Hidden history: curated ideas

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Where to begin.

Look at familiar objects and inventions, then follow the stories of the people and places behind them.

WonderHistory

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC. When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about it, around 450 BC, it was already more than 2,000 years old.

The pyramid was the tomb of Khufu, whom the Greeks called Cheops, a king of Egypt's Fourth Dynasty. Herodotus, who visited Egypt around 450 BC, was told that 100,000 men had worked on it in three-month shifts: ten years to build the causeway for hauling the stone, and twenty for the pyramid itself. He even reports an inscription recording what was spent on radishes, onions and garlic for the workers. Modern digs tell a different story. Workers' settlements at Giza, and a workers' cemetery found there in 1990, point to thousands of conscripted labourers rather than slaves. In 2013, at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, archaeologists found the Diary of Merer, the logbook of an inspector whose crew of about 40 men shipped limestone from the Tura quarries to Giza. It is the oldest known papyrus with writing on it.

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WonderHistory

The Mongol Empire, founded by Genghis Khan in 1206 and enlarged by his sons and grandsons, became the largest contiguous land empire in history. In the late 13th century it stretched in one unbroken block from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe.

Genghis Khan was born Temüjin around 1162. After uniting the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppe, he was proclaimed ruler of all the Mongols in 1206, and by his death in 1227 his armies held lands from northern China to the Caspian Sea. His heirs pushed on into Russia, Iran and the rest of China. At about 24 million square kilometres, it was second in size only to the British Empire, whose lands were scattered across the oceans. The conquests were extremely destructive, yet the order the Mongols then imposed, known as the Pax Mongolica, made long-distance trade along the Silk Road safer. A network of relay stations, the Yam, let messengers change horses and cover up to 200 kilometres a day. By 1294 the empire had split into four states: the Golden Horde, the Chagatai Khanate, the Ilkhanate in Iran and the Yuan dynasty in China.

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WonderTechnology

Louis Daguerre's 1838 photograph of the Boulevard du Temple in Paris shows a busy street as almost empty: the exposure took minutes, so moving people and carriages left no trace. The only clear figures are a man having his boots polished and, probably, the shoe-shiner, who kept still long enough to show up.

Daguerre, a French painter of theatre scenery, took the picture from his studio window at eight in the morning in late April or early May 1838 (possibly 1837). In his process, the daguerreotype, the image formed directly on a silver-coated copper plate. It cut the exposure from the eight hours or more needed for the oldest surviving photograph, taken by Nicéphore Niépce in the 1820s, to four or five minutes: still far too long for walkers and carriages. Like every daguerreotype, the picture is a mirror image. Daguerre announced his invention in January 1839 and that October gave this plate to King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The original was later ruined by a failed restoration, so the image we know comes from copies made in the 1930s by the photography historian Beaumont Newhall.

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WonderArt

The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera is a blurry view of rooftops from an upstairs window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce's country house in France. It was made in 1826 or 1827, and the exposure lasted many hours, perhaps days.

Niépce called his process heliography, 'sun writing'. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt that hardens in light, and placed it in a camera obscura, a simple box camera, pointed out of the window. Where light fell, the bitumen hardened; the rest was washed away with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, leaving the image. Sunlight falls on both sides of the buildings, so the exposure was long: traditionally put at about eight hours, though a modern researcher who recreated the process concluded it must have lasted several days. The plate is kept at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in a sealed, oxygen-free case.

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WonderHistory

In 1845 Sir John Franklin set out from England with two Royal Navy ships to complete the Northwest Passage, the Arctic sea route north of Canada. The ships were trapped in ice, and all 129 men died. The wrecks of Erebus and Terror were finally found in 2014 and 2016, where Inuit oral history had long placed them.

