History: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 4

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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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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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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.

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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.

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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’.

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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.

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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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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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In 1877 Thomas Edison built the phonograph, the first machine that could both record sound and play it back. A needle pressed the vibrations of a voice into a sheet of tinfoil wrapped round a turning cylinder, and running a needle along that groove again brought the sound back.

Edison hit on the idea while looking for ways to record telegraph and telephone messages at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He announced the invention on 21 November 1877 and was granted a patent in February 1878. Years later he recalled that the first words he recorded were the nursery rhyme 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. In December 1877 the machine was shown at the offices of Scientific American, where it greeted the editors and asked how they liked the phonograph. Twenty years earlier the Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville had built a device that traced sound as wavy lines on soot-blackened paper, but it could not play them back; one of his 1860 tracings was only turned into sound in 2008. Tinfoil wore out quickly, so later machines used wax cylinders and then flat discs.

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Light bulbs that glow when electricity heats a thin thread, or filament, inside them existed before Thomas Edison. In 1879 his team at Menlo Park, New Jersey, made one with a carbon filament that lasted, then built the generators, wiring, meters and power stations that made electric light practical for homes and offices.

In 1802 the chemist Humphry Davy made a strip of platinum glow with electricity, and over the next 75 years many inventors tried to turn that glow into lasting light. In England, the inventor Joseph Swan showed a working carbon-filament lamp to an audience of more than 700 in Newcastle in February 1879, and his house in Gateshead became the first in the world lit by light bulbs. Edison's team made its first successful test on 22 October 1879, when a bulb glowed for about 13 and a half hours; filaments of carbonised bamboo later lasted more than 1,200 hours. Edison's bigger achievement was the system around the bulb. In September 1882 his Pearl Street Station in New York began supplying electricity to 82 customers. In Britain, Edison's and Swan's companies later merged as Ediswan.

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In 1928, at St Mary's Hospital in London, Alexander Fleming saw that a stray mould had stopped bacteria growing around it on a lab dish, and later named its active substance penicillin. From 1939 an Oxford team led by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain purified it and proved it could cure infections.

Fleming came back from a holiday in September 1928 to find a dish of Staphylococcus bacteria spoiled by a Penicillium mould, with a clear ring around it where the bacteria had died. He published his findings in 1929 but could not make the substance pure or stable enough to use as a drug. In Oxford, Florey, Chain, Norman Heatley and colleagues learned to grow the mould and extract penicillin, and in May 1940 showed that it protected infected mice. In February 1941 they gave it to their first patient, an Oxford policeman; he improved, but the supply ran out and he died. American factories then scaled up production, and 2.3 million doses were ready for the Normandy landings in 1944. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In his Nobel lecture Fleming warned that taking too little penicillin could make bacteria resistant to it.

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On 8 November 1895, in his laboratory at the University of Würzburg in Germany, Wilhelm Röntgen found invisible rays that pass through skin and flesh but are stopped by bone and metal. He called them X-rays, X for unknown, and in 1901 received the first Nobel Prize in Physics.

Röntgen was passing electricity through a glass tube covered in black cardboard when he noticed a coated screen on a nearby bench begin to glow. For weeks afterwards he almost lived in his laboratory, studying the new rays. About six weeks after the discovery he made an X-ray image of his wife Anna Bertha's hand, showing her bones and her ring, and his paper 'On a New Kind of Rays' appeared on 28 December 1895. News spread within days, and doctors were soon using X-rays to look at broken bones. Röntgen refused to patent the discovery so that everyone could benefit from it. Many languages, including German and Turkish, still name the rays after him, which is why an X-ray is a 'röntgen' in Turkish.

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On 2 December 1942, under the stands of a disused American football stadium at the University of Chicago, a team led by Enrico Fermi started the first controlled nuclear chain reaction. Their reactor, Chicago Pile-1, was a carefully built stack of graphite blocks and uranium.

In a chain reaction, each uranium atom that splits releases particles called neutrons, which go on to split more atoms. Fermi, an Italian physicist who had moved to the United States, worked with a team of about 30, including Leo Szilard and Leona Woods. They stacked some 45,000 graphite blocks, with uranium set among them, in a squash court beneath the stands of Stagg Field. The pile had no radiation shielding or cooling, because it ran at only about half a watt. After about four and a half minutes the team stopped it by putting control rods back in. The work was secret, part of the Manhattan Project, the wartime American programme to build an atomic bomb. Arthur Compton, the physicist in charge of the work in Chicago, reported the success by telephone in code: 'The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.'

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On 25 June 1967, Our World became the first live television programme broadcast around the globe by satellite. Broadcasters in 14 countries each sent a live segment, and an estimated 400 to 700 million people watched, the largest television audience up to that time.

