1. ipod
Believed to have been invented in...
In 2001, if you are a die hard Mac fan. Or 1997, if you are
aware cheaper MP3 players existed before Steve Jobs figured out people would
pay twice as much to hear their pirated songs on the bus if the MP3 player
looked like the bastard son of Eve from Wall-E and a pocket calculator.
Actually Invented in...
In 1979, Kane Kramer and his friend, James Campbell, came up
with the idea of a portable music player the size of a cigarette box. The music
player baptized as the IXI System stored music digitally in a chip and had a
display screen and buttons to navigate it.
They even built five prototypes they showed potential
investors. Wow! That sounds amazing! So they sold it, became gazillionaires and
everybody listened to ABBA songs they downloaded with their Ataris, right?
Well, no, obviously not.
The IXI had one big problem: It only had enough memory for
three and a half minutes of music, which does screw you up if you had your
heart set on carrying "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" anywhere you went. And how
were you supposed to get your music files back in the decades before Napster?
Since almost nobody had computers in those days, Kramer
suggested putting terminals in music stores, connected via telephone with a
central music server so users could buy and download their music at the store.
Keep in mind we're talking about 1979 phone modems, which means Kramer's idea
also involved people bringing their own tent and enough food for camping for
two months while they downloaded "Funky Town."
2. The Fax Machine Was Invented Before the Civil War
Actually Invented In ...
1843. This means that faxes, which use phone lines to transmit
data, actually predate telephones (the first phone was patented in 1876).
Imagine how loud you'd have screamed "Bullshit!" if during the movie
Lincoln one of the characters had gotten up to send a fax.
But it's true -- the Civil War was still a full two decades
away and the Oregon Trail was experiencing the height of its dysentery-ridden
rush hour when the fax machine was built by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain.
He had just patented the first electric clock, and apart from being a pioneer
of electricity, Bain enjoyed dabbling in communication technology: He
contributed to telegraph lines on the railway between Edinburgh and Glasgow and
invented an electric timing system for railway engines while he was at it.
The electrical telegraph was an extremely new technology, but
Bain was a natural. He figured that if telegraph transmission was good enough
for transmitting the sound of Morse code, it should be good enough for
pictures.
And before anyone could explain to him that sounds and
pictures were two completely different things, he had already converted parts
of his electrical clocks into an image scanner and rigged it to the telegraph
system. Did it work? Did it ever! What's more, it looked like this:
Forgotten Futures
Various inventors tinkered with the design, and by 1899,
newspaper offices were actually using them. Sure, it'd take 20 to 30 minutes to
send a single photograph, but that's a hell of a lot faster than having a dude
deliver that shit by horse.
3. The Digital Calculator Was Invented in 1640
At first, the world's favorite device for cheating at simple
math seems like a bad fit for a list like this. After all, everyone knows that
calculators have existed for quite some time now -- Kraftwerk wrote love songs
for them way back in 1981, so calculators must've been around for at least a
couple of decades before that. Hell, let's play it safe and say they were
invented in ... 1960?
1860? No?
Well, shit.
Actually Invented In ...
1640.
Yep, back in the middle of the 17th century, just after the
pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and the rest of the world was dealing with
various plagues and the baroque movement, one man ignored the struggles of
everyday life in order to make math his bitch.
By the age of 16, French wunderkind Blaise Pascal had already
figured out how air pressure and vacuums work and contributed to a formative
treatise on projective geometry (which, of course, is second nature to our
readership, so we won't delve into that any further). One day, he decided to
give his father (a tax accountant who provided Pascal's education) a present,
but didn't want to go the traditional route of half-assedly building a
birdhouse at arts and crafts. Seeing Pops wrestle yet another hardcore
accountin' match with scores and scores of figures, Pascal finally got his gift
idea: He would break all known boundaries of technology and build his dad a
mathematics machine.
After some initial hit-and-miss research, Pascal indeed managed
to build the world's first mechanical calculator, which became known as
Pascaline.
Pascaline crunched numbers pretty ingeniously: The required
figures were set on the lid's dials, which twisted and turned the machinery
inside in precisely the right way so that the correct results popped up in the
little windows on the lid. Technically, the machine could only do sums, but it
was totally possible to subtract (by doing the process in reverse), multiply
(with repeated addition), and divide (with repeated subtraction). It was
calibrated specifically for calculations involving money, and its settings
could even be adjusted between French and English currencies.
Pascal built about 50 Pascaline calculators, attempting to
sell them commercially. They never really took off, what with him being around
200 years too early. A bunch of these "extremely damage-prone"
devices still survive today, lounging around in museums and scoffing at your TV
that is bound to break down within three years of purchase.
Today, mechanical calculators are all but extinct, and even
their digital successors are fighting a losing battle, considering that their
power is dwarfed by the average phone. Still, it's a humbling thought that the
basic functions of all of those machines could be performed with a clunky brass
box put together by a kid from the 17th century.