The ships became locked in ice off King William Island in September 1846, and Franklin died there in June 1847. A note later found in a stone cairn records that in April 1848 the 105 surviving men abandoned the ships and set off south on foot; none reached safety. In 1854 the explorer John Rae brought back Inuit accounts of dying men, but in Britain they were widely dismissed. Inuit families went on passing down what their elders had seen. The Inuit historian Louie Kamookak spent decades gathering these stories, and a memory shared by Inuk crew member Sammy Kogvik led searchers to Terror in Terror Bay. Both wrecks are now a National Historic Site that Parks Canada manages jointly with Inuit.

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WonderArchitecture

Angkor, capital of the Khmer Empire in today's Cambodia from the ninth to the fifteenth century, was ringed by giant reservoirs, moats and canals that stored monsoon rain and moved water across an urban area of about 1,000 square kilometres.

The largest reservoirs, called barays, are vast rectangles banked with earth: the West Baray, built in the eleventh century, measures about eight kilometres by two and still holds water. Moats such as the one around Angkor Wat framed temples modelled on the sacred mountain and surrounding oceans of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. Radar and aerial surveys published in 2007, and airborne laser scanning (lidar) that saw through the forest in 2012, revealed roads, canals and house mounds across at least 1,000 square kilometres, the largest known pre-industrial settlement. Researchers still debate how much the barays watered rice fields. Tree rings show long droughts broken by intense monsoons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which damaged the network and probably contributed to Angkor's decline.

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WonderHistory

The Sweet Track, a raised wooden walkway across the Somerset marshes in England, was built with timber felled in the winter of 3807–3806 BC. Tree rings date it to that single year, making it one of the oldest precisely dated built roads in the world.

The track is named after Ray Sweet, the peat cutter who found its timbers in 1970. It ran for about 1.8 kilometres between an island of higher ground and a ridge, with oak planks laid end to end on crossed pegs driven into the peat. The parts were prepared in advance, and ten people could have assembled it in a day. It follows almost the same line as an even older walkway, the Post Track, built around 3838 BC. The Sweet Track was used for only about ten years before rising water covered it. Waterlogged peat kept out oxygen and preserved the wood, and dendrochronology, dating by counting and matching tree rings, pinned down the year the trees were cut. Finds along it include a polished jade axe head.

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WonderHistory

When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

Eagle was the lunar module that carried Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface. Light, and so radio, travels at almost 300,000 km per second. At the Moon's average distance of about 384,400 km, a signal takes roughly 1.28 seconds each way, so every exchange with Mission Control in Houston had a built-in pause of about 2.6 seconds before an answer could arrive. Large dish antennas at Goldstone in California and at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia picked up the signals; the clearest pictures of the first steps came through Australia and were watched live by an estimated 600 million people. Before leaving, the crew set up a panel of reflectors on the surface. Scientists still fire lasers at it and time the light's return, which is how we know the Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 cm a year.

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WonderTechnology

The Apollo Guidance Computer that steered astronauts to the Moon had about 4 kilobytes of rewritable memory and 72 kilobytes of permanent memory. Its programs were woven by hand into “rope memory”: a wire threaded through a tiny magnetic ring stored a 1, and a wire passing it by stored a 0.

Designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and built by Raytheon, the computer was one of the first to use silicon chips (integrated circuits) and fitted into about 28 litres. Its memory was counted in “words” of 16 bits, or binary digits: 2,048 rewritable and 36,864 permanent. During Apollo 11's descent on 20 July 1969 it flashed 1202 and 1201 alarms: a radar left on in case the landing had to be abandoned was stealing processing time and overloading it. Its operating system, designed by J. Halcombe Laning, dropped less urgent jobs and restarted in a moment while the landing programs kept running, so Mission Control told the crew to carry on. The flight software was written by a team led by Margaret Hamilton, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Its power was similar to that of the first home computers of the late 1970s.

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WonderTechnology

The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek geared device probably made in the 2nd century BC, had a spiral dial covering 223 lunar months for predicting eclipses. Symbols on the dial marked the months when an eclipse of the Sun or Moon was expected, and inscriptions gave details such as the hour.

