Technology facts and facts about technologies.
114 facts on this shelf
As late as 1993, high-tech paraphernalia like computers, printers and video games had a negligible effect on power usage. Today, it's estimated to account for more than 13 percent of a typical household energy budget. By 2020, it could be as much as 25 percent
Submarines have been using low and mid-frequency active sonar technology, a deafening soundwave that is dangerous even 300 miles from it's source. Some mid-frequency sonar systems can put out over 235 decibals, which is about as loud as a rocket launch.
Animals for hundreds of miles literally jump out of the ocean to try to avoid the sound. The damaging effects vary, bet are akin to decompression sickness causing internal bleeding and bursting organs including lungs and eardrums. When beached dolphins are reported this sonar technology is rarely mentioned in the news, although the link has been demonstrated.
What can you do? learn more here
(update: court blocks sonar 7/6/06)
LFA stands for Low Frequency Active sonar, a technology used by submarines to "see." Unfortunately even one hundred miles from the source of a LFA source animals experience the equivalent of decompression sickness, killing every dolphin, porpoise, orca, and whale within 100-300 miles, depending on the decibal. It's no good for humans either.
There are currently three types of batteries commonly used to run people's laptops:
1) Nickel Cadmium (Ni-Cd) batteries were the standard technology for years, but are now out of date.
2) Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH) batteries are a cadmium-free replacement for Nickel Cadmium.
3) Lithium Ion (Li-ion) is the battery you want for your laptop and is the current standard for portable power.
About 5.5 billion people, roughly two-thirds of the world's population, use the internet, according to the International Telecommunication Union.
The Tesla Model Y doesn't use a traditional key. Drivers can use their phone as a key.
The Tesla Model Y gets over-the-air software updates.
Vladimir Zworykin developed the iconoscope, an early electronic camera tube for television.
Hawk-Eye line-calling technology debuted at a Grand Slam at the 2006 US Open.
The 2015 "Modern Family" episode "Connection Lost" was filmed on iPhones and iPads and plays out entirely on a laptop screen.
Cher's 1998 hit "Believe" was the first major song to use Auto-Tune as an obvious vocal effect.
Mark Twain was among the first authors to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher.
Continuous shuffling machines make card counting in blackjack nearly impossible.
Nikola Tesla's AC technology was used at the Niagara Falls hydroelectric plant in the 1890s.
Stephen Hawking communicated using a computer he controlled with a sensor that detected movement in his cheek.
Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in science and technology.
The oldest known wooden wheel, found in the Ljubljana Marshes of Slovenia in 2002, is roughly 5,000 years old, dating to around 3150 BC.
The wheel was likely first used for making pottery in Mesopotamia around 3500 BC, before anyone put wheels on carts.
The Bronocice pot from Poland, dated to about 3500 BC, has one of the earliest known drawings of a wheeled wagon.
The hardest part of inventing the wheel was the axle, because the axle had to fit the hole in the wheel almost perfectly or the whole thing would wobble and grind.
Ancient Mesoamerican cultures made wheeled toys, but never used wheels for transportation, likely because they had no large animals to pull carts.
The first Ferris wheel, built by engineer George Ferris, debuted at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as America's answer to the Eiffel Tower.
John Boyd Dunlop developed the first practical air-filled tire in 1888 to give his son a smoother ride on his tricycle.
The wheel and axle is one of the six classical simple machines, along with the lever, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw.
Bernard Sadow patented the wheeled suitcase in 1972, around 5,000 years after the wheel was invented.
Johannes Gutenberg developed a printing press with movable metal type in Mainz, Germany, around 1440.
About 180 Gutenberg Bibles were printed around 1455, and fewer than 50 survive today.
Bi Sheng invented movable type made of baked clay in China around 1040 AD, about 400 years before Gutenberg.
The oldest surviving book printed with movable metal type is the Jikji, a Korean Buddhist text printed in 1377.
Gutenberg adapted the screw press, which was already used to squeeze grapes for wine and olives for oil, and paired it with a new oil-based ink that stuck to metal type.
Gutenberg lost a lawsuit to his investor Johann Fust in 1455 and had to hand over much of his printing equipment, so he never got rich from his invention.
