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Ursula Franklin: The Real World of Technology

I’m not a fan girl for much, but Ursula Franklin is astonishing. I adore her. These quotes are from her lectures “The Real World of Technology”, given in 1989 as part of the Massey Lectures, an annual series exploring contemporary issues. In these lectures Ursula Franklin examines the connection between technology and culture, and how it impacts us, as humans, in a way that is both accessible and brilliant. These lectures were later published as a book of the same name. 

Complete Lectures: Audio | Text 

Technological Advances and Applications: 1921 – now

Historical dating of this type is challenging. There are often multiple patents and a chain of inventors and scientists behind each innovation, occasionally reaching the same solution simultaneously. Or there may be some debate about which product qualifies as, say, the first “pocket-sized” cell phone. The dates shown reflect either when the public would have encountered these technologies in their day-to-day lives or when a large-scale project, like GPS, was initiated. There were definitely some surprises here for me, from indoor plumbing to e-cigarettes. 

1920s

1921 Traffic light

  • The first four-way, three-colour traffic light was created by William Potts in Detroit, Michigan. His design was the first to include an amber ‘caution’ light along with red and green lights. 

1921 Insulin

  • Insulin was the first peptide hormone discovered. Frederick Banting and Charles Best, working in the laboratory of John Macleod at the University of Toronto, were the first to isolate insulin from dog pancreas in 1921.

1921 Wirephoto

  • Western Union transmitted its first photograph in 1921. AT&T followed in 1924, and RCA began sending Radiophotos in 1926.

1921 3D movie

  • The earliest confirmed 3D film shown to an out-of-house audience was The Power of Love, which premiered at the Ambassador Hotel Theater in Los Angeles on September 27, 1922.


1921 Lie detector

  • The instrument, with its diverse collection of physiological indices, became known as the polygraph, which Larson then fully developed for forensic use in 1921, and applied it in police investigations at the Berkeley Police Department.


1922 Technicolor 

  • The Toll of the Sea (1922), the first generally released Technicolor film, and the first to use a two-strip subtractive color process

1924 Execution by lethal gas

  • Gee Jon (Chinese: 朱家休 c. 1895 – February 8, 1924) was a Chinese national who was the first person in the United States to be executed by lethal gas.

1924 Spiral bound notebook

  • In 1924, the spiral notebook was said to have made its debut. Edward Podosek, an English inventor with many patents, is often credited for the invention. Although he may not have been the inventor of the spiral notebook, he was the first person known to have used them to record information.

1925 Diesel locomotive 

  • The first successful diesel engines used diesel–electric transmissions, and by 1925 a small number of diesel locomotives of 600 hp (450 kW) were in service in the United States. 

1925 Dynamic Loud Speaker

  • The moving-coil principle commonly used today in speakers was patented in 1925 by Edward W. Kellogg and Chester W. Rice. The key difference between previous attempts and the patent by Rice and Kellogg is the adjustment of mechanical parameters to provide a reasonably flat frequency response.

1925 Modern Planetarium 


1926 Liquid-fueled rocket

  • Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) is recognized as the father of American rocketry and as one of the pioneers in the theoretical exploration of space. Goddard dreamt of exploring the Earth’s upper atmosphere and, ultimately, space using rocket propulsion. Although his work was revolutionary, he received little public support for his research. Following his theoretical work on the physics of rocketry, he began experimenting with different rocket engines. Believing that liquid propellants offered the most promise, he successfully launched the first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, on a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. His more advanced work and patents allowed American scientists to build, test, and fly more advanced rockets at the dawn of the Space Age.

1926 Yagi Antenna 

  • A Yagi–Uda antenna, or simply Yagi antenna, is a directional antenna consisting of two or more parallel resonant antenna elements in an end-fire array; these elements are most often metal rods (or discs) acting as half-wave dipoles. Yagi–Uda antennas consist of a single driven element connected to a radio transmitter or receiver (or both) through a transmission line, and additional passive radiators with no electrical connection, usually including one so-called reflector and any number of directors. It was invented in 1926 by Shintaro Uda of Tohoku Imperial University, Japan, with a lesser role played by his boss Hidetsugu Yagi.

1926 Three-point hitch 

  • Harry Ferguson patented the three-point linkage for agricultural tractors in Britain in 1926. He had long been a champion of the importance of rigid attachment of the plough to the tractor. The idea did not originate with him, but he led its popularization over many years of development, explaining, and selling.

1927 Quartz clock

  • In October 1927 the first quartz clock was described and built by Joseph W. Horton and Warren A. Marrison at Bell Telephone Laboratories. The 1927 clock used a block of crystal, stimulated by electricity, to produce pulses at a frequency of 50,000 cycles per second. A submultiple controlled frequency generator then divided this down to a usable, regular pulse that drove a synchronous motor.

1928 Iron lung 

  • The concept of external negative pressure ventilation was introduced by John Mayow in 1670. The first widely used device was the iron lung, developed by Philip Drinker and Louis Shaw in 1928. Initially used for coal gas poisoning treatment, the iron lung gained fame for treating respiratory failure caused by polio in the mid-20th century.

1928 Fluorocarbons

  • By 1930, General Motors and Du Pont formed the Kinetic Chemical Company to produce Freon, and by 1935, over 8 million refrigerators utilizing R-12 were sold by Frigidaire and its competitors. In 1932, Carrier began using R-11 in the worlds first self-contained home air conditioning unit known as the “atmospheric cabinet”. As a result of CFCs being largely non-toxic, they quickly became the coolant of choice in large air-conditioning systems. Public health codes in cities were revised to designate chlorofluorocarbons as the only gases that could be used as refrigerants in public buildings.
  • Growth in CFCs continued over the following decades leading to peak annual sales of over 1 billion USD with greater than 1 million metric tonnes being produced annually. It wasn’t until 1974 that it was first discovered by two University of California chemists, Professor F. Sherwood Rowland and Dr. Mario Molina, that the use of chlorofluorocarbons were causing a significant depletion in atmospheric ozone concentrations. This initiated the environmental effort which eventually resulted in the enactment of the Montreal Protocol.

1928  Bubble gum

  • Chewing gum has a history that spans as far back as the ancient Greeks, who chewed the resin from mastic trees. But it wasn’t until 1928 that Walter Diemer happened upon just the right gum recipe to make the very first bubble gum, a special type of chewing gum that allows the chewer to blow big pink bubbles

1928 Commercially available TV

  • General Electric’s experimental station in Schenectady, New York, on the air sporadically since January 13, 1928, was able to broadcast reflected-light, 48-line images via shortwave as far as Los Angeles, and by September was making four television broadcasts weekly. It is considered to be the direct predecessor of current television station WRGB. The Queen’s Messenger, a one-act play broadcast on September 11, 1928, was the world’s first live drama on television.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television 

1929 Frozen food

  • From 1929, Clarence Birdseye introduced “flash freezing” to the American public. Birdseye first became interested in food freezing during fur-trapping expeditions to Labrador in 1912 and 1916, where he saw the natives use natural freezing to preserve foods. A 1920s hunting trip to Canada, where he witnessed the traditional methods of the indigenous Inuit, directly inspired Birdseye’s food preserving method.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_food

1930 Car radio

  • Despite these hurdles, the allure of entertainment on the go was strong. In 1930, the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation (later known as Motorola) introduced the Motorola, the first commercially successful car radio. Priced at around $110 (equivalent to about $1,700 today), it was a luxury item that quickly became a must-have for car enthusiasts.

  • https://taselectronics.com/blog/the-evolution-of-car-audio/

 

1930 Electronic razor

  • The first person to receive a patent for a razor powered by electricity was John Francis O’Rourke, a New York civil engineer, with his US patent 616554 filed in 1898. The first working electric razor was invented in 1915 by German engineer Johann Bruecker. Others followed suit, such as the American Col. Jacob Schick, considered to be the father of the modern electric razor, who patented the first electric razor in 1930.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shaver 

 

1930 Scotch tape 

 

1931 Strobe light

  • The origin of strobe lighting dates to 1931, when Harold Eugene “Doc” Edgerton employed a flashing lamp to make an improved stroboscope for the study of moving objects, eventually resulting in dramatic photographs of objects such as bullets in flight.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strobe_light 

 

1931 Differential analyzer

  • In 1931, Vannevar Bush completed work on his most significant invention, the differential analyzer, a precursor to the modern computer. It used electrical motors to drive shafts and gears that represented terms in complex equations, and was invaluable to scientists and engineers in fields as diverse as ballistics, acoustics, and atomic physics. The differential analyzer significantly reduced the time and effort required to carry out such calculations and opened the eyes of many observers to the enormous possibilities of computers.

  • https://www.invent.org/inductees/vannevar-bush 

 

1931 Air conditioning

  • In 1931, H.H. Schultz and J.Q. Sherman developed what would become the most common type of individual room air conditioner: one designed to sit on a window ledge. The units went on sale in 1932 at US$10,000 to $50,000 (the equivalent of $200,000 to $1,200,000 in 2024.) A year later, the first air conditioning systems for cars were offered for sale. Chrysler Motors introduced the first practical semi-portable air conditioning unit in 1935, and Packard became the first automobile manufacturer to offer an air conditioning unit in its cars in 1939.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioning 

 

1933 Electron microscope

 

1933 Lightweight wheelchair 

  • In 1933 Harry C. Jennings Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair. Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturer of wheelchairs. Their “X-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Jennings from the men’s folding “camp chairs/stools”, rotated 90 degrees, used in the outdoors and at the mines.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelchair 

 

1933 Sunscreen

 

1933 Hybrid corn 

 

1933 Cake mix

  • The first Duff baking-mix patent was granted on Oct. 24, 1933, but the Duff company had already been tweaking the formula. On June 13, 1933, the company had informed the U.S. Patent Office that it had made a major breakthrough, arguably the biggest, in cake-mix history—a cake mix that required the home baker to add fresh eggs.

  • https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/pop-culture/article/cake-mix-history

 

1934 Tape recorder

  • Semi Joseph Begun was a pioneer of magnetic recording. Begun was born in Danzig, Germany. He graduated in 1929 from the Institute of Technology in Berlin. There, he became interested in magnetic recording. His doctoral thesis and his book were firsts in this field, both entitled Magnetic Recording. In 1934, he built the first tape recorder for broadcasting.

  • https://www.invent.org/inductees/semi-joseph-begun 

 

1935 Synthetic fiber

  • After several years of experimental work, on 28 February 1935, Carothers produced an example of the first wholly synthetic fabric, nylon.

 

1935 Beer can  

  • The Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company was a brewery in Newark, New Jersey founded by Gottfried Krueger and John Laible. Krueger had been brewing beer since the 1858. In 1934, the American Can Company approached the brewery with the idea of canning its beer and offered to install the equipment for free: If the beer flopped, Krueger Brewing Company wouldn’t have to pay.

  • So, on January 24, 1935, Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer were the first beers sold to the public in cans. Canned beer was an immediate success. The public loved it, giving it a 91 percent approval rating.