Sponge divers found the mechanism in 1901, a corroded lump among treasures from a Roman-era ship that sank off the Greek island of Antikythera around 70 to 60 BC. Its hand-turned bronze gears modelled the movements of the Sun and Moon, and it is called the oldest known analogue computer, a machine that calculates with moving parts rather than digits. The eclipse dial follows the Saros cycle: after 223 lunar months (new moon to new moon), about 18 years and 11 days, the Sun, Earth and Moon return to almost the same positions, so eclipses repeat in a similar pattern. Symbols in 51 of the dial's cells mark 38 lunar and 27 solar eclipses. Much of this was read only in the 2000s, when researchers including Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth used X-ray scans to see inside the fragments. The front, which probably showed the planets, is largely lost.

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WonderTechnology

Paper money was first used in China. In the early 11th century, merchants in Sichuan began issuing paper notes called jiaozi in place of heavy iron coins, and in 1023 the Song government took over issuing them. Europe's first banknotes appeared in Sweden in 1661.

The idea had roots in the Tang dynasty (618–907): by 804, merchants were using “flying cash”, paper certificates that let them move money across China without carrying coins. In Sichuan, where iron coins were too heavy for large payments, private firms in the regional capital, Chengdu, began issuing jiaozi notes. When some issuers went bankrupt, the state set up its own office in 1023 and printed the first government notes the following year. Paper money rested on trust: a note was worth only what its issuer promised. That trust could be abused, and when the Song printed far more notes than they could back with coins, prices soared. Europeans learnt of paper money from travellers such as Marco Polo, who described the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan's notes in the 13th century. Europe's first banknotes came from Stockholms Banco in 1661; the bank failed six years later.

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WonderTechnology

The magnetic compass began in China as a tool for fortune-telling and geomancy, the art of siting houses and tombs in harmony with the land. The first records of Chinese sailors steering by a magnetised needle date from the early 12th century.

The first Chinese direction-finders were probably “south-pointing spoons” made of lodestone, a naturally magnetic iron ore. Placed on a smooth bronze board marked with directions, the spoon turned until its handle pointed south. Texts from the Han dynasty (206 BC to AD 220) appear to describe such devices, although archaeologists have not yet found one. The big step came under the Song dynasty. In 1088 the scholar Shen Kuo described needles magnetised by rubbing them on lodestone, and noticed that they do not point exactly north-south, the effect now called magnetic declination. A few decades later the writer Zhu Yu recorded that sailors steered by the stars at night and the sun by day, and turned to the south-pointing needle when the sky was overcast. In Europe, the first written mention of a compass dates from about 1190.

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WonderTechnology

Gunpowder, a mixture of saltpetre, sulphur and charcoal, was discovered in China in the 9th century by alchemists searching for an elixir of long life. Its Chinese name, huoyao, still means “fire medicine”. Carried west over the following centuries, it changed warfare across the world.

The first confirmed recipes appear in Taoist alchemy books of the Tang dynasty: one dated 808, and another from about 50 years later, the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, which warns that people who heated saltpetre and sulphur with honey had burnt their hands and faces, and even their whole house. Saltpetre (potassium nitrate) releases oxygen when heated, which is why the mixture burns so fiercely. Chinese armies used it in fire arrows and bombs, and the military handbook Wujing Zongyao, finished in 1044, gives the earliest written formulas for military use. By the 12th century soldiers carried “fire lances”, tubes that shot flames and later bullets. Gunpowder reached the Islamic world and Europe in the 13th century; the English friar Roger Bacon described it in 1267. In 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II used huge cannons to breach the walls of Constantinople.

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WonderTechnology

Before standard time, each town kept its own time by the sun: noon was when the sun stood highest in its sky. Because the Earth turns one degree every four minutes, noon in Bristol came about ten minutes after noon in London.

