Technology
Discover facts about technology. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Technology
Dishwashers clean plates using highly pressurized hot water
You probably assume your dishwasher fills up entirely with water like a giant mechanical bath. Cute. It actually uses a surprisingly small pool of scalding…
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Cotton gins use fine combs to tear seeds from plant fibers
Picking the sticky seeds out of raw cotton by hand is a miserable existence. The cotton gin fixes this by dragging the fluffy raw cotton through a terrifying…
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Lab-grown meat once depended on calf blood
Cultured meat is pitched as a cruelty-free utopia, but the cells refuse to grow unless they are bathed in a highly specific nutrient broth. For years, this…
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Excel 97 secretly contained a 3D flight simulator
Because compiling endless financial reports is soul-crushing, developers built their own escape hatch. If you opened a specific worksheet in Excel '97,…
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Why Alexa is always listening for its wake word
You literally paid a trillion-dollar corporation to bug your living room. Amazon's Echo devices continuously record short snippets of audio, locally…
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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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Keyboard spacebars wear out faster on the right side for the vast majority of users because human beings are overwhelmingly right-handed and unconsciously favor that thumb.
Keyboard spacebars wear out faster on the right side for the vast majority of users because human beings are overwhelmingly right-handed and unconsciously…
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Sony executives initially hated the name 'Walkman' and tried desperately to change it before the iconic portable cassette player launched in overseas markets in 1979.
Sony executives initially hated the name 'Walkman' and tried desperately to change it before the iconic portable cassette player launched in overseas markets…
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Wireless internet technology was actually born out of a failed scientific experiment to detect miniature black holes by Australian radio astronomer John O'Sullivan in the 1990s.
Wireless internet technology was actually born out of a failed scientific experiment to detect miniature black holes by Australian radio astronomer John…
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Microsoft designer Vincent Connare created the infamous Comic Sans font in 1994 to be used in the speech bubbles of a cartoon dog designed to help people navigate Windows 95.
Microsoft designer Vincent Connare created the infamous Comic Sans font in 1994 to be used in the speech bubbles of a cartoon dog designed to help people…
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Microsoft executives faced an absolutely brutal internal review meeting in 2000 where Bill Gates aggressively screamed at the original Xbox development team, repeatedly calling…
Microsoft executives faced an absolutely brutal internal review meeting in 2000 where Bill Gates aggressively screamed at the original Xbox development team,…
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Vibrating alert on your smartphone was originally developed for military mechanics and airplane pilots in the 1960s to warn them of incoming hazards in deafeningly loud environments.
Vibrating alert on your smartphone was originally developed for military mechanics and airplane pilots in the 1960s to warn them of incoming hazards in…
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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 was originally built in 2004 as an educational physics simulator called Interactive Physics, meant to help students understand gravity, pulleys, and basic mechanical engineering.
Roblox was originally built in 2004 as an educational physics simulator called Interactive Physics, meant to help students understand gravity, pulleys, and…
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First website ever created was launched in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN research facility in Switzerland, entirely dedicated to explaining the basic concept of the World Wide Web.
First website ever created was launched in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee at the CERN research facility in Switzerland, entirely dedicated to explaining the basic…
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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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Saehan Information Systems launched the MPMan F10 in 1998 as the world's very first mass-produced portable solid-state digital audio player, beating the Apple iPod to the market by three full years.
Saehan Information Systems launched the MPMan F10 in 1998 as the world's very first mass-produced portable solid-state digital audio player, beating the Apple…
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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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Sony's Betamax video cassette format was widely considered by tech experts to be vastly superior to JVC's VHS format in terms of actual picture quality, resolution, and audio…
Sony's Betamax video cassette format was widely considered by tech experts to be vastly superior to JVC's VHS format in terms of actual picture quality,…
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Friedhelm Hillebrand, a brilliant German telecommunications researcher, established the strict 160-character limit for standard SMS text messages in 1985 by sitting at his…
Friedhelm Hillebrand, a brilliant German telecommunications researcher, established the strict 160-character limit for standard SMS text messages in 1985 by…
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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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Monks in the Middle Ages originally used the at-symbol as a shorthand abbreviation for the Latin word 'ad', which meant 'toward' or 'at', strictly as a way to save valuable ink…
Monks in the Middle Ages originally used the at-symbol as a shorthand abbreviation for the Latin word 'ad', which meant 'toward' or 'at', strictly as a way to…
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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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