Some of the most transformative tools in our daily lives weren't born from decades of meticulous planning, but from happy accidents, sudden sparks of inspiration, and the relentless pursuit of solving a simple problem. From the device that heats your lunch in seconds to the invisible boxes that carry global trade, the story of modern innovation is full of surprising twists. Let’s explore ten pivotal inventions, some stumbled upon and others strenuously built, that fundamentally reshaped how we live, work, and connect.
1. The Microwave Oven (1945): A Melted Candy Bar's Legacy
It was invented utterly by accident one fateful day more than 70 years ago,when a Raytheon engineer named Percy Spencer was testing a military-grade magnetron and suddenly realized his snack had melted. Spencer earned several patents while working on more efficient and effective ways to mass-produce radar magnetrons. A radar magnetron is a sort of electric whistle that, instead of creating vibrating sound, creates vibrating electromagnetic waves. According to Michalak, at the time Spencer was trying to improve the power level of the magnetron tubes to be used in radar sets. On that fateful day in 1946, Spencer was testing one of his magnetrons when he stuck his hand in his pocket, preparing for the lunch break, when he made a shocking discovery: The peanut cluster bar had melted. Says Spencer, “It was a gooey, sticky mess.”In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a Mr. Goodbar candy bar he had in his pocket. The first food deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave oven was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters. To verify his finding, Spencer created a high-density electromagnetic field by feeding microwave power from a magnetron into a metal box from which it had no way to escape. When food was placed in the box with the microwave energy, the temperature of the food rose rapidly. On 8 October 1945, Raytheon filed a United States patent application for Spencer's microwave cooking process, and an oven that heated food using microwave energy from a magnetron was soon placed in a Boston restaurant for testing.
Percy LeBaron Spencer was a self-taught engineer who had never finished grammar school. While at the Raytheon Corp., he worked on magnetrons — vacuum tubes that produce microwave radiation and are used in radar systems. In 1941, he devised a more efficient way to manufacture them. His innovation allowed production to rise from 17 per day to over 2,600 per day. Spencer was testing a magnetron when he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Intrigued, Spencer tested other foods, including popcorn kernels, and noticed that they all popped. He put an egg near the magnetron and watched as it started to shake and then explode. Spencer realized that the foods had been exposed to low-density microwave energy. He next built a metal box and fed microwave power into it. The energy entered the box but could not escape — microwaves do not pass through metal. Spencer discovered that microwaves could cook food faster than convention ovens that used heat. He filed a patent application in 1945. He exposed popcorns to microwaves and they popped, he tried the whole egg and it exploded. Then he attached a high density electromagnetic field generator to an enclosed metal box and experimented on food that way which allowed for controlled and safe experimentation. Microwave cooking oven was patented on October 8, 1945 with the one of the first prototypes placed at a Boston restaurant for testing.
2. The Space Shuttle (1981): A Reusable Spaceplane
The versatile and reusable space shuttle revolutionized the space program and space travel in general.Although the shuttle was the result of a group effort, NASA pioneer Dr. George A. Mueller is credited with developing the shuttle after he completed Project Apollo. Space Shuttle Columbia's maiden launch was on April 12, 1981. NASA's space shuttle was the world's first reusable spacecraft. It launched like a rocket and returned to Earth like a glider, landing like an airplane on a long concrete runway. It was designed to carry large payloads — such as satellites — into orbit and bring them back, if necessary, for repairs.The space shuttle's largest contribution was building the International Space Station, which remains in orbit today to conduct hundreds of science experiments annually on human health, engineering and other matters. The program is also remembered for launching and servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, visiting the Russian space station Mir, launching numerous satellites and probes, and performing thousands upon thousands of hours of basic science experiments. The space shuttle grew out of several efforts to develop reusable spacecraft. The X-15 program in the 1950s tested the idea of flying a space plane. The U.S. Air Force also conducted studies on semi-reusable spacecraft in the 1960s. NASA began work on an Integrated Launch and Re-entry Vehicle (ILRV) in 1968, and by 1969 the space shuttle's development received approval from then-President Richard Nixon.