Town clocks usually showed local mean time: sundial time averaged over the year, because the real sun runs up to about a quarter of an hour fast or slow across the seasons. The difference grew with distance east or west. In Britain, Oxford was five minutes behind London and Leeds six; in India and North America, cities could be an hour or more apart. That hardly mattered while journeys took days, but trains and the telegraph made it a problem. North American railways switched to five standard time zones on 18 November 1883, and in 1884 delegates from 25 countries meeting in Washington chose the meridian through Greenwich as the world's zero line of longitude. The Ottoman Empire had its own system, alaturka time, which reset clocks to 12 at every sunset; Turkey replaced it with the international 24-hour day in 1926.

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WonderTechnology

Railways pushed Britain onto one national time. In November 1840 the Great Western Railway began running its trains on London time; by the end of 1847 almost every British railway had followed, and in 1880 Greenwich Mean Time became Great Britain's legal time.

London time was set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, so it was known as Greenwich Mean Time, or simply “railway time”. The patchwork of local times caused confusion, missed connections and near misses between trains. Some towns resisted. The clock on Bristol's Exchange was given a second minute hand for London time, and it still shows both; Exeter held out until 1852 because the Dean of its cathedral, whose clock set the city's time, refused to change it. The electric telegraph settled the matter: from the 1850s, time signals from Greenwich ran along wires beside the tracks, and by 1855 almost every town in Britain kept GMT. Parliament made it the legal time for Great Britain on 2 August 1880.

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WonderTechnology

On 28 December 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumière held a paid film show in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris, traditionally counted as the birth of cinema. With their Cinématographe they projected ten films, each under a minute long: real movement could now be replayed after the moment had passed.

The Cinématographe, patented by the brothers in February 1895, was a portable, hand-cranked box that worked as camera, printer and projector in one. The Lumière family ran a factory in Lyon making photographic plates, and their first film showed its workers streaming out of the gates. Films had been shown before: the brothers had projected this one on 22 March 1895 to about 200 members of a French society for industry, and in Berlin the Skladanowsky brothers had screened films for a paying audience on 1 November. The December show drew around 40 paying visitors and invited guests. The famous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat was not in that programme; it was first shown in January 1896, and historians have found no report from the time of audiences fleeing from the screen.

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WonderTechnology

In 1945 six women, chosen from about 200 “human computers” who calculated artillery tables by hand, became the first programmers of ENIAC, one of the earliest general-purpose electronic computers. There were no manuals or programming languages; they learned the machine from its wiring diagrams.

ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania for the US Army to calculate the paths of artillery shells. It filled a room: panels about 30 metres long, some 18,000 vacuum tubes (glass valves that switch electric current) and 27 tonnes of equipment. Programming it meant setting switches and plugging cables between its units, which could take days. Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman did this work and could trace a fault to a single failed tube, yet they were classed as “subprofessionals”. When the student Kathy Kleiman found photographs of them in the 1980s, she was told they were probably models posing by the machine. In the 1990s she learned that most had not been invited to ENIAC's 50th anniversary, tracked them down and recorded their stories. In 1997 they entered the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.

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WonderTechnology

During the Second World War, codebreakers at Bletchley Park in England read German messages encrypted with the Enigma and Lorenz cipher machines. To do it, they built some of the first computing machines, including Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic digital computer.

Bletchley Park, a country house north-west of London, was the wartime home of Britain's codebreakers, and about three-quarters of its staff were women. The work built on Polish success: five weeks before the war, Poland's Cipher Bureau showed British and French experts how it had broken Enigma. From 1940, electromechanical machines called Bombes, designed by Alan Turing and improved by Gordon Welchman, raced through possible Enigma settings. A different cipher, the Lorenz machine used by the German High Command, was attacked with Colossus, built by the Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers; it broke its first message in February 1944, and an improved model was working days before the Allied landings in Normandy. The historian Harry Hinsley, himself a Bletchley veteran, estimated that this work shortened the war by two to four years; others think the gain was smaller and impossible to measure. It all stayed secret until the 1970s.

