20th Century: The Technoshaman Era

1900

1901 Radio invented by Gugliemo Marconi who improved on experiments by Jagdish Chandra Bose.

Vacuum cleaner invented by Hubert Cecil Booth. The first commercial version was the Baby Dizzy released in 1908. Indian versions from Eureka Forbes in 1980s.

1902 Windscreen wipers designed by Mary Anderson. Originally a boon to railroads but rapidly adopted to cars.

1903 ECG invented by Wilhelm Einthoven. The original machine occupied an entire room. The latest devices are the size of wrist-watches and can, in fact, be carried on the person.

1907 Plastics invented by Leo Baekeland. He called it Bakelite, which was a popular synonym until the 1930s.

Washing machine designed by Hurley Machine Co. Becomes available in India only in the 1990s.

Maria Montessori develops her schooling and pre-school system. The Italian's method became the global benchmark.

1916 The battle tank developed by the British in wwi and first unveiled at The Somme. Named "tank" for no particular reason except a fancied resemblance to watertanks. Not employed with enough imagination to break the deadlock on the Western Front.

1921 Insulin synthesised by Frederick Banting. Brought a new lease of life to diabetics. Incidentally, insulin is the first genetically modified drug to be commercially available.

1926 TV developed independently by John Logie Baird and Philo Farnsworth. Farnsworth developed the electronic TV tube while still a high-school student. But he struggled to prove his patents and died a bitter and disappointed man.

Robert Goddard launches his first liquid-fuelled rockets. From here to the moon takes 63 years, and a World War in between.

1929 Ernest Lawrence builds the first cyclotron or atom smasher on an indoor basketball court at the University of Chicago. This is an essential step towards building the atom bomb (1945).

1933 The first Frequency Modulation Receiver /Transmitter developed by Edwin Armstrong. The local commercial FM station becomes a cultural icon only as late as 1986.

1934 Cat's-eyes invented by Percy Shaw.

1933-35 Radar developed independently by British and German research teams. But non-military use only starts after wwii.

1937 Frank Whittle develops the first jet engine. Despite the research by both sides during wwii, the first production jet only appears in 1945 with the Messcherschmidt 263.

1938 Laszlo and Georg Biro unveil the ballpoint pen. Still hated by careful calligraphers.

DuPont comes out with nylon. It was developed by Wallace Carrothers in 1935. Carrothers, like many other unsung inventors, committed suicide in 1937. The nylon stocking is hard currency across Europe between '42-46 as American GIs discover to their delight.

1939 Igor Sikorsky builds the first helicopter stating he "just added an engine to a Leonardo (da Vinci) design". Nobody realises the military implications. If Rommel had possessed choppers, this piece would be written in German!

Paul Muller synthesises ddt, which is promptly hailed as the ultimate insecticide. It is only withdrawn after 1972 as the extent of environmental damage is realised.

1940 Charles Drew develops a blood-plasma storage system, that allows blood banking. This saves literally millions of lives and changes healthcare forever.

1941 Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan develop the Aerosol. Unfortunately those little bursts of cfc damage the ozone layer. So they are banned in 1978.

1942 Jacques Yves Costeau and Emile Gagnan build the scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus).

1943 Willem Kolff makes the first dialysis machine.

Albert Hofmann synthesises Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (lsd). This hallucinogen sparks the Beat movement and many literary, musical and artistic masterpieces.

1944 Norman Borlaug develops hybrid wheat strains that make the Green Revolution possible. Suddenly, the Malthusian food/population equation gets a little less scary.

1945 Percy Spencer stumbles on the microwave oven principle by carrying chocolate into a radiation lab. He also ruins a perfectly good suit. The first Indian versions appear in 1994.

OK, here it comes. The Manhattan Project succeeds and Hiroshima-Nagasaki are demolished. India demonstrates fission capability in 1974 and follows up with a fusion demonstration in 1998.

1946 John Mauchly and John Eckert build eniac, the first electronic digital computer. A few still credit Charles Babbage for the computer's mechanical progenitor.

1947 Edwin Land makes the prototype of the Polaroid camera.

Mikhail Kalashnikov designs the AK-47 assault rifle. Around 300 million AK-47s (including its variants) are estimated to be in circulation. The revolutionary government of Mozambique has put the rifle on the national flag.

William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain build the first transistor in Bell Labs. The first commercial transistor radios released by Sony in 1954.

1949 John von Neumann writes the first stored program. This transforms computing.

1952 Jonas Salk makes the polio vaccine. Medical historians suggest that Sabin actually gets there first and definitely makes a better vaccine. But Salk becomes the icon.

1954 US physiologist Gregory Pincus leads the team that develops the birth-control pill.

1956 Ampex makes the first video-recorder. But Mitsubishi builds the vcr market 1969 onwards with its vhs standard. Sony fails with the Betamax.

1958 Wilson Greatbatch makes the first pacemaker.

1959 Robert Noyce builds the first integrated circuit. Suddenly, electronic equipment shrinks in size.

1960 Charles Townes builds the first laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). The first surgical operation is carried out in 1961 at Cincinnati.

British engineer Christopher Cockerell invents the hovercraft using tincans and a tablefan.

1962 Telstar, the first geo-stationary communication satellite, is launched into orbit, based on an unpatented system dreamt up by Arthur C. Clarke in 1947. Indian Insat 1A is launched in 1982.

1964 IBM's System 360 is the first mainframe computer. IBM CEO Tom Watson says: "There is a global market for 5 computers".

1969 Unix programming language created. The Advanced Research Project (Arpanet) is funded by the CIA at seven US universities to develop a decentralised network which can survive nuclear attack. This leads to the Internet. The first jumpjet, the vertical take-off landing VTOL Harrier, is released by Hawker Siddeley Co of UK. Still in service, including with the Indian Navy.

1971 Geoffrey Hounsfield invents computer-assisted tomography (cat) scan.

Marcian Hoff invents the microprocessor. The building blocks of the modern IT industry are slowly slipping into place.

1975 The Altair 8800 is the first PC. The Apple II in '78 is the first commercial success. IBM follows in '81 with 8086XT PC.

1976 The first flight of the nasa space shuttle. Right now, it's on a mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

1978 Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe create the first test-tube baby. Louise Browne is doing fine and voted in the last British election.

1979 Sony releases the Walkman. Co-chairman Akio Morita wants to listen to music while he plays golf. A lot of other people also like the concept. Philips and Sony independently develop the CD.

1984 Alec Jeffreys invents genetic (DNA) fingerprinting. This resolves many paternity suits and leads to a whole new school of forensic evidence and the blockbuster Jurassic Park.

1989 CERN mathematician Tim Berner-Lees invents the browser and creates the World Wide Web. He calls the proto-browser that enables him to navigate hypertext links "Enquire" and refuses to patent it since he "hacked it out over the weekend".

1997 Ian Wilmut of the Roslin Institute (Scotland) clones Dolly the sheep. The experiment opens a whole can of ethical worms.

1998 Viagra (sildenfil citrate) is launched commercially by Pfizer. This is an accidental and very profitable spin-off from research into heart disease.