The original vision of the space shuttle program was to develop a vehicle that would launch into space very frequently (several times a month) to deploy and repair satellites as required. The military was also an active participant in the development, and the shuttle's payload bay (which carried equipment into satellites into space) was enlarged in the design phase to accommodate larger military satellites. In the late 1930s, the Nazis initiated the "Amerika Bomber" project, an effort to build an aircraft capable of taking off from Germany and dropping a bomb on the continental United States. Various engineers, including a man named Eugen Sanger, submitted proposals. Sanger's idea, developed with the mathematician Irene Bredt, was a type of winged rocket called the Silbervogel (German for "silver bird"). The reusable Silbervogel would ascend to suborbital space, then drop down into the stratosphere. At that point, the increasing air density would give the vehicle lift, bouncing it to a higher altitude again. The process would repeat, with the Silbervogel making the trip across the Atlantic in a series of leaps and bounds. The Nazis didn't end up building the Silbervogel, or any other Amerika Bomber proposal. But the Silbervogel concept found its way into American hands at the end of World War II, when the United States brought over many German scientists in a mission known as Operation Paperclip.
Near the end of the Apollo space program, NASA officials were looking at the future of the American space program. They were using one-shot, disposable rockets. What they needed was a reliable, less expensive rocket, perhaps one that was reusable. The idea of a reusable "space shuttle" that could launch like a rocket but land like an airplane was appealing and would be a great technical achievement. NASA began design, cost and engineering studies on a space shuttle and many aerospace companies also explored the concepts. In 1972, President Nixon announced that NASA would develop a reusable space shuttle or space transportation system (STS). NASA decided that the shuttle would consist of an orbiter attached to solid rocket boosters and an external fuel tank and awarded the prime contract to Rockwell International. Finally, after many years of construction and testing (i.e. orbiter, main engines, external fuel tank, solid rocket boosters), the shuttle was ready to fly. Four shuttles were made (Columbia, Discovery, Atlantis, Challenger). The first flight was in 1981 with the space shuttle Columbia, piloted by astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen. Columbia performed well and the other shuttles soon made several successful flights.
3. The Graphical User Interface - GUI (1981): Clicking Instead of Typing
If you enjoy using a computer without typing long strings of complicated codes,you have Douglas Engelbart and Alan Kay to thank. In 1981, the pair developed the graphical user interface, which allows users to click icons and images using a mouse, an item Engelbart invented more than a decade earlier. Short for Graphic User Interface, the GUI uses windows, icons, and menus to carry out commands such as opening files, deleting files, moving files, etc. and although many GUI Operating Systems are operated by using a mouse, the keyboard can also be used by using keyboard shortcuts or arrow keys. The GUI was co-invented at Xerox PARC by Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart in 1981.A GUI is an interface to your computer that gives you easy ways to navigate through your desktop and programs by showing you icons to represent folders, program names, and recycle bins. It also gives you the ability to use a mouse. GUI created a comfortable environment that made personal computers attractive to the average person. And sales of home computers took off like a rocket. But the development of today’s graphical user interface was anything but simple. It took some 30 years of effort by engineers and computer scientists in universities, government laboratories, and corporate research groups, piggybacking on each other’s work, trying new ideas, repeating each other’s mistakes.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, many of the early concepts for windows, menus, icons, and mice were arduously researched at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Palo Alto, Calif. In 1973, PARC developed the prototype Alto, the first of two computers that would prove seminal in this area. More than 1200 Altos were built and tested. From the Alto’s concepts, starting in 1975, Xerox’s System Development Department then developed the Star and introduced it in 1981—the first such user-friendly machine sold to the public. Before Xerox PARC researchers got to work in the 70s, the basic idea of GUI had been circulating for some time. Indeed, the idea of making computers more visual, more tactile, and more accessible was explored by several visionaries. In the 60s, computer pioneer Douglas Engelbart had conceptualized GUI. He envisioned a computer system that used hypertext, window-based OS, and videoconferencing. He also came up with the concept for the computer mouse. Engelbart did this work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The GUI prototype he designed was called the oN-Line system (NLS). NLS presented a brand new idea for a computerized information system.