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WonderTechnology

ARPANET, a US research network, carried its first message on 29 October 1969, from the University of California, Los Angeles, to the Stanford Research Institute. It split data into small “packets” that travelled separately and were reassembled on arrival, and it became the main forerunner of the internet.

ARPANET was funded by ARPA, a research agency of the US Department of Defense, so that scientists could share scarce, expensive computers at a distance. Its packet switching drew on ideas by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain. On that first evening the UCLA student Charley Kline typed “login”, but the Stanford computer crashed after two letters, so the first message was simply “lo”; about an hour later the login worked. The network was declared operational in 1971 and soon carried an early form of email. In 1974 Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn described a way for separate networks to pass data between them, which grew into TCP/IP, the common rules the internet still uses. ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on 1 January 1983, a date often called the birth of the internet, and was shut down in 1990.

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WonderTechnology

In 1781 James Watt patented a way to turn the up-and-down push of a steam engine's piston into continuous rotation. His rotative engines let steam, rather than water or wind, drive factory machinery directly.

Earlier steam engines, such as Thomas Newcomen's of 1712, were used mainly to pump water out of mines. Watt had already made the engine far more efficient with a separate condenser, a chamber where the steam was cooled outside the main cylinder so that the cylinder itself stayed hot. The obvious way to get rotation was a crank, but James Pickard had patented its use in 1780, so Watt's firm used a ‘sun and planet’ gear suggested by his employee William Murdoch, in which one gear wheel travels round another. With his business partner Matthew Boulton, Watt sold engines across Britain; by 1800 the firm had built about 500, more than half of them driving mill machinery. Mills and factories no longer had to stand beside a fast river and could be built almost anywhere.

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WonderTechnology

The electric telegraph, developed in the 1830s and 1840s, sent messages along wires as coded pulses of electricity. News, prices and instructions that had taken days to travel by horse, ship or train could now cross great distances in minutes.

In Britain, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a telegraph in 1837, and within two years one was working along the Great Western Railway out of Paddington station in London. In the United States, Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail developed Morse code, which spells out letters as short and long signals, dots and dashes. On 24 May 1844 Morse sent the Bible verse ‘What hath God wrought’ from Washington to Baltimore. Soon the wires crossed seas as well. A cable laid across the Atlantic in 1858 carried a greeting from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan but failed after about three weeks. A lasting link followed in 1866, and the slogan ‘two weeks to two minutes’ summed up the change from letters sent by ship. Railways used the telegraph to run trains safely, newspapers to report distant events the same day, and markets to share prices between cities.

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WonderTechnology

Photography, announced to the world in 1839, gave people a detailed view of places and events they had never seen. Once pictures could be printed from negatives, and later in newspapers, a single photograph could reach thousands of people.

The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera was made by Nicéphore Niépce in France in 1826 or 1827: the view from his window, which needed hours of light. In 1839 Louis Daguerre made his own process public in Paris. Each daguerreotype was a single image on a metal plate and could not be copied. In England, Henry Fox Talbot developed a paper negative from which many prints could be made, the idea behind film photography until the digital age. Roger Fenton's pictures of the Crimean War in 1855, where Britain fought alongside France and the Ottoman Empire, brought a distant war before the British public, though long exposures limited him to posed scenes and landscapes. Newspapers long printed only engravings copied from photographs; the halftone process, which breaks a picture into tiny dots, let the New York Daily Graphic print one of the first true newspaper photographs in 1880.

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WonderTechnology

In the 1840s ether and then chloroform made it possible to put patients into a deep, painless sleep for surgery. Operations no longer had to be as quick as possible, and surgeons could attempt longer, more careful work.

