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WonderTechnology

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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No single company or government owns the internet. It is tens of thousands of independent networks, run by phone companies, universities, businesses and others, that agree to pass data to one another using shared rules called protocols.

Data travels in small chunks called packets, each labelled with its destination, which may take different routes before being put back together. The core rules, known as TCP/IP, were proposed in 1974 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, and the ARPANET, the American research network the internet grew from, switched to them on 1 January 1983. Today the rules are developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, an open community anyone can join by contributing, while ICANN, a non-profit organisation, coordinates domain names and the numerical addresses that identify connected devices. A message from Istanbul to London may pass through several companies' cables and routers, the machines that send packets on their way, in a fraction of a second.

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DNA data storage writes digital files into synthetic DNA, using its four chemical letters, A, C, G and T, in place of a computer's 0s and 1s. A single gram could in theory hold about 215 million gigabytes, but writing and reading DNA is still far too slow and costly for everyday use.

Computers store everything as 0s and 1s. DNA storage translates those into sequences of A, C, G and T, builds the matching strands chemically, and reads them back with the same sequencing machines used in genetics. In 2012 George Church's team at Harvard stored a whole book this way. In 2013 Nick Goldman and colleagues at the European Bioinformatics Institute stored all of Shakespeare's sonnets and an audio clip of Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. The 215 million gigabyte figure comes from DNA Fountain, a method published in 2017 by Yaniv Erlich and Dina Zielinski. Kept cool and dry, DNA can last for thousands of years, which makes it attractive for archives, but in that study writing just two megabytes cost about 7,000 dollars.

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WonderTechnology

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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WonderTechnology

A single optical fibre, a glass strand about as thin as a human hair, can carry dozens of separate data streams at once. Each travels on its own wavelength of infrared laser light, a method called wavelength-division multiplexing, which lets one pair of fibres carry more than 16 trillion bits of data a second.

Engineers speak of each signal having its own colour, although the wavelengths used are infrared and invisible to the eye. At the sending end one device combines the beams into a single fibre, and at the far end another splits them apart again, much as a prism splits white light. The idea was first published in 1970, and early laboratory systems combined just two signals. It spread in the 1990s together with the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, a short stretch of fibre laced with the rare-earth metal erbium that boosts all the wavelengths at once without turning them into electrical signals; teams at the University of Southampton and Bell Labs first demonstrated it in 1986 and 1987. Between 1992 and 2001 the capacity of fibre systems doubled about every six months. Telecoms companies can still add capacity by upgrading the equipment at each end instead of laying new cable.

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WonderTechnology

The World Wide Web and the internet are not the same thing. The internet is the global network that links computers together; the web is one service that runs on it: pages you move between by clicking links.

The internet is the network itself: undersea and underground cables, mobile masts, Wi-Fi and routers, the devices that pass data along, all following a shared set of rules called TCP/IP that lets any two connected machines exchange data. The web is one application that uses it. Web pages are written in a language called HTML, each has its own address, or URL, and a browser fetches them using rules called HTTP. Email, video calls, online games and many phone apps travel over the same network without using the web at all. The internet's roots go back to ARPANET, a US research network set up in 1969; the web was proposed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and first ran there at the end of 1990.

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WonderScience

The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed galaxies whose light set out more than 13 billion years ago. One of them, GN-z11, found in 2015, appears as it was only about 400 million years after the Big Bang, so astronomers can see the universe when it was young.

Light travels at a fixed speed, so looking far into space also means looking back in time. Hubble, a joint project of NASA and the European Space Agency, was launched on 24 April 1990; once a flaw in its main mirror was corrected in 1993, it began sending back sharp images of the distant universe. In December 1995 it stared at one tiny patch of sky for ten days, and the resulting Hubble Deep Field showed about 3,000 galaxies. GN-z11, reported in 2016 by a team led by Pascal Oesch, remained the most distant galaxy known until the James Webb Space Telescope found even earlier ones in 2022. The universe itself is about 13.8 billion years old.

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A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is a chip with thousands of small cores that do the same calculation on many numbers at once. Built to draw video game images, it turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence, and today's GPUs perform trillions of calculations a second.

