The Great Geek Manual

1882
Leroy B. Firman receives the first patent for a telephone switchboard. (U.S. No. 252,576) The invention will play a fundamental role in the success of the telephone industry.

Thomas Edison is issued a patent for the carbon microphone for the telephone. (US No. 252,442) The microphone consists of a conducting material, such as carbon, held between metal cups or rings attached to the telephone mouthpiece’s diaphragm. Sound waves cause the diaphragm to change the pressure on the carbon button, which, in turn, causes variation in the electric current passing through the carbon button. The variations correspond to the amplitude and pitch of whatever sound is passing through the mouthpiece.

1938
Howard Aiken submits a formal proposal for the construction of an automatic calculating machine, later known as the Harvard Mark I, to Havard University President J.B. Conant. The proposal includes a history of the computers built by Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith and a discussion of the features that would be required in a machine intended for scientific calculations.
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Facts are so last century. In the Internet-dominated world, networked facts have pretty much taken over. The old-fashioned view of the fact is that it is an irreducible atom of knowledge. The way information is organised on the Web means that everything is connected and it is only as a result of the links between elements of information that facts come into being. Weinberger calls these configurations of linked data, in which two ideas are connected by a relationship, ‘triples’ [...]

The old metaphor for knowledge was architectural and archaeological: foundations, bricks. Now we have clouds…

With the new medium of knowledge — the Internet — knowledge not only takes on properties of that medium but also lives at the level of the network. So rather than simply trying to cultivate smart people, we also need to be looking above the level of the individual to the network in which he or she is embedded to see where knowledge lives.

- “Networked facts are the new black” by Emma Lindley, January 4, 2012.
First posted by RSA blogs.

Master Dave just doesn’t feel motivated today. With great power eventually comes great laziness.

1939
The Superman comic strip premieres. The series will run continuously until May 1966, and, at the peak of its popularity, it will run in over three hundred newspapers with an aggregate readership of over twenty million.

1956
The United States government’s automated air defense system, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), is disclosed to the public. The SAGE system connects hundreds of radar stations in Canada and the United States into the first large-scale computer communications network. With the increasing fear of a large-scale attack on the United States, it was evident that the nation’s defense capabilities required an improvement, and the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was commissioned to develop an automated nationwide computer-based air defense system to provide the edge that the nation needed. SAGE was completed in the early sixties, and it revolutionized air defense and civilian air traffic control. In 1979, SAGE will be replaced by Regional Operations Control Centers (ROCC).
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We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

- “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer, December 29, 2011.

1907
Dr. Lee De Forest patents the three-element vacuum tube, the Audion tube. (US No. 841,386) The component can be used as an electrical signal amplifier, most notably in radios.

1913
The first telephone line between Berlin and New York is inaugurated.

1936
In Toledo, Ohio, construction of the first building covered completely in glass is completed for the Owens-Illinois Glass Company.
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We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines. So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

- “The Joy of Quiet” by Pico Iyer, December 29, 2011.

1873
“Celluloid” becomes a registered trademark.

1878
William Henry Preece demonstrates the new telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell to Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight. Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and in 1877, Bell had come to England on his honeymoon, demonstrating his device to telegraph engineers and giving lectures as he traveled. At the conclusion of the demonstration, the Queen, very impressed with the device, orders a phone line installed between Osbourne House and Buckingham Palace.

1914
Henry Ford introduces the first modern assembly line for the Ford Model T when he improves his existing assembly-line operation with the addition of a chain to pull each chassis along. This method of using continuous motion reduces the time is takes to assemble a car from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three minutes.
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