Before anaesthesia, surgery was a last resort, and surgeons prized speed to limit pain and blood loss. The American doctor Crawford Long used ether in Georgia in 1842 but did not publish his results until 1849. The turning point came on 16 October 1846 at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, when the dentist William Morton gave ether to a patient, Edward Gilbert Abbott, while the surgeon John Collins Warren removed a tumour from his neck. By December surgeons in London were using it too. In 1847 the Edinburgh obstetrician James Young Simpson introduced chloroform, and in 1853 Queen Victoria was given it during the birth of her eighth child. Anaesthesia alone did not make surgery safe: infection still killed many patients until Joseph Lister began cleaning wounds and instruments with carbolic acid, a germ-killing chemical, in the 1860s, the start of antiseptic surgery.

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WonderTechnology

Regular radio broadcasting began around 1920, and within two decades one voice could reach millions of homes at the same moment. Leaders used it to speak straight to the public: to reassure, to rally and to spread propaganda.

On 2 November 1920 the station KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcast the results of the American presidential election, often counted as the start of commercial radio. The British Broadcasting Company followed in 1922. In Turkey, broadcasting began on 6 May 1927 from the basement of the main post office in Sirkeci, Istanbul; since hardly anyone owned a receiver, the sound was played through a loudspeaker above the building's door. From 1933 to 1944 President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave ‘fireside chats’, calm evening talks that during the war reached, on average, more than half of American radio listeners. In 1933, the year the chats began, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, had a cheap set called the Volksempfänger, or ‘people's receiver’, put on sale so that as many Germans as possible could hear the regime.

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WonderTechnology

The Manhattan Project, a secret American programme run with Britain and Canada during the Second World War, built the first atomic bombs. The first was tested in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, and in August two were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In 1939 Albert Einstein signed a letter, drafted by the physicist Leo Szilard, warning President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might build a bomb from uranium. The project took shape in 1942 under General Leslie Groves, with J. Robert Oppenheimer directing the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, where the bombs were designed. At its peak it employed nearly 130,000 people, and it cost nearly 2 billion US dollars. The bombings of 6 and 9 August 1945 killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people, most of them civilians. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on 8 August, and Japan announced its surrender on 15 August; historians still debate how much each event weighed in that decision. In August 1949 the Soviet Union tested its own bomb, and the nuclear arms race began.

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WonderTechnology

On 26 April 1986 reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, in Soviet Ukraine, exploded during a safety test. A flawed reactor design, a badly run test and official secrecy made it one of the two worst nuclear accidents in history.

The test was meant to check whether the slowing turbine could keep the cooling pumps running during a power cut. The Soviet RBMK reactor had a dangerous quirk: when its cooling water boiled into steam, the nuclear reaction sped up instead of slowing down. At 1.23 am the power surged out of control, a steam explosion blew the reactor open, and the fire in its core spread radioactive material across the Soviet Union and Europe. Pripyat, the plant workers' town, was evacuated about 36 hours later, with some 49,000 people moved at first. The Soviet government admitted the accident only after alarms went off at the Forsmark power plant in Sweden, more than 1,000 kilometres away. Two workers died in the explosion and 28 more from radiation within three months. In 2016 a huge steel arch, the New Safe Confinement, was slid over the ruins.

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WonderTechnology

Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone on 9 January 2007 as three devices in one: a phone, a widescreen iPod and an internet communicator. It went on sale in the United States on 29 June 2007 and in time replaced many more gadgets.

Jobs unveiled the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco. Its big idea was a multi-touch screen, one that responds to several fingers at once, in place of a keyboard or a stylus. The first model had a 2-megapixel camera, no GPS and no way to install other companies' apps, and it cost 499 or 599 US dollars with a two-year contract. The real change came on 10 July 2008, when the App Store opened with 500 apps. From then on the phone could stand in for maps, cameras, music players, alarm clocks, newspapers and, for many people, the bank branch. The first Android phones, sold from 2008, followed the same path. By July 2025 more than 3 billion iPhones had been sold.