 

1936 Live TV broadcast

  • In November 1936, a 405-line broadcasting service employing the Emitron began at studios in Alexandra Palace and transmitted from a specially built mast atop one of the Victorian building’s towers. It alternated for a short time with Baird’s mechanical system in adjoining studios, but it was more reliable and visibly superior. This was the world’s first regular high-definition television service. The EMI patent was given in May 1932 to Australian James Dwyer McGee and William Francis Tedham (1902–2000).

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television

 

1936 Lobotomy

  • The procedure was modified and championed by Walter Freeman, who performed the first lobotomy at a mental hospital in the United States in 1936. Its use increased dramatically from the early 1940s and into the 1950s; by 1951, almost 20,000 lobotomies had been performed in the US and proportionally more in the United Kingdom. More lobotomies were performed on women than on men: a 1951 study found that nearly 60% of American lobotomy patients were women, and limited data shows that 74% of lobotomies in Ontario from 1948 to 1952 were performed on female patients.

  • The originator of the procedure, Portuguese neurologist António Egas Moniz, shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine of 1949 for the “discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses”, although the awarding of the prize has been subject to controversy.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy 

 

1936 Helicopter

  • The Focke-Wulf Fw 61 was the first successful, practical, and fully controllable helicopter in 1936, while in 1942, the Sikorsky R-4 became the first helicopter to reach full-scale production. Starting in 1939 and through 1943, Igor Sikorsky worked on the development of the VS-300, which over four iterations, became the basis for modern helicopters with a single main rotor and a single tail rotor.

 

1936 The Hindenburg

  • In 1936, the Zeppelin Company, with the financial aid of Nazi Germany, built the Hindenburg (the LZ 129), the largest airship ever made. Named after the late German president, Paul von Hindenburg, the Hindenburg stretched 804-feet-long and was 135-feet-tall at its widest point. That made the Hindenburg just 78-feet shorter than the Titanic and four times larger than the Good Year blimps.

 

1937 Walkie-Talkie 

  • Handheld two-way radios were developed by the military from backpack radios carried by a soldier in an infantry squad to keep the squad in contact with their commanders. The Canadian inventor Donald Hings was the first to create a portable radio signaling system for his employer CM&S in 1937. He called the system a “packset”, although it later became known as a “walkie-talkie”. In 2001, Hings received the Order of Canada for the device’s significance to the war effort. Hings’ model C-58 “Handie-Talkie” was in military service by 1942, the result of a secret R&D effort that began in 1940.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie 

 

1937 Turbo-jet engine

  • On 16 January 1930 in England, Whittle submitted his first patent (granted in 1932). The patent showed a two-stage axial compressor feeding a single-sided centrifugal compressor. Practical axial compressors were made possible by ideas from A.A. Griffith in a seminal paper in 1926 (“An Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design”). Whittle would later concentrate on the simpler centrifugal compressor only, for a variety of practical reasons. Whittle had his first engine running in April 1937.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_jet_engine

 

1938 Fluorescent lamp

  • Even though the patent issue was not completely resolved for many years, General Electric’s strength in manufacturing and marketing gave it a pre-eminent position in the emerging fluorescent light market. Sales of “fluorescent lumiline lamps” commenced in 1938 when four different sizes of tubes were put on the market. They were used in fixtures manufactured by three leading corporations: Lightolier, Artcraft Fluorescent Lighting Corporation, and Globe Lighting. The Slimline fluorescent ballast’s public introduction in 1946 was by Westinghouse and General Electric and Showcase/Display Case fixtures were introduced by Artcraft Fluorescent Lighting Corporation in 1946. During the following year, GE and Westinghouse publicized the new lights through exhibitions at the New York World’s Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. Fluorescent lighting systems spread rapidly during World War II as wartime manufacturing intensified lighting demand. By 1951 more light was produced in the United States by fluorescent lamps than by incandescent lamps.

 

1938 FM radio

  • FM broadcasting began in the late 1930s, when it was initiated by a handful of early pioneer experimental stations, including W1XOJ/W43B/WGTR (shut down in 1953) and W1XTG/WSRS, both transmitting from Paxton, Massachusetts (now listed as Worcester, Massachusetts); W1XSL/W1XPW/W65H/WDRC-FM/WFMQ/WHCN, Meriden, Connecticut; and W2XMN, KE2XCC, and WFMN, Alpine, New Jersey (owned by Edwin Armstrong himself, closed down upon Armstrong’s death in 1954). Also of note were General Electric stations W2XDA Schenectady and W2XOY New Scotland, New York—two experimental FM transmitters on 48.5 MHz—which signed on in 1939. The two began regular programming, as W2XOY, on November 20, 1940. Over the next few years this station operated under the call signs W57A, W87A and WGFM, and moved to 99.5 MHz when the FM band was relocated to the 88–108 MHz portion of the radio spectrum. General Electric sold the station in the 1980s. Today this station is WRVE.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcasting#History 

 

1938 Freely programmable computer 

  • The Z1 was the first freely programmable computer in the world that used Boolean logic and binary floating-point numbers; however, it was unreliable in operation. It was completed in 1938 and financed completely by private funds. This computer was destroyed in the bombardment of Berlin in December 1943, during World War II, together with all construction plans.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer) 

 

1938 Nuclear fission 

  • Nuclear fission was discovered in December 1938 by chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Robert Frisch. Fission is a nuclear reaction or radioactive decay process in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller, lighter nuclei and often other particles. The fission process often produces gamma rays and releases a very large amount of energy, even by the energetic standards of radioactive decay. Scientists already knew about alpha decay and beta decay, but fission assumed great importance because the discovery that a nuclear chain reaction was possible led to the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission.

 

1938 Ball-point pen

  • Bíró’s innovation successfully coupled viscous ink with a ball-and-socket mechanism that allowed controlled flow while preventing ink from drying inside the reservoir. Bíró filed for a British patent on 15 June 1938.

 

1938 LSD

  • The psychedelic drug (or entheogen) lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was first synthesized on November 16, 1938, by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in the Sandoz laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. It was not until five years later on April 19, 1943, that the psychedelic properties were found.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_LSD

1941 Polyester

  • In 1928 polyester was patented in Britain by the British General Electric Company. Carothers’ project was revived by British scientists Whinfield and Dickson, who patented polyethylene terephthalate (PET) or PETE in 1941.

 

1941 TV commercial 

  • The first official paid television advertisement came out in the United States on July 1, 1941, at 2:30 p.m., over New York station WNBT (subsequently WNBC) before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies. The announcement for Bulova watches, for which the company paid anywhere from $4.00 to $9.00 (reports vary), displayed a WNBT test pattern modified to look like a clock with the hands showing the time. The Bulova logo, with the phrase “Bulova Watch Time”, appeared in the lower right-hand quadrant of the test pattern while the second hand swept around the dial for one minute.

 

1942 Nuclear self-sustaining chain reaction

  • Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1) was the first artificial nuclear reactor. On 2 December 1942, the first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was initiated in CP-1 during an experiment led by Enrico Fermi. The secret development of the reactor was the first major technical achievement for the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create nuclear weapons during World War II.

 

1943 Synthetic rubber 

  • Shortages of natural rubber caused by the advent of World War II led the U.S. government to embark on a program to produce a substitute for this essential material quickly and on a very large scale. There was a real danger the war would be lost unless American scientists and technologists were able to replace almost a million tons of natural rubber with a synthetic substitute within 18 months.

  • To work this industrial and scientific miracle, the U.S. government joined forces with the rubber companies, the young petrochemicals industry, and university research laboratories. The resulting synthetic rubber program was a remarkable scientific and engineering achievement. The partnership of the government, industry, and academe expanded the U.S. synthetic rubber industry from an annual output of 231 tons of general purpose rubber in 1941 to an output of 70,000 tons a month in 1945.

  • The impact on the rubber industry proved to be permanent. Today 70 percent of the rubber used in manufacturing processes is synthetic and a descendant of the general purpose synthetic GR-S (government rubber-styrene) produced by the United States in such great quantity during World War II.

  • https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/syntheticrubber.html 

 

1943 Penicillin

 

1943 Kidney dialysis 

  • Kolff Rotating Drum (1943): The first practical artificial kidney was built during World War II by the Dutch doctor Willem Kolff. The Kolff kidney used a 20-meter long tube of cellophane sausage casing as a membrane. The tube of casing was wrapped around a slatted wooden drum. Run by an electric motor, the drum spun in a tank filled with dialysate.

 

1944 Long range ballistic missile

  • The German V-2 rocket was the world’s first large-scale liquid-propellant rocket vehicle, the first long-range ballistic missile, and the ancestor of today’s large rockets and launch vehicles. Called the A-4 (Aggregat 4) by German Army Ordnance, the rocket was dubbed V-2, or Vergeltungswaffe Zwei (“Vengeance Weapon Two”), by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry when its existence was publicly announced in November 1944, two months after first deployment as a weapon. Launched from mobile platforms, the missile had a maximum range of about 320 km (200 miles) and a one-ton warhead. At least 10,000 concentration camp workers died in the process of manufacturing it.

  • https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/missile-surface-surface-v-2-4/nasm_A19600342000#



1945 DDT

  • By October 1945, DDT was available for public sale in the United States. Although it was promoted by government and industry for use as an agricultural and household pesticide, there were also concerns about its use from the beginning.

 

1945 Atomic bomb

  • Nuclear weapons have only twice been used in warfare, both times by the United States against Japan at the end of World War II. On August 6, 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) detonated a uranium gun-type fission bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” over the Japanese city of Hiroshima; three days later, on August 9, the USAAF detonated a plutonium implosion-type fission bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon 

 

1945 General- purpose computer 

  • ENIAC (/ˈɛniæk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all. It was Turing-complete and able to solve “a large class of numerical problems” through reprogramming.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC 

 

1946 Tupperware

  • Tupperware is an American company that manufactures and internationally distributes preparation, storage, and serving containers for the kitchen and home. It was founded in 1942 by Earl Tupper, who developed his first bell-shaped container and introduced the products to the public in 1946.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupperware 

 

1946 Consumer tape recorder 

  • Development of magnetic tape recorders in the late 1940s and early 1950s is associated with the Brush Development Company and its licensee, Ampex. The equally important development of the magnetic tape medium itself was led by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M) corporation. In 1938, S.J. Begun left Germany and joined the Brush Development Company in the United States, where work continued but attracted little attention until the late 1940s when the company released the very first consumer tape recorder in 1946: the Soundmirror BK 401.

 

1947 Transistor

  • A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals for connection to an electronic circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor’s terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Some transistors are packaged individually, but many more in miniature form are found embedded in integrated circuits. Because transistors are the key active components in practically all modern electronics, many people consider them one of the 20th century’s greatest inventions.

  • Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor (FET) in 1925, but it was not possible to construct a working device at that time. The first working device was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor

 

1947 Defibrillator

  • The external defibrillator, as it is known today, was invented by electrical engineer William Kouwenhoven in 1930. Kouwenhoven studied the relationship between electric shocks and their effects on the human heart when he was a student at Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering. His studies helped him invent a device to externally jump start the heart. He invented the defibrillator and tested it on a dog, like Prévost and Batelli. The first use on a human was in 1947 by Claude Beck, professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University.

 

 

1948 Holography

  • The Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor invented holography in 1948 while he was looking for a way to improve image resolution in electron microscopes.

 

1948 Polaroid Camera  

  • An instant camera is a camera which uses self-developing film to create a chemically developed print shortly after taking the picture. Polaroid Corporation pioneered (and patented) consumer-friendly instant cameras and film, and were followed by various other manufacturers.

  • The invention of commercially viable instant cameras which were easy to use is generally credited to Edwin Land, the inventor of the model 95 Land Camera, widely considered the first commercial instant camera, in 1948, a year after he unveiled instant film in New York City.

 

1949 Radiocarbon dating

  • Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.

  • The method was developed in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago by Willard Libby.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating 

 

1949 Fracking 

  • Hydraulic fracking is the most commonly used well stimulation technique. It involves the fracturing of formations in bedrock by a pressurized liquid. The process involves the high-pressure injection of “fracking fluid” (primarily water, containing sand or other proppants suspended with the aid of thickening agents) into a wellbore to create cracks in the deep rock formations through which natural gas, petroleum, and brine will flow more freely. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, small grains of hydraulic fracturing proppants (either sand or aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open.

  • Hydraulic fracking began as an experiment in 1947, and the first commercially successful application followed in 1949.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracking 

 

1949 Pager

  • Another breakthrough came in 1949 when he adapted his two-way radios to one-way for cordless remote telephonic signaling. He had effectively invented the first telephone pager system. His intention for this system was to be used by medical doctors, but was met with skepticism by doctors who were afraid the system would upset patients. This same technology is used in one-way radio signaling devices such as garage door openers.

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gross_(engineer)

1950 Indoor Plumbing

  • Complete plumbing facilities are defined as hot and cold piped water, a bath- tub or shower, and a flush toilet.
  • 1940: Only 55% of American homes had complete plumbing
  • 1950s–1960s: Plumbing became standard in new home construction
  • 1990s: Nearly universal access across the U.S.
  • Today: Fewer than 1% of homes lack indoor plumbing, according to U.S. Housing Surveys
  • https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-plumbing.html 

 

1950 Electric Guitar

  • The first mass-produced solid-body guitar was Fender Esquire and Fender Broadcaster (later to become the Fender Telecaster), first made in 1950, five years after Les Paul made his prototype. The Gibson Les Paul appeared soon after to compete with the Broadcaster.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_guitar 

 

1950 Video game 

  • Bertie the Brain is one of the first games developed during the early history of video games. It was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The four meter (13 foot) tall computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an algorithm, presented by its creators as artificial intelligence. The player entered a move on a keypad in the form of a three-by-three grid, and the game played out on a grid of lights overhead. The machine had an adjustable difficulty level. After two weeks on display by Rogers Majestic, the machine was disassembled at the end of the exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_the_Brain 

 

1950 Synthetic Antiobiotics  

 

1950 Modern credit card

  • The concept of customers paying different merchants using the same card was expanded in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara, founders of Diners Club, to consolidate multiple cards. The Diners Club, which was created partially through a merger with Dine and Sign, produced the first “general purpose” charge card and required the entire bill to be paid with each statement.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card 

 

1950 Programmable robot 

 

1951 Commercial computer

  • The UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer I) was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer for business applications produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, the inventors of the ENIAC. Design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand (which later became part of Sperry, now Unisys). In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the machine was simply known as “the UNIVAC”.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_I 

 

1951 Float glass

  • In the 1950s, Pilkington Bros., England, developed the float glass process, producing high-quality distortion-free flat sheets of glass by floating on molten tin. Modern multi-story buildings are frequently constructed with curtain walls made almost entirely of glass.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass 

 

1952 Thermonuclear weapon 

 

1953 Heart-lung machine 

  • Dr. John Gibbon developed a heart-lung machine that he used in 1953 to successfully complete the first open-heart operation. Because of the development of the heart-lung machine, surgeons were able to perform surgeries previously considered too risky. Improved versions of the heart-lung machine allow surgeons today to repair heart defects and damaged heart valves, and to perform bypass surgery and heart transplants.

 

1953 Color television

  • When CBS testified before Congress in March 1953 that it had no further plans for its own color system, the National Production Authority dropped its ban on the manufacture of color television receivers, and the path was open for the NTSC to submit its petition for FCC approval in July 1953, which was granted on 17 December. The first publicly announced network demonstration of a program using the NTSC “compatible color” system was an episode of NBC’s Kukla, Fran and Ollie on 30 August 1953, although it was viewable in color only at the network’s headquarters. The first network broadcast to go out over the air in NTSC color was a performance of the opera Carmen on 31 October 1953.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television#North_America 

 

1953 Washing Machine

  • Despite the high cost of automatic washers, manufacturers had difficulty meeting the demand. Although there were material shortages during the Korean War, by 1953 automatic washing machine sales in the US exceeded those of wringer-type electric machines.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washing_machine 

 

1954 Solar battery

  • 1954 – On April 25, 1954, Bell Labs announces the invention of the first practical silicon solar cell. Shortly afterwards, they are shown at the National Academy of Sciences Meeting. These cells have about 6% efficiency. The New York Times forecasts that solar cells will eventually lead to a source of “limitless energy of the sun”.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_solar_cells 

 

1954 Kidney transplant

 

1954 Uzi submachine gun

  • The Uzi prototype was finished in 1950. It was first introduced to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) special forces in 1954, and the weapon was placed into general issue two years later. The IDF supplied Uzis to rear-echelon troops, officers, artillery troops and tank crews, as well as a frontline weapon by elite light infantry assault forces.

 

1954 Transistor radio 

 

1955 Hovercraft 

  • The first practical design for hovercraft was derived from a British invention in the 1950s. They are now used throughout the world as specialised transports in disaster relief, coastguard, military and survey applications, as well as for sport or passenger service.

 

1955 Polio vaccine

  • The success of an inactivated (killed) polio vaccine, developed by Jonas Salk, was announced in 1955. 
  • Soon after Salk’s vaccine was licensed in 1955, children’s vaccination campaigns were launched. In the U.S., following a mass immunization campaign promoted by the March of Dimes, the annual number of polio cases fell from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 by 1957. By 1961 only 161 cases were recorded in the United States.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine 

 

1955 Seat Belt

  • The first modern three-point seat belt (the so-called CIR-Griswold restraint) commonly used in consumer vehicles was patented in 1955 U.S. patent 2,710,649 by the Americans Roger W. Griswold and Hugh DeHaven.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt 

 

1955 Atomic clock 

  • The first practical atomic clock using caesium atoms was built at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom in 1955 by Louis Essen in collaboration with Jack Parry.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_clock 

 

1955 Nuclear Submarine

  • In July 1951, the U.S. Congress authorized construction of the first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, under the leadership of Captain Hyman G. Rickover, USN (sharing a name with Captain Nemo’s fictional submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, the first demonstrably practical submarine Nautilus, and another USS Nautilus (SS-168) that served with distinction in World War II).
  • The Westinghouse Corporation was assigned to build its reactor. After the submarine was completed at the Electric Boat Company, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower broke the traditional bottle of champagne on Nautilus’ bow, and the submarine was commissioned USS Nautilus (SSN-571), on 30 September 1954. On 17 January 1955, she departed Groton, Connecticut, to begin sea trials. The submarine was 320 feet (98 m) long and cost about $55 million.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_submarine 

 

1956 Intermodal  shipping container

  • In 1955, trucking magnate Malcom McLean bought Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, to form a container shipping enterprise, later known as Sea-Land. The first containers were supplied by Brown Trailers Inc, where McLean met Keith Tantlinger, and hired him as vice-president of engineering and research. Under the supervision of Tantlinger, a new 35 ft × 8 ft × 8.5 ft (10.7 m × 2.4 m × 2.6 m) Sea-Land container was developed, the length determined by the maximum length of trailers then allowed on Pennsylvanian highways. Each container had a frame with eight corner castings that could withstand stacking loads. Tantlinger also designed automatic spreaders for handling the containers, as well as the twistlock mechanism that connects with the corner castings.
  • Modern form: Containers in their modern 21st-century form first began to gain widespread use around 1956. Businesses began to devise a structured process to use and to get optimal benefits from the role and use of shipping containers. Over time, the invention of the modern telecommunications of the late 20th century made it highly beneficial to have standardized shipping containers and made these shipping processes more standardized, modular, easier to schedule, and easier to manage.

 

1956 Hard disk drive 

 

1956 Artificial intelligence program 

  • Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, and Cliff Shaw. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning, and has been described as “the first artificial intelligence program”. Logic Theorist proved 38 of the first 52 theorems in chapter two of Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, and found new and shorter proofs for some of them.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_Theorist 

 

1956 Video tape recorder 

  • The Ampex VRX-1000 became the world’s first commercially successful videotape recorder in 1956. It uses the 2″ quadruplex format, using two-inch (5.1 cm) tape. Because of its US$50,000 price, the Ampex VRX-1000 could be afforded only by the television networks and the largest individual stations.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_tape_recorder 

 

1956 Keyboard controlled computer

  • On July 4, 1956, MIT researchers first used a keyboard as a direct input device for a computer.
  • Before this, computer users typically used punched cards or paper tape to feed their programs into computers.
  • In February 1956, Doug Ross wrote a memo arguing that a Flexowriter, an electrically-controlled typewriter, could be used as a computer input device.
  • Five months later, on July 4 1956, a keyboard was connected to the MIT Whirlwind computer, one of the earliest large-scale high-speed computers, as an experiment. It proved a success, confirming that keyboard input was much more useful and convenient.
  • https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6117/First-keyboard-used-to-input-data/ 

 

1957 Artificial satellite

  • Sputnik 1 (/ˈspʌtnɪk, ˈspʊtnɪk/, Russian: Спутник-1, Satellite 1), sometimes referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries became depleted. Aerodynamic drag caused it to fall back into the atmosphere on 4 January 1958.

 

1958 Federal Aviation Agency

  • The FAA was created in August 1958 as the Federal Aviation Agency, replacing the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA). In 1967, the FAA became part of the newly formed U.S. Department of Transportation and was renamed the Federal Aviation Administration.