The terms "uppercase" and "lowercase" come from printers storing capital-letter type in the upper case and small-letter type in the lower case.
William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476, and printing helped standardize English spelling.
Hero of Alexandria described the aeolipile, a spinning steam-powered ball, in the 1st century AD, though it was treated as a novelty rather than a working machine.
Thomas Savery patented a steam pump in 1698 nicknamed "The Miner's Friend," designed to pump water out of flooded mines.
Thomas Newcomen built the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712 to pump water from mines in England.
James Watt patented a separate condenser in 1769, which made steam engines far more fuel-efficient by not having to reheat the main cylinder every stroke.
James Watt came up with the term "horsepower" as a marketing tool to compare his steam engines to the horses they were replacing.
The watt, the standard unit of power used on every light bulb and appliance, is named after steam engine pioneer James Watt.
Richard Trevithick built the first full-scale working steam locomotive, which ran on a track in Wales in 1804.
George and Robert Stephenson's locomotive, the Rocket, won the 1829 Rainhill Trials and set the basic design for steam locomotives for the next 150 years.
Robert Fulton's Clermont became the first commercially successful steamboat in 1807, carrying passengers up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany.
Most of the world's electricity is still made by steam turbines, since coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants all work by boiling water to spin a turbine.
English inventor Joseph Swan demonstrated a working incandescent bulb around the same time as Edison, and the two later joined forces in a company called Ediswan.
Edison's team found that a filament made of carbonized bamboo could burn for over 1,200 hours.
Edison's lab tested thousands of materials as possible light bulb filaments, including plant fibers from around the world.
William Coolidge at General Electric found a way to make tungsten into thin wire in 1910, and tungsten filaments became the standard for incandescent bulbs.
The Centennial Light, a bulb in a firehouse in Livermore, California, has been burning almost continuously since 1901.
Edison's Pearl Street Station opened in Manhattan in 1882 as the first commercial central power plant in the US, lighting buildings in the financial district.
Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for the blue LED, which made bright white LED lighting possible.
Household LED bulbs use at least 75% less energy than incandescent bulbs and last up to 25 times longer.
The first words Bell spoke over the telephone, on March 10, 1876, were "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."
Inventor Elisha Gray filed paperwork for a telephone design on the same day as Bell in 1876, which led to years of legal battles.
In 2002, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution honoring Italian inventor Antonio Meucci for his early work on the telephone.
Western Union reportedly turned down a chance to buy Bell's telephone patent for $100,000, viewing the phone as a toy.
The first commercial telephone exchange opened in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1878 with 21 subscribers.
The first transcontinental phone call was made in 1915, when Bell in New York called his old assistant Thomas Watson in San Francisco.
Almon Strowger, an undertaker, invented the automatic telephone exchange in 1891, reportedly because he believed a rival's wife who was a switchboard operator was sending his customers to her husband.
The Bell System introduced touch-tone dialing in 1963, slowly replacing the rotary dial.
Karl Benz's Patent-Motorwagen, patented in 1886, is widely considered the first practical gasoline-powered automobile.
In 1888, Bertha Benz drove her husband's Motorwagen about 66 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany, in the first long-distance road trip by car.
French engineer Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built a steam-powered vehicle in 1769, designed to haul cannons, and it's often called the first self-propelled road vehicle.
Ford's moving assembly line, introduced in 1913, cut the time to build a Model T from over 12 hours to about 90 minutes.
From 1914 to 1925, Ford only made the Model T in black, because black paint dried fastest and kept the assembly line moving.
Around 1900, electric cars made up about one-third of all vehicles on US roads.
Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seatbelt in 1959, and Volvo made the patent free for all car companies to use.
The first speeding ticket was given in England in 1896 to Walter Arnold, who was driving 8 mph in a 2 mph zone.
Charles Kettering invented the electric starter, which first appeared on the 1912 Cadillac and ended the need to start cars with a dangerous hand crank.
The Wright brothers' first powered flight on December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet.
The longest of the Wright brothers' four flights on December 17, 1903, was flown by Wilbur and covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.