4. Photoshop (1987): The Image-Editing Giant
Adobe Photoshop is such a staple for image-editing that when a picture appears doctored,it is common to say it's been "photoshopped," even if the picture was edited with a different program. The word didn't exist, however, before 1987, when the Knoll brothers, Thomas and John, developed the first version of the software, which was initially purchased by another company before Adobe realized its incredible potential. Who doesn’t know the name of Photoshop? The ultimate most popular and powerful photo editing software in the world! For the last 30 years, it’s been the first choice by millions of industry professionals.It’s also called a raster graphics editor. This application is widely used by designers, photographers, web developers, marketing coordinators, art directors, webmasters, and artists from different media. Some of the popular Photoshop versions are likely Adobe Photoshop Elements, Photoshop CC, Lightroom Classic, etc. These all have different purposes to develop that have some special characteristics. They are brothers namely Thomas Knoll, a software engineer, and John Knoll, a visual effects supervisor.
At the time of exploring the idea of Photoshop, Thomas was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, who was then writing a program called ‘Display’ that was being developed for displaying grayscale images on a monochrome display. Then after seeing the project, his brother John, who was a visual effect artist at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) planned to turn this into a complete image editing program. It was a big step indeed! Initially, it was known as ImagePro. In 1987, Thomas Knoll was a PHD student at the University of Michigan where he was studying Engineering. Thomas had always been interested in photography much like his father and he had a dark room in his basement. Thomas's father, Glen Knoll, was a professor at a local college. Much like his son, he was also interested in photography and computers. Glen was one of the first people to get their hands on an Apple II Plus computer as he was allowed to bring it home from work.
One day, Thomas wrote a small subroutine for a program on his father's Apple II Plus that allowed him to translate monochromatic images to greyscale on his monitor. After working on the program a little more, Thomas was able to create a number of processes that applied various effects to images on the screen. It was a rather primitive program by today's standards but considering it was 1987, this was pretty breakthrough technology. While Thomas was studying at University, John Knoll (his brother) was working on special effects at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic. When he saw what Thomas had created on his father's Apple II, he told Thomas that he should turn his program into a fully fledged image editor. John and Thomas actually began to work together on the application. By utilising Thomas's programming expertise and John's design experience, the two brothers improved on the initial application and in 1988, released a piece of software called "Image Pro".
Within just a few months of completing the software, the two brothers had managed to form a partnership with a company named Barneyscan. Barneyscan manufactured and sold scanners and they decided to purchase 200 copies of Thomas and John's image editing software to ship with their scanners. Through Barneyscan, the software was sold under the name "Barneyscan XP". Knoll brothers met with Adobe executives that they really hit the jackpot. Adobe executives were so impressed with the product that they offered the two brothers a licensing partnership with Adobe. The agreement would see Photoshop version 1.0 launched under the Adobe brand name for the first time ever and subsequently gave way to the many iterations of Adobe Photoshop that we've seen over the years. The two brothers managed to win over Adobe executives and formed a partnership that would see them release Image Pro under the Adobe brand name.
