The Great Geek Manual

Master Dave just doesn’t feel motivated today. With great power eventually comes great laziness.

1939
The Superman comic strip premieres. The series will run continuously until May 1966, and, at the peak of its popularity, it will run in over three hundred newspapers with an aggregate readership of over twenty million.

1956
The United States government’s automated air defense system, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), is disclosed to the public. The SAGE system connects hundreds of radar stations in Canada and the United States into the first large-scale computer communications network. With the increasing fear of a large-scale attack on the United States, it was evident that the nation’s defense capabilities required an improvement, and the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was commissioned to develop an automated nationwide computer-based air defense system to provide the edge that the nation needed. SAGE was completed in the early sixties, and it revolutionized air defense and civilian air traffic control. In 1979, SAGE will be replaced by Regional Operations Control Centers (ROCC).
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We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

- “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer, December 29, 2011.

1907
Dr. Lee De Forest patents the three-element vacuum tube, the Audion tube. (US No. 841,386) The component can be used as an electrical signal amplifier, most notably in radios.

1913
The first telephone line between Berlin and New York is inaugurated.

1936
In Toledo, Ohio, construction of the first building covered completely in glass is completed for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company.
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We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

- “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer, December 29, 2011.

1873
“Celluloid” becomes a registered trademark.

1878
William Henry Preece demonstrates the new telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell to Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight. Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and in 1877, Bell had come to England on his honeymoon, demonstrating his device to telegraph engineers and giving lectures as he traveled. At the conclusion of the demonstration, the Queen, very impressed with the device, orders a phone line installed between Osbourne House and Buckingham Palace.

1914
Henry Ford introduces the first modern assembly line for the Ford Model T when he improves his existing assembly-line operation with the addition of a chain to pull each chassis along. This method of using continuous motion reduces the time is takes to assemble a car from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three minutes.
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There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven’t recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can’t decipher. What we can’t understand we call nonsense. What we can’t read we call gibberish.

- Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk, 1999.

1404
The English Parliament passes the Act of Multipliers, forbidding alchemists from using transmutation to create or multiply precious metals, specifically gold and silver. The Act comes in response to widespread fear that alchemists would succeed in their projects and ruin the nation or install a despot. In 1689, Robert Boyle lobbied for repeal of the Act.

1610
Galileo Galilei discovers what will later be named Callisto, the fourth satellite of Jupiter. Galileo names the Moon along with the three he discovered earlier the “Medicean planets,” after the Medici family, and numerically as I, II, III and IV. Galileo’s naming system will be used until the mid-1800′s, when they will come to be referred to as Galilean moons, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io.
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