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WonderTechnology

In December 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, in William Shockley's group at Bell Labs in New Jersey, built the first working transistor: a small device that could amplify an electrical signal, a job that until then needed bulky glass vacuum tubes.

A transistor uses a small electric current to control a larger one, so it can boost a signal or act as an on-off switch. The first was a block of germanium, a semiconductor (a material whose ability to carry electricity can be controlled), touched by two gold contacts held very close together. The key experiment took place on 16 December, and the device was shown to Bell Labs managers on 23 December. Vacuum tubes ran hot, broke easily and used a lot of power. The engineer John R. Pierce came up with the name ‘transistor’. Shockley soon designed a sturdier type that was easier to make, and the three men shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics; Bardeen won a second physics Nobel in 1972. Transistors made pocket radios and modern computers possible, and a single chip today can hold tens of billions of them.

Bell Labs, 1947Read card

WonderTechnology

On 29 October 1969 a student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) sent the first message over the ARPANET, the network that grew into the internet, to a computer at Stanford Research Institute. He meant to type ‘login’, the command for signing in, but the system crashed after ‘l’ and ‘o’.

The student was Charley Kline, working in Leonard Kleinrock's lab; at the other end, more than 500 kilometres away, was the programmer Bill Duvall. About an hour later the login worked. ARPANET was funded by ARPA, the research agency of the US Department of Defense, so that universities could share scarce and expensive computers. It used packet switching: a message is cut into small blocks that travel separately and are put back together at the end, an idea developed independently by Paul Baran in the United States and Donald Davies in Britain. By 5 December 1969 the network linked four sites: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. On 1 January 1983 ARPANET switched to TCP/IP, the shared rules computers still use to talk across the internet, a date often called the internet's birthday.

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WonderTechnology

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the American firm BBN, sent the first email between two computers on a network. To separate a person's name from the name of their computer, he put an @ between them, the pattern still used in every email address.

Until then, people could leave messages only for others using the same computer. Tomlinson combined a program for such messages, SNDMSG, with a file-transfer program he had written, CPYNET, so that mail could travel over the ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. His first test went between two machines standing side by side. He later said the test messages were forgettable, probably a random string of keys such as QWERTYUIOP, the top row of letters. He chose @ because it was already on the keyboard, hardly ever appeared in names and meant ‘at’; in trade it had long meant ‘at the rate of’. Many languages have their own name for it: Italians call it chiocciola (snail), the Dutch apenstaart (monkey's tail), and in Turkish it is kuyruklu a (a with a tail), usually read aloud as ‘et’.

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WonderTechnology

IBM's 350 disk storage unit, announced with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer on 14 September 1956, was the first commercial hard disk drive. It held 5 million characters (letters or digits), about 3.75 megabytes by today's measure, and weighed about a ton.

RAMAC stood for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. Random access, the ability to go straight to any record, was the whole point. Business records were usually kept on punched cards or magnetic tape, which had to be worked through in order, while the disk drive could reach any record in under a second, about 600 milliseconds on average. Inside, a stack of 52 disks, each 61 centimetres across, spun at 1,200 revolutions a minute, and an arm moved between them to read and write. The whole RAMAC system could be leased for 3,200 US dollars a month. The drive was developed at IBM's laboratory in San Jose, California, and the first production units shipped in 1957. A phone today stores tens of thousands of times as much.

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WonderTechnology

The integrated circuit, or microchip, puts transistors and other electronic parts together on one small piece of material such as silicon. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments showed the first on 12 September 1958; Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor independently made a more practical version about six months later.

Before the chip, every transistor, resistor and capacitor was a separate part that had to be wired to the others by hand, so complex circuits grew huge and unreliable. Kilby's first chip was a sliver of germanium joined up with fine gold wires; when he switched it on, an oscilloscope, an instrument that draws electrical signals on a screen, showed a steady wave, proof that it worked. Noyce's chip was made of silicon and used the planar process devised by his colleague Jean Hoerni, in which the parts and the connections between them are built up in thin, flat layers. That made chips easy to mass-produce, and almost all chips are still made on the same principle. Noyce co-founded Intel in 1968 and died in 1990; Nobel Prizes are not awarded after death, and in 2000 Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention.

