Technology: quotes, facts and reflections

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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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Telomeres are stretches of repeated DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes, a little like the plastic tips on shoelaces. They get shorter as many of our cells divide, but their length cannot predict how long a particular person will live.

In the mid-1970s the Australian-born biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, working at Yale, found that chromosome ends carry a short DNA “word” repeated many times; in humans it is TTAGGG. She shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak for showing how telomeres, and an enzyme called telomerase that rebuilds them, protect chromosomes. Each time most body cells divide, the copying machinery cannot quite reach the very end, so a little telomere is lost; when it gets too short, the cell stops dividing, which is why telomeres are often called a clock. But it is a poor clock for comparing people or species: mice have much longer telomeres than humans yet live only two or three years, and telomere length varies widely between people from birth. Many scientists therefore doubt commercial tests that claim to read your “biological age” from them.

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The atomic clocks on GPS satellites run about 38 millionths of a second a day faster than clocks on the ground, an effect predicted by Einstein's theories of relativity. Left uncorrected, the drift would put your position out by about 11 km within a single day.

A GPS receiver, such as the one in your phone, works out where it is by timing signals from several satellites orbiting about 20,200 km up. Radio signals travel about 300 metres in a microsecond, a millionth of a second, so even tiny clock errors matter. Relativity pulls the clocks apart in two ways. Special relativity says moving clocks run slow: travelling at almost 4 km a second, the satellite clocks lose about 7 microseconds a day. General relativity says clocks in weaker gravity run fast: high above Earth they gain about 46. The net gain is about 38 microseconds a day. So before launch, each satellite clock is set to run slightly slow, at 10.22999999543 million cycles a second instead of 10.23 million, and in orbit it keeps step with clocks on the ground.

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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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In 1984 and 1985, John Clarke, Michel Devoret and John Martinis showed that a whole electrical circuit on a chip, cooled almost to absolute zero, can behave as a single quantum object, just like an atom. The discovery earned them the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The experiments were done at the University of California, Berkeley, in Clarke's group; Martinis was his doctoral student and Devoret a postdoctoral researcher. Absolute zero, −273.15 °C, is the lowest temperature possible. At the heart of the circuit was a Josephson junction: two superconductors, metals that carry current with no resistance when very cold, separated by an insulating layer only a few atoms thick. Vast numbers of electrons moved together as if they were one particle. The team saw two signs of quantum behaviour: the circuit escaped from a trapped state by tunnelling, slipping through an energy barrier it could not climb over, and it absorbed microwave energy only in fixed steps, or quanta, as an atom does. Circuits of this kind are now the qubits, the basic units of information, in the superconducting quantum computers built by companies such as Google and IBM.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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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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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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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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