If Darwin tracked Homo Technicus!

We have not come this far through a wormhole. Every invention, every breakthrough, every disruptor has been a stepping stone on the evolutionary path of technology. Let’s look back at 40 of these stairs.

From paper to processors to adjacent developments in engineering and chemistry – here is a walk down the memory lane of technology’s evolution, so far.

1 Printing Press: It Kindle-d knowledge

Imagine what we would do with smartphones and computers if we did not know how to write, or read. In other words, if we did not know how to print. That’s where this marvel helped mankind. It’s a machine by which text and images could be transferred from movable type to paper or other media by means of ink. This progress on traditional printing by Johannes Gutenberg actually helped a lot, as it mechanized printing. From metal presses, to power-driven cylinders, to the rotary press, to offset printing—this machine, too, kept evolving with time—up till Lithography and 3D printing.

2 Electricity: Lighting a bulb, literally

As much as Milennials brag about Internet to the Baby Boomers, none of this dance would have been possible without advances in electricity. Researchers were already struggling with the over-heating problem when they tried to create a raw version of electricity—based on the premise that electricity could be used for lighting just as people were using small, individual gas ‘burners’ that time. Edison proposed to connect his lights in a parallel circuit by subdividing the current, and ensuring that the failure of one light-bulb would not cause a whole circuit to fail. He tried to achieve this with a bulb with high resistance. He came close through a complex, regulator-controlled vacuum bulb with a platinum filament. And then crossed the impracticality hurdle of platinum’s cost through a carbon filament. The rest is electricity.

3 Phonograph: Rings a Bell

Would today’s low-latency gaming or lightning-fast calls be possible if Thomas Alva Edison did not pave this road with the phonograph—the carbon-button transmitter for the telephone speaker and microphone? But most remarkably, from a tech industry’s keyhole, we can admire the part he played in improving an automatic telegraph system and in devising the quadruplex (which could transmit four messages simultaneously over one wire). He also laid the foundation of phone by developing the carbon-button transmitter used in telephone speakers and microphones. And of course, with the phonograph that he created by using a stylus-tipped carbon transmitter to make impressions on a strip of paraffined paper. These minute indentations generated a reproduction of sound when the paper was pulled back beneath the stylus. So much initial struggle – that lies invisible today in the nano seconds that we take to make a call.

4 Lathe: Cut to Perfection

Modern factories may be busy with devices of the thinnest size or power-flex quotient. But it all began somewhere with the invention of Lathe—a tool that could perform turning operations for removing unwanted material from a work-piece rotated against a cutting tool. It changed the erstwhile system of wood lathes, for the industrial revolution with the introduction of rotating horizontal spindle to which the work-holding device gets attached. It would usually be power driven at speeds of varying types. Thank the son of a Blacksmith, David Wilkinson, for revolutionizing factories.

5 Daguerreotype: Click That Please

It was the first commercially successful photographic process (1839-1860) invented by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre that is responsible for the Instagram joy of the current century. A typical kit covered tripod, a box for treatment with mercury vapor, boxes for fuming with iodine and bromine, a soft buckskin pad for buffing the plates and a box of unexposed silvered copper plates ready for use. With a mirror-like surface, it was very fragile; and also not quite portable. Plus, it was expensive so only the wealthiest of people could afford to have their portraits taken. And look at how disposable and casual photographs have become today!

6 Typewriter: Shorthand for progress

How impossible it sounds to think of a machine where characters were produced by steel types striking the paper through an inked ribbon! Here, the types were actuated by corresponding keys on a keyboard and the paper was held by a platen that is automatically moved along with a carriage when a key is struck. It had a cylinder, with its line-spacing and carriage-return mechanism; the escapement, which caused the letter spacing by carriage movement; the arrangement of the type-bars so as to strike the paper at a common centre. It worked with the actuation of the type-bars by means of key levers and connecting wires; printing through an inked ribbon. Here, the positions of the different characters on the keyboard, conformed almost exactly to the arrangement that is now universal. In the touch-screen age that is fast moving to sensors and voice-assistants; it has to sound so unreal. How slow of them! Or how impatient of us! But if not for the American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes’s first practical type-writer, we would not have got as far as the first computer. The QWERTY keyboard.

