Older Than They Think/Technology: Difference between revisions
Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.9.2
Beta Log 86 (talk | contribs) No edit summary |
(Rescuing 1 sources and tagging 0 as dead.) #IABot (v2.0.9.2) |
||
| (12 intermediate revisions by 8 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{
* According to ''The Book Of General Ignorance'' by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, the technological use of the term "bug" existed long before the famous incident in which a moth shorted out a Harvard supercomputer in 1947. The word was used to mean a fault in a piece of machinery as early as the 1800s, and it appeared with that definition in Webster's dictionary in 1934. The moth incident was merely an ironic coincidence that brought the metaphor to life.
* A lot of technological devices are subject to this trope. Possibly the best example is the [[Cell Phone|mobile telephone]]: devices that a modern observer would recognize as such have been in limited use since the 1950s, and the basic idea is much older than that. New tech appearing on the market is less often the result of a new idea and more often a new way to make an old idea economically feasible. Mobile phones hit the general consumer market in the 1980s and 1990s, but the first true mass-market phone that launched the device into the ubiquity it enjoys today was the Nokia 5110 (nicknamed the "brick") launched in 1999. The term "mobile phone" itself was first attested in 1945.
** A wealthy character uses a car phone in a 1960 episode of ''The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour''. (The episode in question concerns Lucy accidentally giving the man an exploding cigar, and then desperately trying to retrieve it before he smokes it.)
** There's a British newspaper cartoon from the 1920s based on the fact that people were predicting mobile phones to become commonplace. Rather incredibly, it accurately predicts the social faux pas of mobile phones going off in awkward moments such as "at the theatre" and "at your wedding"!
Line 15 ⟶ 16:
* The principle by which the microwave oven works was discovered accidentally in 1945 by Percy Spencer, an engineer building radar sets for the US military. The first commercial microwave went on sale in 1947 to restaurants; it wouldn't be for many years that it became popular in the home. This is partly because the original "Radarange" oven was six feet tall and weighed nearly half a ton, and needed water cooling. One of the larger consumers of the device was, in fact, the US Navy, who found that ovens without hot coils that could start fires were quite useful on their ships.
* The first cash-dispensing machine was put to use in New York in 1939. It was unpopular though, and shut down after six months. ATMs returned in 1967, the first in London.
* The answering machine was invented in 1935. [https://web.archive.org/web/20140829002118/http://www.blackinventor.com/pages/benjaminthornton.html It could also keep track of the time]. The use of one in the 1979 ''[[Doctor Who]]'' story "Shada" is perfectly accurate.
** In fact, the lyrics of the Rupert Holmes song ''Answering Machine'', which hit the charts in 1979, shows that many of the cliches associated with such machines -- getting cut off in the middle of a message, two people playing "phone tag" with each other because they're never at home when the other one calls, etc. -- were already sufficiently well-established in pop culture that a pop artist could safely write a song about them and assume everyone who heard it would get the point.
*** Especially anyone who watched "The Rockford Files". It used an answering machine in its opening credits, starting in 1974.
Line 30 ⟶ 31:
* This happens all the time with computer hardware and software. The mainstream company gets praise for "new ideas" that slightly less known companies came up with. Tabbed browsing in IE7 or Firefox? The very first web browser with a tabbed interface was NetCaptor, which implemented it in 1998. Intel's idea for a dual-core processor? Thank Sun Microsystems for that one. This also has a history of going back to the early days of Microsoft and Apple. The general public has no idea that Douglas Engelbart invented half the things all computers use now (GUI and mice, etc.) back in the 1960s, nor that the Internet began in 1969.
** The first virus that spread via modem was called Creeper and spread over ARPANET (the internet's predecessor) in 1971.
* Though credit for inventing movable-type printing goes to Gutenberg, a German, he probably got the idea from reports coming to him from China. The system caught on better in Europe because of a more manageable alphabet size, as opposed to thousands of glyphs for Chinese.
** The Koreans essentially perfected the system long time before Gutenberg, and used it for the exactly same purpose, while the Chinese usually preferred to carve entire pages for printing.
* Most people aren't aware that the air to air guided missile was first used by the German Luftwaffe in [[WW 2]].
** The first [[wikipedia:Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane|cruise]] [[wikipedia:Kettering Bug|missiles]] were developed by the Americans during [[World War
* The first aircraft carriers saw combat in [[World War
* Everybody knows that the German Me-262 was the first jet fighter to see combat, during [[World War II]]. Fewer people know that Allied jet fighters, British Gloster Meteors, also saw combat, being used to intercept the V-1s. The first American jetfighter, the Bell Airacomet, first flew in 1943, but did not prove fit to see combat.
* The first electrically driven train was first used in the late 1800's.
Line 45 ⟶ 46:
** It does take some time with 300 bauds, but it would take even five times longer with the 56-baud protocol that had been in use in telegraphy prior to that. [[wikipedia:Émile Baudot|Émile Baudot]] (from whose name the term "baud" comes from) patented his 56-baud multiplexing teletypewriter in 1874.
* An episode of ''Columbo'' from the 1970s shows a murderer using a VCR as part of his fake alibi. (He's a wealthy technology buff, and one of the few to own such technology at the time. Columbo only figures it out because the guy is arrogant enough to show off his VCR to the detective.)
* The Antikythera Mechanism, an artifact variously described as the world's first clockwork mechanism, first calculator, and first analog computer, was built sometime around 150-100 ''B.C.''.
