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13.10 — Technology, Computing and Inventions
Who made what, and the detail that makes it stick. A large share of these entries end with somebody either not patenting the thing or not being credited for it.
Inventions and inventors
Who invented the printing press with movable metal type in Europe? Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. He was sued by his financier, lost the press, and died poor while the business made others rich.
Who invented the telephone, and who nearly did? Alexander Graham Bell, patent filed 14 February 1876 — hours before Elisha Gray filed a caveat. Antonio Meucci had a working device earlier and could not afford the fees.
Who invented the light bulb? Not Edison alone — around twenty people made incandescent lamps first, and Joseph Swan had one at the same time. Edison's contribution was a practical filament and, more importantly, the whole electrical distribution system around it.
Who invented the telegraph, and what was the first message? Cooke and Wheatstone in Britain, Morse in America. Morse's 1844 message was "What hath God wrought".
Who worked out Morse code's letter frequencies? Alfred Vail, by counting type in a newspaper print shop — which is why E is one dot and Q is four symbols.
Who invented radio? Marconi built the practical system and won the Nobel, but Tesla's patents on the underlying work were upheld by the US Supreme Court in 1943. Jagadish Chandra Bose demonstrated millimetre-wave transmission in Calcutta in 1895 and refused to patent anything.
Who invented television? John Logie Baird demonstrated mechanical television in 1925; Philo Farnsworth built the first fully electronic system in 1927.
Who invented the aeroplane, and what was their real insight? The Wright brothers, 1903 — and their insight was control in three axes, not lift or power. They were bicycle makers.
Who invented the car, and who made the first long drive? Karl Benz patented the Motorwagen in 1886. Bertha Benz drove 106 km in 1887 without telling him, cleared a fuel line with a hatpin, and invented brake linings on the way.
Who invented the steam engine, and what did Watt actually do? Newcomen built a working engine in 1712; Watt added a separate condenser in 1769, cutting fuel use to about a quarter and taking steam power out of the coal mine.
Who invented the photograph, and which process won? Daguerre and Fox Talbot announced in 1839. Talbot's negative-positive process lost the publicity and won the future, because it could be copied.
Who invented the ballpoint pen? László Bíró, a Hungarian journalist, with his chemist brother, patented 1938. It sold first to the RAF, because fountain pens leak at altitude.
Who invented the safety pin, and what did he get? Walter Hunt, 1849, in about three hours to pay a fifteen-dollar debt. He sold the patent for four hundred dollars.
Who invented Velcro, and how? George de Mestral, 1941, after examining burdock burrs stuck to his dog under a microscope. The name is velours plus crochet.
Who invented the zip as we know it? Gideon Sundback, 1917. Judson's 1893 hook-and-eye version kept springing open. The name came from a boot brand.
Who invented dynamite, and what did he do with the money? Alfred Nobel, 1867. A premature obituary called him the merchant of death, and he left his fortune to the prizes.
Who invented the World Wide Web, and what was the manager's verdict? Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, proposal 1989. His manager wrote "Vague but exciting" on it.
Who invented email and the @ sign's use? Ray Tomlinson, 1971. He chose @ because it was on the keyboard and could not appear in a name.
Who invented the shipping container, and why did it matter? Malcom McLean, an American trucking operator, 1956. It cut the cost of moving goods across an ocean by something like 95 per cent, which is the real mechanism behind globalisation.
Who invented the barcode? Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver, patented 1952. Woodland's first version was a bullseye, drawn after dragging his fingers through beach sand while thinking about Morse code.
Who invented the ATM, and why is the PIN four digits? John Shepherd-Barron's machine opened in Enfield in 1967. He shortened a six-digit code to four because his wife said she could reliably remember four.
Who invented the microwave oven, and how? Percy Spencer at Raytheon, 1945, after a chocolate bar melted in his pocket near a live radar magnetron.
Who invented the jet engine? Frank Whittle in Britain and Hans von Ohain in Germany, independently. Whittle patented first and the German aircraft flew first.
Who invented the transistor, and when? Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947. It replaced the vacuum valve and started the whole of modern electronics.