4. Contact Lenses Existed in the 19th Century
Eyes are fickle and vulnerable things, so of course science
has spent a lot of time poking them. However, in this particular case, their
efforts bore wonderful fruit: Ever since contact lenses gained FDA approval in
1971, their science-magic has been offering us an alternative to nerdy
eyeglasses. Unlike the optically challenged poor sods just a few decades ago,
we can freely and easily disguise our bad eyesight with contacts instead of
douche-y hipster frames. If that's not progress, we don't know what is.
Actually Invented In ...
1888, the year that Jack the Ripper roamed the crumbling
heights of Victorian stuffiness and Germany went through three whole kaisers
(presumably because they couldn't decide whose mustache was the manliest).
Apart from the troubled era he lived in, there are two things
you need to know about German inventor Adolf Fick: He came from a family of
geniuses, each with a heavy penchant for pioneering research, and his field of
choice was ophthalmology, so he literally spent his days poking eyeballs with things.
With that background, it was really just a matter of time before he wound up
looking for new, non-spectacled ways to improve eyesight.
Fick's prototype lenses are to modern contacts what the
Model-T Ford is to a Ferrari: bulky, clumsy, and insulting to the eye. They
were essentially eyeglass lenses, made of heavy blown glass that covered the
entire eye, and they could only be worn for a few hours before the screaming
pain outweighed the benefits of being able to see.
Fick tested his invention on rabbits, then molds cast from the
eyes of cadavers, and finally on himself. (We're assuming he washed them in
between uses.) After a two-hour test run failed to explode his eyeballs, six
volunteers became the first contact lens wearers.
While Fick's lenses absolutely did work, their cumbersome
nature and the extreme discomfort this wrought made them impractical. He
discontinued his research in 1902, and nobody picked it up until the 1930s. At
that point, the technology was sufficiently advanced for further development.
By 1937, there were already around 4,000 contact lens users in America alone.
The only reason the rest of us had to wait so long to get a pair was that until
recently, the lenses were expensive as hell.
5. Automatic Door
Believed to have been invented in...
1954, by Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt.
These two Texans designed the first automatic door after
noticing how strong winds would fuck with people's door opening abilities. The
pair got to work on their product and, before long, people across the world
were walking up to automatic doors, hesitating, thinking "fuck, is...is it
broke?," continuing, halting abruptly, shielding their face with their
hands and then flinching, humiliated as the door opened with perfect comedic
timing.
Horton and Hewitt went on to found Horton Automatics, one of
the biggest sellers of automatic doors today, with a massive range of clients
including McDonald's and Tim Horton's Donuts (Nepotism?).
Actually invented in...
Around 50 BC, by Hero of Alexandria.
Fucktasticly named Hero was a Greek engineer, mathematician,
inventor, teacher and overachiever who is believed to have lived somewhere
around the second century. He is credited with numerous inventions, but his
most celebrated was the aeolipile, which is not a type of airborne haemorrhoid,
but an early steam engine.
The invention was used to spice up religious ceremonies with
some special effects. The invention consisted of an alter, to be placed in
front of some large, heavy temple doors, and all manners of pullies, buckets,
fire and water. It was kind of like Mouse Trap, but instead of catching mice it
made the masses think the breath of God had opened the doors.
As a companion piece, Hero designed a similar device that
would be used to create the sound of a trumpet when the temple doors opened,
because everyone knows God has an invisible trumpet follow him everywhere he
goes.
6.Batteries
Believed to have been invented in...
1800, by Italian Alessandro Volta.
Nine years earlier fellow Italian Luigi Galvani attached two
pieces of metal to a dead frog's leg and noticed that when he did, the leg twitched,
thus discovering that animals generate electricity and, at the same time,
establishing the historical animosity between experimental scientists and
frogs.
Galvani, though, thought that living things and living things
alone were the source of all electricity, a touchingly idealistic notion that
would have made for some horrific power generators. Alessandro Volta, on the
other hand, substituted frogs with cardboard soaked in salt water, producing
what was thought to be the world's first battery.
Actually invented in...
Around 200 BC.
In 1938, German archaeologist Wilhelm Konig (who died a few
years later in a face melting Ark of the Covenant related accident) discovered
a number of clay jars that would come to be known as the Baghdad Batteries. The
jars have an asphalt stopper and, sticking through it, an iron rod surrounded
by a copper cylinder. Tests revealed the presence of an acidic substance
similar to vinegar and when replicas were made and filled with such a substance
they produced between 0.8 and 2 volts.
The discovery of a working battery from 200 BC raised a whole
lot more questions than it answered. Were there a lot of devices that required
batteries back then? Did everyone just respond to the inventor with, "Nice
going dipshit, a battery is exactly what we need to feed our families."
Some scientists propose that they were used to relieve pain
while other scientists point out that electric stimulation would be ineffective
when compared to painkillers available at the time such as heroin opiate and
cannabis; who wants an electric shock when you could be chasing the dragon?
The most plausible explanation is that they were used to
electrically graft silver onto gold, a method that is still practiced in Iraq
today. Another is that they were placed into statues of gods to simulate the
religious experience of "HOLY CRAP GOD JUST FREAKING SHOCKED ME! WHAT A
DICK!"
Not only these many more are oldest.
Not only these many more are oldest.
