the operator remained out of sight.

1962
Ranger 3 is launched on a mission to study the Moon. However, the space probe will miss the moon by twenty-two thousand miles (35,400 km).
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In reaffirming the greatness of our nation, we understand that greatness is never a given. It must be earned. Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the faint-hearted — for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame. Rather, it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things — some celebrated but more often men and women obscure in their labor, who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.

- U.S. President Barack Obama, in his inaugural address, January 20, 2009.

You have zero privacy – Get Over it.

- Scott McNealy, Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems (January 25, 1999)

1881
Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell found the Oriental Telephone Company, the world’s first telephone company.

1915
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, inaugurates the first transcontinental telephone service in the United States with a phone call placed from New York City to Dr. Thomas Watson in San Francisco, California. In a ceremony, Bell, age 68, makes the ceremonial first call and speaks the first complete sentence transmitted by telephone across a continent, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!” The circuit consists of 2,500 tons of copper wire, 130,000 poles, and three vacuum tube repeaters.

1933
The University of Iowa launches low definition television station W9XK, the first educational television service in the United States.

1955
Scientists at Columbia University unveils an atomic clock accurate to within one second every three hundred years.
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May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

- Neil Gaiman