The use of tools, power, and materials, generally for the purposes of production. Almost every human process for getting food and shelter depends on complex technological systems, which have been developed over a 3-million-year period. Significant milestones include the advent of the steam engine in 1712, the introduction of electricity and the internal combustion engine in the mid-1870s, and recent developments in communications, electronics, and the nuclear and space industries. The advanced technology (highly automated and specialized) on which modern industrialized society depends is frequently contrasted with the low technology (labour-intensive and unspecialized) that characterizes some developing countries. Intermediate technology is an attempt to adapt scientifically advanced inventions to less developed areas by using local materials and methods of manufacture. Appropriate technology refers to simple and small-scale tools and machinery of use to developing countries.
In human prehistory, the only power available was muscle power, augmented by primitive tools, such as the wedge or lever.
The earliest materials used by humans were wood, bone, horn, shell, and stone. Metals were rare and/or difficult to obtain, although forms of iron were in use from 1000
. The improvements made to the blast furnace in the 15th century enabled cast iron to be extracted, but this process remained expensive until English ironmaker Abraham Darby substituted coke for charcoal in 1709, thus ensuring a plentiful supply of cheap iron at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Rubber, glass, leather, paper, bricks, and porcelain underwent similar processes of trial and error before becoming readily available. From the mid-1800s, entirely new materials, synthetics, appeared. First dyes, then plastic and the more versatile celluloid, and later drugs were synthesized, a process continuing into the 1980s with the growth of
, which enabled the production of synthetic insulin and growth hormones.
The utilization of power sources and materials for production frequently lagged behind their initial discovery. The
, known in antiquity in the form of a pole powered by a foot treadle, was developed further in the 18th century when it was used to produce objects of great precision, ranging from astronomical instruments to mass-produced screws. The realization that gears, cranks, cams, and wheels could operate in harmony to perform complex motion made
possible. Early attempts at
include Scottish engineer James Watt's introduction of the governor into the steam engine in 1769 to regulate the machine's steam supply automatically, and French textile maker Joseph Marie Jacquard's demonstration in 1804 of how looms could be controlled automatically by punched cards. The first moving assembly line appeared in 1870 in meat-packing factories in Chicago, USA, transferring to the motor industry in 1913. With the perfection of the programmable electronic computer in the 1960s, the way lay open for fully automatic plants. The 1960s–90s saw extensive developments in the electronic and microelectronic industries (initially in the West, later joined by Japan and the Pacific region) and in the field of communications.
| c. 3000 BC | Middle East | The abacus, which uses rods and beads for making calculations, is developed in the Middle East and adopted throughout the Mediterranean. A form of the abacus is also used in China at this time. |
| c. 400 BC | China, Europe | The Chinese begin to use bitumen for cooking food and burning in lamps – the first use of oil as a source of energy. In Europe it is used as a lubricant and as a medicinal ointment. |
| c. 230 BC | Seleucid Kingdom | Copper-lined pottery jars, with asphalt plugs, containing metal rods – the first electric battery – are used in Baghdad to coat objects with thin layers of gold or silver – the first example of electroplating. |
| c. 100 BC | China, Former Han Empire | The Chinese begin to use ice for refrigeration. |
| 83 | China | The first compass is described in a Chinese book, the Louen Heng/Discourses Weighed in the Balance. It consists of a spoon-shaped piece of magnetite which spins on a bronze plate, the handle of the spoon pointing north. It is derived from a divining board – where objects are scattered on a platter and the direction of their pointing is found significant – and is not likely to have been used for navigation. |
