The Great Geek Manual

1868
Thomas Edison patents his first invention, an electric voice machine.

1881
David H. Houston, a Scottish immigrant, is granted the first patent for roll film for cameras.

1887
Dorr E. Felt, of Chicago, Illinois, is granted a patent for the Comptometer, which is the first practical key-driven calculator. He experimented with an adding device that he built in a “macaroni box.” (US No. 371,496) The comptometer, an adder, displays a single register of results. Subtraction is carried out by nines-complement arithmetic, and multiplication by repeated addition. The comptometer will become commercially successful and be widely used in business. Read the patent.

1907
International Business Machines (IBM), which will go on to become one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world, applies for its first U.S. patent. (US No. 998,631) The patent will be granted on July 25, 1911.

1939
United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt receives the Einstein-Szilárd letter, in which notable physicists warn Roosevelt of the possibility of Nazi Germany conducting research on nuclear fission in an attempt to create an atomic bomb. They urge Roosevelt to launch a similar research program before it’s too late. The letter was written by Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, but it will receive considerable national attention because it was also signed by renowned scientist and media icon Albert Einstein. The letter will arguably become the genesis of the Manhattan Project, and it will later become legendary when it’s revealed by scientist Linus Pauling that, by the end of his life, signing this letter had become one of Einstein’s greatest regrets. Read the letter at HyperTextbook.com.

1950
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issues the first license to broadcast television in color to CBS after an ad hoc National Television System Committee (NTSC) is formed, the initials of which are applied to the system. However, RCA will successfully dispute the license and block CBS from putting it into effect.

1957
The Jodrell Bank radio telescope, the world’s largest radio telescope, designed by Sir Bernard Lovell, is opened in Cheshire, England by Manchester University. Though the telescope is popularly known for tracking and communicating with man-made satellites, its primary function is to investigate cosmic rays. It will play an important role in the research of gravitational lenses, masers, meteors, pulsars, and quasars, and it will be heavily involved in tracking space probes even later.

The orbit of the last stage of the R-7 Semyorka rocket carrying Sputnik I is first successfully calculated on an IBM 704 computer by teams at The M.I.T. Computation Center and Operation Moonwatch, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1958
NASA launches its first spacecraft, the lunar probe Pioneer 1 on a mission to study the ionizing radiation, cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and micrometeorites in the vicinity of the Earth. It will later fall back to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere.

1962
International Business Machines (IBM) introduces the IBM 1440 data processing system, featuring a major achievement in data storage technology, the IBM 1311 disk storage drive with disk packs. IBM proclaims it is “one of the most important new products we have ever announced.” The 1311 is about the size and shape of a top-loading washing machine and stores two million characters on a removable IBM 1316 disk pack. Each disk pack is four inches high, weighs ten 10 pounds (4.5 kg), and contained six disks fourteen inches in diameter with ten recording surfaces.