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An interesting sum up of the 20th century
by Forbes. The Century was like a booming of technology chasing by the human
beings. The sun rises and falls, and our grandfathers and grandmothers used
up their energy to witness their development of the metamorphic utopia...a flow
of automation and a proof of humaine superiology, and of course at that time,
all the consequences and by-products were yet to be seen...
The study was traced back from 1917,
when peace was about to periodically come around the world: -
- 1917 - Sneakers (cool!)
- 1918 - Mass Spectrometer (invented by Chicago
University Professor Arthur Dempster)
- 1921 - Tetraethyl lead (to make a gasoline
engine more efficient, AND ALSO A MAJOR POLLUTANT)
- 1923 - Business Management (Sloan's modern
corporate management)
- 1923 - Multipane Camera (An entertainment
epic commenced)
- 1924 - Mutual Fund
- 1924 - Frozen Food
- 1925 - Bell Telephone Laboratories (i believe
tele-form products was one of the crux for the 21st century)
- 1926 - Rocket Engine (developed by Robert
Goddard 1882-1945)
- 1927 - TV (by Philo Taylor Farnsworth 1906-1971,
TV WAS ANOTHER "INNOVATION" THAT TURNED TOTALLY THE FLOW OF INFORMATION
"WORLDWIDE")
- 1928 - Penicillin (by Alexander Fleming
1881-1955)
- 1929 - Synthetic Rubber (by Julius Nieuwland
1878-1936, the common material was once upon a time great breakthrough during
the 20's)
- 1930 - Jet Engine (by Sir Frank Whittle
1907-1996, the history of aircraft started with a thesis...)
- 1933 - Frequency Modulation (by Edwin Howard
Armstrong 1890-1954, you may no longer be interested in whether the reception
is in AM mode or FM mode, but in the past, people did, especially those broadcast
industry who had invested huge money in AM)
- 1933 - Wallboard (this is the finishing
of your habitat, an invention that changes the mode of your HOME as well as
the city skyline
- 1934 - Nylon (by Wallace Hume Carothers
1896-1937, sometimes i wonder how our culture can be "accumulated"...)
- 1937 - Blood Bank (idea initiated by Bernard
Fantus 1874-1940, what an idea! So what else can the bank keeps??)
- 1937 - Pulse-code Modulation (by Alec H.
Reeves 1902-1971)
- 1938 - Xerography (by a patent Lawyer Chester
Floyd Carlson 1906-1968, this is for document copying only, not concept copying)
- 1939 - Automatic Transmission
- 1939 - Helicopter (a year of transportation
movement!?)
- 1940 - Radar (War can be a situation for
scientists, no matter whether they position themselves as one or not, to think)
- 1942 - Electronic Digital Computer
- 1945 - Nuclear Power (this is the landmark
of the first half of the 21st century...and seems that people are starting
to feel blurred about the scenery.)
- 1947 - Cellular Phone (not yet like the
one in your pocket)
- 1947 - Microwave Oven (by Percy L. Spencer
1894-1970, this can be regarded as a diversion of research angle after the
World War II from miltary to kitchen use :)
- 1947 - Instant Photo (by Edwin Herbert
Land 1909-1991, Polarisation!)
- 1948 - LP (by Peter Carl Goldmark 1906-1977
and is dedicated to all the music lovers...the speed was for the first time
slowened to 33-1/3rpm and using vinyl instead of shellac)
- 1949 - Magnetic Core Memory (by An Wang
1920-1990)
- 1950 - Diners Club Card (money makes money)
- 1951 - Levittown (at Long Island, New York,
the middle class)
- 1951 - The Pill
- 1952 - Thorazine
- 1952 - The Conglomerate (Royal Little)
- 1952 - Holiday Inn
- 1954 - Fortran (the first high-level computer
programming language)
- 1955 - Fast Food ("Modern Life is
Rubbish"...)
- 1956 - Containerised Shipping (by Malcolm
McLean 1913-2001)
- 1956 - Fiber Optics (this is what I remember
from my Secondary Physics textbooks...)
- 1956 - Disk Drive (a disk drive can still
be huge...a gathering of 50 spinning 60cm magnetic disks stacked on top if
one another)
- 1956 - Ampex VRX-1000 (by Charles Paulson
Ginsburg 1920-1992)
- 1958 - Laser (the inventions might have
driven people to the realisation of the Sci-Fi momentum in the 60's...the
man on the moon)
- 1959 - Integrated Circuit
- 1961 - Pampers (maybe this is an invention
to tribute the baby boom and the generation X)
- 1962 - Modem (can you imagine this?)
- 1968 - Mouse (Well before Dolly!? Still
a fulfillment of the Computer World! Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research
Institute gave birth to the first "Mouse" in his teleconference
presentation "onscreen")
- 1969 - Automated Teller Machine (ATM -
where you don't need to queue for long time...)
- 1969 - Internet (a debut connection of
terminals at the Stanford and the UCLA, the magic of life 2 decades later)
- 1970 - CD (from 1948, we have LP. and from
1970, James T. Russell gave us the CD, yet a pirate one)
- 1971 - Answering Machine (not much a great
invention to me, but this work by Valdemar Poulsen are found in 67% of American
homes)
- 1972 - Computed Tomography Imaging (the
solution to develop 3D images of internal organs in an advancement of using
X-ray and examine the skeleton only)
- 1972 - Ethernet
- 1972 - UNIX & C Programming
- 1976 - Popularisation of PC (Steven P.
Jobs, Apple's co-founder, marketed PCs with "smart" design and drove
the World into PCs)
- 1984 - Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD, step
one for Laptops to replace traditional PCs)
- 1984 - Dell - The Customised Mass Retail
(Michael Dell commenced his project of bypassing distributors and disintermediate
the retail market, and now he is the dominator of the PC market)
- 1987 - Mevacor (the first widely used drug
that reduces cholesterol)
- 1987 - Prozac (a drug that alters serotonin
levels and controls depression developed by Ray Fuller)
- 1991 - World Wide Web (the 3 W links the
world together into a cybernetic nodes of information)
- 1998 - Viagra (still a development of drug
for the "Modern" people)
- TBC...
For more information, please refer to
Forbes here
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