 

1958 Pacemaker

  • In 1958, engineer Earl Bakken of Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the first wearable external pacemaker for a patient of C. Walton Lillehei. This transistorized pacemaker, housed in a small plastic box, had controls to permit adjustment of pacing heart rate and output voltage and was connected to electrode leads which passed through the skin of the patient to terminate in electrodes attached to the surface of the myocardium of the heart.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacemaker 

 

1958 Lego

  • In 1953, the automatic binding bricks were renamed Lego bricks. In 1957, the interlocking principle of Lego bricks was born, and in 1958, the stud-and-coupling system was patented, which added significant stability to built pieces. And this transformed them into the Lego bricks children use today

 

1959 Microchip 

  • Newly employed by Texas Instruments, Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning the integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working example of an integrated circuit on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as “a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated”. The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force. Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit 

 

1959 Copy machine

  • The Xerox 914 was the first successful commercial plain paper copier. Introduced in 1959 by the Haloid/Xerox company, it revolutionized the document-copying industry. The culmination of inventor Chester Carlson’s work on the xerographic process, the 914 was fast and economical. The copier was introduced to the public on September 16, 1959, in a demonstration at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, shown on live television.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_914

1960 MOS transistor 

  • The main advantage of a MOSFET is that it requires almost no input current to control the load current under steady-state or low-frequency conditions, making it the fundamental building blocks of nearly all modern electronics
  • … J.R. Ligenza and W.G. Spitzer studied the mechanism of thermally grown oxides, fabricated a high quality Si/SiO2 stack and published their results in 1960. Following this research, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng proposed a silicon MOS transistor in 1959 and successfully demonstrated a working MOS device with their Bell Labs team in 1960. Their team included E. E. LaBate and E. I. Povilonis who fabricated the device; M. O. Thurston, L. A. D’Asaro, and J. R. Ligenza who developed the diffusion processes, and H. K. Gummel and R. Lindner who characterized the device. This was a culmination of decades of field-effect research that began with Lilienfeld.

 

1960 Laser 

  • A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word laser originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The first laser was built in 1960 by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories, based on theoretical work by Charles H. Townes and Arthur Leonard Schawlow and the optical amplifier patented by Gordon Gould.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser 

 

1960 CPR

  • It was not until the middle of the 20th century that the wider medical community started to recognize and promote artificial ventilation in the form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation combined with chest compressions as a key part of resuscitation following cardiac arrest. The combination was first seen in a 1962 training video called “The Pulse of Life” created by James Jude, Guy Knickerbocker, and Peter Safar. Jude and Knickerbocker, along with William Kouwenhoven and Joseph S. Redding had recently discovered the method of external chest compressions, whereas Safar had worked with Redding and James Elam to prove the effectiveness of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The first effort at testing the technique was performed on a dog by Redding, Safar, and JW Pearson. Soon afterward, the technique was used to save the life of a child. Their combined findings were presented at the annual Maryland Medical Society meeting on September 16, 1960, in Ocean City, and gained widespread acceptance over the following decade, helped by the video and speaking tour they undertook. Peter Safar wrote the book ABC of Resuscitation in 1957. In the U.S., it was first promoted as a technique for the public to learn in the 1970s
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiopulmonary_resuscitation 

 

1960 Robotic exoskeleton

  • In the 1960s, another exoskeleton called the Hardiman gained notoriety due to its level of sophistication, though it was not commercialized. It was co-developed by General Electric and the US Armed Forces. This exoskeleton was powered by hydraulics and electricity and amplified the wearer’s strength by a factor of 25, so that lifting 110 kilograms (240 lb) would feel like lifting 4.5 kilograms (10 lb). A feature called force feedback enabled the wearer to feel the forces and objects being manipulated. However, the Hardiman had major limitations, including its 680-kilogram (1,500 lb) weight. The Hardiman was designed as a master-slave system consisting of a set of overlapping exoskeletons: the slave device (outer exoskeleton) followed the motions of the master device (inner exoskeleton), which followed the motion of the human operator. The response time for the slave suit was slow, and control issues caused “violent and uncontrollable motion by the machine” when moving both legs simultaneously. Hardiman’s slow walking speed of 0.76 meters per second (2.5 ft/s) further limited practical uses.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoskeleton_(human) 

 

1960 Oral contraceptives 

  • Oral contraceptives, abbreviated OCPs, also known as birth control pills, are medications taken by mouth for the purpose of birth control. The introduction of the birth control pill (“the Pill”) in 1960 revolutionized the options for contraception.

 

1961 Electret microphone

  • Electret materials have been known since the 1920s and were proposed as condenser microphone elements several times, but they were considered impractical until the foil electret type was invented at Bell Laboratories in 1961 by Gerhard Sessler and James West, using a thin metallized Teflon foil. This became the most common type, used in many applications from high-quality recording and lavalier use to built-in microphones in small sound recording devices and telephones. Modern electret microphones use PTFE plastic, either in film or solute form, to form the electret.

 

1963 E-cigarette 

  • The earliest e-cigarette can be traced to American Herbert A. Gilbert. In 1963, Gilbert applied for a patent for “a smokeless non-tobacco cigarette” that involved “replacing burning tobacco and paper with heated, moist, flavored air”. This device produced flavored steam without nicotine. The patent was granted in 1965. Gilbert’s invention was ahead of its time. However, it received little attention and was never commercialized because smoking was still fashionable at that time. Gilbert said in 2013 that today’s electric cigarettes follow the basic design set forth in his original patent.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette 

 

1963 Graphic User Interface 

  • Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad in 1963, widely held as the first graphical computer-aided design program. It used a light pen to create and manipulate objects in engineering drawings in realtime with coordinated graphics.

 

1963 Push button telephone 

  • On 18 November 1963, after approximately three years of customer feedback, the Bell System officially introduced dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) technology in Carnegie, Pennsylvania and increased its use in Greensburg, under its registered trademark Touch-Tone. Over the next few decades touch-tone service replaced traditional pulse dialing technology and it eventually became a world-wide standard for telecommunication signaling.

 

1963 Instant replay 

  • CBS Sports Director Tony Verna invented a system to enable the standard videotape machine to instantly replay on December 7, 1963, for the network’s coverage of the US military’s Army–Navy Game.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_replay 

 

1963 Audio cassette 

  • The cassette tape, also called Compact Cassette, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was introduced in August 1963.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape 

 

1963 Measles vaccine

  • The measles vaccine was first introduced in 1963. In that year, the Edmonston-B strain of measles virus was turned into a vaccine by John Enders and colleagues and licensed in the United States.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles_vaccine 

 

1964 Mass-produced operating system

  • IBM OS/360, operating system introduced by IBM in 1964 to operate its 360 family of mainframe computer systems. The 360 system was unprecedented in its ability to support a wide array of applications, and it was one of the first operating systems to require direct-access storage devices. The initial release of OS/360 had about 1 million lines of code, much larger than any previous IBM operating system, and OS/360 eventually grew to 10 million lines of code.
  • The name 360 was chosen to convey that a single system could support a full range of machines, though three versions of the operating system existed.
  • https://www.britannica.com/technology/IBM-OS-360 

 

1964 Picturephone

  • The more advanced Picturephone “Mod I” (Model No. 1) had public evaluation displays at Disneyland and the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with the first transcontinental videocall between the two venues made on April 20, 1964. These demonstration units used small oval housings on swivel stands, intended to stand on desks. Similar AT&T Picturephone units were also featured at the Telephone Pavilion (also called the “Bell Telephone Pavilion”) at Expo 67, an International World’s Fair held in Montreal, Canada in 1967. Demonstration units were available at the fairs for the public to test, with fairgoers permitted to make videophone calls to volunteer recipients at other locations.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_videotelephony

 

1964 Fax machine 

  • In 1964, Xerox Corporation introduced (and patented) what many consider to be the first commercialized version of the modern fax machine, under the name (LDX) or Long Distance Xerography.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax 

 

1964 High-speed rail

  • The Shinkansen (Japanese: 新幹線; [ɕiŋkaꜜɰ̃seɴ] ⓘ, lit. ’new trunk line’), colloquially known in English as the bullet train, is a network of high-speed railway lines in Japan. It was initially built to connect distant Japanese regions with Tokyo, the capital, to aid economic growth and development. Beyond long-distance travel, some sections around the largest metropolitan areas are used as a commuter rail network. It is owned by the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency and operated by five Japan Railways Group companies.
  • Starting with the Tokaido Shinkansen (515.4 km; 320.3 mi) in 1964, the network has expanded to consist of 2,951.3 km (1,833.9 mi) of lines with maximum speeds of 260–320 km/h (160–200 mph), 283.5 km (176.2 mi) of Mini-shinkansen lines with a maximum speed of 130 km/h (80 mph), and 10.3 km (6.4 mi) of spur lines with Shinkansen services
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen 

 

1965 Kevlar

  • Kevlar (para-aramid) is a strong, heat-resistant synthetic fiber, related to other aramids such as Nomex and Technora. Developed by Stephanie Kwolek at DuPont in 1965, the high-strength material was first used commercially in the early 1970s as a replacement for steel in racing tires. It is typically spun into ropes or fabric sheets that can be used as such, or as an ingredient in composite material components.

 

1965 Dental implant

  • He (Per-Ingvar Brånemark)  performed the first successful dental implant in a human in 1965 and eventually devised a complete system of implant posts and instruments as well as training for implementation
  • https://www.invent.org/inductees/ingvar-branemark 

 

1965 Minicomputer

  • The PDP-8 is a family of 12-bit minicomputers that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Launched in 1965, it was the first minicomputer to sell for under $20,000, and the $25,000 mark for a complete system would later be a defining characteristic of the minicomputer class. Over 50,000 units were sold during the model’s lifetime.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-8 

 

1965 Carousel slide projector

  • A carousel slide projector is a slide projector that uses a rotary tray to store slides, used to project slide photographs and to create slideshows. It was first patented on May 11, 1965, by David E. Hansen of Fairport, New York. Hansen was an industrial designer at the Eastman Kodak Company. A patent for the rotary tray was granted in 1966 after a 1962 application by the Eastman Kodak Company.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_slide_projector 

 

1967 Touchscreen 

  • 1965: Finger driven touchscreen
  • The first finger driven touchscreen was developed by Eric Johnson , of the Royal Radar Establishment located in Malvern, England, who described his work on capacitive touchscreens in a short article published in 1965 and then more fully—with photographs and diagrams—in an article published in 1967.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen 

 

1967 Mumps vaccine

  • Hilleman’s work led to the first effective mumps vaccine, called Mumpsvax. Licensed in 1967, its four-year development set a record for fastest development of a new vaccine, a record later surpassed by the COVID-19 vaccine, which was developed in less than a year.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumps_vaccine 

 

1967 Microwave oven

  • Raytheon later licensed its patents for a home-use microwave oven that was introduced by Tappan in 1955, but it was still too large and expensive for general home use. Sharp Corporation introduced the first microwave oven with a turntable between 1964 and 1966. The countertop microwave oven was introduced in 1967 by the Amana Corporation. After microwave ovens became affordable for residential use in the late 1970s, their use spread into commercial and residential kitchens around the world, and prices fell rapidly during the 1980s. In addition to cooking food, microwave ovens are used for heating in many industrial processes.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven 

 

1969 ARPANET

  • The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.
  • The first computers were connected in 1969 and the Network Control Protocol was implemented in 1970, development of which was led by Steve Crocker at UCLA and other graduate students, including Jon Postel.

