The Great Geek Manual

1595
Many historians believe that this is the date on which the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet is first performed.

1802
John J. Beckley became the first Librarian of the U.S. Congress. Visit the official website of the Library of Congress.

1845
The Edgar Allen Poe poem “The Raven” is published in the New York Evening Mirror for the first time anywhere.
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1807
Pall Mall in London becomes the first street in the world to be lit by gaslight.

1878
The first commercial telephone exchange in the world is installed in New Haven, Connecticut to serve twenty-one subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. For the first six weeks, the exchange won’t be operated at night. The first experimental message sent over the system is “Ahoy, ahoy.” The first operator is George W. Coy. A Bell franchise had been awarded for New Haven and Middlesex Counties to Coy on November 3, 1877, paid for by incorporating the system into a company with two financial partners. Coy improvised the first crude switchboard, building it from carriage bolts, handles from teapot lids and bustle wire. The concept of interconnecting phone wires had been tried before by three other men, but none of them had operated commercially. Click here to view the original patent application for the telephone exchange.

The Yale Daily News becomes the first daily college newspaper in the United States.
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1785
The University of Georgia, the first public university in the United States, is founded. Visit the official University of Georgia website.

1880
Thomas Edison receives a patent for “an electric lamp for giving light by incandescence” which he first invented on November 21, 1879. (US No. 223,898) Edison’s invention will have a tremendous impact on the electronics industry. In the course of developing the light bulb, one of Edison’s assistants discovered the flow of energy from one electrode to another in what will later come to be known as the “Edison effect,” which will later be fundamental principal of the electron tube, which will be, in turn, the foundation of electronics industry. To view a high resolution scan of the patent application, or to read a transcript of the patent application, visit US News online.
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1697
Isaac Newton receives and solves Jean Bernoulli’s brachistochrone problem. The swiss mathematician Bernouilli had challenged his colleagues to solve it within six months. Newton not only solved the problem before going to bed the night after the challenge had been issued, but in doing so, he invented the new branch of mathematics called “calculus of variations.” Newton will publish the solution anonymously, but the brilliant work makes his identity obvious, and when Bernoulli saw the solution he is famously quoted as saying, “We recognize the lion by his claw.”

1886
Karl Benz patents the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. The first public test-drive of the actual vehicle will be on July 3, 1886 in Mannheim, Germany. The one-cylinder engine has a top speed of 10 mph (16km/h).
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1881
Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell found the Oriental Telephone Company, the world’s first telephone company.

1915
Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates the first transcontinental telephone service in the United States with a phone call placed from New York City to his colleague Dr. Thomas Watson in San Francisco, California. Bell, age 68, makes the ceremonial first call and speaks the first complete sentence transmitted by telephone across a continent, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you!” The circuit consists of 2,500 tons of copper wire, 130,000 poles, and three vacuum tube repeaters.
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1925
A two minute long motion picture of a solar eclipse is recorded by the United States Navy from the dirigible Los Angeles from an elevation of about 4,500 feet, about nineteen miles east of Montauk Point, Long Island, New York. It is the first time a dirigible has been used for astronomical observations in the U.S.

1948
International Business Machines (IBM) dedicates the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), also known as the Poppa, at the company’s world headquarters in New York City. The SSEC is the first computer to combine electronic computation with stored instructions, and it will be the first computer to run a stored program and the last large electromechanical computers to be built. It contains 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays and occupies three sides of a 1,800 square foot room. Among it’s most notable accomplishments will be the calculation of a table of the Moon’s positions which will be used to plot the course of the 1969 Apollo flight.
It will be decommissioned in 1952.
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1959
Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments conceives the idea of an integrated circuit. In 1968, Noyce will found Intel with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove.

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Ed O’Neil scores a record-setting 252,114,350 points playing the Williams Electronics arcade game Robotron at the Outer Limits arcade in Durham, North Carolina. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

The action television series The A-Team premieres on the NBC network with the episode “Mexican Slayride.” The series will become a cultural icon of the eighties, garnering a significant cult following. The series will run for ninety-eight episodes over five seasons. TV.com entry
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1889
The Columbia Phonograph Company is formed in Washington, D.C. as a successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. The company will go on to become the first record company to produce pre-recorded records rather than just blank cylinders.

1908
Edouard Bélin uses his Bélinographe, a system able to send remote photographs over telephone and telegraphic networks, to transmit a photograph 1,700km from Paris to Bordeaux to Lyon then back. The historical event takes twenty-two minutes.
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