When was the first coin-operated vending machine built?
- In ancient Alexandria! It was used to dispense a squirt of holy water in temples.
We thought we were the Columbuses of outer space. But it turns out we were the Leif Ericsons.
The really shocking thing is that it’s more the equivalent of some hot, sexy actress doing it- Lamarr was most known for being particularly beautiful and sexy, not for her acting chops.
It’s almost as if say… Megan Fox turned out to invent something really remarkable.
And aerospace technology hasn’t regressed; it’s more that the applications that once made things like the Saturn V and the Concorde useful aren’t there anymore. Nobody really wants to pay that much more to get to London that fast, and 30 tons to LEO is more than adequate for most anything we want. Beyond that the Block 2 SLS rockets under development are supposed to put 130 tons in LEO, as opposed to the 118 of the Saturn V.
I suspect Boeing or Airbus could develop a supersonic airliner easily, but the market’s not there. It’s not a matter of technology at all.
In the 1970’s there was no payload that big (the largest payload and still the largest ever sent up was Skylab, about 80 tonnes). By the time you could feasibly imagine such large modules, you would have had to design afresh, which would be pretty expensive
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And aerospace technology hasn’t regressed; it’s more that the applications that once made things like the Saturn V and the Concorde useful aren’t there anymore. Nobody really wants to pay that much more to get to London that fast, and 30 tons to LEO is more than adequate for most anything we want. Beyond that the Block 2 SLS rockets under development are supposed to put 130 tons in LEO, as opposed to the 118 of the Saturn V.
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Saturn V would have been useful in building the ISS for sure.
Also, the retiring of the space shuttle with no replacement vehicle can only be seen as another step backward. Currently, the only way to get a human into space is… Soyuz :o
And SpaceX, I have big hopes for the Mars Colonial Transporter.
The World Wide Web was born out of a computer scientist’s (Tim Berners-Lee) frustration with computer files not working from one computer to the next.
This article tells the whole story.
Chinese are not human?
Apple Computer would not be what it is today without John Draper’s (aka “Captain Crunch”) invention of the Blue Box.
Although radar was not used in any practical application until the Second World War, it actually was invented in 1904, before the First World War.
The biggest wartime advancement in radar was the cavity magnetron, which allowed radars to be much more practically sized and more effective. The very high, concentrated energy they put out heated things close to it, so a guy named Percy Spencer put one in a box, showed it could make food hot, and invented the microwave oven - or as he called it, the “Radarange.”
Uh… He did invent the lightning rod, didn’t he? How useful was that?
Actually, Babbage’s Analytical Engines WAS built. Two of them, I think. It just took longer than we thought. It was built entirely (or substantially?) according to his original plans, but using modern materials, in recent times. One is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Ca., where docents give regular demonstrations of the engine in operation. IIRC it was mentioned that there’s another one out there somewhere, also a modern construction from the original plan.
Okay, I just googled the Analytical Engine. According to this blurb (photo included), there were at least two (maybe three? Text is unclear.) build from 2002 through 2008. The 2008 model is the one at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
ETA: BTW, it even had an output device. The mechanism at the lower left corner of the machine is a printer! I think one of the intended purposes of the machine was to print tables of sines, cosines, and other such math/engineering tables, such as one commonly sees at the back of modern math textbooks, which were previously all computed and printed by hand in those days.
Hi everyone - awesome responses. 
The famous story was that he was working with such a magnetron, when he discovered that it had melted a candy bar he had in his pocket. From Wikipedia:
The single-word term “Radarange” has ever since been the trade-marked brand-name of the line of microwave ovens built by Amana.
There are two modern examples of his Difference Engine, but no-one has yet built an Analytical Engine. These folk are in the initial stages of building one.
The first remote controlled powerboat was demonstrated in 1898.
I don’t what she invented, but I saw such technology before 1950. I had a school bank account with the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS). When you opened an account they made a signature card which was stored at a central office. When you wnt to a branch that you had never been to before, they would call the central office and the next thing you would see was a disembodied pen writing your signature on a card. It was not a fax (although faxes were available by then), but someone at the central office tracing your signature and the machine at the branch responding. After that, the branch forever had your signature.
Rats, my second post in almost fifteen years and I get it wrong! I didn’t read to the end of that page and you’re right, it says the speed was 51mph. But I can’t figure out how the 23 meters per second NASA says Saturn V was doing at that point equates to 51mph?