Nvidia marketed its GeForce 256, released in 1999, as the first GPU. Drawing a game frame means working out the colour of millions of pixels with similar maths, so GPUs were built to do many simple sums side by side, rather than a few complex ones in turn as a computer's main processor (CPU) does. In 2007 Nvidia released CUDA, software that let programmers use GPUs for any kind of calculation. The turning point for AI came in 2012. AlexNet, a neural network (a program, loosely modelled on the brain, that learns from examples) trained by Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton on two gaming GPUs in Krizhevsky's bedroom, won the ImageNet image-recognition contest by a wide margin. Training an AI model means repeating the same kinds of multiplication billions of times, exactly the work GPUs do best.

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Computers store everything, from text to photos and music, as binary code: long strings of just two digits, 0 and 1. Each digit is a bit, and eight bits make a byte, which can take 256 different values, enough to stand for any letter on a keyboard.

Computers use two digits because an electronic switch is easy to read reliably as either on or off, with current flowing or not; telling ten voltage levels apart would cause far more errors. The German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz published an account of binary arithmetic in 1703. In 1937 Claude Shannon, then a master's student at MIT, showed that switching circuits could carry out logic, and his famous 1948 paper on information used the word 'bit', short for binary digit, which he credited to his colleague John Tukey. Whether a pattern of bits means a letter, the colour of a pixel or a sound depends on the agreed format: in the common ASCII code, for example, 01000001 is a capital A.

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WonderTechnology

Cloud computing means storing files and running programs on computers in large, distant data centres instead of on your own device. Providers rent out that capacity by the hour or by the gigabyte, so anyone from a small start-up to a large bank can use as much computing power as it needs without buying machines.

The idea is older than the name. In 1961 the computer scientist John McCarthy suggested that computing might one day be sold like water or electricity, as a public utility, and in the 1960s organisations already shared one large, expensive central computer, or mainframe, among many users through a method called time-sharing. Engineers had long drawn the telephone network, and later the internet, as a cloud in their diagrams, and the phrase 'cloud computing' appears in a 1996 business plan at the computer maker Compaq. The modern industry took off in 2006, when Amazon Web Services began renting out storage (S3) and computing power (EC2) to any business or developer, who paid only for what they used.

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WonderTechnology

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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WonderTechnology

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.

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WonderTechnology

In an internal combustion engine, fuel burns inside the engine itself. The hot gases expand and push pistons, and the pistons turn a crankshaft that drives the wheels, so the fuel's chemical energy becomes motion.

'Internal' means the fuel burns inside the cylinders, unlike a steam engine, which burns its fuel outside to boil water. Most petrol engines work in four strokes: the piston moves down to draw in fuel and air, moves up to squeeze the mixture, is driven down when a spark from the spark plug ignites it, and rises again to push out the exhaust. Connecting rods turn this up-and-down movement into the turning of the crankshaft. The Belgian-born engineer Étienne Lenoir built a working gas engine in 1860, and Nicolaus Otto developed the first practical four-stroke engine in 1876. In 1886 Karl Benz patented his Motorwagen, widely regarded as the first practical car, which ran on a four-stroke engine. Even today, most of the energy in the fuel is lost as heat rather than turned into motion.

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The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, was the world's first inter-city railway. It was the first to use only steam locomotives, with no horse-drawn traffic, and the first to run entirely to a timetable. It cut the journey between the two cities to about two hours.

Merchants in Liverpool's port and Manchester's cotton mills wanted a cheaper, faster link than the canals, whose owners they felt were overcharging for carrying cotton. To choose their locomotives, the directors held the Rainhill Trials in October 1829, won by George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket. The line was also the first to be double-tracked all the way, to have a signalling system, run by policemen with flags, and to carry mail. Its passenger service was a great success, and most stagecoach companies on the route soon closed. The opening day was overshadowed when William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was struck by Rocket and died. The line's success helped set off the 'railway mania' of the 1840s, a boom in railway building across Britain.

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Around 1455 in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg's workshop finished printing a Latin Bible with movable metal type: single letters cast in metal that could be arranged into pages, printed and reused. It was Europe's first major printed book, and within 50 years presses were at work across the continent.

