Epic poems are so challenging, only true geeks can read them these days. Not me, I pretend to have a life. Homer (the Greek one) wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey back in the 9th or 8th century B.C. telling of the Trojan War and the hero Odysseus’ ten year journey home. Both legendary stories have helped define much of Greek mythology and influenced modern storytelling with its epic scale (a defining characteristic of epic poems). From the ancient Aeneid by Rome’s Virgil to the terrible Troy movie (oh Brad Pitt, how far you’ve fallen), Homer’s poems still resonate because people still like war and monsters. It’s truly timeless storytelling.

Leonardo da Vinci has many great accomplishments, though few argue his contributions to the Da Vinci Code outweigh all else. The painter, inventor, and just plain geek-extraordinaire created some of the most famous paintings in history, the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, and contributed to the studies of aviation, engineering, and even plate tectonics. Sure, a casual glance might make these revolutionary and ahead-of-their time predictions seem important, but when you think about how many copies the Da Vinci Code has sold compared to Da Vinci’s own works, the lazy guy only has 15 paintings in existence, then you really see who’s going to stand the test of time.

Writing utensils have existed since 3000 BCE, a credit to humankind’s long standing need to pass notes in class. Graphite was used for centuries, along with quills and ink, for writing and drawing. Pencils evolved around the 18th century when Italian wood carved surrounded graphite with, shockingly, wood. Erasers weren’t attached until the mid-19th century. John J Loud filed the first patent on what would evolve into the ballpoint pen in 1888. It took another 50 years when László Bíró invented a working ballpoint pen and licensed his creation to the British Royal Air Force.

Medieval hero and unlucky lover, King Arthur has been a non-stop rerun since the 6th century. Arthur’s mythology has been molded by dozens of writers of the centuries, best defined in 1485 with Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur. Merlin, Morgan Le Fay, and the sword Excalibur have spread their public domain web on the vastness of fantasy literature, from Broadway musicals to Dr. Doom’s girlfriend to a bizarre cadre of European mutant super heroes.

Life without electricity would suck. No TV, console video games, my laptop would only last 2 hours, and I’d have to hand wash my dishes. Thankfully Benjamin Franklin’s mommy never told him not to fly a kite in a thunderstorm, otherwise we’d still be lighting candles to be backlights for our Dell Printing Presses. Thomas Edison captured electricity into a light bulb that further freed man’s reliance on fire, allowing us to get to work on inventing that wheel.

The printed word may be soon dead thanks to texting and Twitter, but for more than 500 years, the print word ruled all. Johann Gutenberg introduced the world to the printing press in 1439, allowing a single copy of text to be reproduced several times at breakneck speeds, especially when raced against the blind monks with carpel tunnel syndrome who had to hand copy every book, pamphlet, and cocktail napkin. Books once cost as much as an entire farm, but with the printing press, you could own a book for the cost a drunk mule. As the printing press became faster, books became cheaper, newspapers moved from stone tablets to tabloids, and the American Revolution happened because of the newest invention, the typo.

Science fiction has two daddies. The prolific writer Herbert George Wells’ is credited, with fellow author Jules Verne, with fathering science fiction. Wells’ classic novels include War of the Worlds, Time Machine, and the Invisible Man all of which have contributed to our stereotyping of Martians as invaders, the future as destructive, and invisible people as creepy. Wells also had a fascination with recreational wargames, penning Little Wars, the predecessor to modern day miniature war games.

The impact of movies on geek culture is hard to argue. If we didn’t have Star Wars to obsess about, we’d be bored out of our glasses. Thankfully, movies were invented in the late 19th century as a mishmash of technologies converged into movie magic. Moving pictures existed for centuries before in the form of sequentially ordered pictures like flip books. A two-second film by Louis Le Prince called “Roundhay Garden Scene” is considered the earliest surviving motion picture, though evidence of earlier examples exists. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, working for Thomas Edison, is credited with developing with coming up with the earliest commercially viable technology for movie making leading to something called the movie industry.

The invention of the telephone spreads credit among several figures, according to Wikipedia, Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison. Each contributed some piece of crediting telemarketers. Bell has been credited with making the first audible telephone call in 1986, calling his friend Watson saying “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.” From then on, Watson screened all his phone calls.

One of the earliest and most complete stories from ancient civilization, the Epic of Gilgamesh follows the adventures of King Gilgamesh on his quest for immortality. The Sumarian epic is likely based on the mythological hero-king from the 27th century BCE, collected into literary form on several giant clay tablets around the 7th century BCE. The portable version came several centuries later when commuters to ancient Egypt wanted reading material for their journey.