 

1969 Moon Landing 



1969 UNIX OS

  • Unix (/ˈjuːnɪks/ ⓘ, YOO-niks; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix

1970 Earth Day

  • Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally through earthday.org (formerly Earth Day Network) including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.

 

1970 ATM

  • The idea of a PIN stored on the card was developed by a group of engineers working at Smiths Group on the Chubb MD2 in 1965 and which has been credited to James Goodfellow (patent GB1197183 filed on 2 May 1966 with Anthony Davies). The essence of this system was that it enabled the verification of the customer with the debited account without human intervention. This patent is also the earliest instance of a complete “currency dispenser system” in the patent record. This patent was filed on 5 March 1968 in the US (US 3543904) and granted on 1 December 1970. It had a profound influence on the industry as a whole.

 

1970 Pocket calculator 

  • The first commercially produced portable calculators appeared in Japan in 1970, and were soon marketed around the world. These included the Sanyo ICC-0081 “Mini Calculator”, the Canon Pocketronic, and the Sharp QT-8B “micro Compet”. The Canon Pocketronic was a development from the “Cal-Tech” project. It had no traditional display; numerical output was on thermal paper tape.

 

1971 Single-chip microprocessor

  • The Intel 4004 is often (falsely) regarded as the first true microprocessor built on a single chip, priced at US$60 (equivalent to $470 in 2024). The first known advertisement for the 4004 is dated November 15, 1971, and appeared in Electronic News. The microprocessor was designed by a team consisting of Italian engineer Federico Faggin, American engineers Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor, and Japanese engineer Masatoshi Shima.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor#Gilbert_Hyatt_(1970) 

 

1971 Space station 

  • Space stations have been hosting the only continuous presence of humans in space. The first space station was Salyut 1 (1971), hosting the first crew, of the ill-fated Soyuz 11.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_station 

 

1971 Floppy disk and disk drive

  • In 1967, at an IBM facility in San Jose, California, work began on a drive that led to the world’s first floppy disk and disk drive. It was introduced into the market in an 8-inch (20 cm) format in 1971.



1971 Liquid-crystal display

  • On December 4, 1970, the twisted nematic field effect (TN) in liquid crystals was filed for patent by Hoffmann-LaRoche in Switzerland, (Swiss patent No. 532 261 Archived March 9, 2021, at the Wayback Machine) with Wolfgang Helfrich and Martin Schadt (then working for the Central Research Laboratories) listed as inventors. Hoffmann-La Roche licensed the invention to Swiss manufacturer Brown, Boveri & Cie, its joint venture partner at that time, which produced TN displays for wristwatches and other applications during the 1970s for the international markets including the Japanese electronics industry, which soon produced the first digital quartz wristwatches with TN-LCDs and numerous other products. James Fergason, while working with Sardari Arora and Alfred Saupe at Kent State University Liquid Crystal Institute, filed an identical patent in the United States on April 22, 1971. In 1971, the company of Fergason, ILIXCO (now LXD Incorporated), produced LCDs based on the TN-effect, which soon superseded the poor-quality DSM types due to improvements of lower operating voltages and lower power consumption. Tetsuro Hama and Izuhiko Nishimura of Seiko received a US patent dated February 1971, for an electronic wristwatch incorporating a TN-LCD. In 1972, the first wristwatch with TN-LCD was launched on the market: The Gruen Teletime which was a four digit display watch.

 

1971 E-mail 

  • In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sent the first mail message between two computers on the ARPANET, introducing the now-familiar address syntax with the ‘@’ symbol designating the user’s system address. Over a series of RFCs, conventions were refined for sending mail messages over the File Transfer Protocol. Several other email networks developed in the 1970s and expanded subsequently.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email 

 

1972 Video game console

  • The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. The hardware was designed by a small team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates, while Magnavox completed development and released it in the United States in September 1972 and overseas the following year. The Odyssey consists of a white, black, and brown box that connects to a television set, and two rectangular controllers attached by wires. It is capable of displaying three square dots and one line of varying height on the screen in monochrome black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played. Players place plastic overlays on the screen to display additional visual elements for each game, and one or two players for each game control their dots with the knobs and buttons on the controller by the rules given for the game. The console cannot generate audio or track scores. The Odyssey came packaged with dice, paper money, and other board game paraphernalia to accompany the games, while a peripheral controller—the first video game light gun—was sold separately.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnavox_Odyssey 

 

1972 Genetic modification  

  • 1972: First Recombinant DNA
  • Recombinant DNA technology involves the joining of DNA from different species and subsequently inserting the hybrid DNA into a host cell, often a bacterium. Researchers at UC San Francisco and Stanford used restriction enzymes to cut DNA from different species at specific sites, and then fused the cut strands from the different species back together. Stanley Cohen of Stanford and Herbert Boyer of UCSF applied for a patent on recombinant DNA technology in 1974; it was granted in 1980. Boyer would co-found Genentech, Inc. in 1976.

 

1973 Fiber optic communication systems

  • Fiber-optic communication is a form of optical communication for transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of infrared or visible light through an optical fiber. The light is a form of carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. Fiber is preferred over electrical cabling when high bandwidth, long distance, or immunity to electromagnetic interference is required. This type of communication can transmit voice, video, and telemetry through local area networks or across long distances.
  • In 1973, Optelecom, Inc., co-founded by the inventor of the laser, Gordon Gould, received a contract from ARPA for one of the first optical communication systems. Developed for Army Missile Command in Huntsville, Alabama, the system was intended to allow a short-range missile with video processing to communicate by laser to the ground by means of a five-kilometer long optical fiber that unspooled from the missile as it flew. Optelecom then delivered the first commercial optical communications system to Chevron.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication 

 

1973 WYSIWYG

  • The Xerox Alto is a computer system developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in the 1970s. It is considered one of the first workstations or personal computers, and its development pioneered many aspects of modern computing. It features a graphical user interface (GUI), a mouse, Ethernet networking, and the ability to run multiple applications simultaneously. It is one of the first computers to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor and has a bit-mapped display. The Alto did not succeed commercially, but it had a significant influence on the development of future computer systems.
  • The Alto was designed for an operating system based on a GUI, later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on March 1, 1973, and in limited production starting one decade before Xerox’s designs inspired Apple to release the first mass-market GUI computers.

 

1973 Multi-Touch Touchscreen

  • In 1973, Beck and Stumpe published another article describing their capacitive touchscreen. This indicated that it was capable of multi-touch but this feature was purposely inhibited, presumably as this was not considered useful at the time (“A…variable…called BUT changes value from zero to five when a button is touched. The touching of other buttons would give other non-zero values of BUT but this is protected against by software” (Page 6, section 2.6). “Actual contact between a finger and the capacitor is prevented by a thin sheet of plastic” (Page 3, section 2.3).

 

1973 Online chat

  • Whether Talkomatic was the first multi-user chat system remains a subject of historical debate. The Party Line feature of the Emergency Management Information Systems And Reference Index (EMISARI), developed by Murray Turoff for the US Office of Emergency Preparedness in 1971, has also been identified as an early multi-user communication system. However, Talkomatic’s wider deployment and influence on subsequent systems have given it prominence in the history of online chat.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talkomatic 

 

1973 First mobile phone call

  • On April 3, 1973, Cooper placed the first public call from a handheld portable cell phone while working at Motorola, from a Manhattan sidewalk to his counterpart at competitor Bell Labs. Cooper reprised the first handheld cellular mobile phone (distinct from the car phone) in 1973 and led the team that redeveloped it and brought it to market in 1983. He is considered the “father of the (handheld) cell phone”, and received the 2015 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for this work.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Cooper_(inventor)

 

1973 Post-it-notes

 

1974 Personal computer

  • Note: There’s a whole debate being this, and several contenders, but all relatively in the same time frame
  • It was only a matter of time before one personal computer design was able to hit a sweet spot in terms of pricing and performance, and that machine is generally considered to be the Altair 8800, from MITS, a small company that produced electronics kits for hobbyists.
  • The Altair 8800 was introduced in a Popular Electronics magazine article in the January 1975 issue (published in late 1974). In keeping with MITS’ earlier projects, the Altair was sold in kit form, although a relatively complex one consisting of four circuit boards and many parts. Priced at only $400, the Altair tapped into pent-up demand and surprised its creators when it generated thousands of orders in the first month. Unable to keep up with demand, MITS sold the design after about 10,000 kits had shipped.
  • https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dt75co.html 

 

1974 Liposuction 

  • The roots of liposuction can be traced back as far as the 1920s when French surgeon Charles Dujarier first introduced the concept of body contouring and fat removal. However, after a procedure performed by Dujarier caused gangrene in the leg of model, interest in the concept of body contouring was lost in the decades following.
  •  
  • Interest in liposuction was reignited after European surgeons used primitive curettage techniques, although these were also eventually ignored due to the inconsistency of results. It was in 1974 that doctors Arpad and Giorgio Fischer working in Rome, Italy, developed the blunt tunnelling technique from which modern liposuction evolved.

 

1974 Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) 

  • In May 1974, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published a paper entitled “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication”. The paper’s authors, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes. A central control component of this model was the Transmission Control Program that incorporated both connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts. The monolithic Transmission Control Program was later divided into a modular architecture consisting of the Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol at the transport layer and the Internet Protocol at the internet layer. The model became known as the Department of Defense (DoD) Internet Model and Internet protocol suite, and informally as TCP/IP.

 

1974 Barcodes

  • Every few years, the small town of Troy in Miami County, Ohio celebrates an historic occasion that for a few giddy weeks puts it on the world map of the grocery trade. At the time, National Cash Register, which provided the checkout equipment, was based in Ohio and Troy was also the headquarters of the Hobart Corporation, which developed the weighing and pricing machines for loose items such as meat. It was here, at just after 8 a.m. on June 26, 1974, that the first item marked with the Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned at the checkout of Troy’s Marsh Supermarket.

 

1974  Transgenic animal

  • In 1974 Beatrice Mintz and Rudolf Jaenisch created the first genetically modified animal by inserting a DNA virus into an early-stage mouse embryo and showing that the inserted genes were present in every cell.

 

1975 General purpose home automation

  • X10 is a protocol for communication among electronic devices used for home automation (domotics). It primarily uses power line wiring for signaling and control, where the signals involve brief radio frequency bursts representing digital information. A wireless radio-based protocol transport is also defined.
  • X10 was developed in 1975 by Pico Electronics of Glenrothes, Scotland, in order to allow remote control of home devices and appliances. It was the first general purpose home automation network technology and remains the most widely available

 

1975 DNA sequencing

  • Two years later in 1975, Frederick Sanger, a biochemist, and Alan Coulson, a genome scientist, developed a method to sequence DNA. The technique known as the “Plus and Minus” method, involved supplying all the components of the DNA but excluding the reaction of one of the four bases needed to complete the DNA.