5. The CMOS Image Sensor (1994): The Camera-on-a-Chip
Eric Fossum recalls of his early experiments with what was at the time an alternate form of digital image sensor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL). His invention of the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor would go on to become the Space Agency’s single most ubiquitous spinoff technology, dominating the digital imaging industries and enabling cell phone cameras, high-definition video, and social media as we know it.Instead, a different imaging technology, using sensors based on the charge coupled device (CCD), allowed high-quality digital photography to come of age by the late 1980s. These image sensors comprise an array of photodetecting pixels that collect charges when exposed to light and transfer those charges, pixel to pixel, to the corner of the array, where they are amplified and measured. CMOS pixels are signal amplifiers themselves, they can each read out their own signals, rather than transferring all the charges to a single amplifier. This lowered voltage requirements and eliminated charge transfer-efficiency issues. And it had the added benefit of allowing almost all the other camera electronics to be integrated onto the computer chip with the pixel array using conventional CMOS production processes, a development that would make CMOS-APS imagers more compact, reliable, and inexpensive.
An active-pixel sensor (APS) is an image sensor consisting of an integrated circuit containing an array of pixel sensors, each pixel containing a photodetector and an active amplifier. There are many types of active pixel sensors including the CMOS APS used most commonly in cell phone cameras, web cameras, most digital pocket cameras since circa 2010, and in most DSLRs. Such an image sensor is produced by a CMOS (and is hence also known as a CMOS sensor), and has emerged as an alternative to charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors. CMOS active pixel sensor which includes a compensation circuit capable of compensating a lowered pixel voltage output due to leakage current of a photodiode. The CMOS active pixel sensor having a light sensing unit for generating an output voltage when light is incident thereupon, the sensing unit having an amount of leakage current before the incidence of light. A reset unit resets the output voltage of the light sensing unit to an initial reset voltage in response to a reset signal. A sense transistor has a source, a drain coupled to a power source voltage, and a gate coupled to the output of the light sensing unit. A select transistor has a drain connected to a source of the sense transistor, and provides the voltage of the sense transistor to a bit line, in response to a select signal. A compensation unit supplies a voltage corresponding to the output voltage of the light sensing unit lowered by the leakage current.
Eric Fossum invented the image sensor that used intra-pixel charge transfer along with an in-pixel amplifier to achieve true correlated double sampling (CDS) and low temporal noise operation, and on-chip circuits for fixed-pattern noise reduction, and published the first extensive article predicting the emergence of APS imagers as the commercial successor of CCDs. Between 1993 and 1995, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed a number of prototype devices, which validated the key features of the technology. Though primitive, these devices demonstrated good image performance with high readout speed and low power consumption. Eric Fossum invented the CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) active pixel sensor camera-on-a-chip, the miniaturized camera technology that has become a fixture in imaging.
In 1990, Fossum joined NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he managed research and development in image sensor and focal-plane technology. While he was at JPL, NASA wanted smaller cameras that would use less energy and offer greater resistance to radiation events that affect image sensors in space. Fossum achieved this with the CMOS image sensor, inventing a new kind of pixel with all necessary technology on a single chip. Each chip contained arrays of light-sensitive pixels, each with its own amplifier. Circuits within the chip allowed functions like noise reduction, analog-to-digital conversion and digital image processing. Realizing the potential to improve digital cameras for consumers on Earth, in 1995 Fossum co-founded a company called Photobit and licensed the technology from Caltech. Also in 1995, Fossum was granted a U.S. patent for the active pixel sensor. Today, he holds over 175 U.S. patents. Photobit was later acquired by Micron. CMOS image sensor technology is now used in more than 6 billion cameras produced each year, including nearly every smartphone. Thanks to the accessibility of digital photography, billions of photos are shared on the internet each day, changing the way people connect across the world.
