The Great Geek Manual

1889
The Columbia Phonograph Company is formed in Washington, D.C. as a successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. The company will go on to become the first record company to produce pre-recorded records rather than just blank cylinders.

1908
Edouard Bélin uses his Bélinographe, a system able to send remote photographs over telephone and telegraphic networks, to transmit a photograph 1,700km from Paris to Bordeaux to Lyon then back. The historical event takes twenty-two minutes.
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…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. … Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

This vote has consequences. If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

- “The Deepening Paradox” by Karl Schroeder, November 2011.
Originally posted to Kschroeder.com.

1789
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth by William Hill Brown, is published in Boston, Massachusetts by Isaiah Thomas.

1888
Charles Babbage’s son, Henry Provost Babbage, uses the mill portion of the Analytical Engine he constructed from his father’s drawings to compute multiples of Pi in order to prove that the design is functional.

1920
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit organization that defends and the constitutional rights of individuals, is formed. The organization will have a significant impact on a number of fundamental issues surrounding the internet, the media, and the communication industry in general. Visit the official ACLU website.
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The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

- Charles Bukowski

Art

• 9 pulpy science fiction movie posters from an alternate cinematic universe
• Beautiful Portraits of Game Characters
• Calvin and Hobbes / Spider-Man Mash-Up
• Check out this amazing Stormtrooper Cake
• The Magic of Man
• Make a greeting card with a Mechanical Iris for all your steampunk events!

Comics

• Fox News expose: sex sells in comics and is destroying our children
• The great ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ web-shooter debate
• One Way To Reduce Piracy: Improve The LCS Experience
• The Top 5 Science Fiction Comics

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1885
La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, New York is issued the first US patent for a roller coaster, the “Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway,” which he had built at Coney Island in New York City in 1884. (US No. 332,762) For five cents a ride, passengers sit sideways in cars that travel a six hundred foot wooden railway, at a top speed of six miles per hour. Thompson, who will later be dubbed “the father of gravity,” will earn back his original US$1,600 investment within just three weeks.

1929
The Fox Film Corporation releases the western film “In Old Arizona,” directed by Irving Cummings and starring Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Dorothy Burgess, to US theaters. It is the first full-length talking motion picture to be shot outdoors on location in the US. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

1930
The first episode of “Lone Ranger” is broadcast from radio station WXYZ-Detroit. The series will be enormously influential on future comic books.

1969
Astronomers at the University of Arizona establish the first optical identification of a pulsar, which is located in the Crab Nebula.

1981
The inauguration speech of US President Ronald Reagan is broadcast. It is the world’s first broadcast to feature live teletext subtitles for the hearing impaired.
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Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recorded daily weather observations, but they didn’t record them hourly or by the minute. Not only did they have other things to do, such data didn’t seem useful. Even after the invention of the telegraph enabled the centralization of weather data, the 150 volunteers who received weather instruments from the Smithsonian Institution in 1849 still reported only once a day. Now there is a literally immeasurable, continuous stream of climate data from satellites circling the earth, buoys bobbing in the ocean, and Wi-Fi-enabled sensors in the rain forest. We are measuring temperatures, rainfall, wind speeds, C02 levels, and pressure pulses of solar wind. All this data and much, much more became worth recording once we could record it, once we could process it with computers, and once we could connect the data streams and the data processors with a network.

How will we ever make sense of scientific topics that are too big to know? The short answer: by transforming what it means to know something scientifically.

This would not be the first time. For example, when Sir Francis Bacon said that knowledge of the world should be grounded in carefully verified facts about the world, he wasn’t just giving us a new method to achieve old-fashioned knowledge. He was redefining knowledge as theories that are grounded in facts. The Age of the Net is bringing about a redefinition at the same scale. Scientific knowledge is taking on properties of its new medium, becoming like the network in which it lives.

- “To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data” by David Weinberger, January 3 2012.
First posted to The Atlantic.

1875
Thomas Edison is issued a patent on a “Telegraph Apparatus.” (US No. 158,787)

1903
The first trans-Atlantic radiotelegraphic message is sent from President Roosevelt to King Edward VII by way of the stations at Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Poldhu, England. It is not generally known whether the message was relayed by ships on the Atlantic or whether it was received directly from Cape Cod in its complete form. A station even larger than the one at Poldhu was begun in 1905, at Clifden, Ireland, and in 1907 this plant and a twin station at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, were opened for limited commercial trans-Atlantic radio service.

1904
Thomas Edison is issued a patent for an “Electrical Automobile” designed with a driving motor that may be conveniently and effectively utilized for the purpose of charging the batteries. (US No. 750,102) The design uses a small turbine steam engine connected to the armature of an electric motor. By reversing the rotation of the motor-armature, the electric motor converts to a generator for charging the batteries. A clutch is used to disconnect the motor from the driving wheels while charging. Under usual operations, the motor runs off storage batteries.
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