The Great Geek Manual

Due to some issues getting posts to re-appear in the site’s RSS feed each year when it’s updated, the “This Day in Geek History” posts have each been given their own page. Choose your date below.

The evolution of PC games was created by digital creative agency Reverse Enginears for the new video game website Polygon due to launch later this year. The video contains sounds and music taken straight out of PC games and remixed in chronological order. In case you’re wondering, here’s a list of the games referenced in the video:
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1879
The first electric company in the U.S. to produce and sell electricity California Electric Light Company is established in San Francisco, California.

1905
Albert Einstein publishes the article “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies“, wherein he introduces the concept of special relativity.

1908
At around 7:15am, northwest of Lake Baikal, Russia, a huge fireball nearly as bright as the Sun is seen crossing the sky. Minutes later, there is a huge flash and a shock wave felt up to 400 miles (650km) away. Over Tunguska, a meteorite traveling at over 60,000mph (25km per second) penetrates Earth’s atmosphere, heats to about 10,000°C, and detonates 3 to 4 miles (6 to 10km) above the ground. The blast releases the energy of 10-50 Megatons of TNT, destroying 830 square miles (2,150 sq km) of forest (approximately 80 million trees) and leaving no trace of life. The Tunguska rock came out of the Taurid Meteor storm that crosses Earth’s orbit twice a year. Read more about The Tunguska Event.
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512
A solar eclipse is recorded by a monastic historian in Ireland.

1613
The original Globe Theatre in London, England burns down accidentally when a cannon discharged during a performance of William Shakespeare’s Henry VIII sets fire to the building’s thatched roof.

1888
Edison’s foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, makes a wax cylinder recording in the Crystal Palace, London of a four thousand person choir performing Handel’s Israel in Egypt at a distance of more than one hundred yards from the phonograph. It is the first “field” recording outside of a studio, as well as the first known recording of classical music.
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1451
An eclipse allegedly prevents a war from breaking out between the Mohawk and the Seneca Indians.

1928
Austrian Friedrich Schmiedl launches his first experimental rocket. Though his first rocket design isn’t successful, on September 9, 1931, Schmiedl will operate the world’s first official postal rocket-mail service in Austria using a V-7 rocker, until laws prohibiting the civilian use of explosives are passed.

1938
A 450 metric ton meteorite strikes the Earth in an empty field near Chicora, Pennsylvania.
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1847
New York and Boston are linked by telegraph wires for the first time.

1898
The first solo circumnavigation of the globe is completed by Joshua Slocum of Briar Island, Nova Scotia aboard a sloop-rigged fishing boat that he named Spray. Read more at the Joshua Slocum Centennial page.

1923
Captain Lowell H. Smith and Lieutenant John P. Richter perform the first ever aerial refueling aboard a DH-4B biplane.
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1870
Christmas is declared a federal holiday in the United States.

1894
Karl Benz of Germany is granted the first U.S. patent for a gasoline-driven automobile.

1896
The first movie theater in the U.S. opens. Admissions costs ten cents.

1948
William Shockley files the original patent for his grown junction transistor, the first bipolar junction transistor.
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1638
A lunar eclipse becomes the first astronomical event recorded in the United States.

1783
Antonie Lavoisier announces to the French Academy of Sciences that water is the product of the combination of hydrogen and oxygen. However, this discovery was made earlier by the English chemist Henry Cavendish.

1876
Alexander Graham Bell gives the first public demonstration of his speaking telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The event, the first World’s Fair to be held in the United States, commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It’s estimated that roughly ten million people will attend the exhibition, which also features the first public debut of Heinz Ketchup, Hires Root Beer, the Remington Typographic Machine (the first commercially successful typewriter), and the first automatic screw making machine.
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