 

1976 Supercomputer 

  • Seymour Cray unveiled the CRAY-1 in 1976, considered the first supercomputer. Born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, Cray was interested in chemistry and radio as a child. After a brief service during World War II, he went to the University of Minnesota where he studied engineering. In 1951 he joined Engineering Research Associates which was developing computers for the Navy. Later he co-founded Control Data Corporation, and in 1972 he founded CRAY Research.

 

1976 Public-key cryptography 

  • In 1976, Whitfield Diffie, Martin Hellman, and Ralph Merkle developed public key cryptography (PKC), an innovative new method for securing electronic communications. PKC provides security on the otherwise highly insecure Internet, making it vital to such areas as e-commerce.

 

1976 Home VCR

  • VHS (Video Home System) is a discontinued standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes, introduced in 1976 by JVC. It was the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period of the 1980s and 1990s.

 

1976 Word processor

 

1976 Laser printer 

  • The laser printer was invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Laser printers were introduced for the office and then home markets in subsequent years by IBM, Canon, Xerox, Apple, Hewlett-Packard and many others. Over the decades, quality and speed have increased as prices have decreased, and the once cutting-edge printing devices are now ubiquitous.
  • in 1976, the first commercial implementation of a laser printer, the IBM 3800, was released. It was designed for data centers, where it replaced line printers attached to mainframe computers. The IBM 3800 was used for high-volume printing on continuous stationery, and achieved speeds of 215 pages per minute (ppm), at a resolution of 240 dots per inch (dpi). Over 8,000 of these printers were sold.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_printing 

 

1976 Supersonic airliner

  • Concorde began scheduled flights with British Airways and Air France on 21 January 1976.

 

1977 Self-driving car 

  • In 1977, the first self-driving car that operated independently of rails or wires under the road is designed by the Japanese Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory. The vehicle was equipped with two cameras that used analog computer technology for signal processing.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars 

 

1977 Color graphics on PCs

  • In 1977 Apple Computer introduced the Apple IIOffsite Link, the first personal computer sold as a fully assembled product, and the first with color graphics.

 

1977 Full-body MRI scan

 

1978 GPS satellite signal

  • The GPS project was launched in the United States in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems, combining ideas from several predecessors, including classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. The U.S. Department of Defense developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites, for use by the United States military, and became fully operational in 1993. Civilian use was allowed from the 1980s.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System
  • The primary incarnation of this approach began in 1974 when the U.S. Air Force started development of the first of a series of Navstar satellites, the ground control system, and various types of military user equipment.
  • In February 1978, the first Block I developmental Navstar/GPS satellite launched, with three more Navstar satellites launched by the end of 1978. More than 700 tests were conducted between 1977 and 1979, in which Aerospace engineers helped confirm the accuracy of the integrated space/control/user system.  Additional GPS Block I demonstration satellites were launched in the early 1980s.
  • https://aerospace.org/article/brief-history-gps 

 

1978 In vitro fertilization 

  • In July 1978, Louise Brown was the first child successfully born after her mother received IVF treatment.

 

1979 Cellular network 

 

1979 Commercial online service providers

  • The first commercial online services went live in 1979. CompuServe (owned in the 1980s and 1990s by H&R Block) and The Source (for a time owned by The Reader’s Digest) are considered the first major online services created to serve the market of personal computer users. Utilizing text-based interfaces and menus, these services allowed anyone with a modem and communications software to use email, chat, news, financial and stock information, bulletin boards, special interest groups (SIGs), forums and general information. Subscribers could exchange email only with other subscribers of the same service.

 

1979 Walkman 

  • Walkman (Japanese: ウォークマン, Hepburn: Wōkuman) is a brand of portable audio players manufactured by Sony since 1979. It was originally introduced as a portable cassette player and later expanded to include a range of portable audio products. Since 2011, the brand has referred exclusively to digital flash memory players.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman

1980 Flash memory 

 

1981 Reusable spacecraft

  • The Space Shuttle was the first operational orbital spacecraft designed for reuse. Each Space Shuttle orbiter was designed for a projected lifespan of 100 launches or ten years of operational life, although this was later extended.
  • On April 12, 1981, the Space Shuttle launched for the first time, and was piloted by John Young and Robert Crippen.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle

 

1981 Mobile phone service

  • The first automatic analog cellular systems ever deployed were NTT’s system first used in 1979 for car phones in Tokyo (and later the rest of the country of Japan), and the cellular systems released by Comvik in Sweden in September, NMT in the other Nordic countries in October 1981.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones 

 

1982 Commercial CDs 

  • The compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and is capable of holding uncompressed stereo audio. First released in Japan in October 1982, the CD was the second optical disc format to reach the market, following the larger LaserDisc (LD). In later years, the technology was adapted for computer data storage as CD-ROM and subsequently expanded into various writable and multimedia formats. As of 2007, over 200 billion CDs (including audio CDs, CD-ROMs, and CD-Rs) had been sold worldwide.

 

1982 Direct-to-home satellite TV

  • NHK began the world’s first direct broadcast satellite service in May, 1984.

 

1982 Laptop computer 

  • Toss up between the Epson HX-20 and the Grid Compass (first to use a clam shell design) and the Dulmont Magnum, all released in 1982

 

1982 Artificial heart 

  • Although other similar inventions preceded it from the late 1940s, the first artificial heart to be successfully implanted in a human was the Jarvik-7 in 1982, designed by a team including Willem Johan Kolff, William DeVries and Robert Jarvik.

 

1983 First Utility-Scale Solar Farm

  • First Utility-Scale Solar Farm in U.S. Begins Operation
  • The Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) pioneered utility-scale solar power generation in 1982. ARCO opened a 1.1 megawatt (MW) operation in Hesperia, California, the first industrial solar power plant in the country. The company later opened a larger, 5.2 MW solar power plant in Carrizo Plain, California. The plant in Carrizo Plain operated from 1983 to 1994 and had one of the largest photovoltaic arrays in the world.

 

1983 Internet

  • January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to “talk” to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the Internet. All networks could now be connected by a universal language.

 

1983 Commercial cellular network

 

1983 Commercial mobile phone

 

1983 Consumer camcorders

 

1983 Mass-market computer with GUI

  • The Lisa, released in 1983, featured a document-centric graphical interface atop an advanced hard disk based OS that featured such things as preemptive multitasking and graphically oriented inter-process communication. The comparatively simplified Macintosh, released in 1984 and designed to be lower in cost, was the first commercially successful product to use a multi-panel window interface.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface

 

1984 3D Printing 

  • On 8 August 1984 a patent, US4575330, assigned to UVP, Inc., later assigned to Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corporation was filed, his own patent for a stereolithography fabrication system, in which individual laminae or layers are added by curing photopolymers with impinging radiation, particle bombardment, chemical reaction or just ultraviolet light lasers. Hull defined the process as a “system for generating three-dimensional objects by creating a cross-sectional pattern of the object to be formed”. Hull’s contribution was the STL (Stereolithography) file format and the digital slicing and infill strategies common to many processes today. In 1986, Charles “Chuck” Hull was granted a patent for this system, and his company, 3D Systems Corporation was formed and it released the first commercial 3D printer, the SLA-1, later in 1987 or 1988.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing#History 
  • https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3864 

 

1984 DNA profiling

  • In 1984, Alec Jeffreys developed the technique of DNA fingerprinting in his laboratory at the University of Leicester. These techniques have revolutionised the way that the police solve crimes.

 

1985 Genetically altered organism

  • The first transgenic livestock were produced in 1985 and the first animal to synthesize transgenic proteins in their milk were mice in 1987. The mice were engineered to produce human tissue plasminogen activator, a protein involved in breaking down blood clots.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism 

 

1985 Internet domain name

  • March 15, 1985 – symbolics.com

 

1986 Computer virus

  • Brain is the industry standard name for a computer virus that was released in its first form on 19 January 1986, and is considered to be the first computer virus for the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and compatibles.

 

1986 Pocket-sized cell phone

  • Technophone PC105T
  • Development moved quickly on the world’s first pocket-sized cell phone and by the summer of 1985 (merely 15 months since they had started) their new phone passed its approval testing on the 25th July in the US and 8th August in the UK. Almost immediately the first English TACS phones began to roll off the production line, followed by the first American AMPS phones in Autumn. The pocket revolution had begun.

 

1986 LISTSERV

  • The term Listserv (styled by the registered trademark licensee, L-Soft International, Inc., as LISTSERV) has been used to refer to electronic mailing list software applications in general, but is more properly applied to a few early instances of such software, which allows a sender to send one email to a list, which then transparently sends it on to the addresses of the subscribers to the list.
  • In 1986, Éric Thomas developed an independent application, originally named “Revised Listserv” (also known as “Revised LISTSERV”), which was the first automated mailing list management application. Prior to Revised Listserv, email lists were managed manually. To join or leave a list, people would write to a list administrator and ask to be added or removed, a process that became more time-consuming as discussion lists grew in popularity.

 

1987 PowerPoint 

  • Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, developed by Microsoft.
  • It was originally created by Robert Gaskins, Tom Rudkin, and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoint for about $14 million three months after it appeared.

 

1987 Prozac 

  • In the U.S., the FDA gave its final approval in December 1987, and a month later Eli Lilly began marketing Prozac; annual sales in the U.S. reached $350 million within a year.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluoxetine

1990 Search engine

  • Pre-web content search engine: The Archie search engine, created by Alan Emtage computer science student at McGill University in Montreal, goes live. The program downloads the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creates a searchable database of a lot of file names; however, Archie does not index the contents of these sites since the amount of data is so limited it can be readily searched manually
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines 

 

1990 Photoshop

 

1990 Hubble Telescope

 

1991 World Wide Web

 

1991 Solid-state drive

 

1991 Sim card

 

1991 Webcam

  • The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. It was the subject of the world’s first webcam, created by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky in 1991.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot 

 

1991 Linux

  • Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux 

 

1991 Email from space

 

1992 SMS text messaging

 

1992 MPEG

  • MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to about 1.5 Mbit/s (26:1 and 6:1 compression ratios respectively) without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting (DAB) practical.
  • Today, MPEG-1 has become the most widely compatible lossy audio/video format in the world, and is used in a large number of products and technologies. Perhaps the best-known part of the MPEG-1 standard is the first version of the MP3 audio format it introduced.
  • Development of the MPEG-1 standard began in May 1988.
  • The standard was finished with the 6 November 1992 meeting.

 

1992 Email attachments

  • 1992: Making emails more than text
  • Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) made email much more flexible, supporting text in character sets other than ASCII. It also made it possible to include multimedia attachments such as images, audio, and videos.
  • Formatting emails without knowledge of code became a reality thanks to CompuServe. The early internet service provider (ISP) introduced a WYSIWYG editor for email and online forums that allowed different fonts, colors, and emoticons. Of course, emojis in email are used all the time now, including as a way to make subject lines stand out in the inbox

 

1993 Personal digital assistant

  • The Newton is a specified standard and series of personal digital assistants (PDAs) developed and marketed by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1993 to 1998. An early device in the PDA category – the term itself originating with the Newton – it was the first to feature handwriting recognition.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton 

 

1993 WWW publicly available

 

1993 Graphical web browser 

  • In 1993, the world’s first freely available Web browser that allowed Web pages to include both graphics and text was developed by students and staff working at the NSF-supported National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
  • Mosaic spurred a revolution in communications, business, education, and entertainment that has had a trillion-dollar impact on the global economy.