Who invented the integrated circuit? Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild, independently, in 1958-59.
Who invented the computer mouse, and what did he earn from it? Douglas Engelbart, demonstrated in 1968. The patent expired before mice sold in quantity; he received about ten thousand dollars.
Who is the father of the computer, and who wrote the first algorithm? Charles Babbage, for the Analytical Engine he designed and never built; Ada Lovelace, for the procedure published in her notes on it.
Who invented the modern smartphone category? No single person — but the iPhone in 2007 set the form, combining a capacitive multi-touch screen, a real browser and an app model.
Who invented Wi-Fi's underlying frequency-hopping idea? A patent by the actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil, filed 1942 for torpedo guidance. It fed into later spread-spectrum work.
Computing
What does CPU, RAM, ROM and GPU stand for? Central processing unit, random access memory, read-only memory, graphics processing unit. RAM is volatile and forgets when power goes; ROM does not.
What is the difference between hardware, software and firmware? The physical machine, the programs, and the low-level software stored on a chip that starts the machine.
What is a bit, a byte and a nibble? One binary digit, eight bits, and four bits — which is exactly one hexadecimal digit.
Why does a 1 TB disk show as about 931 GB? Because manufacturers use decimal prefixes and Windows reports binary ones. The correct binary names are kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte and tebibyte.
What is the binary, octal and hexadecimal base? 2, 8 and 16. Hexadecimal uses 0–9 then A–F, which is why colour codes look like #FF5733.
What does HTTP, HTML, URL and IP stand for? Hypertext transfer protocol, hypertext markup language, uniform resource locator, internet protocol.
What is the difference between the internet and the web? The internet is the network; the web is one service running on it, alongside email, video calls and everything else.
What is an IP address, and what is the difference between IPv4 and IPv6? A numeric address for a device. IPv4 has about 4.3 billion addresses and has run out; IPv6 uses 128 bits and has effectively unlimited.
What is DNS? The system that turns a name like example.com into an IP address. It is often called the phone book of the internet.
What is a firewall, a VPN and encryption? A filter on network traffic; a tunnel that encrypts your traffic to a remote point; and the process of scrambling data so only a key holder can read it.
What is open-source software, and give the standard examples. Software whose source code anybody may read, modify and redistribute. Linux, Firefox, Python, Apache and Git.
Who created Linux, and who created Git? Linus Torvalds created both — Linux in 1991 as a student project, and Git in 2005 in about two weeks after a licensing dispute over the tool the kernel had been using.
Who created Python, Java, C and C++? Guido van Rossum, James Gosling, Dennis Ritchie and Bjarne Stroustrup. Python is named after Monty Python, not the snake.
What is an algorithm, and where does the word come from? A finite sequence of steps to solve a problem. From the Latinised name of al-Khwarizmi, the ninth-century Baghdad mathematician.
Who was Alan Turing, and what is a Turing machine? The founder of theoretical computer science. A Turing machine is an idealised device with a tape and rules that defines what any computer can do.
What is the Turing test? Turing's 1950 proposal that a machine be judged by whether a person conversing with it can tell it from a human.
What was ENIAC, and what was Colossus? ENIAC, 1945, was the first general-purpose electronic computer, programmed by rewiring. Colossus, 1943, was the first electronic programmable digital computer, built for codebreaking and kept secret for thirty years.
Where does the word "bug" come from? Engineering slang predating computing, but the famous instance is a moth taped into the Mark II logbook in 1947 by Grace Hopper's team, noted as "first actual case of bug being found".
Who wrote the first compiler, and who was behind COBOL? Grace Hopper, both. She was told a compiler was impossible.
What is Moore's Law? Gordon Moore's 1965 observation that transistor counts double roughly every two years. It was never a law of physics — it became an industry target that everybody planned around.
What is cloud computing, in one line? Renting somebody else's computers over the internet instead of owning your own.
What is AI, machine learning and a neural network? The broad field; the subset where systems learn from data rather than explicit rules; and the model architecture loosely inspired by brain cells that most modern machine learning uses.
