Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
The Soviet computer that solved equations with water
Vladimir Lukyanov’s 1936 water integrator represented changing quantities with water levels and controlled flows. The connected vessels modeled equations,…
Discover more
When email stopped working past 500 miles
A software update set a network timeout so low that messages to servers more than 500 miles away arrived too late. The delay roughly matched the time signals…
Discover more
Why the mouse wheel was invented
An impatient software developer wanted to navigate large arrays of corporate financial data without repeatedly dragging narrow, pixelated scrollbars.
Discover more
Early TV worked with spinning metal discs
Early experimental TVs used rapidly spinning metal discs with precisely cut holes to scan scenes line by line, producing blurry, flickering silhouettes.
Discover more
Invisible light barrier protecting electronics
An opto-isolator turns an electrical signal into light, sends it across a gap, then converts it back—letting circuits communicate without a direct electrical…
Discover more
A wooden seal hid a listening device for seven years
The device had no battery: a membrane inside the seal picked up and transmitted audio only when a nearby van activated it with a specific radio frequency.
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
The computer that predicted Eisenhower's landslide
UNIVAC projected an Eisenhower landslide in 1952, but TV executives doubted it because human pollsters expected a close race. They held back the result until…
Discover more
An early pacemaker stored energy in a wound-up spring
Albert Hyman’s 1932 apparatus used a spring-driven generator to supply electrical impulses through a needle electrode. It was an external experimental…
Discover more
A window can leak a conversation through its vibrations
Sound in a room makes nearby surfaces vibrate very slightly. A laser microphone analyzes changes in light reflected from a suitable surface to recover those…
Discover more
Wikipedia's open door does not mean everyone contributes equally
Research tracking which added words readers actually encountered found that frequent editors dominated much of the visible contribution. Counting accounts…
Discover more
A space-camera project helped put cameras in everyone's pocket
JPL developed a CMOS active-pixel sensor approach that combined image sensing with electronics on a chip while using little power. Those qualities were useful…
Discover more
The cloud began as a shape on network diagrams
Telecom engineers drew a cloud on network diagrams to represent external networks whose inner workings weren't shown—the data simply went somewhere beyond the…
Discover more
One route to the mouse wheel began with a spreadsheet zoom lever
Microsoft's Eric Michelman recalled experimenting with a joystick to help Excel users move through large sheets. Zooming out made a distant section easier to…
Discover more
Apollo mirrors still bounce lasers back to Earth
The Apollo astronauts left retroreflector panels on the Moon that bounce laser light back toward its source. Scientists still fire lasers at them from Earth…
Discover more
One early barcode design was a bullseye
Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver's patented approach included concentric circles instead of the familiar straight stripes. A circular pattern could be…
Discover more
Your bank card chip began in France
The chip was developed in France in the mid-1980s to fight fraud on toll phones, before the technology spread to bank cards.
Discover more
How spoofed GPS signals put yachts on land
Spoofed satellite signals can make a yacht appear miles inland on tracking systems, obscuring its real route at sea.
Discover more
Modern password spaces are highly secure and memorable
Long passphrases with spaces, such as “my dog loves green apples,” can be easier to remember than symbol-heavy strings while still being difficult for hacking…
Discover more
A scientist imagined a forecast computer made of 64,000 people
In 1922, Lewis Fry Richardson described a vast hall where human calculators would each compute the weather for part of the world. A coordinator would keep…
Discover more
Students put a Coke machine online to avoid disappointing walks
At Carnegie Mellon in 1982, David Nichols and other students connected a vending machine to ARPANET. Their system tracked stock and how long bottles had been…
Discover more
Coca-Cola explored charging more when the weather got hotter
In 1999, reports described the company's work on vending technology that could adjust prices with temperature. The business logic was simple: a cold drink…
Discover more
Your envelope can carry a fluorescent tracking mark
US postal sorting equipment has used an ID tag printed in fluorescent ink on the back of an envelope. It gives machinery a way to identify the individual…
Discover more
A radar researcher described a touchscreen in 1965
E. A. Johnson at Britain's Royal Radar Establishment published a touch-display design decades before smartphones. Selecting something directly on a screen…
Discover more
The drunken joke that made text blink online
A Netscape engineer reportedly threw together the HTML blink tag as a joke during a late-night drinking session. It made text flash on and off across early…
Discover more