The Great Geek Manual

1800
In a letter, Alessandro Volta announces his invention of the voltaic pile, the earliest battery, to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in London, England.

1841
The short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, which will later come to be widely considered the first detective story in history, is published in Graham’s Magazine. The story establishes many literary devices and motifs later seen in the mystery genre.

1886
An alternating-current (AC) electrical system is demonstrated by lighting Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts with electricity generated by the power planet of George Westinghouse.

1900
Nikola Tesla receives a patent for the wireless transmission of electric power. (US No. 645,576) View the patent online.

1916
Albert Einstein publishes an academic paper on his Theory of General Relativity entitled “Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitästheorie” in the journal Annalen der Physik. Einstein’s theory accounts for the slow rotation of the elliptical orbit of Mercury, which Newtonian gravitational theory failed to explain.
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1474
The Republic of Venice passes the Venetian Patent Statute, the first patent law of its kind in the world. It declares that “each person who will make in this city any new and ingenious contrivance, not made heretofore in our dominion, as soon as it is reduced to perfection… It being forbidden to any other in any territory and place of ours to make any other contrivance in the form and resemblance thereof, without the consent and licence of the author up to ten years.” The law is intended to stimulate the economy by attracting inventors to Venice.

1800
Alexander von Humoldt and Aimé Bonpland capture the first specimen of Electric eels (Electrophorus electricus) during a five-year expedition through the jungles of South America. Humboldt will later write about his discovery in an article entitled, “Observation on the Electric Eel of the New World” in 1808.
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1952
A patent for the Electrical Integration Circuit is issued to William “Willy” A. Higinbotham. (US No. 2,589,807) The circuit was conceived in the early forties for the Eagle radar bombsight. Six years later, Higinbotham will develop one of the first video games, Tennis for Two.

1953
MGM, which has been working on its own wide-screen system, becomes the first studio to adopt CinemaScope. So as to create an industry standard and justify exhibitors’ commitment of investment in equipment, other major studios agree to adopt the Fox system as standard. Warner Bros will join later in the year after the release of The Robe but Paramount prefers to back developments in 3D.

1954
Howard Hughes buys RKO Pictures for US$23,489,478.

1955
The initial trial installation of electronic telephone switching for Morris, Illinois is announced. Recorded announcements of disconnects and changed numbers will be used in some small dial offices.
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1799
Étienne Gaspard Robertson is granted a patent for his Phantascope magic lantern. The device incorporates a mechanism to maintain focus while the image is tracked forward and backward to change an image’s size.

1845
Stephen Perry of the rubber manufacturing company Messers Perry and Co. of London first patents the rubber band. He conceived of the device after experimentally slicing up rubber bottles that had been manufactured by South and Central America natives and brought to England by sailors.

1898
John Philip Holland demonstrates the first practical submarine off Staten Island, New York. The ship remains submerged for one hundred minutes.

1950
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley announces the discovery of radioactive element 98, “Californium.” It was produced by bombarding Curium-242 with Helium-ions.
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1802
The United States Army Corps of Engineers is established by an act of Congress authorizing President Thomas Jefferson to “organize and establish a Corps of Engineers … that the said Corps … shall be stationed at West Point in the State of New York and shall constitute a Military Academy.”

1867
Joseph Lister publishes an article on his discovery of antiseptic surgery in the medical journal The Lancet. The article is the first of a series in which Lister applies Pasteur’s theory that the micro-organisms which cause gangrene might be inhibited chemically. In the articles, he details his successful use of Phenol (carbolic acid) on medical instruments, surgical incisions, and wound dressings to reduce infections.

1919
The wireless telephone is invented, enabling pilots to communicate in flight with each other and the ground for the first time.
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1493
Christopher Columbus returns to Spain from his first voyage to the new world, which began on August 3, 1492. The return comes after spending a week in Portugal, where his ship had been blown by a storm during the return trip.

1915
The English Divisional Court of Appeal rules in the case of Ellis v North Metropolitan Theatres Ltd. that local authorities do not have the right to ban cinema exhibitions on Sundays.

1959
At Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, the first US atomic reactor built specifically for medical research, the Brookhaven Medical Research Reactor (BMRR), reaches criticality. The reactor will be decommissioned in December 2000.

1960
The National Observatory at Kitt Peak, Arizona is dedicated. Housing twenty-three telescopes, it is the largest and most diverse gathering of astronomical instruments in the world. Visit the official Kitt Peak National Observatory website.
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1794
Eli Whitney patents the Cotton Gin, a mechanism to separate cotton seeds from the plant’s usable fiber. Before the Cotton Gin, removing seeds from cotton was a task largely accomplished by slave labor. The invention, which makes it possible for a single person to clean fifty pounds of cotton in a day, will revolutionize the textile industry and significantly decrease the demand for slave labor in the US. Many historians will later mark this invention as the beginning of the industrial revolution.

1839
Sir John Herschel uses the word “photography” for the first time in history during a lecture given to the Royal Society in London.

1891
The construction of the first submarine telephone cable across the English Channel is completed.

1915
The first issue of the Sunday Pictorial, the first newspaper to make extensive use of photography, is launched in the UK.
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1781
William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus, but mistakes it for a comet. It is the first planet discovered with the aid of a telescope. By 1787, Herschel will also discover the Uranian satellites Titania and Oberon, which will later be named by his son, John Herschel.

1882
The zoopraxiscope, an optical apparatus invented by Eadweard J. Muybridge to exhibit photographs of moving animals, is demonstrated at the Royal Institution to the Prince of Wales. The zoopraxiscope projects images from rotating glass disks in rapid succession to give the impression of motion. It is essentially the first movie projector, with a sequence of stop-motion silhouette images hand-painted around the edge of a circular glass disk, which is then loaded onto the projector’s side vertically position. In 1893, Muybridge will present his invention at “Zoopraxigraphical Hall” during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
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