What was Deep Blue, and what was AlphaGo? The IBM machine that beat Kasparov at chess in 1997 using brute-force search and hand-written rules; and the 2016 system that beat Lee Sedol at Go by learning evaluation from self-play. The second was the bigger scientific step.
What is blockchain, and what was the first cryptocurrency? A shared ledger where each block cryptographically references the last, making retroactive change detectable. Bitcoin, 2009, from a paper by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.
What is a QR code, who invented it, and why is it free? Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave in 1994, to track car parts. The company holds the patent and chose never to enforce it, which is why it is everywhere.
What is the difference between LCD and OLED? LCD has a backlight and each pixel is a shutter, so black is grey; OLED pixels emit their own light, so black is truly black and dark mode saves power.
What is 4G, 5G and what does G stand for? Generation. Each generation is a new set of radio standards — 5G adds much higher bandwidth and lower latency, using higher frequencies with shorter range.
What is GPS, and does it need the internet? A constellation of satellites broadcasting time and position. A receiver only listens and needs no network at all — the internet supplies the map, not the fix.
Why does GPS need relativity? Satellite clocks run about 38 microseconds a day fast relative to the ground, from combined special and general relativistic effects. Uncorrected, positions would drift by about 10 km a day.
Everyday technology, decoded
What does laser stand for? Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Radar and sonar are also acronyms — radio and sound detection and ranging.
What does PDF, JPEG, MP3 and GIF stand for? Portable document format; Joint Photographic Experts Group; MPEG Audio Layer III; Graphics Interchange Format.
What is lossy versus lossless compression? Lossy throws information away permanently — JPEG, MP3 — and lossless does not — PNG, FLAC, ZIP.
How does noise cancellation work? A microphone hears the noise, the electronics produce its exact inverse, and the two sum to near silence. It works far better on low frequencies, because their long wavelengths tolerate positioning error.
How does contactless payment work? The terminal powers the card by induction, then the chip signs a one-time challenge with a key that never leaves it. That is why it cannot be cloned like a magnetic stripe.
Why does a phone camera take good photos with a tiny lens? It takes several exposures and merges them — computational photography — rather than relying on optics alone.
What is a captcha, and what does it stand for? Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Early ones digitised books as a side effect.
What is the difference between a virus, a worm and ransomware? A virus attaches to a host file; a worm spreads by itself across a network; ransomware encrypts your files and demands payment.
What is two-factor authentication, and why is SMS the weakest form? Something you know plus something you have. SMS is weakest because a SIM swap moves your number to an attacker, and messages show on lock screens.
Why is a browser's padlock not proof a site is safe? It only proves the connection is encrypted, not that the site is honest. Any site can obtain a certificate.
What is Bluetooth named after? Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, the tenth-century Danish king who united warring tribes. The logo is his initials as Norse bind runes.
What is Wi-Fi short for? Nothing. It was invented by a branding agency to echo "hi-fi"; the "wireless fidelity" tagline was attached afterwards and then dropped.
Firsts in computing and the internet
First website, and is it still up? The CERN page describing the web project, 1991. A restored copy is online.
First email, first text message, first tweet? 1971 by Ray Tomlinson to himself; "Merry Christmas" in 1992, typed on a computer because phones could not compose; and Jack Dorsey's "just setting up my twttr" in 2006.
First item sold on Amazon and on eBay? A book about artificial intelligence; a broken laser pointer, sold to a collector of broken laser pointers.
First webcam, and what did it watch? A coffee pot at Cambridge, so researchers would not walk to an empty one.
First video on YouTube? Nineteen seconds of a co-founder at a zoo, 2005.
First computer virus to spread widely on the internet? The Morris worm, 1988, written by a student who intended it as a measurement exercise and crashed a large fraction of the connected internet.
First smartphone, arguably? IBM Simon, 1994, with a touchscreen, email and apps — thirteen years before the iPhone.
Which country has the fastest average internet, and which invented the SIM card? Rankings shift, but small dense economies like Singapore and South Korea lead. The SIM was developed by Giesecke & Devrient in Germany in 1991.
What comes next
The next page is sport — the rules, the records and the numbers that come up in every quiz ever written.