| c. 100 | Roman Empire | Parchment scrolls begin to be replaced by notebooks (collections of pages, written on both sides and sewn together down the middle), in the Roman Empire. |
| 100 | India | Indian metallurgists invent cast steel. The proportion of carbon within the steel is tightly controlled at less than 1.7% of the total. |
| c. 270 | China | The Chinese invent gunpowder, a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal. At first, it appears to have been used only for fireworks. |
| c. 650 | China, Tang Empire | The Chinese invent the horse collar, which enables the animal to pull from the shoulders without restricting its wind-pipe, leading to great improvements in transport and agriculture. |
| 11 May 868 | China | A printed paper roll, dated 11 May and containing part of a Chinese translation of the Buddhist text Dharani Sutra, is the earliest surviving evidence for a printed book. |
| 1103 | China | The first recorded use of fireworks occurs, in China. |
| 1335 | Italy, Milan | The world's first public clock, regularly striking the time in hours, is erected in the town square at San Gottardo, Milan, Italy. |
| 1449 | England, Scotland | The first British patent of invention is issued by Henry VI to Flemish-born John of Utznam for his technique for making stained glass for Eton College. Patents rapidly become the recognized way of asserting rights over an invention. |
| 1640 | England | In England, the Marquis of Worcester devises a steam engine to work a fountain. Steam is used to eject water from receivers through control cocks. It is a forerunner of Savery's steam pump. |
| 1674 | Netherlands | The Dutch scientist and instrumentmaker Christiaan Huygens makes a watch using a balance wheel controlled by the oscillations of a spring to keep time. |
| 1712 | UK | The first recorded practical steam engine to use a piston and cylinder, constructed by English inventor Thomas Newcomen, is installed at Dudley Castle, near Wolverhampton, England, where it is used for pumping out underground mineworkings. |
| 26 May 1733 | England | English inventor John Kay patents his flying shuttle, a loom shuttle carrying the weft thread through the weave. Previously the shuttle was thrown from side to side by hand, which required two people for broad cloth. |
| 1740 | UK | English clockmaker Benjamin Huntsman rediscovers the principle of producing steel in a crucible. Huntsman's Sheffield steel is far superior to any other cast steel being made. |
| 1753 | UK, France | French cartographer Nicolas Desmarest suggests the construction of a Channel Tunnel linking Britain to mainland Europe. |
| 1764 | England | English inventor James Hargreaves invents the spinning jenny, which allows one individual to spin several threads simultaneously. The first model can spin 8 yarns at once but later models could spin 80. |
| 1769 | England | English inventor Richard Arkwright patents a spinning machine (or ‘water frame’ because it operates by water) that produces cotton yarn suitable for warp; it is one of the key inventions of Britain's Industrial Revolution. |
| 1781 | Scotland | Scottish engineer James Watt discovers how to convert the up-and-down motion of his steam engine into rotary motion, which can then turn a shaft. |
| 1782 | Scotland | Scottish engineer James Watt patents the double-acting steam engine, which provides power on both the upstroke and the downstroke of the piston. |
| 1783 | England | English iron manufacturer Henry Cort develops a rolling mill with grooved rollers for making iron bars. With this machine he can produce 15 tonnes of iron bars in 12 hours, where a traditional forge hammer could only produce 1 tonne. |
| 21 November 1783 | France | Using a hot-air balloon made by Joseph and Etienne Montgolfier, Jean F Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes make the first human flight, in Paris, France. |
| 1784 | USA | US engineer Oliver Evans invents an automated process for grinding grain and sifting flour; it marks the beginning of automation in America. |
| 1784 | Swiss Confederation | Swiss inventor Aimé Argand invents an oil-burner consisting of a cylindrical wick, two concentric metal tubes to provide air, and a glass chimney to increase the draught. It gives a light ten times brighter than previous lamps and the principle is later used in gas-burners. |
| 1784 | England | English iron manufacturer Henry Cort discovers the ‘puddling process’ of converting pig iron into wrought iron. It revolutionizes the manufacture of iron, production of which quadruples over the next 20 years. |
