Famous Inventions That Changed The World

Perhaps one of the most under rated inventions belongs to the barcode. Barcodes aren't given much thought by the majority of consumers, but these codes were fairly recently implemented, in a working fashion, in 1970. A small food store owner decided one day that keeping records of the inventory of his stock and their associated prices was an extremely laborious process and so, in 1948, he took it upon himself to contact The Drexel Institute of Technology in a bid to work towards a feasible solution. Bernard Silver rose to the challenge and set out to investigate this problem, and began working on a solution involving an automatic way of keeping track of items which had been sold....

The Internet is something which many of us now take for granted, but the invention of the Internet, is still recent. The Internet is essentially a network connecting thousands of smaller networks into a single global network. The Internet model and the Transmission Control Protocols used to implement the idea were developed in 1973 by Vinton Cerf, an American computer scientist. His project was backed by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), directed by Robert Khan, an American engineer. The Internet initially was used to connect University networks and research labs within the United States. The World Wide Web, as we now know it, was...

The invention of the printing press took place in approximately 1450 AD, by a German inventor by the name of Johannes Gutenburg. During this time, there were many cultural changes in Europe which sparked the requirement of a quick, inexpensive method of producing large amounts of documents. Gutenberg received investment from banks and local business in order to work on a viable solution. Gutenberg's original concept remained relatively unchanged until the 19th century. In the early 1800's, the advancements in technologies meant that the printing press had to be amended to cope with the modern world and growing demand. Iron materials replaced wooden materials for printing, which...

Personal computers are now commonplace in most homes throughout the world, and are relied on heavily by both individuals and businesses. The invention of the computer is relatively new, emerging into our lives relatively late in the 20th century. The technology to build such intricate and sophisticated systems was simply not available prior to this, though advancements in microelectronics made the vision of a computer a realistic one. The two innovations in electronics which allowed for this were the integrated circuit, which was manufactured in 1959, and the microprocessor, which appeared in 1971. The integrated circuit allowed the internal memory solutions to be shrunken down into...

The very first electric light was invented as early as 1800 by English inventor, Humphry Davy. Through various experimentations with electricity, he invented a basic electric battery, soon followed by electric light once he realised that carbon glowed, producing light when connected to the battery. This reaction is called an electric arc. In 1860, Sir Joseph Wilson Swan set about attempting to develop a practical, long-lasting form of electric light. It was he who realised that carbon paper filament worked well, however did burn up relatively quickly. In 1878, his new lamp inventions were showcased in Newcastle, England. 1877 saw American Charles Francis Brush develop a series...

One of the most important and revolutionary inventions which impacts greatly upon modern day communication is the invention of the telephone. The idea behind the telephone is simple, a system which converts sound into a series of electrical impulses of differing frequencies, and then reverses this procedure to re-create the sound, typically a human voice. Sounds simple enough, but it took many years and an array of different inventors to finally succeed with the technology. As early as 1831, Michael Faraday proved that vibrations of metal could be converted into electrical impulses. This was the basic principle of the telephone, but no one made use of such technology until 1861,...

The televison set was invented by not one person but a group of numerous personnel. The principal idea was based on photoconductivity of the element selenium, founded by Willoughby Smith in 1873. All televisions make use of an image which is scanned to produce a representation time signal, which is then reversed and decoded by the human eye. On 26 January 1926, John Logie Baird demonstrated the first public television, which transmitted live moving images. Several months later, 3 July 1928, Baird demonstrated the first colour television. In 1923, Charles Francis Jenkin demonstrated his own version of a primitive television set. Strangely...