The Great Geek Manual

1906
A US patent is issued to inventor Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, an electrical engineer, for the crystal detector, one of the first devices widely used for receiving radio broadcasts, until the later development of the later triode vacuum tube. His patent describes the device as “a means for receiving intelligence communicated by electric waves.”

1920
KDKA becomes the first radio station credited with broadcasting regularly scheduled professional programming.

1931
The first commercial teletype service was introduced by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).

1947
A permanent television is installed on a seagoing vessel for the first time.

1950
The NTSC color television system comes into effect as a standard in the US.
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1477
William Caxton issues his first dated printed book in England, Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (”Sayings of the Philosophers). Caxton will produce approximately one hundred copies of the work.

1879
Eugen Skladanowsky presents the first public projection of photographs at the Floria Theatre in Berlin.

1894
The “New York World” publishes the first regular Sunday comic section.

1929
Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin demonstrates a television receiving system called the Kinescope to the Institute of Radio Engineers in the US.

1951
See It Now hosted by Edward R. Murrow becomes the first live coast-to-coast commercial television broadcast in the US. The program will become well know for its high journalistic standards.
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1947
The first transistor, a solid-state amplifier made of germanium, plastic, and gold, is invented by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen in a series of experiments conducted between November 17 and December 23.

1960
Customer trials of the world’s first electronic Telephone Central Office in Morris, Illinois begin.

1967
Surveyor 6 becomes first man-made object to lift off the Moon.

1970
Douglas Engelbart receives a patent for the first computer mouse. (US No. 3541541) The patent, titled “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System,” is a simple hollowed-out wooden block, with a single push button on top.
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1904
John Ambrose Fleming invents the vacuum tube, otherwise known as the thermionic valve. The valve consists of a carbon or tungsten filament lamp with a metal plate insulated from the filament and a wire through the glass wall of the bulb to a third terminal outside. When battery current is applied to the filament, the space between the filament and the insulated plate will conduct electrons in just one direction. Vacuum tubes are used to amplify, switch, or otherwise modify, a signal by controlling the movement of electrons in an evacuated space, and they will remain the basis of electronic technology for decades to come.

1942
Construction of an experimental atomic pile begins. The pile will be used to investigate the world’s first artificial nuclear chain reaction under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. The later research will be an important contribution to the Manhattan Project, a project to develop nuclear weapons.

1962
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) announces the IBM 1062 teller terminal and the IBM 7710 data communication unit.

1965
The Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe on a mission to land on the surface of Venus, though the pressure of the planet’s atmosphere will crush the probe before it relays any data.
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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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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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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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1799
American astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass makes the first written record of a meteor shower in the US, the Leonids meteor shower, from a ship off the Florida Keys. He writes, “In every instant the meteors were as numerous as the stars,” and that the “whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with sky rockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the light of the sun after day break.”

1901
The first Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded to Wilhelm Röentgen for the discovery of X-rays.

1915
Theodore William Richards of Harvard University becomes the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

1933
Hugh Gray captures what he claims to be the first known photo of the Loch Ness Monster.

1937
Alan Turing publishes a paper entitled “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem.” In it, Turing provides an abstraction that will form the basic theory of computability for several decades. Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine described in this paper will provide the fundamental concepts of computers that other inventors will later conceive independently.
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