| 1784 | England | English engineer and inventor Joseph Bramah invents an improved ‘pick-proof’ lock. |
| 1784 | USA | US scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin invents glasses with bifocal lenses. |
| 1795 | England | English engineer and inventor Joseph Bramah invents a hydraulic press capable of exerting a force of several thousand tonnes. |
| 1798 | Germany | German printer Alois Senefelder invents lithography. |
| 1800 | Italy | Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invents the voltaic pile made of discs of silver and zinc – the first electric battery. |
| 1816 | Scotland | Scottish clergyman Robert Stirling patents the Stirling hot-air engine. It utilizes the fact that air in a cylinder heats when compressed and cools when it expands. |
| 1829 | USA | The US inventor William Austin Burt patents the Typographer, the first patented typewriter. A handle is used to select the letter which is then inked on a pad and pressed on the paper. |
| 1830 | France | The French inventor Barthélemy Thimonnier patents the first sewing machine. Eighty are constructed to make French army uniforms but are destroyed the following year by a mob of tailors fearing unemployment. |
| 1832 | Belgium | The Belgian inventor Joseph Plateau develops the phenakistoscope, a device which creates the illusion of motion. It consists of a disc, with images in reverse, located around the centre, and which is rotated in front of a mirror. The illusion of motion is created by observing the images in the mirror through slits on the disc. |
| 1832 | USA | John Matthews creates the soda fountain, a machine for carbonating water that he then sells at his shop in New York City. |
| 1834 | England | The English mathematician William George Horner develops the zoetrope, a motion picture device that is an improvement over the phenakistoscope. It consists of two discs with images on one side observed through slits on the other. |
| 1836 | Sweden | Swedish engineer John Ericsson patents a screw propeller. Other screw propellers are patented about this time by British engineer Francis Pettit Smith (1836), Austrian engineer Joseph Ressel (1832), Scottish engineer Robert Wilson (1832), and US engineer John Stevens (1826). |
| 1836 | England | The English chemist Edward Davy designs an electromagnetic repeater for amplifying and relaying telegraphic signals. |
| 1837 | France | The French artist Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre produces a detailed photograph of his studio on a silvered copper plate. |
| 1839 | USA | US inventor Charles Goodyear invents vulcanized rubber by adding sulphur and white lead and then heating it. |
| 1839 | England | English pioneer of photography William Fox Talbot publishes a paper describing the paper negative. |
| 1841 | Germany | German chemist Robert Wilhelm von Bunsen invents the carbon–zinc battery. |
| 1841 | UK | English mechanical engineer Joseph Whitworth standardizes the size of threads on screws, which becomes internationally accepted. |
| 10 September 1846 | USA | US inventor Elias Howe patents a practical sewing machine; it revolutionizes garment manufacture in both the factory and home. |
| 1852 | USA | US inventor and machine-shop owner Elisha Otis installs, in a factory in Albany, New York, a freight lift equipped with an automatic safety device that prevents it from falling if the lifting chain or rope breaks. This leads to the passenger elevator, making the building of skyscrapers more practical. The first permanent Otis and Son elevator is installed in the Haughwort Department Store in New York in 1857. |
| 1856 | UK | English inventor Henry Bessemer obtains a patent for the Bessemer converter, which converts cast iron into steel by blowing air through molten iron. The converter is tilted to take a charge of molten pig iron, then turned to the vertical and air is blown in at the bottom, then tilted again to pour out the molten steel when conversion is complete. It is an efficient way of making steel. |
| 16 August 1858 | UK, USA | Queen Victoria of Britain and US president James Buchanan are the first to exchange messages on the first successful Atlantic telegraph cable laid between Valentia, Ireland, and Newfoundland, Canada. The cable lasts for only 27 days. |
| 1859 | France | Belgian inventor Etienne Lenoir builds the first successful internal combustion engine, which runs on a mixture of coal gas and air. Ignition is supplied by a high-tension spark obtained from a battery and induction coil. It is the first gas engine and development follows rapidly. |
