The Great Geek Manual

1520
The first public burning of books is held in Louvain, Netherlands.

1806
Ralph Wedgewood patents carbon paper, which he describes as an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings” in London, England.

1826
The first railway in the United States opens in Quincy, Massachusetts.

1849
Author Edgar Allan Poe dies at 5:00am, four days after being found delirious in a Baltimore, Maryland gutter.

1868
Cornell University opens in Ithaca, New York. Four hundred twelve students enroll for its first term, a record among American universities.

1913
Once again, Henry Ford overcomes the resistance of many of his own stockholders with a revolutionary method of building automobiles. Ford, who for ten years has advocated manufacturing the greatest number of cars to sell at the lowest price, can now assemble one of his Model Ts at its Highland Park plant within three hours. Ford himself can build an entire car with his hands, but in his factory, automobiles are manufactured on an assembly line. One worker attached doors, another fenders, another the engine. Ford projects that his assembly line will turn out more than 250,000 Model T’s in the first year alone.

1931
Short-exposure infrared photography is first demonstrated by researchers at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York. The first short-exposure infrared photo taken is of a group of fifty Kodak engineers in a totally dark room flooded with invisible infrared light for the purpose.

1952
Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland are granted the first patent for the bar code system. (US No. 2,612,994) The bar codes consist of a series of concentric rings that form a bull’s eye. Read the patent online.

Raphael Robinson discovers the 664-digit Mersenne prime M2203, which can be expressed as 2^2,203 – 1, using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). The number will be the largest prime number discovered for almost two whole days, until Robinson’s unprecedented discovery of a fifth Mersenne prime in a single year.

1954
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) demonstrates its first calculator to rely completely on transistors. The device consumes only five percent of the power of a comparable electronic calculator. Three years later, IBM will introduce the resulting consumer model, the IBM 608, which will be the world’s first all-transistor commercial calculator. Equipped with more than 3,000 germanium transistors, the 608 is capable of storing forty nine-digit numbers and performing 4,500 additions per second. It will ultimately prove too expensive to be a commercial success. However, its release will set off a number of changes across the industry, beginning with a dramatic reduction in the price of transistor, which, at the time of this demonstration, are markedly more expensive than vacuum tubes.