Send To A Friend11 "Modern" Technologies That Are Way Older Than You Think
By Danny Harkins, Juan Arteaga
For a long time, we've been able to pride ourselves on the fact that we're smarter than our primitive ancestors. Sure, they made fire and the wheel and invented language, or whatever, but we brought technology.
Turns out a lot of our most technologically sophisticated inventions were already invented, which does nothing but remind us how useless we are.
Believed to have been invented in...
In 2001, if you are a die hard Mac fan. Or 1997, if you are aware cheaper MP3 players existed before Steve Jobs figured out people would pay twice as much to hear their pirated songs on the bus if the MP3 player looked like the Gruden son of Eve from Wall-E and a pocket calculator.
Actually Invented in...
In 1979, Kane Kramer and his friend, James Campbell, came up with the idea of a portable music player the size of a cigarette box. The music player baptized as the IXI System stored music digitally in a chip and had a display screen and buttons to navigate it.
They even built five prototypes they showed potential investors. Wow! That sounds amazing! So they sold it, became gazillionaires and everybody listened to ABBA songs they downloaded with their Ataris, right? Well, no, obviously not.
The IXI had one big problem: It only had enough memory for three and a half minutes of music, which does screw you up if you had your heart set on carrying "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" anywhere you went. And how were you supposed to get your music files back in the decades before Napster?
Since almost nobody had computers in those days, Kramer suggested putting terminals in music stores, connected via telephone with a central music server so users could buy and download their music at the store. Keep in mind we're talking about 1979 phone modems, which means Kramer's idea also involved people bringing their own tent and enough food for camping for two months while they downloaded "Funky Town."
#10.The Automobile
Believed to have been invented in...
Late 19th century or early 20th century, or whatever the hell that World of Motion ride at EPCOT said.
Actually Invented in...
A French inventor named Nicolas Joseph Cugnot built one, back before the American Revolution.
Back when most people were blaming their diseases on fairies and the evil eye, Cugnot had one great idea: a horse carriage minus the stupid, smelly horse. In 1769, he finally finished his horseless carriage; a steam-engine-powered automobile that looked like a steampunk Big Wheel.
It could carry four tons while traveling at the break-neck speed of two and a half miles per hour (people had really weak necks in those days).
Why did we never read about Napoleon's mechanized, steam-powered army trampling England under their godless robotic wheels? Well, the inventions had problems. While testing his vehicle in 1771, Cugnot lost control and discovered the unique sensation we've come to know as "crashing into a brick wall." You might think that you could laugh off such a crash at five miles an hour, but try it while sitting in one of these bastards.
Despite being an undeniably revolutionary invention, it was still slow, heavy and horrible to drive. Cugnot ran out of money to improve his invention, and while the French government was interested in continuing with the idea, a little uprising of the people called the French Revolution put an end to that.
Cugnot escaped to Belgium where he lived in poverty. Fun fact: There were about 600-700 million people on earth when Cugnot was born. That's also how many cars there are now.
#9.Heat Rays
Believed to have been invented in...
In 2007, headlines blared that the US military had unveiled an unstoppable weapon in the war against comfortable temperatures. The Active Denial System looks like a car that can catch scrambled porn channel signals, but its purpose is far more sinister and less useful: It shoots a beam that heats people's skin to an uncomfortable 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
That sounds low, but remember the idea is to disperse crowds, not turn people into ash, War of the Worlds-style.
Actually Invented in...
"Dammit! The naked guy walked into the picture again!"
Well you could go all the way back to before 400 BC, when polished surfaces could be used to focus sunlight to ignite fires or cauterize wounds. But heat rays only got interesting in 212 BC when Archimedes supposedly built a heat ray to burn down enemy ships to defend the city of Syracuse.
As our commenters will be glad to point out, many scientists consider Archimedes' heat ray a myth, including the guys from Mythbusters. But some equally smart people disagree.
Doctor Ioannis Sakkas, a Greek engineer with the name of a Star Trek villain, conducted experiments in 1973 to prove that Archimedes crazy butt death ray was possible. Instead of using one giant mirror like others who tried and failed, Sakkas used 50 human sized bronze mirrors that, when reflecting light unto the same small wooden boat, managed to ignite it in a short time.
And as any scientist can tell you, when confronted with two possible theories, the scientific method dictates that we must go with the one that is awesome.
#8.The Computer
Believed to have been invented in...
Some time around World War II, by Alan Turing or by Konrad Zuse, depending on whether you ask Alan Turing or Konrad Zuse.
Actually Invented in...
Some time around 1833. Charles Babbage was a man who hated errors. Mistakes and mathematical untidiness burned his butt so much he decided to build a ludicrously complex machine just to stop idiots from not doing math right.
In 1822, Babbage proposed the idea of building a mechanical calculator to tabulate polynomial functions. The British government, or those officials who didn't fall asleep while Babbage explained the idea, gave him a huge bag of money with a pound sign painted on it and sent him to work on it. 10 years later they finally figured out Babbage was never going to finish the machine because he was an insufferable butt who pissed off everyone who tried to help him.
By that time Charles had already moved on to bigger things. He looked at his awesome polynomial functions tabulator and thought "You know what's more rad than polynomial functions? A machine you could program to do all different kinds of math!" And so he conceived the Analytical Engine. And he built it and then laid back and played Grand Theft Horse Carriage: Manchester happily ever after, or he would have if he had ever managed to finish a damn thing in his life.
He asked the British Association for the Advancement of Science for funds, and was promptly denied, since all of their money was presumably tied up with a guy who said he could cure the evil eye with some leeches or something.
The last version of the machine read programs and data from punch cards and had a memory capable of storing 1,000 numbers with 50 decimal digits each, which roughly translates to 20.7 Kb. Only a partial model was finished, when Babbage died in 1878 while still trying to perfect the design.
As a side note, Babbage's invention lead to the invention of a new career. Augusta Ada King, countess of Lovelace, created the first program for the never finished machine (a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers) becoming the world's first programmer.
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