6. The Compiler (1949): Teaching Computers English
A compiler is a computer program or set of programs that transforms source code written in a computerized source language into another computer language often having a binary form known as an object code.The most common reason for wanting to transform source code is to create an executable program. The first compiler written for the A-0 programming language is attributed to its inventor, Grace Hopper in 1949. In 1946, she returned to inactive duty and joined the Harvard faculty as a research fellow, where she continued her computing research until 1949.That year, she accepted a post as senior mathematician with Eckert-Mauchly Computer, which was purchased in 1950 by Remington Rand and merged into the Sperry Corporation in 1955. During this period, Hopper developed the revolutionary concept of the compiler, an intermediate program that translates instructions written in English into code that may be understood by the computer. Normally, programmers would have to write programs out in binary code, consisting of long series of zeros and ones. A compiler would allow a programmer to compose code more quickly and easily, without as much room for error, using English commands. Hopper’s first compiler, A-O, was unveiled in 1949 and used symbolic mathematical code to represent binary code combinations. She followed up with B-O, or “Flow-Matic,” which is considered the first English language data-processing compiler. It was used to program UNIVAC I and II machines by the end of 1956. The UNIVAC, which stands for Universal Automatic Computer, was among the first commercially available computers in the Unites States and was built by Sperry Rand.
When discussions arose as to how to create a standardized, universal computer language, Hopper was deeply involved in the development of COBOL. Her Flow-Matic compiler was used to help form a basis for the language, and she designed standard manuals and tools for it, as well as translator programs that converted non-standard COBOL languages into the standard version. The first specifications for COBOL were made available in 1959. A compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code).The most common reason for converting a source code is to create an executable program.
The first compiler was written by Grace Hopper, in 1952, for the A-0 programming language; the A-0 functioned more as a loader or linker than the modern notion of a compiler. The first autocode and its compiler were developed by Alick Glennie in 1952 for the Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester and is considered by some to be the first compiled programming language. The FORTRAN team led by John Backus at IBM is generally credited as having introduced the first complete compiler in 1957. COBOL was an early language to be compiled on multiple architectures, in 1960. Early compilers were written in assembly language. The first self-hosting compiler – capable of compiling its own source code in a high-level language – was created in 1962 for Lisp by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT.Since the 1970s it has become common practice to implement a compiler in the language it compiles, although both Pascal and C have been popular choices for implementation language. Building a self-hosting compiler is a bootstrapping problem—the first such compiler for a language must be compiled either by hand or by a compiler written in a different language, or (as in Hart and Levin's Lisp compiler) compiled by running the compiler in an interpreter.
7. The Laser Printer (1969): Precision Printing from a Computer
The laser printer was invented at Xerox in 1969 by researcher Gary Starkweather.Forty years ago, Xerox introduced our first commercial laser printer, called the Xerox 9700. We demonstrated this groundbreaking technology at the 1977 National Computer Conference in Dallas, Texas. That was the world’s first introduction to what is now a fixture of offices everywhere. The Xerox 9700 sparked a new era in printing, and users were quick to take advantage of its capabilities. The printer made it possible for data processing centers to produce fonts, graphics and logos on cut-sheet paper at speeds of up to 120 pages per minute.Specifically, Gary Starkweather invented the laser printer in 1969 at the Xerox research lab in Webster, New York. Soon after, he transferred to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and developed a prototype for the Xerox 9700: our company’s first laser printer, which came to market in 1978. Starkweather’s invention spawned the entire laser printing industry, which is still core to Xerox’s success. The first laser printer was introduced by Gary Starkweather, a product development engineer at Xerox. He came up with the idea of employing a laser beam to “draw” a picture of what was to be duplicated directly onto the copier drum in 1969. Starkweather converted a Xerox 7000 copier to create SLOT after transferring to the newly founded Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in 1971. Next, Starkweather collaborated with Butler Lampson and Ronald Rider in 1972 to add a control system and character generator, culminating in the EARS (Ethernet, Alto Research character generator, Scanned laser output terminal) which subsequently became the Xerox 9700 laser printer.