* M.P.-3 players have been around since 1998, and iPods have been around since 2001, but the [[wikipedia:Kane Kramer|IXI Digital Audio Player]] goes back even further, to 1979.
* Speaking of Apple, their first handheld computer was released in ''1993''. It was a tablet, no less; Apple also coined the phrase "Personal Digital Assistant" in 1992.
* The first submarine was built in 1620 by [[wikipedia:Cornelius Drebbel|Cornelius Drebbel]]. The first use in warfare was in [[The American Revolution]].
** Cornelius' submarine was based on the work of the mathematician [[wikipedia:William Bourne chr(28)mathematicianchr(29)|William Bourne]]. Also, the Turtle (the name of the submarine 'supposedly' used during the Revolutionary War) was a total dud, and never actually did anything, and it was left up to the [[wikipedia:H.L. Hunley|Hunley]] to be the first successful military submarine, albeit at the cost of itself and its crew.
Line 55 ⟶ 56:
* Some technology is ridiculously old. Plywood? 3500 BC. Toothpaste? 5000 BC. Braided rope? ''17,000BC''.
* Drilling for oil originated from China around the 1st century. Though at the time, they started out drilling for salt. They even had derricks made of bamboo that resemble modern ones closely.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20070703224202/http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/sunglasses.htm Sunglasses], yet again a Chinese invention (although they were just dark glasses at that point; they offered no corrective vision properties.)
** Even before that, the Inuit had [[wikipedia:Inuit snow goggles|a kind of sunglasses]] prevent glare from the snow, proving that even then [https://web.archive.org/web/20200803000512/https://www.snowsportzone.com/snow-blindness-safety-guide/ the idea of safeguarding the eyes was a known concern.]
* Railguns are the height of modern technology, right? Really futuristic, technical and...Wait, no, they were first patented in 1918.
* Spam is much, much older than the Internet. The dentists Maurice and Arnold Gabriel sent out hundreds of unsolicited telegrams advertising their services in 1864; in the modern times it is also known as "junk mail".
Line 66:
* First fully automatic multi-barelled gun, capable of firing 7200 rounds per minute (impressive even for today's standards) was a Fokker-Leimberger aircraft gun designed in 1916. It was abandoned only because wartime substandard ammunition was causing jams.
* Electric instruments were introduced in the late nineteenth century, the first being Thaddeus Cahill's ''Telharmonium''. It was, in all regards, a room-sized synthesizer.
** Telharmonium provided steaming music since ''1897'' with two musicians playing pipe music.
** Also, there are recordings of purely electronic music that sounds like something a surrealist would have made no earlier than the 1970s that happen to be from 1913.
* The first motorbike was Daimler-Maybach ''Reitwagen'' built in 1885. Its creators [[It Will Never Catch On|considered the concept a dead end]] however and abandoned their invention focusing on cars instead. Boy, they were wrong.
* Electric cars are a futuristic concept, right? Wrong. They even predate ones powered by internal combustion! In 1828 Hungarian engineer Ányos Jedlik built an electric toy car. The first electric car capable of carrying a person has been demonstrated in 1881 by Gustave Trouvé in Paris and until 1890's electric cars became quite popular. Some people were even sure that no one will be interested in the 'dangerous' internal combustion engines. Combustion however proved to be better alternative due to the low efficiency of early electric engines and batteries.
* Speaking of batteries, many people think the battery is a relatively new invention, no older than the early 20th century or late 19th century. However, a few clay jars with structures strongly resembling modern batteries (and have been tested to produce an electric charge) known as the
* The oil lamp is already known to be an old invention, around for at least centuries, even
* The first plastic was created in 1856. Granted, it was of such poor quality that plastic was not mass-produced until the early twentieth century, and the earliest plastics would likely be considered hazardous materials today, but it was around in the 1800s...
* Leonardo da Vinci invented<ref>Note, I didn't say built</ref> the following: tanks, robots, calculators, solar power, and parachutes, along with many other things.
* Those cool looking machine guns in [[Modern Warfare]] must be pretty high tech, right? Well, The first truly automatic weapon, the Maxim gun, was invented in 1884, and even the most advanced 21st century assault rifle basically works the same way as the Maxim gun. There have been improvements in material, but the method in which they load and fire hasn't changed in 120+ years. Oh, and electrical gun sights? Patented in the year 1900, and used on military aircraft as early as 1918.
** Many gun operations can be attributed to John Moses Browning. For example, the current machine guns (M2, M240, and M249) used in the US military? They stemmed from Browning's designs.
** An assault rifle needs selective fire and a proper cartridge, though.
* Ford is often misattributed as having introduced mass production to automobile manufacture. The company was simply the first to use an assembly line, which it borrowed from meat packing plants; The first mass produced car was the curved dash Olds, which was introduced six years before the formation of Ford Motor Company.
* Multi-stage rockets fitted with explosive warheads, shaped exhausts and delta wing stabilizers? Look no further than Conrad Haas's ''Wie du solt machen gar schöne Rakette, die da von im selber oben hinauff in die hoch faren'' (How can you make very nice Rocket that can travel high and far) written around 1550. Same rockets with chemical, biological and incendiary warheads? See Kazimierz Siemienowicz's ''Artis Magnae Artilleriae pars prima'' (Great Art of Artillery, part one), published in 1650. The concept was also by no mean obscure, as the latter has been a most popular European artillery handbook for the next two centuries.
Line 82 ⟶ 83:
{{reflist}}
[[Category:
| |||