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The Pioneer Behind Electromagnetism
Without an understanding of the fundamental relationship between electricity and magnetism, it would not have been possible to invent motors, telecommunications equipment, kitchen appliances and more....
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The Invention That Let Fiber Optics Span the Globe
Plenty of big stories from the year 1985 had their moment in the sun and are now all but forgotten: New Coke, “We Are the World,” the rise of desktop publishing. But one at-the-time obscure invention...
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Franklin’s Franklins Were Freakishly Un-Fakeable
To make something hard to fake, you can use exotic materials or clever tricks. Benjamin Franklin, a printer by vocation, a scientist by avocation, leaned on cleverness, developing measures that are...
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Who Really Invented the Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Battery?
Fifty years after the birth of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery, it’s easy to see its value. It’s used in billions of laptops, cellphones, power tools, and cars. Global sales top US $45 billion a...
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The Cold War Arms Race Over Prosthetic Arms
In 1961, Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, broke his hip and wound up in Massachusetts General Hospital. Wiener’s bad luck turned into fruitful conversations with his orthopedic surgeon,...
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Assistive Tech at the End of Sight
Seeing his words on the printed page is a big deal to Andrew Leland—as it is to all writers. But the sight of his thoughts in written form is much more precious to him than to most scribes. Leland is...
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Granville T. Woods: Smartest Guy in the Room
Any home baker will confirm that, even if you have all the right ingredients and follow the recipe, things don’t always turn out the way you envisioned. Such was the life of inventor extraordinaire...
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Taking the Measure of the Earthquake That Destroyed Tokyo
At 11:58 am on Saturday, 1 September 1923, the Kanto region of Japan started to shake. The earthquake began with a violent horizontal back-and-forth motion, followed by two vertical jolts, and then...
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The Marimba Virtuoso’s Desktop Planetarium
On 21 April 1962, the Seattle World’s Fair opened to the public. Included in its many exhibits on modern science and the progressive future was this electric desktop orrery. Much like the traditional...
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A Brief History of the Office Cubicle
In 1964, the office cubicle was born. For that you can thank Robert Propst, a designer at the Herman Miller furniture company. Four years earlier, he had proposed a radical alternative to the office...
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Lewis H. Latimer: A Life of Lightbulb Moments
James Weldon Johnson’s hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” adopted by African Americans as the unofficial “Negro National Anthem,” includes the line, “We have come over a way that with tears has been...
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Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years
The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California has spawned many pioneering computer technologies including the Alto—the first personal computer to use a graphical user interface—and the first laser...
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Why Are We Still Doing What Simon Says?
In 1976, Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison, two game designers, happened to see a trade show demonstration of an Atari arcade game called Touch Me. The game’s waist-high cabinet featured four large...
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Fakes: Not an Internet Thing, a Human Thing
Every day, as the Internet becomes more indispensable to modern life, the drawbacks of deep engagement with the virtual realm capture as much attention as the wide-ranging benefits. On the Internet,...
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35 Years Ago, Researchers Used Brain Waves to Control a Robot
Using the brain to directly control an object was long the stuff of science fiction, and in 1988 the vision became a reality.IEEE Life Senior Member Stevo Bozinovski and Members Mihail Sestakov and...
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The Cheesy Charm of the Clapper
“Clap on! Clap off! Clap on! Clap off! The Clapper!” This 1980s earworm of a jingle touted a gadget to turn your lights, your TV, or any other electrical device on or off with the clap of your hands....
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How Tech Automated the January 6 Investigations
Josh Coker’s Facebook page doesn’t show any MAGA memes or Trump quotes. He wasn’t live-streaming on 6 January 2021, and no one has ever stepped forward to identify him as one of the mob that stormed...
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The Man Who Coined the Word “Robot” Defends Himself
You’re familiar with Karel Čapek, right? If not, you should be—he’s the guy who (along with his brother Josef) invented the word “robot.” Čapek introduced robots to the world in 1921, when his play...
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The Battle for Better, Broader, More Inclusive AI
AI’s inclusivity problem is no secret. According to the ACLU, AI systems can perpetuate housing discrimination and bias in the justice system, among other harms. Bias in the data an AI model relies on...
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What Is an Electronic Sackbut?
If you, like me, think of musical synthesizers as an artifact of 1970s rock and disco, then you, like me, will be surprised to learn that the first electronic synthesizer predates those genres by...
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100 Years Ago, IBM Was Born
Happy birthday, IBM! You’re 100 years old! Or are you?It’s true that the businesses that formed IBM began in the late 1800s. But it’s also true that a birth occurred in February 1924, with the...
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What If the Biggest AI Fear Is AI Fear Itself?
It’s been just about a year now—a nonprofit called the Future of Life Institute posted an open letter reflecting people’s darkest fears about artificial intelligence. “Contemporary AI systems are now...
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This Clock Made Power Grids Possible
On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston’s Edison Electric...
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Sci-fi and Hi-fi
Many a technologist has been inspired by science fiction. Some have even built, or rebuilt, entire companies around an idea introduced in a story they read, as the founders of Second Life and Meta...
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The Story Behind Pixar’s RenderMan CGI Software
Watching movies and TV series that use digital visual effects to create fantastical worlds lets people escape reality for a few hours. Thanks to advancements in computer-generated technology used to...
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Why L. Ron Hubbard Patented His E-Meter
To call L. Ron Hubbard a prolific writer is an extreme understatement. From 1934 to 1940, he regularly penned 70,000 to 100,000 words per month of pulp fiction under 15 different pseudonyms published...
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The Rise and Fall of 3M’s Floppy Disk
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have...
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How Engineers at Digital Equipment Corp. Saved Ethernet
I’ve enjoyed reading magazine articles about Ethernet’s 50th anniversary, including one in the The Institute. Invented by computer scientists Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs, Ethernet has been...
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50 Years Later, This Apollo-Era Antenna Still Talks to Voyager 2
For more than 50 years, Deep Space Station 43 has been an invaluable tool for space probes as they explore our solar system and push into the beyond. The DSS-43 radio antenna, located at the Canberra...
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Robert Kahn: The Great Interconnector
In the mid-1960s, Robert Kahn began thinking about how computers with different operating systems could talk to each other across a network. He didn’t think much about what they would say to one...
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