The Great Geek Manual

1879
Thomas Edison first publicly demonstrates his electric incandescent light bulb at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His bulb isn’t the first electric light, since arc lights are already in use for the illumination of large areas, such as department stores and streets. Edison isn’t even the first inventor to experiment with incandescent lamps, which use electricity to heat a filament to a high temperature. However, Edison’s lamp uses the first practical filament and is the first to feature a vacuum seal sufficient to remove the oxygen from the bulb’s interior.

1951
The invention of the first battery to successfully convert radioactive energy to electrical energy is announced.

1955
General Motors becomes the first corporation in the United States to earn over US$1 billion in a single year when it reports to its stockholders a listed net income of US$1,189,477,082 in revenues.
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The Future is a Virus..

Not literally, of course. But if we think about the future as something that infects us, we gain a new perspective on our world. Human civilization has a weak immune system when it comes to futures. We can sometimes recognize when something big is imminent, and act. We rely on clumsy, inefficient tools like finance, religion, even “look before you leap” to make us look forward and consider our choices. So more often than not, we’re taken by surprise, shocked when something big happens “out of the blue.” We haven’t prepared for big changes. Our immune system needs to be strengthened. But how do we do something like that? (I suspect you know the answer.) First, a digression: a biological immune system works by encountering a pathogen, then generating antibodies to fight that pathogen. The body now recognizes that pathogen, so if it’s encountered again, the body is ready to fight it off. That’s roughly how it all works. Now, some pathogens can be deadly, and getting infected the first time doesn’t help the immune system if you’re dead!

- “The Future is a Virus” by Jamais Cascio, December 16, 2011.
Originally posted to The Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies.

1899
In a corporate reorganization, AT&T assumes the business and property of American Bell and becomes the parent company of the Bell System.

1924
Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that Andromeda, which astronomers had previously believed to be a nebulae, is actually another galactic system outside the Milky Way.

1953
United States electronics manufacturer RCA introduces the first new-style NTSC monochrome-compatible television receivers. Price: US$1,175

1973
Skylab 4 and Soyuz 13 photograph the Comet Kohoutek at its perihelion, capturing the first images of a comet ever taken by from space. The media hyped Kohoutek as the “comet of the century” and scientists predicted that Kohoutek would be an Oort Cloud Object. As such, it was believed likely that this was the comet’s first visit to the inner solar system, which would result in a spectacular display of outgassing. However, Kohoutek’s display will be considered a let-down, leading some media sources to dub the event “Comet Watergate.” Infrared and visual telescopic studies will later lead scientists to conclude in retrospect that Kohoutek is actually a Kuiper belt object, which accounts for its apparent rocky makeup and lack of outgassing.
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Our children no longer want to become physicists and astronauts. They want to invent the next Facebook instead. Short of that, they are happy to land a job at Google. They don’t talk quanta — they dream bits. They don’t see entanglement but recognize with ease nodes and links. As complexity takes a driving seat in science, engineering and business, we physicists cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.

- “The network takeover” by Albert-László Barabási.
Originally published in Nature Physics, January 2012.

1885
Gottlieb Daimler patents the first bike in Germany.

1891
Thomas Edison is granted a patent for “a means for transmitting signals electrically,” the wireless radio.

1913
The first motion picture serial to feature what will become the genre’s characteristic cliffhanger endings at the end of each installment (chapter), “The Adventures of Kathlyn,” premieres in Chicago. The thirteen episode serial was produced by the Selig Polyscope Company after William Selig was inspired by the rising sensationalism of news journalism during Chicago’s newspaper circulation war to bring serial stories to the big screen. The very first serial, What Happened to Mary was released by Edison Studios on July 26, 1912, but it was Selig’s cliffhanger endings that would popularize the format.
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Transhumanist visions appear to aim at invulnerability. We are invited to fight the dragon of death and disease, to shed our old, human bodies, and to live on as invulnerable minds or cyborgs. This paper argues that even if we managed to enhance humans in one of these ways, we would remain highly vulnerable entities given the fundamentally relational and dependent nature of posthuman existence. After discussing the need for minds to be embodied, the issue of disease and death in the infosphere, and problems of psychological, social and axiological vulnerability, I conclude that transhumanist human enhancement would not erase our current vulnerabilities, but instead transform them. Although the struggle against vulnerability is typically human and would probably continue to mark posthumans, we had better recognize that we can never win that fight and that the many dragons that threaten us are part of us. As vulnerable humans and posthumans, we are at once the hero and the dragon.

- “Vulnerable Cyborgs: Learning to Live with our Dragons” by Mark Coeckelbergh, November 2011.

1612
Galileo Galilei becomes the first astronomer to observe Neptune, although he catalogs it as a fixed star, rather than a planet.

1869
William Finley Semple is granted the first patent for chewing gum. (US No. 98,304)

1895
The world’s first movie theater opens in the Salon Indien at the Grand Café in Paris, France. The theater makes use of a portable film camera and a functional projector, the Cinematographe, based on Edison’s experimental Kinetograph. Thirty-three people attend the first public showing, at the admission price of one franc each. The first film, La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière, was created especially for the occasion. It shows workers leaving the Lumières’ factory in Lyon by foot, by bicycle, and by car. The theater is owned and operated by Louis and Auguste Lumières, who will refuse all offers to purchase copies of their equipment. View the film online at the Institut Lumière.
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Geography has become irrelevant. Our online phantom world has become the new us. We create complex webs of information and people who support us, and yet they are so fleeting, so tenuous. Time speeds up and then it begins to shrink. Years pass by in minutes. Life becomes that strange experience in which you’re zooming along the freeway and suddenly realize that you haven’t paid any attention to driving for the last fifteen minutes, yet you’re still alive and didn’t crash. The voice inside your head has become a different voice. It used to be “you.” Now your voice is that of a perpetual nomad drifting along a melting landscape, living day to day, expecting everything and nothing.

And this is why Marshall McLuhan is important, more so now than ever, because he saw this coming a long way off, and he saw the reasons for it.

- Marshall McLuhan, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland, 2011.