Ernie Cline's book Ready Player One is set in a dystopian American future where everyone is searching for treasure in an online universe.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Ernie Cline is living the geek dream. The Fanboys screenwriter, who once worked in tech support to pay the bills, has turned a love of all things nerd into a full-time gig scrawling yarns about, well, all things nerd.

After he spent a roller coaster couple of years getting the Star Wars-steeped script he wrote for Fanboys made into a film, he decided his skills might be put to better use as a fiction writer.

Now, he’s on a whole n...

1877: Thomas Edison suggests using the word hello as a telephone greeting. The idea catches on.

Edison invented a lot of things, for sure, but one thing he didn’t invent was the telephone. The brass ring for that one goes to Alexander Graham Bell, although Elisha Gray filed his patent for a similar device the same day. But they never called it Ma Gray, did they?

Edison’s contribution to the “improvement in telegraphy” was giving us the salutation now used the world over, in one form or another. Bell’s famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone — “Mr. Watson, come here. I want...