7 Xerography: That’s why Xerox

We owe it to Chester F. Carlson, an American physicist for creating an electrostatic dry-copying process. He was working with the patent department of P.R. Mallory Company, a New York electronics firm. So when he struggled with getting copies of patent drawings and specifications, he started to think of finding a way to copy line drawings and text. He succeeded using electrostatics while other firms were trying to find something similar through chemistry. Even then, no one would support marketing his patent. Until he came across a small firm in Rochester, N.Y., the Haloid Company (later the Xerox Corporation). And after 11 years of this, Xerox introduced its first office copier.

8 Transistor: The backbone that kept getting smaller

Every semiconductor device can be traced back to something that was used for amplifying, controlling, and generating electrical signals. Without this property it’s hard to create good hardware of integrated circuits and microchips. That’s why 1947–48 is an important year, It was then when three American physicists, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, joined minds at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company’s Bell Laboratories. They created a viable alternative to the electron tube – with the properties of miniaturization, low heat generation, high reliability, and low power consumption.

9 Integrated Communication: Let’s get talking

When engineer Douglas Engelbart demonstrated this in 1968, little did he know that he was laying down the skeletal work for user interfaces that Mac and Windows would use. It was the curtain raised on ‘Integrated Computer Systems’ with technologies moving in conjunction with each other, including: on-screen windows, hypertext, graphics, file linking, revision control, video conferencing, the computer mouse, and word processing. Then came Arpanet that linked computers in 1969. Brought in by the idea of “packet switching,” which simultaneously delivers messages as short units and reassembles them at their destination.

10 Compiler: Hopping on to the next thing

Low-code or no-code, or bro-code, programmers need compliers for computers and applications. That’s what translates a programmer’s instructions into computer codes. Grace Hopper is where it all came from. When she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., she designed one of the first compilers, also named them so. She also worked on the development of compilers for COBOL and was a strong advocate of this language. She retired from the navy with the rank of commander in 1966, but kept working on helping with Navy’s computer languages in US for a long time.

11 Fibre Optics: The Diet of Modern Era

When in 1970, scientists at Corning produced a fiber of ultrapure glass that transmits light well enough to be used for telecommunications, a turning point happened. It changed the way Internet, calls and entertainment would work from there on- expanding both density and reach- and removing the many barriers of done-to-dust physical cables. It began with physicist Charles K. Kao promoting the idea that attenuation in optical fibre was caused by removable impurities rather than optical scattering, and that attentuation could be reduced below 20 dB per kilometer. This could enable fibers to be a practical medium for communication. Then, members of the British Post Office came to Corning Glass Works exploring help in creating pure glass fiber optics. In August 1970 industrial physicists at Corning, Robert D. Maurer , Peter C. Schultz , and Donald B. Keck, accomplished the crucial attenuation level of 20 dB required for optical fiber telecommunications. This made the tarmac smooth to go ahead on and Corning produced the first optical cable in 1975, and manufactured the first optical fiber to carry commercial communication traffic in 1977.

12 George Eastman:

The Kodak Moment

We need to thank his mother’s kitchen too where this American entrepreneur and philanthropist did all those experiments with gelatin emulsions. Come 1880, and he had invented and patented a dry-plate coating machine. He, then, formed the Eastman Dry Plate Company in 1881 which was pivotal in creating easy-to-use and accessible cameras. Eastman is also the one who can be thanked for fostering the practice of professional photofinishing, and developing a flexible film that was a critical contribution to the launch of the motion picture industry.

13 Robert Noyce and

Jack Kilby: Munna Bhai and Circuit

The first general-purpose computer, the nearly 30-ton ENIAC (1947), housed 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors. In 1959, the integrated circuit put everything neatly on one tiny chip. This happened when Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce showed that many transistors, resistors, and capacitors could be arranged on a single board of semiconductor material. The integrated circuit, or microchip, has, as we know now, become a crucial component in computers and other electronic equipment.

14 Seymor Cray:

The Superman of computing

The Cray-1, was the first commercially developed supercomputer, and is installed in the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It became the first supercomputer to successfully implement vector processors, a system that allows a single operation to quickly be performed on a large set of data, which is reflected in its speed of 160 MFLOPS—or 160 million floating-point operations per second.