| 1865 | Sweden | The Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel invents the blasting cap. Used to detonate nitroglycerine safely and dependably, it expands the use of explosives in industry. |
| 1866 | USA | US scientist Mahlon Loomis transmits the first telegraph message over radio waves. It is sent between two mountains in West Virginia using kites to support the aerials. |
| 1876 | Germany | The German engineer Karl von Linde develops the first really efficient refrigerator, replacing the potentially explosive methyl ether with ammonia. It opens the way for refrigerated railway cars and ships. |
| 7 March 1876 | USA | Scottish-born US inventor Alexander Graham Bell patents a device for transmitting human speech over electric wires. It consists of an identical microphone and receiver each made of a solenoid placed next to an iron membrane; vibration in the microphone's membrane induces a current in the solenoid that travels down the wire and causes the membrane in the receiver to vibrate. |
| 1878 | USA | The Remington Model 2 typewriter is introduced in the USA. It is the first typewriter to have a shift key to write both upper and lower case letters; earlier typewriters had only capitals. |
| 21 October 1879 | USA | US inventor Thomas Alva Edison demonstrates his carbon-filament incandescent lamp light. He lights his Menlo Park power station with 30 lamps that burn for two days; later filaments burn for several hundred hours. Each light can be turned on or off separately in the first demonstration of parallel circuit. |
| 1880 | UK | British geologist John Milne invents the modern seismograph for measuring the strength of earthquakes. |
| 1881 | UK | British inventor Percival Everitt patents the first practical vending machine, which supplies goods when a coin is inserted into it. |
| 1884 | Germany | German inventor Paul Gottlieb Nipkow patents a mechanical scanning device consisting of a rotating disc with a spiral of holes. All television systems later use the disc, or a modified version of it, to scan images, until electronic scanning is invented. |
| 1887 | USA | German-born US inventor Emil Berliner patents the flat phonograph disc or record, and develops a method of making them. Easier to manufacture than cylinders, they also minimize distortions caused by gravity since the stylus moves across the record rather than up and down as on the cylinders. |
| 1888 | USA | Serbian-born US inventor Nikola Tesla invents the first alternating current (AC) electric motor, which serves as the model for most modern electric motors. He sells the patent to George Westinghouse, who manufactures the motors in competition with Edison's direct current (DC) electric generators. |
| 1890 | USA | US inventor and statistician Herman Hollerith uses punched cards to automate counting the US census. The holes, which represent numerical data, are sorted and tabulated by an electric machine, the forerunner of modern computers. In 1896 Hollerith forms the Tabulating Machine Company, which later changes its name to International Business Machines (IBM). |
| 1891 | Germany | The world's first long-distance high-voltage line for transmitting electricity is established between Lauffen and Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Over 8,000 volts are carried over a distance of 177 km/120 mi. |
| 1892 | Germany | German inventor Hermann Ganswindt proposes using steel cartridges loaded with explosives to achieve escape velocity and leave the Earth. He is the first to link rockets and space flight. |
| 1892 | Germany | German engineer Rudolf Diesel patents the diesel engine, a new type of internal combustion engine that runs on oil. The engine works on the Otto cycle. Air is highly compressed and the heat generated ignites the oil in the cylinder. It proves more efficient than earlier prime movers. |
| 12 December 1896 | UK, Italy | The Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi publically demonstrates his system for commercially viable radio communication in Britain and obtains a patent. |
| 1897 | Germany | German physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun improves the cathode-ray tube. By varying the voltage, he can control the narrow beam of electrons. His ‘Braun tube’ is the forerunner of television tubes, radar screens, and oscilloscopes. |
