1895, DISCOVERY OF X-RAY
It was in fact by accident that we discovered X-RAY and it wasn’t well received at first as some people deemed it, seeing one’s death.
1901: RADIO
Guglielmo Marconi sent the first radio message over the Atlantic Ocean from England to Canada. The signal simply carried the letter ‘s’ in Morse code.
1927: TV BABY!
Television was invented
1928: ULTRASOUND
Sound was first used to detect flaws in metal, the technology would later find its way into medicine.
1953: IN-FLIGHT RECORDER INVENTED
The in-flight recorder, or ‘black box,’ was an Australian innovation created by Dr. David Warren.
He didn’t receive any royalties for the idea, and it didn’t take off at first, but it’s now a standard and compulsory part of aviation, with planes both carrying a cockpit voice recorder and in-flight data recorder to help assist investigators following an incident.
The devices are bright orange, waterproof, and designed to withstand harsh temperatures in an effort to preserve data.
1957: SPUTNIK 1
The soviet union launches a low-orbit satellite into space on 4th October 1957. It sent radio signals back to Earth for three weeks before its batteries died.
The craft weighed around 180 pounds and was equipped with two radios.
This launch would be followed by Sputnik 2 which carried Laika, the first animal carried into space, sourced from the streets of Moscow.
TELSTAR 1
On 10th July 1962, a communications satellite was launched into orbit which carried television, phone calls, and digital communication over the Atlantic, between the US and the UK.
Weighing in at 77kgs and costing around $50 million USD, its first pictures delivered to Europe from the US included a press conference from the late John F Kennedy and a baseball game.
Radiation interfered with the satellite’s communication and caused the satellite’s command channel to stop working.
Telstar 2 was launched on May 7, 1963
1969: CONCORDE TAKES FLIGHT
A now-retired supersonic airliner capable of travelling twice the speed of sound took flight.
On her arrival in Sydney in 1972, she was met by environmental protesters holding signs that read ‘Ban the boom’ and ‘Save the ozone layer.’
1973: GPS INVENTED
Brought to life partly thanks to the space race between the US and the Soviet Union, GPS began its life as a non-public military technology designed to give the US an edge, in later years it would be made available for civilian use, but with degraded accuracy ‘selective availability,’ this ended in the year 2000.
1973:MOTOROLA MAKES FIRST MOBILE PHONE CALL
Marty Cooper made the first mobile telephone call on April 3, 1973, from Sixth Avenue in NYC.
1978: TEST TUBE BABY (IVF)
The first baby conceived outside a mother’s womb, Louise ‘Joy’ Brown was born July 25, 1978.
British doctors delivered Louise via Cesarean, born with a weight of 5ibs, 12ozs.
1981: MTV LAUNCHES
Hello stereo sound, video-jockeys and a brand which gave us ‘I want my MTV’ in Dire Straights, Money For Nothing, arguably the first pre-internet era viral marketing campaign.
1982:US FESTIVAL LINKS US TO RUSSIA (SPACEBRIDGE)
On September 5 the first telecast was conducted between US and Russia for the US Festival, a music festival bankrolled by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.
1984: MACINTOSH LAUNCHES
On January 24, the Macintosh was unveiled to the world.
1984: CHERNOBYL DISASTER
A routine test failed and the facility went into a meltdown, radiation was released into the atmosphere.
1985: KILLER RADIATION THERAPY MACHINE – Therac-25
A software bug in a radiation therapy machine under certain conditions would administer lethal levels of radiation.
1989: Hello World Wide Web
The internet can’t be traced back to a single creator, its origins come from the development of ARPANET, a military project designed to share information between universities, and wouldn’t be possible without the creation of TCP/IP in the 70s.
The first message sent by ARPANET was ‘Login,’ however only ‘LO,’ managed to be transferred before the system failed.
1990: AT&T OUTAGE
The United States phone carrier AT&T suffered a nationwide outage triggered by a single line of code pushed in a software update weeks prior as was amplified by the architecture of SS7.
2005: HELLO YOUTUBE
YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim published a 19-second-long video standing in front of an elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo.
A now iconic moment of internet history dubbed the first YouTube video was published on April 23 2005.
As of 2024, it has secured over 339 million views according to the platform.
2007: STEVE JOBS INTRODUCES ‘IPHONE’
The late Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone at Macworld in San Francisco on 29th June 2007.
2024: GLOBAL IT OUTAGE CROWDSTRIKE
A bad software update in security software with kernel-level access brought industries offline globally as Windows-based computers experienced a BSOD.
