The Great Geek Manual

1880
Wabash, Indiana becomes the first town anywhere to be completely illuminated by electrical lighting, less than two months after connecting the world’s first electric streetlight on February 2nd.

1903
Richard Pearse of New Zealand reputedly flies a powered, heavier-than-air machine, nine months before the Wright Brothers make their famous and well-documented flight at Kitty Hawk. Accounts vary, but his flight may have traveled as far as 350 yards through the air before striking a large hedge. If true, the aircraft is the first to use modern ailerons, rather than inferior wing warping system that the Wrights’ early designs will use. Pearse’s machine also has a modern tricycle undercarriage permitting it to takeoff without ramps. Some sources will mark this as the anniversary of his flight, others will claim the event occurred some months later.
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Art

• Amazing Selena (from Underworld: Awakening) cosplay
• House Stark by April Morato
• New Superman logo for Man Of Steel revealed.
• R2-D2 in Legos

Comics

• The History of Avengers vs. X-Men: battling it out long before 2012.

Cross-Media

• Mainstream finally believes fantasy fans
• Twenty Must Read Retold (Fairy) Tales – An Introduction to the Genre

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You make some sexest remarks and go home to play video games for eight hours… crisis adverted.

If you could travel back in time, what would you tell your younger self about the future of video games? Probably nothing good.

240 BC
Chinese Astronomers record the first confirmed perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The account is confirmed by Babylonian, Japanese, and Mesopotamian astronomers.

1791
After a proposal in the journal Académie des sciences by Borda, Condorcet, Lagrange, Laplace, and Monge, the French National Assembly decides that a metre will be defined as ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator.
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1807
Vesta 4, the brightest asteroid on record and the only asteroid visible to the naked eye, is discovered by amateur astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers from Bremen, Germany. Vesta is a main belt asteroid with a diameter of 525km and a rotation period of 5.34 hours. Pictures taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 show Vesta’s complex surface, with a surprisingly diverse geology similar to that of terrestrial worlds, an exposed mantle, ancient lava flows, and impact basins. Though no bigger than the state of Arizona, it once had a molten interior. This contradicts conventional notions that asteroids are essentially cold, rocky fragments left behind from the early days of planetary formation.

1886
The first batch of Coca-Cola is brewed over a fire in a backyard in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John Pemberton as a cure for hangovers, stomach aches, and headaches. He markets the drink as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage,” and first sells it to the public a few weeks later on May 8th. Coke contains cocaine as an ingredient until 1904, when the drug will be banned by Congress.

1903
The first transatlantic news service between New York and London begins, making use of Marconi’s wireless. On March 30 1903, The Times in London becomes the first newspaper to establish an ongoing arrangement with the Marconi Telegraph Company for the regular transmission of news between the United States and the UK. Shortly thereafter, the The New York Times requests that it be part of the arrangement. Despite extensive teething problems, the importance of wireless as a cheap form of communication will quickly become obvious.
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Art

• 8-Bit Movie Posters from Behance
• Excellent Portal Gun prop demo
• Make your own Hunger Games cookies with this tutorial from Not Your Momma’s Cookie.
• NASA charts out the flow of the oceans over the course of decades in a beautiful video reminiscent of the work of Van Gogh
• Starcraft 2 Propaganda

Comics

• Interview: Joe Hill and Jason Ciaramella WonderCon talk “Locke & Key”
• News: ‘Superman’ rights trial called for by Warner Bros
• SFSignal examines the The Year in Graphic Novels So Far

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1747
Benjamin Franklin writes the first of the famous series of letters in which he describes his experiments with electricity to Peter Collinson a fellow of the Royal Society of London, England. In this first letter, he writes, “For my own part I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has lately done; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have, during some months past, had little leisure for anything else.” Read more about Franklin’s experiments at The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary website.
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