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Q0451In 1975 Kodak engineer Steven Sasson built the first digital camera — a toaster-sized box shooting 0.01-megapixel images to tape. Kodak feared it would threaten its film business.
Q0452A message can leave your phone, pass through cables under streets and seas, and arrive as light-guided data far away. Fibre optics matter because they give the internet enormous capacity without needing signals to crawl through copper alone. The global lesson is hidden infrastructure: the cloud still needs a physical world underneath it.
Q0453The first barcode scan, on 26 June 1974, rang up a pack of chewing gum in Ohio — a tiny beep that would go on to reorganise shops, supply chains and global trade.
Q0454Ethernet, developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, set the standard for wiring computers into local networks — the quiet plumbing that still links much of the connected world.
Q0455First demonstrated in 1960, the laser was famously 'a solution looking for a problem' — now it cuts steel, reads discs, performs surgery and carries the internet's light.
Q0456Bluetooth is named after Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, a 10th-century Danish king who united tribes — as the tech unites devices. Its logo even blends his initials in runes.
Q0457The first website went live on 6 August 1991, and it simply explained what the World Wide Web was — a page about pages, the seed of everything online that followed.
Q0458IBM's Simon (1992) is widely seen as the first smartphone — a touchscreen phone with apps, email and a calendar, arriving fifteen years before the iPhone.
Q0461Open-source software lets anyone read, change and share the code freely. Much of the internet's foundation is built this way — a global commons written by volunteers.
Q0462Traditional programming tells a computer exact steps. Machine learning often gives the system many examples, then lets it find useful patterns for prediction or classification. That matters globally in translation, medicine, finance, search and everyday recommendations. The so-what is practical: better tools still need careful goals, good data and human judgement.
Q0463The transistor may be the most-manufactured object ever: a single modern chip holds billions, and the world makes more transistors each year than grains of rice or stars we can see.
Q0464An MRI can show brain, muscle, joints and organs in detail because it reads signals from atoms inside the body. For a patient, the personal comparison is simple: it turns hidden tissue into a map on a screen. Globally, it changed diagnosis by making many internal problems visible earlier and more safely. Seeing well can prevent guessing badly.
Q0465In a reactor, controlled fission releases heat. That heat makes steam, steam spins a turbine, and the turbine produces electricity, much like other power stations. The difference is the fuel's density and the safety responsibility around it. The global lesson is trade-off: powerful energy systems can lower some risks while demanding serious control of others.
Q0466Edison's 1877 phonograph was the first machine to record and replay sound — the first time a human voice could outlive the moment it was spoken.
Q0467In 1879 Edison unveiled a practical, long-lasting light bulb. He didn't invent the idea, but he made electric light cheap and reliable enough to change how the world worked and slept.
Q0468In 1928 Alexander Fleming noticed mould killing bacteria in a dish he'd left out — the accident that led to penicillin and the antibiotic age that has saved countless lives.
Q0469Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895, letting doctors see bones without cutting — a breakthrough so important it earned the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Q0470In 1942, under a Chicago squash court, Chicago Pile-1 achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction — the quiet, secret moment the atomic age truly began.
Q0471Communication satellites let live television cross oceans for the first time, so events could be watched worldwide as they happened — the planet sharing a single moment.
Q0472ENIAC (1945) filled a room and weighed 30 tonnes (33 short tons), yet did in seconds what took people days. The first general-purpose electronic computer began the machine age of calculation.
Q0473Encryption scrambles data so only someone with the right key can read it — the invisible lock behind online banking, private messages and much of modern trust.
Q0474A normal bit is read as 0 or 1. A qubit can be prepared and manipulated using quantum states before measurement gives an outcome. That does not make quantum computers automatically faster at everything, but it could matter for chemistry, materials and some optimisation problems. The lesson is precision: new power often comes with narrow, demanding conditions.
Q0475In 1950 Alan Turing proposed judging machine intelligence by conversation: if you can't tell a machine from a person, does the difference matter? The question still shapes AI.
Q0476Your message may cross several companies, cables, routers and countries before it arrives. The internet keeps working because networks agree on common technical rules for addressing and moving data. That global cooperation is easy to miss when an app feels instant. The so-what: open standards can create more power than one central owner.