 

1993 Modern LEDs (High Brightness Blue LEDs)

  • In the early 1990s, Shuji Nakamura, Hiroshi Amano and Isamu Akasaki invented blue LEDs that were dramatically more efficient than their predecessors, bringing a new generation of bright, energy-efficient white lighting and full-color LED displays into practical use, work that won them the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics.

 

1994 Smartphone

  • The IBM Simon Personal Communicator(simply known as IBM Simon) is a cellular phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) designed by International Business Machines(IBM), released in 1994. Built on an x86processor, the IBM Simon features a 4.5 inch resistive touchscreen display and runs an MS-DOS-compatible operating system with the ability to install additional software using its PCMCIA slot, The Simon also has a modem for faxing and email and was also the first PDA to include telephony features (make phone calls) through cellular, retrospectively so been referred to as the first true smartphone because of its features and capabilities

 

1994 Commercial VOIP

  • Founded in 1994 by Jeff Pulver, Brandon Lucas, and Izak Jenie, Free World Dialup (FWD) was the first true VoIP business venture–and one of the only completely free options ever created.

 

1994 Mobile game

  • The earliest known game on a mobile phone was a Tetris variant on the Hagenuk MT-2000 device from 1994.

 

1994 Spam

  • On January 18, 1994, the first large-scale deliberate USENET spam occurred. A message with the subject “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon” was cross-posted to every available newsgroup. Its controversial message sparked many debates all across USENET.
  • In April 1994, the first commercial USENET spam arrived. Two lawyers from Phoenix, Canter and Siegel, hired a programmer to post their “Green Card Lottery- Final One?” message to as many newsgroups as possible. What made them different was that they did not hide the fact that they were spammers. They were proud of it, and thought it was great advertising. They even went on to write the book “How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway : Everyone’s Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the internet and Other On-Line Services”. They planned on opening a consulting company to help other people post similar advertisements, but it never took off.

 

1995 Online dating 

 

1996 DVDs

  • The DVD (digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan.

 

1996 Cloned animal

  • Dolly (5 July 1996 – 14 February 2003) was a female Finn-Dorset sheep and the first mammal that was cloned from an adult somatic cell. She was cloned by associates of the Roslin Institute in Scotland, using the process of nuclear transfer from a cell taken from a mammary gland. Her cloning proved that a cloned organism could be produced from a mature cell from a specific body part. Contrary to popular belief, she was not the first animal to be cloned.

 

1996 Genetic test for breast cancer

  • In 1996, BRCA1/2 mutation screening became the first genetic test for cancer risk to become available as a clinical service.

 

1996 Free instant messaging

  • ICQ was among the first stand-alone instant messenger (IM) applications—while real-time chat was not in itself new (Internet Relay Chat [IRC] being the most common platform at the time), the concept of a fully centralized service with individual user accounts focused on one-on-one conversations set the blueprint for later instant messaging services like AIM, and its influence is seen in modern social media applications. ICQ became the first widely adopted IM platform.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ 

 

1996 Mobile web



1997 Phone with texting

  • The first true texting phone came out in 1997 when Nokia released the 90001 Communicator with a full QWERTY keyboard.

 

1997 Social Media

  • The first social media platform is generally considered to be Six Degrees, launched in 1997. Named after the “six degrees of separation” theory, it allowed users to create profiles, list friends, and browse friend networks – establishing the foundation for all modern social media platforms.

 

1997 Microsoft Clippy

  • The Office Assistant is a discontinued virtual assistant for Microsoft Office. It assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Office, in Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft FrontPage. It had a wide selection of characters to choose from, with the most well-known being a paperclip called Clippit (commonly referred to by the public as Clippy).
  • First introduced in Microsoft Office 97

 

1997 Wi-Fi 

  • The first version of the 802.11 protocol was released in 1997, and provided up to 2 Mbit/s link speeds. This was updated in 1999 with 802.11b to permit 11 Mbit/s link speeds.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi 

 

1997 Hybrid Car

  • The first mass-produced hybrid vehicle was the Toyota Prius, launched in Japan in 1997, and followed by the Honda Insight, launched in 1999 in the United States and Japan. The Prius was launched in Europe, North America and the rest of the world in 2000.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_electric_vehicle 

 

1998 Google

  • Google was founded on September 4, 1998, by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

 

1998  Stem cell therapy 

 

1999 Digital video recorder

  • Consumer digital video recorders ReplayTV and TiVo were launched at the 1999 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

 

1999 Peer-to-peer file sharing system

  • June 1999 – Napster was created by Shawn Fanning. Napster let users search across all users’ shares. Napster provided a centralized server that indexed the files, and carried out the searches. Individual files, however, remain on the hosts’ computers and were transferred directly from peer to peer.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_file_sharing

 

1999 Mobile app store

  • In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launched i-mode, the first integrated online app store for mobile phones, gaining nationwide popularity in Japanese mobile phone culture.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_store 

 

1999 Bluetooth 

 

1999 The Internet of Things

  • The term “Internet of things” was coined independently by Kevin Ashton of Procter & Gamble, later of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Auto-ID Center, in 1999, despite preferring the phrase “Internet for things.”
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_things

2000 Phone cameras

 

2000 Robotic Surgery

  • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the da Vinci Surgical System in 2000 for adult and pediatric use in urologic surgical procedures, general laparoscopic surgical procedures, gynecologic laparoscopic surgical procedures, general non-cardiovascular thoracoscopic surgical procedures, and thoracoscopically assisted cardiotomy procedures.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vinci_Surgical_System 

 

2001 Telesurgery 

  • The Lindbergh operation was a complete tele-surgical operation carried out by a team of French surgeons located in New York on a patient in Strasbourg, France (over a distance of several thousand miles) using telecommunications solutions based on high-speed services and sophisticated Zeus surgical robot. The operation was performed successfully on September 7, 2001 by Professor Jacques Marescaux and his team from the IRCAD (Institute for Research into Cancer of the Digestive System). This was the first time in medical history that a technical solution proved capable of reducing the time delay inherent to long distance transmissions sufficiently to make this type of procedure possible.

 

2001 Space tourism

  • Space tourism started in April 2001, when American businessman and engineer Dennis Tito became the first ever space tourist to travel to space aboard a Soyuz-TM32 spacecraft.

 

2001 Contraceptive patch 

  • The first transdermal contraceptive patch was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2001.

 

2001 First lethal drone strike  

 

2001 3G

  • The first commercial launch of 3G was also by NTT DoCoMo in Japan on 1 October 2001, although it was initially somewhat limited in scope; broader availability of the system was delayed by apparent concerns over its reliability.

 

2001 Wikipedia

  • Less than a year after the unsuccessful launch of Nupedia—an online free encyclopedia—its successor, Wikipedia, goes live on January 15, 2001.

 

2001 Segway

  • The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing, zero-emission, electric vehicle used for “personal transport”. Segways have had success in niche markets such as transportation for police departments, military bases, warehouses, corporate campuses or industrial sites, as well as in tourism. The earliest patent resembling the modern Segway PT, U.S. patent #6,357,544, was filed on May 27, 1994 and issued to Dean Kamen on December 30, 1997. Kamen introduced his invention to the public in 2001.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_inventions_(after_1991) 

 

2001 Self-healing materials

 

2002 Social network

 

2003 Human genome project 

  • The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It was the world’s largest collaborative biological project. Planning for the project began in 1984 by the US government, and it officially launched in 1990. It was declared complete on 14 April 2003, and included about 92% of the genome.

 

2004 Podcast

 

2004 Mars Rover

  • NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission was a robotic space mission involving two Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, exploring the planet Mars. It began in 2003 with the launch of the two rovers to explore the Martian surface and geology; both landed on Mars at separate locations in January 2004. Both rovers far outlived their planned missions of 90 Martian solar days: MER-A Spirit was active until March 22, 2010, while MER-B Opportunity was active until June 10, 2018.

 

2005 YouTube 

  • YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion, since which it operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube 

 

2006 Cloud computing

  • In the 2000s, the application of cloud computing began to take shape with the establishment of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002, which allowed developers to build applications independently. In 2006 Amazon Simple Storage Service, known as Amazon S3, and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) were released.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing 

 

2006 Twitter

 

2006 HPV Vaccine

  • By 2006, interim results from a company-sponsored trial were so promising that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Merck’s Gardasil for the prevention of cervical cancer and genital warts in women before the trial had finished.
  • https://ccr.cancer.gov/news/landmarks/article/hpv-vaccine 

 

2006 Spotify 

  • Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. As of September 2025, it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services, with over 713 million monthly active users comprising 281 million paying subscribers.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify 

 

2007 iPhone 

  • The iPhone (also known as the iPhone 1st generation or iPhone 2G) is a smartphone developed and marketed by Apple as the first device in the iPhone lineup of smartphones. It features a Samsung S5L8900 SoC (90 nm), a 3.5 in multi-touch display, and a web browser (Safari). After years of rumors and speculation, it was officially announced on January 9, 2007, and was released in the United States on June 29, 2007.

 

2007 Modern e-readers

  • The establishment of the E Ink Corporation in 1997 led to the development of electronic paper, a technology which allows a display screen to reflect light like ordinary paper without the need for a backlight. Among the first commercial e-readers were Sony’s Data Discman (which was using Mini CDs with special caddies) and the Rocket eBook. Several others were introduced around 1998, but did not gain widespread acceptance. Electronic paper was incorporated first into the Sony Librie that was released in 2004 and Sony Reader in 2006, followed by the Amazon Kindle, a device which, upon its release in 2007, sold out within five and a half hours. The Kindle includes access to the Kindle Store for e-book sales and delivery.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-reader 

 

2007 Subscription video on demand

  • Launched in 2007, nearly a decade after Netflix, Inc. began its pioneering DVD-by-mail movie rental service, Netflix is the most-subscribed video on demand streaming media service, with 301.6 million paid memberships in more than 190 countries as of 2025.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix 

 

2008 All electric car 

 

2008 Blockchain 

  • A blockchain was created by a person (or group of people) using the name (or pseudonym) Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 to serve as the public distributed ledger for bitcoin cryptocurrency transactions, based on previous work by Stuart Haber, W. Scott Stornetta, and Dave Bayer. The implementation of the blockchain within bitcoin made it the first digital currency to solve the double-spending problem without the need for a trusted authority or central server.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain 

 

2008 Android

 

2009 Quantum machine 

  • A quantum machine is a human-made device whose collective motion follows the laws of quantum mechanics. The idea that macroscopic objects may follow the laws of quantum mechanics dates back to the advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century. However, as highlighted by the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, quantum effects are not readily observable in large-scale objects. Consequently, quantum states of motion have only been observed in special circumstances at extremely low temperatures. The fragility of quantum effects in macroscopic objects may arise from rapid quantum decoherence. Researchers created the first quantum machine in 2009, and the achievement was named the “Breakthrough of the Year” by Science in 2010.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_machine 

 

2009 WhatsApp

  • WhatsApp (officially WhatsApp Messenger), owned by Meta Platforms, is an American social media, instant messaging (IM), and Voice over IP (VoIP) service accessible via desktop and mobile app. It allows users to send text messages, voice messages, and video messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other content. The service requires a cellular mobile telephone number to register. WhatsApp was launched in May 2009.