Mr. Starkweather was working as a junior engineer in the offices of the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, N.Y., in 1964 — several years after the company had introduced the photocopier to American office buildings — when he began working on a version that could transmit information between two distant copiers, so that a person could scan a document in one place and send a copy to someone else in another. He decided that this could best be done with the precision of a laser, another recent invention, which can use amplified light to transfer images onto paper. But then he had a better idea: Rather than sending grainy images of paper documents from place to place, what if he used the precision of a laser to print more refined images straight from a computer? Because his idea ventured away from the company’s core business, copiers, his boss hated it. At one point Mr. Starkweather was told that if he did not stop working on the project, his entire team would be laid off. At the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, Mr. Starkweather built the first working laser printer in 1971 in less than nine months. By the 1990s, it was a staple of offices around the world. By the new millennium, it was nearly ubiquitous in homes as well.
8. The Cellphone (1973): The First Portable Call
Our modern mobile era can trace its roots to 1973 and an engineer and inventor named Martin Cooper,who developed the first hand-held cellular phone. Mobile phones had been around since the 1940s, but their enormous size and a limited number of channels rendered them impractical. Cooper placed the world's first cellphone call from his car in 1973. A cell phone is any portable, wireless telephone using cellular technology consisting of low-powered radio transmitters to make and receive calls. Sometimes referred to as a cellular phone or a mobile phone, the technology in the phone enables the user to access the phone's many functions no matter where they are. A smartphone is a cell phone that offers features in addition to making calls, such as SMS messages — text messages — accessing the internet, and video chat.During World War II, mobile radio systems were commonly used in military vehicles; and not long after, taxicabs and emergency services vehicles had two-way radios. AT&T Bell Labs worked to improve the technology that the previous mobile telephone systems offered, and in 1946 the company introduced the first mobile telephone service in St. Louis, Missouri. When did cell phones come out? Cell phones came out in 1973 after Martin Cooper, a Motorola engineer who invented the mobile phone, made a call to one of his rivals from Bell Labs on the first cell phone. It would be ten years before cell phones would be available to the public. AT&T Bell Labs was working to improve the mobile phone from the time they introduced mobile telephone systems. When introduced in 1946, very few channels were available to use the system; because of the power needed to run the phones, they could only be charged by car batteries. So, at the time, phones could only be used in the car. For the next twenty years, AT&T worked to expand its frequency coverage and expand its mobile phone service.
While AT&T was working on its mobile phone service, Motorola also worked on wireless communications, including radio-controlled traffic systems and handheld police radios. Fearing that AT&T would have a monopoly on cell phones, Motorola placed their engineer Martin Cooper in charge of creating the first cell phone. Cooper worked to create a phone that was not limited to use just in the car. In 1973, Cooper introduced the Motorola DynaTAC phone. At a press conference, he placed the first public call on a mobile phone to his rival engineer at At&T. The DynaTAC phone was nine inches tall and weighed over 2 pounds. Once the phone was charged for over ten hours, it had about 30 minutes of talk time. It would be ten years before cell phones were commercially accessible. In 1983, Motorola introduced the DynaTAC 8000x. The phone was a commercial success, sold for $3,995, had 30 minutes of talk time, and could store 30 phone numbers. The history of mobile phones goes back to 1908 when a US Patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone. Mobile phones were invented as early as the 1940s when engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone base stations. Motorola, on 3 April 1973 were first company to mass produce the the first handheld mobile phone. These early mobile phones are often referred to as 0G mobile phones, or Zero Generation mobile phones. Most phones today rely on 3G or 4G mobile technology.
The first portable cell phone was invented in 1973 by Motorola. On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first-ever cell phone call on the DynaTAC 8000X. The prototype he used weighed 2.4 lb (1.1 kg) and measured 9.1 x 5.1 x 1.8 in (23 x 13 x 4.5 cm). This clunky device offered a talk time of just 30 minutes and required 10 hours to recharge. Before this, owning a car phone was the closest that one could get to not being tied to a landline. The DynaTAC phone was priced at $3,995, equivalent to $10,000 today.
