Telework, it turns out, did. Jack Nilles was working as a rocket scientist in the early s when he was struck by the amount of congestion on the roads. He realized that the daily commute that people made just to get to work was responsible for the stress-inducing traffic everyone had to suffer through. To Nilles, the answer was obvious: Get people off the road by removing the requirement that they come into the office to work.
With that goal in mind, he began working with a team at the University of Southern California to design, define and test a telework initiative at an insurance company using satellite offices, Nilles said in an interview with BizTech magazine. Over the past 40 years, teleworking has grown from a wild and crazy idea to an acceptable way of life, but one sweeping change Nilles sees coming down the road is the revolution of the office space. Aside from a decreasing need for large amounts of commercial office space, the nature of what people do in the office is changing as well.
The office now, for many, is a place for communicating face to face. Sure, you could only talk on it for 35 minutes, but before the DynaTAC, the only option users had for making a call were telephones tethered to the wall. As Cooper told the BBC , the team at Motorola had the unenviable challenge of figuring out for the first time how to pack all of the necessary technology into a self-contained mobile device. There was no blueprint upon which they could improve. We send voice, text and video messages, take pictures, run applications, check the weather and watch TV, movies and more.
Once Cooper took the phone wireless, the sky has truly been the limit for modern communication. So the two areas that I talk a lot about and really believe are important are the wireless impact on medical technology and on social networking. Both of those two things are going to be revolutionary. His impact on technology: Gerald Lawson created the first cartridge-based video game system, the Fairchild Channel F. That invention pushed the video game industry forward into a flexible, diverse future — a world in which games were no longer married to their hardware think Pong.
Once players could switch games on a whim, game developers and software companies flourished. And yet, Lawson is not a well-known name in video game history — or tech history, for that matter.
This, despite the fact that he was one of the few black members of the historic Homebrew Computer Club, which counted Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as members. Lawson died last year of complications from diabetes.
After spending eight years with Fairchild Semiconductor, the makers of the Channel F video game console he helped pioneer, Lawson left and started his own company, VideoSoft, which produced cartridge games for the Atari , the system that ultimately made the Channel F obsolete. However, Marc is more of a software person, while his father was fond of hardware. Over time, Marc has grown to appreciate where his father was coming from. So being programmers, we'll write code without even understanding the architecture of the underlying hardware and what we can really do with it, because programming is abstracted.
As I got a little older, I started to get a little bit more into the hardware side of things. He was more interested in the technology behind video games than in playing them. That means you take what you've taken and gone beyond that. You've learned other things, correlated the pieces, and put it together and added something to it. That's genius. His impact on technology: Long before cloud computing became a tech buzzword, almost everyone was using the cloud without knowing it.
Have you ever e-mailed yourself important files and used your inbox as an archive of sorts, going back to retrieve files as needed? His legacy here was mostly the work of a thief. Today's cars bear the names of their founders and innovators: Benz, Peugeot, Renault. But have you ever heard of a Dodge bicycle?
Or a Mercedes tricycle? In fact, both companies specialized in bikes before moving the autos. The car industry represents the epitome of incremental innovation. Take a tricycle. Add an engine. You've got a car. Just look at the picture to the right, of the the original Benz Motorwagen from Condensing the invention of cars to those six words leaves out a lot of detail and a few main characters.
It was Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach who designed the first four-wheel car with a four-stroke engine and Henry Ford who perfected the assembly line. But the long story short is that the car was a typical "invention" that was far too complicated for one person to conceive on his won. Speaking of building bikes, that's exactly what Orville and Wilbur Wright did before they became the first team to fly a heavier-than-air machine.
But, as we've learned, every great inventor stands on the shoulders of giants. When the Wright brothers asked the Smithsonian for all available information on the history of flight in , they opened a history that had begun with DaVinci's scribbling and continued all the way to the 19th century gliders of Otto Liliental.
But the Wrights solved one of the most nagging problems facing airplane developers -- stability -- by having "a single cable warp the wing and turn the rudder at the same time.
The "Farnsworth Invention" was named after Philo T. Farnsworth, the nominal father of television. But his invention was neither his nor an invention.
Teams of scientists and tinkerers all around the world were working to build, essentially, a radio for images -- i. One key was the cathode ray tube, a vacuum with an electron gun that beams images onto screen that can receive or transmit signals.