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WonderTechnology

Linux, the free operating system that Linus Torvalds started in 1991 as a 21-year-old student in Helsinki, can be used and changed by anyone. Since November 2017 it has run every machine on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

On 25 August 1991 Torvalds announced his project in an online discussion group, describing a free operating system that was ‘just a hobby’. Strictly, Linux is a kernel: the core of an operating system, which manages the processor, memory and devices so that other programs can run. Torvalds wanted to call it Freax, but Ari Lemmke, who helped run the Finnish university network's server where the files were first shared, named the folder Linux, and the name stuck. In 1992 Torvalds released it under the GNU General Public License, which lets anyone use, study, change and share the code as long as their changed versions stay free too. Thousands of volunteers and companies now work on it. The Linux kernel runs inside every Android phone and on much of the internet's servers.

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On 22 May 1973 Robert Metcalfe, a researcher at Xerox's research centre in Palo Alto, California (Xerox PARC), wrote a memo describing a way to link the lab's computers by cable. With David Boggs he turned it into Ethernet, which first ran that November; most wired networks still use it.

Metcalfe named it after the ‘luminiferous aether’, the invisible medium that 19th-century physicists wrongly believed carried light; the cable would be a shared medium for data. The idea grew from ALOHAnet, a radio network at the University of Hawaii in which computers shared one channel and, if two messages collided, each sender waited a random moment and tried again. Ethernet added a rule to listen before sending. The first Ethernet, working on 11 November 1973, linked Xerox Alto computers at about 3 million bits a second; today's versions reach hundreds of billions. In 1979 Metcalfe founded the company 3Com. In 1980 Xerox, Intel and Digital Equipment published Ethernet as an open standard that any manufacturer could use, and in 1983 the engineering body IEEE adopted it as an official standard. Metcalfe received the Turing Award, computing's highest honour, in 2023.

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Bluetooth takes its name from Harald 'Bluetooth' Gormsson, a 10th-century king who united the Danish tribes into one kingdom. In the 1990s the Intel engineer Jim Kardach suggested the name for a new short-range radio standard that would bring phones, computers and other devices together in the same way.

Harald ruled Denmark from about 958 to 986 and brought Christianity to the country. A great runestone he raised at Jelling says he won all of Denmark and Norway, though his hold on Norway lasted only a few years. His nickname is traditionally explained as a bad tooth that looked dark, since the Old Norse word for blue also meant blue-black. Kardach first heard of Harald from the Ericsson engineer Sven Mattisson, who told him stories from The Long Ships, a novel about the Vikings. According to the Bluetooth industry group, he proposed the name in 1996 as a stand-in until marketing found something better. The favourite, PAN, was already far too common a term, and checks on the other candidate, RadioWire, could not be finished in time, so Bluetooth stuck. The logo joins Harald's initials, H and B, written in Viking-age runes, into a single sign.

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On 20 December 1990 the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee put the world's first website online at CERN, the European physics laboratory near Geneva. It explained what the World Wide Web was, how to use a browser and how to set up a web server.

Berners-Lee had proposed the idea in March 1989 as a way for CERN's scientists to reach documents stored on different computers by clicking links. By the end of 1990 he had written the first browser, called WorldWideWeb, and the first web server, both running on a NeXT computer that carried a hand-written note warning people not to switch it off. The site lived at info.cern.ch. In August 1991 he invited people outside CERN to join the project through an online discussion group, and in April 1993 CERN made the Web software free for anyone to use, which let the Web spread around the world. The Web is not the same as the internet: the internet is the network of connected computers, and the Web is the system of linked pages that runs on it.

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