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How to living the Geek life: humor, history, news, and reviews for geeks.
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This Day in Geek History: December 27
1831 At age 22, Charles Darwin embarks from Plymouth harbor aboard the British Naval ship HMS Beagle on what will become a groundbreaking voyage of scientific discovery. The Captain, Robert FitzRoy, will sail to the southern coast of South America t...
This Day in Geek History: December 26
It’s Boxing Day across the Commonwealth of Nations, as well as the first day of Kwanzaa. 1865 The first US patent for a coffee percolator (US No. 51,741) is issued to James H. Mason of Franklin, Massachusetts. 1878 Electric lighting is installe...
This Day in Geek History: December 25
Merry Christmas! 352 The first confirmed celebration of Christmas takes place. 1818 The first performance of “Silent Night” takes place in the Church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria. It was written the day prior. 1939 The characte...
This Day in Geek History: December 24
Christmas Eve! According to Russian folklore, people born on this day of the year are believed to become Werewolves. 1818 The classic Christmas carol, “Silent Night” is composed by Franz Joseph Gruber and Josef Mohr. It will be performed...
This Day in Geek History: December 23
Today is the traditional date for the celebration of Festivus, a fictional holiday introduced by the sitcom Seinfeld. It is also HumanLight, the winter holiday celebrated by American secular humanists. 1672 Astronomer Giovanni Cassini discovers the...
This Day in Geek History: December 20
1879 Thomas Edison privately demonstrates his incandescent light bulb at Menlo Park, in New Jersey. He invented the lamp on October 21, 1879 after thirteen months of experimentation to discover a suitable material for the filament and discovery that...
This Day in Geek History: December 19
1871 Samuel Clemens, better known by the pen name Mark Twain, receives a patent for “An Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Garment Straps,” later known as suspenders. (US No.121,992) 1914 The Cel overlay animation process is paten...
This Day in Geek History: December 18
1839 In New York City, John Draper makes a daguerreotype of the Moon, becoming the first person in the US to photograph a celestial body. 1878 Joseph Swan demonstrates his incandescent light bulb to the Newcastle Chemical Society in northern England....
This Day in Geek History: December 16
December 16th is the birthday of renowned science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke (1917) and Philip K. Dick (1928), as well as authors Peter Dickinson (1927) and Randall Garrett (1927). 1897 The first US submarine to be equipped with an internal com...
This Day in Geek History: December 12
1893 The first US patent for aerial photography is issued to Cornele B. Adams of Augusta, Georgia. (US No. 510,758) His method of photogrammetry can produce a topographic map by means of photographing the same tract of land from different points fr...
This Day in Geek History: December 11
1901 Guglielmo Marconi attempts to transmit a Morse Code signal via radio telegraph across the Atlantic Ocean, from Poldhu in Cornwall, England to Percy Wright Page in Signal Hill, St. John’s, Newfoundland. The attempt fails, but the following...
This Day in Geek History: December 10
1684 De motu corporum in gyrum (Latin: “On the motion of bodies in an orbit”), written by Isaac Newton and derived from Kepler’s laws, is read aloud to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley. 1799 A second legal definition of the metre ...
This Day in Geek History: December 4
1962 The United States performs the last atmospheric nuclear test 69,000 feet over Johnston Island. 1974 Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments presents what had been the world’s first miniature electronic calculator to the Smithsonian Insti...
This Day in Geek History: November 28
1868 Thomas Edison of Boston, Massachusetts applies for his first patent. The patent is for an “electrographic vote recorder,” which will enable a legislators to register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to the r...
This Day in Geek History: November 20
1906 A US patent is issued to inventor Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, an electrical engineer, for the crystal detector, one of the first devices widely used for receiving radio broadcasts, until the later development of the later triode vacuum tube. Hi...
This Day in Geek History: November 18
1477 William Caxton issues his first dated printed book in England, Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (”Sayings of the Philosophers). Caxton will produce approximately one hundred copies of the work. 1879 Eugen Skladanowsky presents the ...
This Day in Geek History: November 17
1947 The first transistor, a solid-state amplifier made of germanium, plastic, and gold, is invented by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen in a series of experiments conducted between November 17 and December 23. 1960 Customer trials of the world’...
This Day in Geek History: November 16
1904 John Ambrose Fleming invents the vacuum tube, otherwise known as the thermionic valve. The valve consists of a carbon or tungsten filament lamp with a metal plate insulated from the filament and a wire through the glass wall of the bulb to a th...
This Day in Geek History: November 13
1907 French inventor Paul Cornu flies the first helicopter. The “flight” carries the vehicle roughly one foot off the ground and only lasts twenty seconds, but it is nonetheless be marked as the first flight of the first helicopter. 1928...
This Day in Geek History: November 12
1799 American astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass makes the first written record of a meteor shower in the US, the Leonids meteor shower, from a ship off the Florida Keys. He writes, “In every instant the meteors were as numerous as the stars,...
This Day in Geek History: November 9
1842 The first US design patent is issued for typefaces and borders to George Bruce of New York City. (US No. D1) This new form of patent was authorized by Act of Congress on August 29, 1842. 1921 Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physi...
This Day in Geek History: November 8
1602 The Bodleian Library is established at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. 1804 The first US patent for a separable electric attachment plug is issued to Harvey Hubbell of Bridgeport, Connecticut. (US No. 774,250) It screws into a lig...
This Day in Geek History: November 7
1492 The Ensisheim Meteorite, the first meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the Earth in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France at near noon. 1631 Pierre Gassendi first observes the transit of a planet. Johannes Ke...
This Day in Geek History: November 6
1572 A supernova is observed in the constellation known as Cassiopeia by Wolfgang Schüler. It appears as a new star, adjacent to the fainter star seen in the middle of the constellation. Although Schüler isn’t the first one to see it, he wi...
This Day in Geek History: November 4
1869 The first issue of the scientific journal Nature, edited by astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer, is first published. The first issue includes articles on astronomy, education, moths, plants, an obituary for chemist Thomas Graham, paleontology, and se...
This Day in Geek History: November 3
1892 In LaPorte, Indiana, The Cushman Telephone Company (the Bell Telephone Company) launches the first automatic telephone exchange using the “step-by-step machine” invented by Almon Brown Strowger with about seventy-five subscribers. T...
This Day in Geek History: November 2
1920 Westinghouse Electric launches radio station KDKA, which will later come to be commonly cited as being the world’s first commercial radio station. 1931 The DuPont Company, of Wilmington, Delaware, announces the first practical synthetic r...
This Day in Geek History: November 1
1848 First railway bookstall is opened at the Euston station, in London by W.H. Smith. 1879 Thomas Edison patents the electric lamp. 1884 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is adopted universally at a meeting of the International Meridian Conference in Washin...
This Day in Geek History: October 31
Happy Halloween! 1912 The Musketeers of Pig Alley, directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Elmer Booth, Lillian Gish, Clara T. Bracy, and Walter Miller, debuts in the US. It is the first gangster film. IMDB listing 1926 Magician Harry Houdini dies ...
This Day in Geek History: October 30
In the United States, today is National Candy Corn Day as well as Mischief Night, which, is also known as Devil’s Night in Michigan. 1888 John L. Loud of Weymouth, Massachusetts is granted the first US patent for a ballpoint pen. (US No. 392,0...
