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Top 50 inventions since 1955
January 24, 2007
What are the top 50 inventions over the last 50 years? Today’s issue of “What's New @ IEEE in Signal Processing” includes a link to Popular Mechanics’ compilation, originally published in December 2005.
The IEEE newsletter cites the television remote control (1955), the light emitting diode (1962), the charge-coupled device (1969), the cell phone (1973), the IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area network standard (2002), and the MP3 player (1998) as key inventions related to electronics that made the list.
Other inventions cited in Popular Mechanics include cordless tools (1961), industrial robots (1961), the communications satellite (Telstar, 1962), the computer mouse (1962), the music synthesizer (Moog, 1964), digital-to-optical recording (1970), electronic ignition (1972), magnetic resonance imaging (1973), the GPS (1978), portable music players (Sony Walkman, 1979), and the scanning tunneling microscope (1981).
Here are some other observations from the Popular Mechanics article:
• 1959--an integrated circuit incorporates the functionality of the 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors that populated the nearly 30-ton, 1947-vintage ENIAC computer.
• 1969--the ARPANET links four computers.
• 1977--The Apple II, Commodore Pet, and Radio Shack's TRS-80 appear four years before the debut of the IBM PC.
• 1989--Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the hypertext markup language (HTML) and the uniform resource locator (URL).
Another interesting fact: “The term ‘fiberoptic’ is coined in 1956, but it isn't until 1970 that scientists at Corning produce a fiber of ultrapure glass that transmits light well enough to be used for telecommunications.”
Participants on the Popular Mechanics panel that chose the inventions represented organizations ranging from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to Stanford University’s Science, Technology and Society Program.
By the way, perhaps you are unhappy that an invention you worked on didn’t make the list. In that case you might turn to a 1987 invention: Prozac, first in a new class of FDA-approved selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors for the treatment of depression.
Posted by Rick Nelson on January 24, 2007 | Comments (2)