| 1904 | USA | US engineer Charles Franklin Kettering invents the first electric cash register. |
| 1907 | USA | The Rectigraph Co. launches the first photocopier, the Rectigraph, in the USA. |
| 1917 | | The US inventor Edwin Armstrong invents the superheterodyne radio circuit. It allows easy tuning of weak radio waves, which it also amplifies. Its design becomes the basis of radar, television, and all amplitude modulation (AM) radios. |
| 1921 | USA | US physicist Albert Hull invents the magnetron, an oscillator that generates microwaves. |
| 1922 | USA | Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi suggests that radio waves may be used to detect moving objects. The US Naval Research Laboratory tests the idea and detects a ship moving between the receiver and transmitter. It is the first example of a sophisticated radar system. |
| 14 October 1922 | USA | The Bell Telephone Company installs the first mechanical switchboard system in New York City. The exchange is called ‘Pennsylvania’. |
| 1923 | USA | The Russian-born US engineer Vladimir Zworykin develops the iconoscope in the USA, an image-scanner that can produce electronic signals for reconstitution on the screen of a cathode-ray tube – the basis of television. |
| 1924 | | The Scottish engineer John Logie Baird produces televised images in outline. |
| 1924 | USA | The Russian-born US engineer Vladimir Zworykin patents the kinescope television receiver. It develops into the modern television picture tube. |
| 1925 | | The Scottish electrical engineer John Logie Baird transmits the first television images of recognizable human faces. |
| 1926 | United Kingdom | The Scottish electrical engineer John Logie Baird transmits pictures of moving objects over telephone lines between London, England, and Glasgow, Scotland. The first demonstration of true television, the images are 30-line silhouettes. |
| 7 April 1927 | USA | The American Telephone and Telegraph company (AT&T)'s president Walter Gifford gives the first demonstration of television in the USA, in the auditorium of Bell Laboratories. The image and voice of US commerce secretary Herbert Hoover is transmitted from Washington, DC, to New York City. |
| 4 February 1928 | United Kingdom | The first demonstration of colour television is given at the Dominion Hotel, London, England, on a 9 ft by 12 ft screen, by John Logie Baird. |
| 27 June 1929 | USA | Scientists at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey demonstrate the transmission of moving color images; 50 lines are scanned at 17.7 frames per second. Among the pictures they show are the US flag, the Union Jack, and a bouquet of roses. |
| c. 1931–c. 1940 | | The development of facsimile machines is made possible with the discovery of a dry chemical copying process. |
| November 1931 | | RCA-Victor in the USA releases Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as the first long-playing record (33 ⅓ RPM compared to 78). |
| 1932 | | The US corporation Technicolor develops a special camera in which three separate films, registering red, green, and blue, are exposed simultaneously. |
| 20 March 1934 | Germany | German scientist Rudolf Kuhnold, using a 700-watt transmitter on 600 megacycles plus a receiver, succeeds in receiving echoes bounced off a battleship anchored 550 m/1,800 ft away. It is the first practical demonstration of radar. |
| 1935 | Germany | The magnetophone, the first tape recorder to use plastic tape, is developed by AEG in Berlin, Germany. |
| c. 1936 | USA | Catalytic cracking, a chemical process in which long-chain hydrocarbon molecules are broken down into smaller ones, is introduced to produce gasoline from low grade crude oil by the US Sun Oil Company and Socony-Vacuum Company. |
| 1937 | UK | British inventor Alec Reeves develops a system in which analogue sound is transformed into electrical impulses and a receiver transforms them back into an analogue signal – the basis of digital recording. |
| 1937 | USA | US radio engineer Grote Reber builds the first radio telescope. It has a parabolic reflector 9.4 m/31 ft in diameter and begins service in Wheaton, Illinois. |
| 1937 | USA | Xerography, an electrostatic copying process, is pioneered in the USA by electrical engineer Chester Carlson; it becomes commercially available in 1950. |
| 12 April 1937 | England | English engineer Frank Whittle tests the first prototype jet engine. A similar engine is developed in Germany at the same time. |