But the cathode ray tube itself has so many fathers that it's difficult to say exactly who invented even the central organ of the television, much less the television itself. In , Farnsworth projected a straight line on a machine he called the Image Dissector, which is truly the basis for the all-electronic television. But, unlike Edison, he was not as gifted at marketing, producing, and becoming a household name for his tweak.
At the end of this section, Lemley lists four inventors who, yeah, okay, really were alone. But the funny thing about the exceptions is that they're almost all accidents. Images above from top: the cotton gin patent by Eli Whitney; a Morse key; Edison's patent; the Benz patent; the Wright brothers take off, ; All credit: Wikimedia Commons. Passionate about improving urban conditions and air pollution, Walton invented a train chimney system that reduced air pollution by filtering smoke through water, trapping the airborne chemicals and holding them in suspension.
In addition to the pollution-minimizing locomotive chimney, Walton also patented a way to greatly reduce the noise of New York City's elevated railways by insulating the tracks with boxes of sand. The city's Metropolitan Railroad bought the rights almost immediately.
Whitney, author of many books for people young and old, patented an early version of alphabet blocks that came in various shapes and sizes and could form letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. Though Beasley had already made a fortune on a barrel-hooping machine patent, this serial inventor went on to design an improved life raft with guard rails that was fireproof and foldable for easy storage. Her life rafts were used on the Titanic and saved over lives.
Tenement fires were much more deadly before Connelly invented an external metal staircase, the very first fire escape. In addition to saving lives, her invention also precipitated one of the first New York City building codes, which required residential buildings to have a secondary means of escape for emergencies.
Though patents for folding ironing boards appeared in the 's, Boone's ironing board featured a key difference: It had a narrow, double-sided arm that made it perfect for ironing sleeves without forming creases. Taking advantage of the heat already generated as a byproduct of combustion, Wilcox invented a way to heat cars by channeling air over the engine and into the cab. For centuries before Greer's invention of a one-handed syringe, medical professionals had been using syringes that required both hands to administer injections.
After receiving a patent in , Anderson tried to sell her new windshield cleaning device to a manufacturer, who refused, stating that her invention lacked practical value.
Her windshield wipers failed to take off before her patent expired and it was 10 years before a similar device became standard on cars. Originally designed to demonstrate the evils of unchecked capitalism, Magie's "The Landlord's Game," was patented in , 30 years before a man patented a very similar game called Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers.
In Delaney's words, her invention of a leash you could shorten at a moment's notice was to prevent dogs from "running on the wrong side of lamp posts or pedestrians, thus causing much annoyance to the owner. Pour-over coffee fans may be surprised to learn that the company Melitta isn't named after an Italian coffee maker. It's actually named after Melitta Bentz, a German entrepreneur who invented an easy, minimalist way to make coffee by placing it in a filter and pouring water over it.
In a time when people were still using ice-boxes, Parpart patented an electric refrigerator that she successfully marketed and improved upon for years. Not much is known about Ida Forbes besides that she patented the first electric hot water heater in a time when most hot water heaters ran on gas. Nicknamed "Iron Woman," El Dorado Jones owned her own metalworking factory where she employed only women over Though she never received the funding to manufacture it, she invented the airplane engine muffler.
Parker's revolutionary design for central heating, though never utilized, was the first that used natural gas, rather than wood, to heat a home. Gilbreth, an engineer and psychologist, performed exhaustive research on the psychological impact that work spaces have on productivity. Her genius in the area of ergonomics brought us many valuable inventions, including the foot pedal trash can. The first female researcher at Harvard Medical School, Hyde created one of the earliest models of an intracellular micropipette electrode, which allowed her to stimulate and monitor a cell without disturbing the cell wall.
This technology is still widely used in science laboratories. Before Blodgett's revolutionary non-reflective glass coating was invented, glass wasn't nearly as useful or reliable as it is today. Her invention has proven indispensable in the making of camera lenses, microscopes and eyeglasses. During World War II, Lamarr, who also happened to be a movie star, created a frequency-hopping communication system that could guide torpedos without being detected.
A pioneer in the field of solar thermal storage systems, MIT researcher Maria Telkes created the first solar-heated system for her home in Dover, Massachusetts.
First inventing a leak-proof diaper covering, then a fully disposable diaper, Donovan was intent on helping as many people as possible with her ingenuity. These two New York Department of Health lab researchers discovered Nystatin, one of the first effective anti-fungal medicines, by collaborating on experiments through the mail.
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