Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Dishwashers clean plates using highly pressurized hot water
A dishwasher doesn’t fill like a bath: it pumps a small pool of water through spinning spray arms to wash the dishes.
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Cotton gins use fine combs to tear seeds from plant fibers
The narrow gaps let cotton fibers pass through while holding back the seeds, automating a tedious part of processing raw cotton.
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Lab-grown meat once depended on calf blood
For years, cultured cells were grown in fetal bovine serum, a nutrient liquid taken from calf blood. The process relied on animals even as researchers aimed…
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Excel 97 secretly contained a 3D flight simulator
Opening a specific worksheet, pressing F5, and clicking through hidden controls launched a purple 3D flight simulator with a monolith bearing the developers’…
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Why Alexa is always listening for its wake word
Echo devices analyze audio locally for the wake word; once they detect “Alexa,” they begin recording and send the request to Amazon’s cloud.
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Sony executive Norio Ohga explicitly demanded in 1980 that the new Compact Disc audio format be expanded from its original sixty-minute capacity to exactly seventy-four minutes for a highly specific reason.
Sony executive Norio Ohga explicitly demanded in 1980 that the new Compact Disc audio format be expanded from its original sixty-minute capacity to exactly…
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Google researchers successfully trained a neural network using sixteen thousand computer processors in 2012, feeding it ten million random thumbnail images from YouTube just to…
Google researchers successfully trained a neural network using sixteen thousand computer processors in 2012, feeding it ten million random thumbnail images…
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The bumps on F and J let your fingers find home without looking.
The bumps on F and J let your fingers find home without looking. Touch typists place their index fingers on those two keys, then arrange the remaining fingers…
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The Walkman reached America under a different name.
The Walkman reached America under a different name. Sony initially sold it as Soundabout in the U.S., Stowaway in Britain, and Freestyle in Australia.…
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A search for black holes helped lead to technology used in fast Wi-Fi.
A search for black holes helped lead to technology used in fast Wi-Fi. CSIRO researchers drew on radio-astronomy signal-processing experience to tackle radio…
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Comic Sans began with a designer thinking about comic-style software.
Comic Sans began with a designer thinking about comic-style software. Vincent Connare wanted lettering that suited the playful characters appearing in…
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The Xbox pitch forced Microsoft to argue against Windows.
The Xbox pitch forced Microsoft to argue against Windows. Accounts of the console's development describe a heated 2000 meeting in which Bill Gates objected to…
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Early pagers replaced a public announcement with a private signal.
Early pagers replaced a public announcement with a private signal. Motorola's 1955 Handie-Talkie radio paging system let selected people receive an alert…
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Ethernet cable standard was sketched out on a napkin by Bob Metcalfe in 1973 while he was crashing at a friend's house and trying to figure out how to network computers without everything constantly crashing.
Ethernet cable standard was sketched out on a napkin by Bob Metcalfe in 1973 while he was crashing at a friend's house and trying to figure out how to network…
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Roblox's founders first built a virtual physics lab.
Roblox's founders first built a virtual physics lab. David Baszucki and Erik Cassel created Interactive Physics, a two-dimensional educational simulation, in…
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The first website explained how to use the World Wide Web itself.
The first website explained how to use the World Wide Web itself. Tim Berners-Lee built it at CERN on a NeXT computer, whose warning label told people not to…
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Keyboard commands for copying and pasting data were created by computer scientist Larry Tesler in 1973 while working on text editing software at the legendary Xerox PARC research facility.
Keyboard commands for copying and pasting data were created by computer scientist Larry Tesler in 1973 while working on text editing software at the legendary…
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The MPMan held a handful of songs three years before the iPod.
The MPMan held a handful of songs three years before the iPod. Saehan's MPMan F10 arrived in 1998 with 32 megabytes of flash memory. Depending on encoding,…
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Satoshi Nakamoto published the original Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and successfully launched the cryptocurrency network a few months later, yet the true identity of this…
Satoshi Nakamoto published the original Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 and successfully launched the cryptocurrency network a few months later, yet the true…
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Early Betamax could run out of tape before your movie ended.
Early Betamax could run out of tape before your movie ended. Sony's first Betamax machines offered about an hour of recording time, while VHS arrived with a…
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One character can change how much text fits in an SMS.
One character can change how much text fits in an SMS. A single message segment holds up to 160 characters in the basic GSM-7 encoding, but only 70 with UCS-2…
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Apple III computers shipped with a catastrophic design flaw in 1980 because Steve Jobs insisted on not including a cooling fan to keep the machine quiet, which caused the…
Apple III computers shipped with a catastrophic design flaw in 1980 because Steve Jobs insisted on not including a cooling fan to keep the machine quiet,…
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Email gave an old accounting symbol a new address.
Email gave an old accounting symbol a new address. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson used @ to separate a user’s name from the computer receiving the message. The…
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Major Hollywood film studios aggressively sued the creators of the videocassette recorder in the 1970s, terrified that giving consumers the ability to record television shows…
Major Hollywood film studios aggressively sued the creators of the videocassette recorder in the 1970s, terrified that giving consumers the ability to record…
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