15 Satellite Comm:

Now this is long-distance

The pivotal moment for satellite communication was in 1945 when Telstar moved ahead on the concept of geosynchronous satellites. This effort began as a way to help the US government solve the challenge of sending TV signals across oceans. Transatlantic communications existed in the form of undersea cables but were not able to support the broadband video technology– black and white television signals- back then. Thus, arrived Telstar 1, the world’s first communications satellite, by Bell Labs and NASA. The nascent attempt could carry 600 voice calls and one black-and-white TV channel, was launched on top of a NASA Thor-Delta rocket. It was parked in an elliptical orbit some 48,000kms above the equator, and could spit out about 20 minutes of transmission time between Europe and the United States during each orbit.

16 Self-driving in reverse gear:

While his other work entailed experiments on a carbon button lamp, on the power of electrical resonance, and on various types of lighting; we know Nikola Tesla best for ‘The Tesla coil’. It is what became the key piece for modern radio and television sets and other electronic equipments. He also claimed and demonstrated a tele-automatic boat guided by remote control.

17 Sketchpad: Doodles for CAD

He might not be aware but Ivan Sutherland, also known as the Father of Computer Graphics, revolutionized 3D computer modeling and simulation when he created the Sketchpad program. His doctoral thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-machine Graphical Communications System, was important in describing the first computer graphical user interface (GUI). Sketchpad was developed on a unique computer, the TX-2, built by Wesley Clark. It had a light pen, first used on the SAGE air defense project for identifying computer-drawn objects. And Sutherland used it to do something really not thought of till then: allow the user to draw directly on the computer display. The light pen gave the coordinates for drawing commands entered using the keyboard. The use of hierarchical memory structures to organize objects and the ability to zoom in and out – made it different from the earlier approach of storing the drawings on a tape.

It was the earliest iteration of a computer-aided design (CAD) program. It ushered in the use of geometric constraints (fixing the length of a line or an angle between two segments). This also paved the way for programs to use a graphical user interface.

18 Barcode: As easy as chewing a gum

Interestingly, Inventor Joe Woodland drew the first bar code in sand in Miami Beach. It started with a distraught supermarket manager who had pleaded with a dean at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia to help with a solution for getting shoppers through his store more quickly, relieving him of delays and the regular stocktaking that were costing him his profits. The dean shrugged him off. But a junior postgraduate, Bernard Bob Silver, overheard this conversation and told this to Woodland, who had graduated from Drexel in 1947. Taking inspiration from Morse code, he cracked the answer.

At 8 a.m. on June 26, 1974, the first item marked with the Universal Product Code (UPC) was scanned at the checkout of Troy’s Marsh Supermarket. Yes, a packet of Wrigley’s became the first product to integrate the usage of barcode technology when it’s scanned at a grocery store in Ohio. The codes soon turned into the industry standard for storing pricing information at grocery stores – exploding a new frontier of consumer-facing and internal tracking applications. And not a bubble. It still works.

Of course, the world moved on to what Japanese Masahiro Hara gave when he invented a two-dimensional barcode known as the QR Code.

19 GPS: Wherever you go

Doppler Effect was always there. But when the Sputnik’s Doppler Effect piqued scientists to use radio signals to track the movement of the satellite from the ground, life for the modern consumer was about to change. Our new-age cabs and food on apps have become possible because of this concept—If a satellite location could be determined from the ground via the frequency shift of its radio signal, then the location of a receiver on the ground could be grabbed by its distance from a satellite.

In 1958, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) did exactly that – it used this principle to develop Transit, the world’s first global satellite navigation system. Meet the first satellite in the modern Navstar Global Positioning System (GPS). In 1978, the first Block I developmental Navstar/GPS satellite was launched, with three more Navstar satellites launched by the end of 1978. Over 700 tests were conducted between 1977 and 1979, in which Aerospace engineers jumped in to help in confirming the accuracy of the integrated space/control/user system (The GPS’s precursor, TRANSIT, was developed in the early 1960s to guide nuclear subs.)

20 Bluetooth: What five out of five dentists use

Jaap Haartsen was active in the area of wireless communications for more than 25 years. In 1993, he started working on indoor wireless communication systems, and was trying to find a solution for short-range radio connections that would add functionality to mobile phones and enable new sales. In 1994, he opened the doors to Bluetooth Wireless Technology, enabling connections between a seemingly endless array of devices.

By Pratima H

pratimah@cybermedia.co.in