The Great Geek Manual

1851
British astronomer William Lassell discovers Ariel and Umbriel, satellites of Uranus. Both satellites names are featured in Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock. Ariel has a diameter of approximately 1,160 km, an orbital period of 2.52 days, and an orbital radius of 191,240 km from Uranus. Umbriel has a diameter of 1,170 km, an orbital period of about four days, and an orbit radius of 266,000 km.

1861
Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line across the United States, bringing an abrupt end to the legendary Pony Express, which was established just eighteen months earlier and which will close just two days later. The connection is inaugurated with the first transcontinental telegraph message, sent by Justice Stephen J. Field of California to President Abraham Lincoln. The final connection between the east coast and the west coast is made at Salt Lake City, Utah. Prior to the connection, it took ten days for a letter to sent from Sacramento, California to arrive in St. Joseph, Missouri.

1911
During one of twenty test flights, Orville Wright remains in the air nine minutes and forty-five seconds in a glider at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina setting a new world record that will stand for another ten years.

1926
Harry Houdini gives his last performance at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, Michigan. He will die on October 31st.
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Source: Funny or Die

Art

• Check out the amazing cavalcade of custom Comic Book Lego MiniFigs! (Also reported here and here.)

Film

• Fantasy Magazine waxes nostalgic on Legend’s Lily and the Subversion of the Damsel Stereotype and bemoans the film’s happy ending.
• Get your Edward Cullen Shower Curtain while supplies last! (Uber-Creepy!)
• Mary Robinette Kowal suggests Ten Costumes to Make Your Halloween Fantastic, beginning with Pirate Stooge and Coraline.
• A gallery of new photos of the upcoming Avatar film have been released.
• There’s a grassroots Oscar campaign afoot to get Sam Rockwell nominated for Best Actor in Moon. Hard to say if it’s deserved, as I haven’t seen it, yet.

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People keep asking me what I think of it now that it’s done. Hence my protest: “The Web is not done!”

- Tim Berners-Lee in a Wired News interview, October 23, 1999.

1877
Nicolaus Otto, Francis Crossley, and William Crossley are granted a patent for the first internal-combustion engine to burn gasoline in a piston chamber. (US No. 194,047) View the patent online.

1911
Captain Carlo Piazza of the Italian military flies a Blériot XI monoplane on an hour-long reconnaissance mission of Turkish troop positions, becoming the first pilot to use an airplane for military purposes. Just more nine days later, Italian forces will carry out history’s first bombing raid based on the intelligence gathered by Piazza.

1956
The Jonathan Winters Show becomes the first program to broadcast (color) video footage recorded on magnetic tape. It’s televised coast-to-coast in the US.

1963
The first program written in Algol Extended for Design (AED) is compiled in a compatible time-sharing system using a bootstrap language compiler. AED was developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Electronic Systems Laboratory by a team led by Douglas T. Ross.
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Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Carnival Park” by Greg Van Eekhout at Starship Sofa.
• Listen to “Come All Ye Faithful” by Robert J. Sawyer at Podcastle.
• Listen to “The Firemen’s Fairy” by Sandra McDonald at Podcastle.
• Listen to “Halloween In July” by Kevin Anderson at Dunesteef.
• Listen to “Images of Anna” by Nancy Kress at Fantasy Magazine.
• Listen to “Little Ambushes” by Joanne Merriam at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “Sleepy Joe” by Marc Laidlaw at Escape Pod.

Flash and Micro Fiction

• Read “The Automatonist’s Assistant” by Luc Reid at Daily Cabal.
• Read “The Creek Didn’t Rise” by Melanie Brown at Powder Burn Flash.
• Read “Deus Ex Machina” by Graeme Reynolds at Flashes in the Dark.
• Read “Getting Rid of the Monsters” by Nancy Jane Moore at BookView Cafe.
• Read the flash fiction “My Girlfriend Leaves the Atmosphere” by Angi Becker Stevens at SmokeLong Quarterly.

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Art

• Inspire 76 has a gallery of Frankenstein images collected from Deviant Art.

Film

• Entertainment Weekly has posted a gallery of new photos from the upcoming New Moon film to make you squee.
• SFX counts down the top ten of its list of the 50 Scariest Horror Moments Ever.
• TC Candler has posted a gallery of The 100 Greatest Movie Posters, beginning with The Sin of Nora Moran.
• Topless Robot takes a listen to The 12 Weirdest Horror Movie Theme Songs.
• Universal Design Replicas is selling a limited edition, hand-crafted Dark Knight motorcycle suit so that any biker can feel like a vigilante.

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1746
Princeton University is chartered. Visit the official Princeton website.

1878
Thomas Edison receives a patent for “Quadruplex-Telegraph Repeaters.” (US No. 209,241) The patent describes circuits that operate each other, so that messages are repeated automatically into one circuit by the receiving instrument of the other circuit, rather than instead of the finger key being operated by hand.

1900
In Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright Brothers make their first untethered glider flight. Their flight lasts only fifteen seconds but covers somewhere between three and four hundred feet.

1926
J. Gordon Whitehead, a McGill University student, sucker punches the famous magician Harry Houdini in the stomach. Houdini will die eight days later on October 31. Popular myth will later hold that the punch is what killed Houdini, but, in fact, the magician will die of appendicitis. Many experts will later agree, however, that Houdini failed to seek treatment for the appendicitis until its late stages because he believed that the pain was the lingering after effect of the punch. Though there are many witnesses to the incident, Whitehead will never be arrested. Don Bell will document the event in the 2004 book The Man Who Killed Houdini.
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