9. The Electronic Spreadsheet (1978): VisiCalc, the First "Killer App"
People had been writing spreadsheets by hand for hundreds of years before the age of computers.But in 1978, Harvard Business School student Dan Bricklin began work on what he called a visible calculator. It would go on to become VisiCalc, the world's first electronic spreadsheet. VisiCalc is arguably the first app in history, and it shipped running on the brand-new Apple II computer in 1979. In 1961, Richard Mattessich, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, pioneered the concept of electronic spreadsheets for use in business accounting. In the autumn of 1978, Harvard Business School student, Dan Bricklin, came up with the idea for an interactive visible calculator. Bricklin and Bob Frankston then co-invented the software program VisiCalc, the world's first "killer application" and electronic spreadsheet for use on personal computers.Before Microsoft's Excel came about, a Harvard MBA student and his former MIT classmate built the first spreadsheet software for the Apple II. It was 1979 and Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston wanted to see their calculators come to life. They wanted to be able to change numbers in their calculations and update their final answers. By creating VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, that's exactly what they did. Bricklin and Frankston would work at night because computer time was cheaper at night. They thought of it as a "visual calculator" and that is why they gave it the name VisiCalc. VisiCalc was such a crucial component of the Apple II that according to Frankston, "when Apple was going to go public, they couldn't go public until I found the last bug in the Apple II VisiCalc."
You may not know Dan Bricklin, but you are almost certainly familiar with his work. It’s fair to say that the Boston-based programmer is as important a figure in the early days of personal computing as contemporaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Bricklin created what could be considered the first killer app: the electronic spreadsheet. Bricklin dreamt up the idea in 1978, while a student at the Harvard Business School. Famously, he used an early prototype of the program to ace an assignment about producing financial projections for various scenarios of a corporate marketing campaign. He wowed the professor and fellow classmates with the breadth, depth, and detail of his analysis, unusual in the time of hand-held calculators. The following year, VisiCalc—short for “visible calculator”—shipped for the Apple II. The spreadsheet—a simple, flexible, and incredibly powerful tool—quickly became the lingua franca of finance.
In 1961, Professor Richard Mattessich pioneered the development of computerized speadsheets for use in business accounting. An electronic spreadsheet organizes information into software defined columns and rows. The data can then be "added up" by a formula to give a total or sum. The spreadsheet program summarizes information from many paper sources in one place and presents the information in a format to help a decision maker see the financial "big picture" for the company.
10. The Standard Cargo Container (1956): The Box That Shrunk the World
The U.S.military began exploring the use of standardized small containers to more efficiently transport guns, bombs and other materiel to the front lines during World War II. But it was not until the 1950s that American entrepreneur Malcolm McLean realized that by standardizing the size of the containers being used in global trade, loading and unloading of ships and trains could be at least partially mechanized, thereby making the transfer from one mode of transportation to another seamless. This way products could remain in their containers from the point of manufacture to delivery, resulting in reduced costs in terms of labor and potential damage.In 1956 McLean created the standard cargo container, which is basically still the standard today. He originally built it at a length of 33 feet – soon increased to 35 – and 8 feet wide and tall. This system dramatically reduced the cost of loading and unloading a ship. In 1956, manually loading a ship cost $5.86 per ton; the standardized container cut that cost to just 16 cents a ton. Containers also made it much easier to protect cargo from the elements or pirates, since they are made of durable steel and remain locked during transport. The U.S. made great use of this innovation during the Vietnam War to ship supplies to soldiers, who sometimes even used the containers as shelters.
Today, the standard container size is 20 feet long, eight feet wide and nine feet tall – a size that’s become known as a “20-foot-equivalent container unit,” or TEU. There are actually a few different standard sizes, such as 40 feet long or a little taller, though they all have the same width. One of the key advantages is that whatever size a ship uses, they all, like Lego blocks, fit neatly together with virtually no empty spaces. This innovation made the modern globalized world possible. The quantity of goods carried by containers soared from 102 million metric tons in 1980 to about 1.83 billion metric tons as of 2017. Most of the container traffic flows across the Pacific Ocean or between Europe and Asia.
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