| 1938 | Germany | The German inventor Konrad Zuse constructs the first binary calculator using a binary code (Boolean algebra); it is the first working computer. |
| 1938 | Germany | A scanning electron microscope is demonstrated by German physicist Manfred von Ardenne. |
| April 1939 | USA | US physicists Georges Stibitz and Samuel B Williams of Bell Laboratories build a computer consisting of over 400 relays connected to teletype machine for input and output of data, thus introducing the idea of operating a computer via a terminal. Called a Complex Number Calculator, it is demonstrated on 8 January 1940. |
| 1940 | UK | British scientists John Turon Randall and Henry Albert Boot develop the cavity magnetron, which can generate high power at high frequencies (20,000 watts at 3,000 megahertz), making centimetric radar practical for the first time. The resulting smaller radar antennae make airborne radar a practicality. |
| 3 October 1942 | Germany | The V2 rocket, the ancestor of modern space rockets, is first launched, in Germany; weighing 40 tons it is 12 m/40 ft long, burns an alcohol-liquid oxygen mixture, can reach a distance of 200 km/125 mi, a height of 97 km/60 mi, and travels at 5,300kph/3,300 mph. |
| 1943 | France | French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau invents the aqualung (or self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, ‘scuba’), the first fully automatic compressed-air breathing apparatus. It allows him to dive to a depth of 64 m/210 ft. |
| 1943 | Switzerland | In Switzerland, Buhrle & Co. develop the first telephone answering machine, which is then manufactured under the name of Ipsophone. |
| 1944 | USA | The US mathematician Howard Aitken builds the Harvard University Mark I, or Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The first programme-controlled computer, it is 15 m/50 ft long and 2.4 m/8 ft high, and its operations are controlled by a sequence of instruction codes on punched paper that operate electromechanical switches. Simple multiplication takes 4 sec and division 11 sec. |
| 8 October 1945 | USA | In Waltham, Massachusetts, Percy LeBaron Spencer patents the first microwave oven, which is used in restaurants and institutions. |
| 1948 | USA | The first atomic clock is installed at the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, DC; it is based on the oscillation of the ammonia molecule and operates using the natural vibrations of atoms. It is extremely accurate, with an error margin of 2 seconds in every 2 million years. |
| 1948 | USA | US physicists John Bardeen, William Bradley Shockley, and Walter Brattain develop the transistor in research at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the USA. A solid-state mechanism for generating, amplifying, and controlling electrical impulses, it revolutionizes the electronics industry by enabling the miniaturization of computers, radios, and televisions, as well as the development of guided missiles. |
| 1950 | Japan | Dr Yoshiro Nakamata of the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan, develops the floppy disk and licenses it to International Business Machines (IBM). |
| 21 January 1954 | USA | The first nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus, is launched by the USA at Groton, Connecticut. It is also the largest submarine, at 97 m/319 ft long. |
| 1955 | USA | US radiophysicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology develop the use of ultra high-frequency (UHF) waves for television broadcasting. With a 0.1–1 metre wavelength and a frequency of 3,000 and 300 megahertz they are used in the USA and Canada to carry channels 14 to 83. |
| 1955 | England | English radio astronomer Martin Ryle builds the first radio interferometer. Consisting of three antennae spaced 1.6 km/1 mi apart, it increases the resolution of radio telescopes, permitting the diameter of a radio source to be determined, or two closely spaced sources to be separated. |
| February 1956 | USA | US engineers Charles Ginsburg and Raymond Dolby of Ampex Corporation demonstrate the first practical videotape recorder. It revolutionizes television broadcasting by permitting shows to be taped rather than shown live. |
| 1957 | UK | The Jodrell Bank observatory, located in Cheshire, England, and designed by English astronomer Bernard Lovell, begins operating. The first large radio telescope, it has a 76-m/250-ft diameter reflector, which can be rotated horizontally at 20° per minute and vertically at 24° per minute. Lovell uses it to track the Soviet satellite Sputnik 1, launched 4 October. |