Before building airplanes, Orville and Wilbur Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, which paid for their flight experiments.
The Wright brothers' key breakthrough was three-axis control, which let a pilot control pitch, roll, and yaw, and their "wing-warping" system twisted the wings to bank the plane.
The Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel in 1901 and tested about 200 wing shapes to fix errors in existing aerodynamic data.
A piece of the original Wright Flyer went to the Moon on Apollo 11 in 1969, and another flew to Mars on NASA's Ingenuity helicopter in 2021.
French aviator Louis Blériot became the first person to fly an airplane across the English Channel in 1909.
The first scheduled commercial airline was the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line in Florida, which started flying passengers across Tampa Bay in 1914.
Charles Lindbergh made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927, flying from New York to Paris in about 33.5 hours.
The first jet-powered airplane to fly was Germany's Heinkel He 178 in 1939, though British engineer Frank Whittle had patented a jet engine design in 1930.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain built the first working transistor at Bell Labs in December 1947, working in a group led by William Shockley.
Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the transistor.
Transistors replaced vacuum tubes, which were bulky, power-hungry, and burned out often, making electronics smaller, cheaper, and more reliable.
The word "transistor" was coined by Bell Labs engineer John Pierce as a mash-up of "transfer" and "resistor."
Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments built the first integrated circuit in 1958, and Robert Noyce independently made a silicon version in 1959.
The transistor is the most manufactured human-made object in history, with an estimated 13 sextillion made by 2018.
Intel's 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, released in 1971, had about 2,300 transistors, while modern chips have tens of billions.
Eight engineers known as the "traitorous eight" left Shockley's transistor company in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which helped launch Silicon Valley.
Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer, in the 1830s, but it was never built.
Ada Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer because in 1843 she published an algorithm meant to run on Babbage's Analytical Engine.
Colossus, built in Britain in 1943–44, was an early electronic computer used to break German military codes during World War II.
A Turing machine is a theoretical model of computing described by Alan Turing in 1936, and it laid the foundation for computer science.
Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in Germany in 1941, is considered the first working programmable, fully automatic computer.
Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse in the 1960s and showed it off in 1968 in a presentation now called "The Mother of All Demos."
Personal computers took off in the late 1970s and early 1980s with machines like the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM PC in 1981.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn designed TCP/IP, the basic communication rules of the internet, in 1974, and ARPANET switched to it on January 1, 1983.
The internet is the global network of connected computers, while the World Wide Web is a system of linked pages that runs on top of it, invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.
The first website, info.cern.ch, went online in 1991 at CERN and explained how the World Wide Web worked.
CERN released the World Wide Web software into the public domain in 1993, so anyone could use and build on it without paying fees.
The first registered .com domain name was symbolics.com, registered on March 15, 1985.
About 99% of international internet data travels through cables on the ocean floor, not satellites.
The first webcam watched a coffee pot in a computer lab at the University of Cambridge so researchers could check if there was coffee without walking over.
Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first handheld cell phone call on April 3, 1973, calling a rival engineer at Bell Labs to brag.
Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on January 9, 2007, and it went on sale on June 29, 2007.
The Apollo Guidance Computer that helped land astronauts on the Moon had only about 4 KB of RAM, while a modern smartphone has millions of times more memory.
The Sharp J-SH04, released in Japan in 2000, is generally considered the first commercially sold camera phone.
Corning's Gorilla Glass, used on the first iPhone and billions of phones since, was based on a strong glass Corning had developed back in the 1960s.
The GPS that smartphones use for maps is a constellation of US satellites operated by the US Space Force, and it's free for anyone in the world to use.
Apple's voice assistant Siri launched on the iPhone 4S in 2011, bringing voice assistants to the mainstream.
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient Greek device often called the world's first analog computer.
In 2018, lidar scans revealed about 60,000 hidden Maya structures in Guatemala.
Bluetooth technology is named after Viking king Harald Bluetooth.
Digital stethoscopes can record heart sounds and use AI to help find problems.
Sequencing a human genome now costs about $1,000 or less.
Leadless pacemakers can be about the size of a large vitamin capsule.
Modern pacemakers can send data to doctors remotely.