The Great Geek Manual

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

- Aristotle

1744
Gowan Knight presents his research on permanently magnetizing steels to the Royal Society. The use of steel instead of soft iron represents a significant improvement in the compass needles used by England’s Royal Navy, but Knight won’t apply for a patent on his compass until 1766.

1883
Thomas Edison receives a patent for his two-element vacuum tube, the forerunner of the vacuum tube rectifier.

1887
German scientist, Dr. Carl Gassner, is issued a patent for the first “dry” cell battery. (US No. 373,064)

1912
Gaumont Chronochrome, the first practical three-color film process, is demonstrated to the French Photographic Society in Paris. A three-lens camera with different color filters is used, compared with the two-color approach of Kinemacolor.
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There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. And not simply an index; the direct reproduction of the thing itself can be summoned to any properly prepared spot. … duplicated from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail.

This in itself is a fact of tremendous significance. It foreshadows a real intellectual unification of our race. The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. … this new all-human cerebrum. It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.

This is no remote dream, no fantasy. It is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs. It is on the level of practicable fact. It is a matter of such manifest importance and desirability for science, for the practical needs of mankind, for general education and the like, that it is difficult not to believe that in quite the near future, this Permanent World Encyclopaedia, so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence, will not come into existence.

- “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia” by H.G. Wells. Originally published in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937.

1666
The English physician Samuel Pepys makes a record in his diary describing the first documented blood transfusion. “Dr. Croone told me … there was a pretty experiment of the blood of one dog let out, till he had died, into the body of another on one side, while all his own run out on the other side. The first died upon the place, and the other very well and likely to do well. This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop and such like; but, as Dr. Croon says, may, if it takes, be of mighty use to man’s health, for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body.”

1878
The first shipment of new telephones designed by L.M. Ericsson of Sweden is delivered. Based on his experience repairing American made phones, Ericsson began manufacturing a “telephone with a trumpet” of his own design. The “trumpet” is an extension of the mouthpiece where a caller blows to initiate a call.

1910
An airplane takes off from a ship for the first time, piloted by Eugene Burton Ely. The ship is the light cruiser USS Birmingham, and the event takes place off the coast of Hampton Roads, Virginia. Ely pilots the plane, a Curtiss pusher, to a nearby beach, where he lands after only just keeping the plane above sea level. Following the flight, Ely will be made a lieutenant in the California National Guard in order to qualify for a $500 prize that had been offered for the first reservist to make such a flight. On January 18, 1911, Ely will land his airplane aboard the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay, using the first ever tailhook system.
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My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

“Turing’s Cathedral” by George Dyson, published in Edge: The Third Culture, October 24, 2005.

1907
French inventor Paul Cornu flies the first helicopter. The “flight” carries the vehicle roughly one foot off the ground and only lasts twenty seconds, but it is nonetheless be marked as the first flight of the first helicopter.

1928
Vladimir Zworykin is granted a patent for a color television imaging tube that employs cathode ray tubes and a screen composed of a mosaic of squares in the three primary colors. Several later biographers will call him the “true inventor of television.”

1955
The first live US television program originating from outside the continental United States is broadcast from Havana, Cuba.

1957
Gordon Gould, a doctoral research student at Columbia University and a former member of the Manhattan Project, completes the design of a light-emitting version of the microwave emitting maser, which he names Light Amplication by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER).

1971
The American space probe, Mariner 9, becomes the first space probe to orbit another planet when it enters into orbit around Mars. The probe’s mission is to return photographs that will map seventy percent of the surface while conducting a study of the planet’s atmosphere.
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Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is “mere”. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part… What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

- The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman, 1964.