The idea came from the BBC producer Aubrey Singer, and the European Broadcasting Union coordinated the project. Four communications satellites, two over the Atlantic and two over the Pacific, linked the countries, and the master control room was at the BBC in London. The rules were strict: everything had to be live, and no politicians or heads of state could appear. Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union, pulled out four days before the broadcast in protest at the West's response to the Six-Day War. The two-hour show featured the conductor Leonard Bernstein and the painter Joan Miró, among others, but it is best remembered for Britain's segment, in which the Beatles performed 'All You Need Is Love' for the first time.

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ENIAC, finished in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first programmable, general-purpose electronic computer. It filled a large room and weighed about 27 tonnes, and each new problem had to be set up by rewiring cables and turning switches, a job that could take weeks.

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed ENIAC for the US Army, to calculate the firing tables gunners used to aim artillery. Until then such tables were worked out by hand by 'human computers', many of them women. ENIAC's 18,000 or so vacuum tubes, glass valves that switch electric current on and off, let it make about 5,000 additions a second, roughly a thousand times faster than earlier electromechanical machines. It was unveiled in February 1946, and the press called it a 'giant brain'. Six women worked out how to program it: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Their role was overlooked for decades; in 1997 they were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. ENIAC stayed in use until 1955.

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In his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', Alan Turing proposed the imitation game: a judge exchanges typed messages with a hidden person and a hidden machine. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine has done well. It became known as the Turing test.

Turing, a British mathematician, had described the basic idea of a programmable computer in 1936 and was one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. In the paper, published in the philosophy journal Mind, he argued that 'Can machines think?' was too vague to answer, because 'machine' and 'think' are so hard to define, and replaced it with a game whose results anyone could observe. He predicted that by about 2000 an average judge would have no more than a 70 per cent chance of spotting the machine after five minutes of questions. He also answered objections one by one, including Ada Lovelace's view that machines can only do what they are told. The test is still debated: passing it shows convincing conversation, not necessarily understanding.

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On 4 October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite: a polished metal ball 58 cm wide that sent out radio beeps anyone with a receiver could pick up. Its success shocked the United States and started the Space Race.

Sputnik weighed 83.6 kg and circled Earth every 96 minutes. It was launched from Tyuratam in Soviet Kazakhstan, now the Baikonur Cosmodrome, on an R-7 rocket built under the chief designer Sergei Korolev. Radio amateurs around the world tracked its simple signal, and scientists used the way its orbit changed to measure the density of the upper atmosphere. The batteries ran out after 22 days, and on 4 January 1958, after about 1,440 orbits, the satellite burned up as it fell back into the atmosphere. In the United States the launch caused alarm that the Soviets were ahead in technology. America launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, on 31 January 1958 and created NASA later that year. In Russian, 'sputnik' means travelling companion as well as satellite.

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In 1609 and 1610 Galileo built improved telescopes and saw mountains on the Moon, Venus going through phases like our Moon, and four moons circling Jupiter. These discoveries undermined the old view that the Earth sits still at the centre of the universe.

Galileo first saw Jupiter's moons on 7 January 1610 and announced them that March in a short book, Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger). He named them the Medicean stars after his future patron, Cosimo II de' Medici; today they are called Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The phases of Venus were an even stronger argument. In the model of the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, Venus always stays between the Earth and the Sun, so it could never appear fully lit. Galileo watched it pass through a complete set of phases, which only makes sense if Venus orbits the Sun. The debate did not end there: in 1633 the Roman Inquisition found him 'vehemently suspect of heresy' for defending a Sun-centred universe, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

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The Jacquard machine, patented by the French weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard in 1804, read weaving patterns from a chain of punched cards. Changing the cards changed the pattern, an idea that later shaped the first computers.

Before Jacquard, patterned silk was woven on a draw loom, where an assistant, often a boy, lifted the right threads by hand for every row: slow and tiring work. Jacquard, from Lyon, built on earlier devices by Basile Bouchon (1725), Jean-Baptiste Falcon (1728) and Jacques de Vaucanson (1740). Each card stood for one row of the design: where there was a hole, a thread was lifted; where there was none, it stayed down. In 1839 a silk portrait of Jacquard was woven using about 24,000 cards. Charles Babbage owned one of these portraits and planned to program his Analytical Engine with punched cards, and in 1890 Herman Hollerith used machines that read punched cards to count the United States census.

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Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, first shown as a small model in 1822, was a mechanical calculator for producing mathematical tables without human error. His Analytical Engine, designed from the mid-1830s, went further: a machine that could be programmed with punched cards to carry out any calculation.

Around 1821 Babbage and his friend, the astronomer John Herschel, were checking tables worked out by hand for the Astronomical Society of London and found so many errors that Babbage exclaimed, 'I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.' The British government funded a full-sized Difference Engine, but work stopped in 1833 and the project was abandoned in 1842 after more than £17,000 had been spent. The Analytical Engine separated a 'store', where numbers were kept, from a 'mill', where calculations were done, much like a modern computer's memory and processor. Neither machine was finished in his lifetime. In 1991 London's Science Museum completed a Difference Engine No. 2 from his drawings, and it worked.

Charles Babbage, 1820sRead card