Inventions Trivia: 22 Inventions that shaped modern society.

We would be so screwed without these inventions people! Think of what the world would be like without them? Lets check out the most important inventions that moulded the way we live today!

1. iPod. The first iPod was released on November 10, 2001, 17 years ago. Not surprisingly, iPod has made an astronomical number of sales (more than 110m units).

2. GPS. GPS or Global Positioning System was developed in 1978, and was made to pinpoint your exact position to within a couple of meters with the help of up to 32 satellites.

3. Credit card. Credit cards were first used in the 1920s, in the US, specifically to sell fuel to a growing number of automobile owners. Nowadays you can do anything with just a credit card.

4. Microwave. Percy Spencer is generally credited with inventing the modernmicrowave oven after World War II from radar technology developed during the war. Named the “Radarange”, it was first sold in 1946.

5. Barcode. Barcodes were not a big success until they were used in supermarket checkout systems. The first product that used a barcode was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum sold on June 26, 1974.

6. Printing press. In 1454 the German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg was the first to construct a press that comprised moveable metal type, which, when laid over ink, could print repeatedly onto paper.

7. Calculator. The original compact calculator was the abacus, developed in China in the ninth century. The young French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) invented the first adding machine in 1642, a clever device driven by gears and capable of performing mechanical addition and subtraction. Without them, the majority of us would either be geniuses or dumber than we already are.

8. ATM. They were invented by John Shephed Barron, and the first ATM was introduced in June 1967 at Barclays Bank in Enfield, UK. No use whatsoever if you don’t have money.

9. Telephone. Alexander Graham made the first working phone in the 1870s. Today there are 1.3 billion phone lines in use around the world. Imagine communication without it?

10. Radio. A Russian, and the Italian-Irish inventor Guglielmo Marconi, saw the potential in this technology when they sent and received the first radio waves. Marconi sent the first transatlantic radio message (three dots for the letter “S”) in 1901.

11. Fridge. The first refrigerator to see widespread use was the General Electric “Monitor-Top” refrigerator introduced in 1927. If it weren’t foe them we would be still storing food in “ice houses” and adding a more than abundant amount of salt to everything.

12. Digital camera. Steven Sasson a Kodak engineer invented and built the first digital camera using a charge-coupled device image sensor in 1975. The first digital camera was just 0.01 mega pixels.

13. Gaming consoles.  The world of game consoles has come a long way since the release of Pong in 1972 and revolutionized the way we entertain ourselves indoors.

14. Television. Television is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome, or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. Where would we be without that too?

15. Mobile phones. What would we do without our trusty portable telephone? In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a “pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone”. That’s when it all began.

16. Aircraft. We can literally fly anywhere we want thanks to the Wright Brothers who developed the three-axis control system with the incorporation of a movable rudder on their 1902 Glider.

17. Automobile/car. It would be impossibly hard to imagine a world without them. Karl Benz built his first automobile in 1885 in Mannheim.

18. Steam engine/train. The Industrial Revolution, which is possibly the greatest change over the shortest period of time in the history of civilization, was carried forward by the steam engine.

19. Internet. In 1989, a man named Tim Berner Lee invented the World Wide Web, which shrank the whole world behind our screens and changed the course of information forever.

20. Email. Computers have changed our lives in so many ways, from landing on the moon to simply browsing the web, none of it would have been possible without them. In fact, it’s hard to think of any aspect of life that has not been improved by computers.

21. Light bulb. It works by transmitting electricity through a wire with high resistance known as a filament. The waste energy created by the resistance is expelled as heat and light. It was invented by the collaboration of Thomas Edison’s ideas with  Joseph Swan’s.

22. Electricity. If the power of electricity had never been harnessed we wouldn’t have even a fraction of what we have in the world today.