Wonder: Something new to discover. - Page 7

Editor’s note

Wonder

For the pleasure of learning something you did not know, from an unfamiliar artist to a surprising discovery.

WonderTechnology

CRISPR started out as a defence system in bacteria, which store snippets of virus DNA and cut up any virus that matches them. In 2012 Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier showed it could be programmed to cut DNA at almost any chosen spot, which made editing genes far easier.

The name stands for ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats’: short DNA sequences repeated at regular intervals, with the virus snippets stored between them. Japanese researchers first noticed the pattern in 1987, and the Spanish microbiologist Francisco Mojica later worked out that it serves as an immune memory. The editing tool pairs a cutting protein, Cas9, with a short guide made of RNA, DNA's chemical cousin, that leads it to the matching DNA. When the cell repairs the cut, a gene can be switched off, or scientists can slip in a corrected version. Doudna and Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In November 2023 the UK became the first country to approve a CRISPR treatment: Casgevy, for the inherited blood disorders sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia. The method also raises ethical questions: in 2018 the Chinese scientist He Jiankui edited human embryos and was later jailed.

Nobel Prize / CRISPR researchRead card

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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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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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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WonderScience

The first vaccine, made by the English doctor Edward Jenner in 1796, protected against smallpox. In 1980 the World Health Organization declared smallpox eradicated, the first and still the only human disease wiped out worldwide.

Long before Jenner, people in China, India and the Ottoman Empire protected children by variolation, deliberately giving them a mild dose of smallpox. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the British ambassador's wife, saw it in Istanbul and had her son inoculated there in 1718. Jenner noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox, a mild disease of cattle, seemed to be safe from smallpox, and in 1796 he tested this on an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. The word vaccine comes from vacca, Latin for cow. Even so, smallpox killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century. In 1967 the WHO stepped up a global campaign built on surveillance and ring vaccination: finding every case and vaccinating everyone around it. The last natural case was a hospital cook in Somalia, Ali Maow Maalin, in October 1977.

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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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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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WonderScience

In 1953 James Watson and Francis Crick in Cambridge proposed that DNA is a double helix, two strands twisted round each other. Their model depended on X-ray images and measurements made at King's College London by Rosalind Franklin and her student Raymond Gosling, and on work by Maurice Wilkins.

X-ray diffraction means shining X-rays through a material and working out its structure from the pattern they scatter onto film. On 2 May 1952 Gosling, working under Franklin, took the sharp image now called Photo 51. In January 1953 Wilkins showed it to Watson without Franklin's permission, and Crick also saw a research report containing her calculations. The model appeared in Nature on 25 April 1953, alongside papers by Franklin and Gosling and by Wilkins's group. Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Franklin had died of cancer in 1958, aged 37, and Nobel rules did not allow a prize to go to someone who had died. In 2023 the historians Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, writing in Nature about newly found documents, argued that she was an equal player in solving the structure, not simply a victim whose photograph was taken.

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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

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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.

ARPANET, 1969Read card

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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’.

Ray Tomlinson, 1971Read card

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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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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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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.

Linus Torvalds, 1991Read card

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Fibre-optic cables carry data as pulses of light through strands of very pure glass about as thin as a human hair. Bundled into cables, these fibres run under streets and across ocean floors, carrying calls, videos and payments between continents.

Light stays inside the fibre because of total internal reflection: when it meets the boundary with the surrounding layer of glass at a shallow angle, it bounces back in instead of escaping. In 1966 Charles Kao and George Hockham, working in England, argued that glass made pure enough could carry light over long distances; Kao later won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1970 the Corning glass company made the first fibre clear enough to be practical. The first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, TAT-8, began working in 1988. A single fibre carries far more data than a copper wire and loses less signal over distance. Today most of the data that crosses oceans travels through undersea cables rather than satellites, and repair ships stand ready for when fishing gear, anchors or earthquakes break them.

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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.

Xerox PARC, 1973Read card

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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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The IBM Simon, on sale in the United States from August 1994, was a mobile phone with a touchscreen, email, fax, a calendar, an address book and other built-in apps. It is often called the first smartphone, and it came out 13 years before the iPhone.

The IBM engineer Frank Canova realised that chips and wireless technology had become small enough for a handheld device. IBM showed a prototype, code-named Sweetspot, at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas in November 1992; it even demonstrated maps, share prices and news long before such services were common. Mitsubishi Electric built the finished phone, and the American operator BellSouth named it the Simon Personal Communicator and sold it for 899 dollars with a two-year contract. Users wrote on it by tapping an on-screen keyboard with a stylus. The high price and a battery that lasted only about an hour held sales back: about 50,000 were sold in six months, and it was withdrawn in February 1995.

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Open-source software is published with its source code, the human-readable instructions programmers write, under a licence that lets anyone study, change and share it. Linux, the Firefox browser and MediaWiki, which runs Wikipedia, are all made this way.

Sharing code was normal in the early days of computing. In the 1980s, as most software became closed, Richard Stallman started the free software movement. In 1991 Linus Torvalds released Linux, which now runs most of the world's busiest web servers and all of the 500 fastest supercomputers; Android is built on it too. The term 'open source' was suggested by Christine Peterson in 1998 to make the idea appealing to business, and the Open Source Initiative was founded the same year. Licences differ. Permissive ones, such as MIT or Apache, let others reuse the code almost freely, while 'copyleft' ones, such as the GNU GPL, require anyone who passes on a changed version to share it under the same terms. Projects are run by volunteers, companies or both.

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Machine learning lets a computer learn a task from examples instead of following rules written by hand. A spam filter, for instance, is shown thousands of emails already marked as spam or not spam, and works out for itself which patterns give spam away.

The term was coined in 1959 by Arthur Samuel, an IBM researcher whose draughts-playing program got better the more it played. A learning system has many internal settings. During training they are adjusted again and again until its answers on the examples are as accurate as possible, and the system then uses them on cases it has never seen. A turning point came in 2012, when AlexNet, a system from the University of Toronto, recognised objects in photos far better than earlier methods, using layered 'neural networks' loosely modelled on the brain. Machine learning now powers translation apps, voice assistants, film and music recommendations and the analysis of medical scans. Because it learns from data, gaps or biases in that data carry through into its answers.

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