The Great Geek Manual

1492
The Ensisheim Meteorite, the first meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the Earth in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France at near noon.

1631
Pierre Gassendi first observes the transit of a planet. Johannes Kepler had predicted a transit of Mercury would occur in 1631. When Gassendi observed the dot of Mercury passing across the face of the Sun with a Galilean telescope by projecting the sun’s image on a screen of paper. He will recount the observation in Mercurius in sole visus (”Mercury in the Face of the Sun”) in 1632.

1903
Léon Gaumont screens his first sound film for the Société de Photographie in Paris, France.

1908
Professor Ernest Rutherford announces in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter.

1911
Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, in his presidential address to the Röntgen Society in London, suggests that high-definition television is possible with cathode ray tubes. The paper won’t be published until April 1924 in the magazine Wireless World.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1572
A supernova is observed in the constellation known as Cassiopeia by Wolfgang Schüler. It appears as a new star, adjacent to the fainter star seen in the middle of the constellation. Although Schüler isn’t the first one to see it, he will later gain a measure of fame when he publishes Stella Nova (Latin: “New Star”). However, it will ultimately be dubbed “Tycho’s Nova” after the better known Tycho Brahe, though he didn’t notice the new star until November 11. For about two weeks, the supernova will be brighter than any other star in the sky and visible during the day, and it will remain faintly visible to the naked eye for about sixteen months, until March 1574.

1862
A direct telegraphic link between New York and San Francisco is established.

1935
Edwin Armstrong presents his paper “A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation,” in which he first proposes FM radio to the New York chapter of the Institute of Radio Engineers,

1944
The Hanford Atomic Facility first produces plutonium. The facility will eventually produce the plutonium used in construction of Fat Man, the atomic bomb that will be detonated over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1824
Stephen van Renssalaer founds the first engineering college in the United States, the Renssalaer School in Troy, New York. It will open on January 3, 1825, and the first class will graduate with ten students April 26, 1826.

1852
The first US national civil engineering society, the American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects, is founded. Twelve engineers attend the event at which the society was founded, though an invitation had been extended to all civil engineers in New York. The purpose of the society is “the advancement of the sciences of engineering and architecture in their several branches, the professional improvement of its members, the encouragement of intercourse between men of practical science, and the establishment of a central point of reference and union for its members.” The organization’s architects will later split off into their own organization, and the organization will be retitled the “American Society of Civil Engineers” (ASCE). Visit the official ASCE website.

1895
George B. Selden of Rochester, New York, receives the first US patent for a gasoline-driven automobile. (US No. 549,160) In the patent, he describes the complete automobile incorporating such a clutch, a compressed air self-starter, and a steering system. As a patent attorney, he knows to delay the contention over the patent by sending amendments and other communications every two years. Meanwhile, others develop the actual working of the automobile, increasing the value of his patents, and making him one of the earliest successful “patent trolls.”
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1869
The first issue of the scientific journal Nature, edited by astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer, is first published. The first issue includes articles on astronomy, education, moths, plants, an obituary for chemist Thomas Graham, paleontology, and several meeting notices. Visit the journal’s official website.

1922
The entrance to the tomb of King Tutankhamen is discovered in the Valley of the Kings where archaeologist Howard Carter had been making extended excavations. One of Carter’s laborers stumbled upon a stone step, the first step in a sunken stairway that ran down into the rock. Carter will open the tomb of the largely unknown child-king later in the month. In 1907, Lord Carnarvon, a wealthy English aristocrat with a passion for archeology, hired Carter and financed his excavations.

1939
The first air conditioned automobile, a Packard, is exhibited in Chicago, Illinois. The Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan has been known for producing luxury automobiles since 1899.

1943
The X-10 nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory goes “critical” with a self-sustaining fission reaction, becoming the world’s second reactor to achieve such a reaction. The reactor took just nine urgent months to build. Over the next year, the reactor performed flawlessly, irradiating thousands of fuel slugs, which were disassembled and dissolved so the plutonium could be extracted, bit by precious bit. It is an experimental reactor far larger and more advanced than Fermi’s Chicago pile.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1892
In LaPorte, Indiana, The Cushman Telephone Company (the Bell Telephone Company) launches the first automatic telephone exchange using the “step-by-step machine” invented by Almon Brown Strowger with about seventy-five subscribers. The event is commemorated with a ceremony, a special train run from Chicago, and a brass band to greet the guests. Strowger, the owner of a funeral parlor, invented the system to eliminate the need for an operator after discovering that his town’s operator had been intercepting calls for his competitor.

1929
The Marconi-Wright facsimile system, a system that uses super high-speed Morse telegraphy, is first demonstrated. With it, documents and images can be transmitted across the Atlantic in just three minutes. The earliest users of the system will be newspapers.

1937
Howard H. Aiken of Harvard University corresponds with J.W. Bryce of International Business Machines (IBM) to suggest constructing an automatic calculating machine for use in computing physical problems. This exchange will eventually inspire the creation of The Harvard Mark I, the first large-scale automatic digital computer in the US.

1953
The first live coast-to-coast color television telecast in the US is made by Radio Corporation of America (RCA).
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1920
Westinghouse Electric launches radio station KDKA, which will later come to be commonly cited as being the world’s first commercial radio station.

1931
The DuPont Company, of Wilmington, Delaware, announces the first practical synthetic rubber, DuPrene, which will later be renamed Neoprene. The new rubber is expensive to produce, but it resists oil and gasoline, which natural rubber doesn’t.

1936
The British Broadcasting Corporation begins transmitting the world’s first regularly scheduled high-definition (200 lines) television service, the BBC Television Service, from Alexandra Palace, in north London. The service will later be renamed BBC1 in 1964. Its range is about thirty-five miles. Regular programs are broadcast twice a day, from 3 – 4pm, and from 9 – 10pm, Monday through Saturday.

1947
In California, Howard Hughes conducts the first and only flight of the Spruce Goose, the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built, over Long Beach Harbor in California. The Spruce Goose, which was formally named Hercules, is the first US plane with eight engines; it boasts a wing span of 319 feet, 11 inches; it weighs over two hundred tons; and it cost twenty-five million dollars to build. It’s named the “Spruce Goose” because its entire airframe and surface is composed entirely of laminated birch wood rather than the aluminum typically used in airplane design, due to wartime restrictions. Its flight lasts about a minute, and it only achieves an altitude of seventy feet.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1848
First railway bookstall is opened at the Euston station, in London by W.H. Smith.

1879
Thomas Edison patents the electric lamp.

1884
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is adopted universally at a meeting of the International Meridian Conference in Washington, DC. The International Date Line is then drawn up and the twenty-four time zones are created.

1887
Eleven years after the phone was invented, the first differentiation between day and night long distance rates goes into effect, with night rates in most, but not all, instances lower than day rates.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Happy Halloween!

1912
The Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Elmer Booth, Lillian Gish, Clara T. Bracy, and Walter Miller, debuts in the US. It is the first gangster film. IMDB listing

1926
Magician Harry Houdini dies of gangrene and peritonitis that developed after his appendix ruptured. The time of his death, on Halloween, will give rise to myths and legend that will cement Houdini’s place
Read the rest of this entry » » »