The Great Geek Manual

1701
The Collegiate School of Connecticut, later renamed Yale University is chartered. It will become the first U.S. school to award a doctorate degree.

1779
In Manchester, England, the Luddite riots erupt in reaction to mechanized looms that were installed in local factories for spinning cotton.

1855
Isaac Singer patents the sewing machine motor, which will go on to revolutionize the textile industry. (US No. 13,661)

1872
A traveling dry goods salesman named Aaron Montgomery Ward launches the world’s first mail-order general merchandise business. Ward launches mail-order business out of concern over the plight of many rural Midwest Americans, who, Ward believes, are being overcharged and under-served by the small town retailers on which they had to rely for their general merchandise. The 1871 Great Chicago Fire destroyed the initial inventory of Montgomery Ward & Company, which Ward founded with two two fellow employees and a total of US$1,600 in capital. His first catalog, which will be the first to be called a “Wish Book,” will list 163 products, and Ward initially writes all of the catalog’s copy himself. The catalog will rapidly grow in popularity, so much so that it will soon be imitated by other enterprising merchants, most notably Richard Warren Sears, who published his first general catalog in 1896. Montgomery Ward will grow into one of the largest retailers in the U.S., but its sales will decline through the late twentieth century, forcing the chain to close in early 2001.

1876
The first two-way telephone conversation over outdoor wires takes place between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson over the telegraph line linking Boston and East Cambridge. Three days earlier, in Boston, Bell’s two-way telephone test of conversation with Watson had been the world’s first two-way telephone conversation in doors.

1890
Though there will never be any conclusive evidence of the event, this is reportedly the date on which French electrical engineer Clément Ader becomes the first person to successfully fly an airplane, though it bears little resemblance to later airplanes. His steam-powered plane, “Eole,” will only fly for a fifty meter length, and unlike the Wright Brothers’ future flight, it rises only a few inches off the ground. The flight ends when the bat-like contraption collides with trees at the end of the testing field. It is certain that Ader coined the French word “avion” for aircraft. Some believe it to be an acronym for “Appareil Volant Imitant les Oisaux Naturels” (Flying Machine Imitating Natural Birds).

1894
The first “magic lantern” feature is shown at the Carbon Studio in New York City. Magic lanterns are early precursors to latter-day cinemas.

1928
John Logie Baird first demonstrates his television system to BBC officials, who aren’t impressed.

1933
An unpredicted meteor shower is seen from Europe. A hundred “shooting stars” a minute are reported by the Soviet Pulkovo Observatory, near Leningrad. Dr. W.J. Fisher, a Harvard astronomer, identifies the Giacobini-Zinner comet as the source of the shower. This minor periodic comet only caused sparse meteor showers in the past and was otherwise of little note to astronomers.

1936
The BBC officially announces that it will begin television service on November 2.

1938
The radio altimeter is first demonstrated in New York by Bell Labs. The device gives pilots an accurate altitude reading of an aircraft above the local terrain by bouncing radio signals off the ground, thus changing aviation forever.

1947
The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation enters into a contract to develop the first electronic digital computer with the ability to store programs, BINary Automatic Computer (BINAC), for the Northrop Aircraft Company. It will be the first computer built commercially, though it will be the only computer that will ever built by the company before it becomes a division of the Remington Rand Corp. The BINAC will be both faster and more powerful than the more famous ENIAC despite being powered by only seven hundred vacuum tubes, rather than ENIAC’s eighteen thousand. The system will feature capacity of 512 words and will cost US$278,000.

The first telephone conversation made between a telephone on an aeroplane and a telephone in a car is place in Wilmington, Delaware.

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