| March 1957 | Japan | The electronics company Sony markets the first pocket-sized transistor radio, in Japan. |
| 1959 | USA | US engineer Jean Hoerni of Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation designs the planar or ‘flat’ transistor and US engineer Robert Noyce discovers a way to join the circuits by printing, eliminating hundreds of hours in their production. Their work leads to the creation of the first microchip, which stimulates the computer industry with its sharply reduced size and cost and leads to the third generation of computers. |
| 1960 | USA | US physicist Theodore Maiman constructs the first laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation), a device producing an intense beam of parallel or coherent light. |
| 1963 | USA | Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks of the University of Michigan develop the hologram. |
| 1963 | USA | The Polaroid Corporation develops colour polaroid film in the USA. |
| 1967 | USA | Amana Refrigeration markets the first microwave oven for home use in the USA. |
| 1967 | Switzerland | Quartz watches are launched in the USA, costing from $550. They have been developed by a group of Swiss watch manufacturers. |
| 1970 | UK | The Dutch electronics company Philips launches the first car cassette player in Britain. |
| 26 June 1974 | USA | The first product barcode (on a pack of Wrigley's chewing gum) is scanned at the checkout of the Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. |
| 1976 | USA | US chemist Stephanie Kwolek develops Kevlar, a plastic fibre as strong as steel; it is used to make bulletproof vests, boat-shells, and tyres. |
| 4 July 1978 | USA | Scientists at the Princeton Large Torus test reactor achieve a temperature of 54 million K/60 million°F, and maintain it for one-twentieth of a second. It is hailed as a breakthrough for nuclear fusion. |
| 1979 | USA | Philips/MCA launches the LaserVision video disk system in the USA. |
| 1 July 1979 | Japan | Akio Morita, chairman of the Japanese company Sony, launches the Walkman, a small portable, personal tape recorder at a price of $165; he is reputed to have invented the product because his own children were fond of loud music. |
| 1981 | USA | The first working high-definition television (HDTV) is demonstrated in Japan. |
| 1982 | Japan | Sony launches the first pocket television set, the Sony Flat TV, in Japan, with a screen size of 5 cm/2 in. It costs $239. |
| October 1982 | Japan | Japanese company Sony launches the first compact disc (CD) players in Japan, working with Philips, the Dutch manufacturer of the compact disc. |
| 1984 | USA | US physicist Dennis Matthews builds the first X-ray laser. |
| 1986 | USA | The first laptop computer is introduced in the USA. |
| 1986 | Germany, Switzerland | German physicist Johannes Bednorz and Swiss physicist Karl Alex Müller announce the discovery of a superconducting ceramic material in which superconductivity occurs at a much higher temperature (30 K) than hitherto known, increasing the potential for use of superconductivity for more energy-efficient motors and computers. They receive the Nobel Prize for Physics – in record time – for their discovery. |
| 1987 | UK | Consumer electronics companies Seiko and Ferguson jointly launch a colour pocket television in the UK; it has a 6.25-cm/2.5-in LCD screen and costs £250. |
| 1990 | USA | The US telecommunications equipment company PhoneMate launches the digital answering machine ADAM, the first with messages stored on a silicon chip rather than tape. |
| 1990 | UK | The British company Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) develops the first practical biodegradable plastic, Biopal. |
| 1996 | Antarctica | Scientists from the Scott Polar Institute, using data from the European Space Agency's ERS-1 satellite, discover a 14,000-sq-km/5,400-sq-mi, 125-m/410-ft-deep lake, 4 km/2.5 mi under the Antarctic ice sheet. Called Lake Vostok after the Russian ice-drilling station it lies beneath, the ice sheet, which acts as a blanket, and a pressure of 300–400 atmospheres allow the water to remain liquid. |
| July 1996 | USA | The US engineers Theodore O Poehler and Peter C Searson announce the invention of the first all-plastic battery. It uses polymers instead of conventional electrode materials and has implications for military and space applications as well as its use in consumer devices such as hearing aids and wristwatches. |
