Who invented technology

As language began to develop along with tool making, was this handaxe made to suggest ideas? Does the care and craftsmanship with which it was made indicate the beginnings of the artistic sense unique to humans?

Schick and N. Schick, Making silent stones speak. Sign up for our newsletter! Receive occasional emails about new Smarthistory content. Our earliest technology? Where is he now? His patent expired in , and he never received any royalties from it, according to the BBC.

He retired from McDonnell Douglas in and formed the nonprofit Bootstrap Institute, now known as the Douglas Engelbart Institute , an organization dedicated to promoting a collective approach to problem-solving. But what would I do? There were so many complicated problems in the world. Things were changing at such a large scale. I came to realize that we needed new levels of group understanding and abilities to work collectively to solve complex problems. Designed and developed by Abramson at the University of Hawaii, the ALOHAnet was the first network to transmit data successfully using radio signals — a fundamental technological breakthrough.

While Hawaii may be better known for its natural beauty than for its technological inventions, it actually makes sense that the wireless network was born there. ALOHA channels in particular have proved to be resilient technology, used in every generation of mobile broadband, from 1G to 4G.

Indeed, it would have been surprising had such a network architecture, shaped by the requirements of voice communications at the end of the 19th century, been compatible with the emerging requirements of data communication networks at the end of the 20th century.

His impact on technology: If your company has work-from-home Fridays, you can thank Jack Nilles. His efforts to define and promote the concept of telework is partially responsible. Telework, it turns out, did.

Jack Nilles was working as a rocket scientist in the early s when he was struck by the amount of congestion on the roads. He realized that the daily commute that people made just to get to work was responsible for the stress-inducing traffic everyone had to suffer through.

To Nilles, the answer was obvious: Get people off the road by removing the requirement that they come into the office to work. With that goal in mind, he began working with a team at the University of Southern California to design, define and test a telework initiative at an insurance company using satellite offices, Nilles said in an interview with BizTech magazine.

Over the past 40 years, teleworking has grown from a wild and crazy idea to an acceptable way of life, but one sweeping change Nilles sees coming down the road is the revolution of the office space. Aside from a decreasing need for large amounts of commercial office space, the nature of what people do in the office is changing as well.

The office now, for many, is a place for communicating face to face. Sure, you could only talk on it for 35 minutes, but before the DynaTAC, the only option users had for making a call were telephones tethered to the wall.

As Cooper told the BBC , the team at Motorola had the unenviable challenge of figuring out for the first time how to pack all of the necessary technology into a self-contained mobile device. There was no blueprint upon which they could improve. By this point, these analogue machines could already replace human computers in some tasks and were calculating faster and faster, especially when their gears began to be replaced by electronic components.

But they still had one serious drawback. They were designed to perform one type of calculation and if they were to be used for another, their gears or circuits had to be replaced. That was the case until , when a young English student, Alan Turing, thought of a computer that would solve any problem that could be translated into mathematical terms and then reduced to a chain of logical operations with binary numbers, in which only two decisions could be made: true or false.

The idea was to reduce everything numbers, letters, pictures, sounds to strings of ones and zeros and use a recipe a program to solve the problems in very simple steps. The digital computer was born, but for now it was only an imaginary machine. At the end of the Second World War —during which he helped to decipher the Enigma code of the Nazi coded messages— Turing created one of the first computers similar to modern ones , the Automatic Computing Engine, which in addition to being digital was programmable; in other words, it could be used for many things by simply changing the program.

Although Turing established what a computer should look like in theory, he was not the first to put it into practice. That honour goes to an engineer who was slow to gain recognition, in part because his work was financed by the Nazi regime in the midst of a global war. On 12 May , Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in Berlin, which was the first fully functional programmable and automatic digital computer.

Just as the Silicon Valley pioneers would later do, Zuse successfully built the Z3 in his home workshop, managing to do so without electronic components, but using telephone relays.

On the other side of the war, the Allied powers did attach importance to building electronic computers, using thousands of vacuum tubes.

The first computer that was Turing-complete, and that had those four basic features of our current computers was the ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer , secretly developed by the US army and first put to work at the University of Pennsylvania on 10 December in order to study the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.

Presper Eckert, occupied m2, weighed 30 tons, consumed kilowatts of electricity and contained some 20, vacuum tubes. ENIAC was soon surpassed by other computers that stored their programs in electronic memories.

The vacuum tubes were replaced first by transistors and eventually by microchips, with which the computer miniaturization race commenced. But that giant machine, built by the great winner of the Second World War, launched our digital age. Nowadays, it would be unanimously considered the first true computer in history if it were not for Konrad Zuse , who decided in to reconstruct his Z3, which had been destroyed by a bombing in With the RAMAC, a mechanical arm would retrieve data by storing data at a particular magnetic orientation.

This technology goes on to be used at a smaller size in laptops and computer servers everywhere. Enovid, a drug the FDA approves for menstrual disorders, comes with a warning: The mixture of synthetic progesterone and estrogen also prevents ovulation.

Two years later, more than half a million American women are taking Enovid—and not all of them have cramps. In the FDA approves Enovid for use as the first oral contraceptive. The Boeing debuts as the world's first successful commercial jet airliner, ushering in the era of accessible mass air travel.

The four-engine plane carries passengers and cruises at mph for up to 5, miles on a full tank. The first general-purpose computer, the nearly ton ENIAC , contains 18, vacuum tubes, 70, resistors and 10, capacitors.

In , the integrated circuit puts those innards on one tiny chip. In , Wilson Greatbatch grabs the wrong resistor and connects it to a device he is building to record heartbeats.

When the circuit emits a pulse, he realizes the device can be used to control the beat; in the first Pacemaker is successfully implanted in a human. It Sure Looks Like It. Black and Decker releases its first cordless drill, but designers can't coax more than 20 watts from its NiCd batteries. Instead, they strive for efficiency, modifying gear ratios and using better materials.

Telstar is launched as the first "active" communications satellite—active as in amplifying and retransmitting incoming signals, rather than passively bouncing them back to Earth.

Telstar makes real a concept by science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, who envisioned a global communications network based on geosynchronous satellites. Ivan Sutherland—The Father of Computer Graphics—revolutionized 3D computer modeling and simulation when he created the Sketchpad program. As the earliest iteration of a computer-aided design CAD program, Sketchpad pioneered the use of geometric constraints fixing the length of a line or an angle between two segments.

It was also one of the first programs to use a graphical user interface, as opposed to a text-based one—if you're reading this on a computer without knowing a single line of code, you can thank Sutherland and Sketchpad.

The first model of these foot-long planes was developed in just 90 days in AQMs go on to fly more than 34, surveillance missions. Their success leads to the eventual development of the UAVs widely used today. The International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines releases a semi-dwarf, high-yield Indica variety that, in conjunction with high-yield wheat, ushers in the Green Revolution.