 

2009 Bitcoin

  • Nakamoto released bitcoin as open-source software. On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network was created when Nakamoto mined the starting block of the chain, known as the genesis block. Embedded in this block was the text “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”, which is the date and headline of an issue of The Times newspaper. Nine days later, Hal Finney received the first bitcoin transaction: ten bitcoins from Nakamoto.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#2008%E2%80%932009:_Creation 

2010 Synthetic organism

  • Scientists have created the world’s first synthetic life form in a landmark experiment that paves the way for designer organisms that are built rather than evolved.

 

2010 Instagram 

  • The Burbn Beta app was made available for iOS on October 6, 2010, by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — still as a prototype, but for the first time available as a real app on the App Store rather than a web-based prototype. The app received around 25,000 registrations that day, though it remained a public beta. Six days later, on October 12, 2010, the final stable non-beta version was officially released under a new name — Instagram.

 

2011Snapchat 

  • According to documents and deposition statements, Reggie Brown brought the idea for a disappearing-pictures application to Evan Spiegel because Spiegel had prior business experience. Brown and Spiegel then pulled in Bobby Murphy, who had experience coding. The three worked closely together for several months and launched Snapchat as “Picaboo” on the iOS operating system on July 8, 2011.
  • The app was relaunched as Snapchat in September 2011…
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapchat 

 

2011 Virtual assistant

 

2011 E-sports

  • When Justin.tv was launched in 2007 by Justin Kan and Emmett Shear, two recent Yale graduates, the site was divided into several content categories. The gaming category grew especially fast, and became the most popular content on the site In June 2011:   the company decided to spin off the gaming content as TwitchTV, inspired by the term twitch gameplay. It launched officially in public beta on June 6, 2011. Since then, Twitch has attracted more than 35 million unique visitors a month.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitch_(service) 

 

2012  3D bioprinting

  • Three dimensional (3D) bioprinting is the utilization of 3D printing–like techniques to combine cells, growth factors, and/or biomaterials to fabricate biomedical parts, often with the aim of imitating natural tissue characteristics. In 2012, otolaryngologist Glenn Green led a team that bioengineered one of the first synthetic tracheas to stabilize the breathing of a struggling baby.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_inventions_(after_1991) 

 

2012 Raspberry Pi

  • After years of development, the first Raspberry Pi model, the Raspberry Pi Model B, was officially released on February 29, 2012.

 

2013 Zoom

  • Zoom Communications, Inc. (formerly Zoom Video Communications, Inc., commonly shortened to Zoom, and stylized as zoom) is an American communications technology company primarily known for the videoconferencing application Zoom. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, United States. The company was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former Cisco engineer and executive. It launched its software in 2013

 

2014 Commercial humanoid robot

  • Pepper is a semi-humanoid robot manufactured by Aldebaran Robotics (formerly Softbank Robotics Europe), designed with the ability to read emotions. It was introduced in Japan in June 2014 and manufactured till 2020.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot) 

 

2014 Smart home technology reaches mass market

  • in 1975, the first general purpose home automation network technology, X10, was developed. It is a communication protocol for electronic devices. It primarily uses electric power transmission wiring for signalling and control, where the signals involve brief radio frequency bursts of digital data, and remains the most widely available.[4]
  • By 2012, in the United States, according to ABI Research, 1.5 million home automation systems were installed.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_automation 

 

2015 CRISPR gene editing

  • It was conceived after a yogurt company in 2007 identified an unexpected defense mechanism that its bacteria use to fight off viruses…. Now, it has matured into a molecular marvel, and much of the world—not just biologists—is taking notice of the genome-editing method CRISPR, Science’s 2015 Breakthrough of the Year.

 

2015 Discord 

 

2016 OpenAI 

  • In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of “OpenAI Gym”, its platform for reinforcement learning research.[31] Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI in August 2016 to help it train larger and more complex AI models with the capability of reducing processing time from six days to two hours.[32][33] In December 2016, OpenAI released “Universe”, a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites, and other applications.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI 

 

2016 Artificial pancreas 

  • A key milestone in artificial pancreas technology development was achieved in 2016 with the publication of results of an industry-supported trial. It was the largest outpatient artificial pancreas study done to that date, including 124 people with type 1 diabetes ages 14 and older who used the device for 3 months. The studied tested a “hybrid” system: although the device automatically adjusts insulin levels, it requires users to count and enter mealtime carbohydrates. Thus, it is not completely automated and still requires human input. The study showed that the hybrid artificial pancreas system was safe for use.
  • Based on the results of the trial, in September 2016 the FDA announced that it approved the device for use in people 14 years of age and older with type 1 diabetes—the first commercial hybrid artificial pancreas to be FDA approved.
  • https://www.niddk.nih.gov/news/archive/2017/story-discovery-artificial-pancreas-managing-type1-diabetes 

 

2016 VR headsets

 

2016 Molecular machine

 

2017 Multi-use rocket

 

2017 TikTok 

 

2017 AI wins at Go

  • AlphaGo versus Ke Jie was a three-game Go match between the computer Go program AlphaGo Master and current world No. 1 ranking player Ke Jie, being part of the Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen, China, played on 23, 25, and 27 May 2017. AlphaGo defeated Ke Jie in all three games.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_versus_Ke_Jie 

 

2019 Commercial  quantum computing system

  • IBM Quantum System One is the first circuit-based commercial quantum computer, introduced by IBM in January 2019. This integrated quantum computing system is housed in an airtight borosilicate glass cube that maintains a controlled physical environment. Each face of the cube is 9 feet (2.7 m) wide and tall.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Q_System_One 

 

2019 5G broadband cellular network 

2020 COVID MRNA vaccine

 

2020 Adoption of Telemedicine

 

2020 GPT-3 generates human-like responses 

 

2020  Cultured Meat

  • On 2 December 2020, the Singapore Food Agency approved the “chicken bites” produced by Eat Just for commercial sale. It marked the first time that a cultured meat product passed the safety review (which took 2 years) of a food regulator, and was widely regarded as a milestone for the industry.

 

2020  Self Driving Taxis

  • In December 2020, Waymo was the first to offer rides in self-driving taxis to the public in limited geographic areas (SAE Level 4),failed verification] and as of April 2024 offers services in Arizona (Phoenix) and California (San Francisco and Los Angeles).
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car 

 

2021 NFTs

  • NFTs as a form of digital art emerged in the 2020s, with NFTs such as Everydays: the First 5000 Days. The NFT market experienced rapid growth during 2020, with its value tripling to US$250 million. In the first three months of 2021, more than US$200 million were spent on NFTs and in the early months of 2021, interest in NFTs increased after a number of high-profile sales and art auctions. However, by 2022 this market was in the process of rapid collapse. A report in September 2023 concluded that 95% of collected NFTs now possess zero market value, and that “79% of all NFT collections remain unsold”.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token 

 

2021 AI Text-to-Image Art

  • In 2021, the emergence of DALL-E, a transformer-based generative model, marked an advance in AI-generated imagery. This was followed by the releases of Midjourney and Stable Diffusion in 2022, which further democratized access to high-quality artificial intelligence art creation from natural language prompts. These systems can generate photorealistic images, artwork, and designs based on text descriptions, leading to widespread adoption among artists, designers, and the general public.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence 

 

2022 Generative AI

  • In November 2022, the public release of ChatGPT popularized generative AI for general-purpose text-based tasks. The system’s ability to engage in natural conversations, generate creative content, assist with coding, and perform various analytical tasks captured global attention and sparked widespread discussion about AI’s potential impact on work, education, and creativity.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intelligence 

 

2022 Antiretroviral HIV/AIDS prevention

  • Lenacapavir, sold under the brand names Sunlenca among others, is an antiretroviral medication used to treat and prevent HIV/AIDS. It is taken by mouth or by subcutaneous injection. Lenacapavir is a human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) capsid inhibitor.
  • Lenacapavir was approved for medical treatment in the European Union in August 2022, in Canada in November 2022, and in the United States in December 2022.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenacapavir 



2022 Vagina on a chip

  • Scientists have developed what they say is the world’s first “vagina-on-a-chip,” which uses living cells and bacteria to mimic the microbial environment of the human vagina. It could help test drugs against bacterial vaginosis (BV), a common microbial imbalance that makes millions of people more susceptible to sexually transmitted diseases and increases risk of preterm delivery during pregnancy.
  • https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-vagina-on-a-chip-will-help-researchers-test-drugs/ 

 

2023 Solid State Battery

  • QuantumScape is a solid-state battery startup that spun out of Stanford University. It went public on the NYSE on November 29, 2020, as part of a SPAC merger with Kensington Capital. In 2022 the company introduced its 24-layer A0 prototype cells. In Q1 2023, it introduced QSE-5, a 5 amp-hour lithium metal cell.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_battery 

 

2023 GLP-1 Drugs 

  • Originally developed for diabetes, these GLP-1 receptor agonists induce significant weight loss, with mostly manageable side effects. This year, clinical trials found that they also cut symptoms of heart failure and the risk of heart attacks and strokes, the most compelling evidence yet that the drugs have major benefits beyond weight loss itself. For these reasons, Science has named GLP-1 drugs the Breakthrough of the Year.
  • https://www.science.org/content/article/breakthrough-2023 

 

2023 RSV vaccine

 

2023 Whole-Eye & Partial-Face Transplant

 

2023 Sematic Decoding (fMRI)

  • A new brain-reading method for “semantic decoding” is demonstrated. The non-invasive system, based on 16 hours of fMRI data per participant and a transformer, is able to translate a person’s neural activity into a continuous stream of text.

 

2023  Gene therapy treatment for sickle cell disease

 

2024 AI Text-to-Video Model

  • OpenAI released a new technology called Sora (text-to-video model), a video model generates short video clips based on user prompts, and can also extend existing short videos. Sora was released publicly for ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro users in December 2024. This has revolutionized the video industry, since this machine generates videos in shorter time, leading to more companies adopting AI videos, with Coca-Cola Christmas commercial being the first one to do so.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model) 



2024 Brain-computer interface (BCI)

 

2024  Wetware

  • The first bioprocessing system for human brain organoids performing computational tasks enabling remote wetware computing research via a Python library, NeuroPlatform, is released.
  • Biocomputing pioneers include Swiss company FinalSpark, which earlier this year debuted its “Neuroplatform”—a computer platform powered by human-brain organoids—that scientists can rent over the Internet for $500 a month.