Printing of the Bible began around 1452. It was a huge undertaking: each copy ran to nearly 1,300 pages, usually bound in two large volumes, and between 160 and 185 copies were printed. At least some sold for 30 florins, about three years' wages for a clerk. Gutenberg had borrowed 1,600 guilders for his press and the Bible from Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz financier. In 1455 Fust took him to court to recover the money; the ruling apparently went Fust's way, and he took over the Bible workshop, leaving Gutenberg in heavy debt. Fust and his partner Peter Schöffer carried on printing, and their Mainz Psalter of 1457 was the first book to give its printers' names and a printed date. It did not mention Gutenberg. No complete Gutenberg Bible has been sold since 1978, when one fetched 2.2 million dollars.

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Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in 1977, have both crossed into interstellar space, the space between the stars, beyond the bubble of particles blown out by the Sun. They are the only spacecraft known to have got there, and both still send data to Earth.

The Sun constantly blows out a stream of electrically charged particles, the solar wind. It carves a vast bubble in space called the heliosphere, whose outer edge, the heliopause, is where the solar wind meets the thin gas between the stars. Voyager 1 crossed it on 25 August 2012 and Voyager 2 on 5 November 2018, both about 120 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. By August 2026 Voyager 1 was some 25.6 billion kilometres from the Sun, and its radio signals were taking more than 23 hours to reach us. It was expected to pass a full light-day from Earth, the distance light travels in 24 hours, in November 2026. Both probes run on electricity made from the heat of decaying plutonium. That supply shrinks every year, so engineers have been switching instruments off one by one to keep them going.

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WonderTechnology

On 30 April 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain, meaning anyone could use, copy or change it without paying or asking permission. That decision helped the web grow from a tool for physicists into something the whole world uses.

The timing mattered. Earlier that year the University of Minnesota had announced licence fees for its Gopher software, a rival system for finding documents online, and many developers turned to the web instead. Early in 1993 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Illinois released Mosaic, an easy-to-use browser that showed pictures alongside text, and versions for ordinary PCs and Macs soon followed. By late 1993 there were more than 500 known web servers, carrying about 1% of internet traffic. By the end of 1994 there were 10,000 servers and some 10 million users. That year Berners-Lee left CERN to found the World Wide Web Consortium, which works to keep the web's standards open and free for everyone to use.

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WonderScience

Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics not for relativity but for explaining the photoelectric effect, in which light striking a metal knocks electrons out of it. He proposed that light comes in tiny packets of energy, now called photons, an idea at work today in solar panels and camera sensors.

The prize took an unusual path. In 1921 the Nobel committee decided that none of the nominations met its standards, so the prize was held back and awarded a year later, in November 1922, while Einstein was travelling to Japan. Relativity was left out on purpose: it was still controversial, and some committee members doubted that experiments had confirmed it. The photoelectric paper of 1905 had solved a real puzzle. Faint blue or ultraviolet light can knock electrons out of certain metals while bright red light cannot, because each packet's energy depends on the light's colour, not its brightness. The American physicist Robert Millikan confirmed Einstein's equation by experiment in 1916. When Einstein gave his Nobel lecture, in Gothenburg in July 1923, he spoke about relativity anyway. As agreed in their divorce, the prize money went to his first wife, Mileva Marić.

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On 17 December 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew the Wright Flyer for 12 seconds and 120 feet (37 metres): the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered aeroplane. The brothers made three more flights that day; the longest, by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered 852 feet (260 metres).

The brothers had tried three days earlier. On 14 December they tossed a coin, Wilbur won, and he stalled the Flyer after three and a half seconds. On the 17th, after repairs, they laid their launching rail on level ground facing a wind of more than 30 km/h (20 mph), which gave the aircraft enough airspeed to lift off. Five local people watched, and one of them, John Daniels of the nearby lifesaving station, took the famous photograph of Orville's flight. All four flights were straight and no more than about 3 metres high. The 12-horsepower engine had been built by the brothers' mechanic, Charlie Taylor. Minutes after the last flight a gust tumbled the Flyer over and wrecked it. The brothers telegraphed their father and asked him to tell the press, but the Dayton Journal decided the flights were too short to be news.

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Voyager 1 and 2 were launched in 1977, thirteen years before Tim Berners-Lee's first web server went online at CERN at the end of 1990. Both probes are still working, run by onboard computers that carry out about 8,000 instructions a second; a modern phone manages billions.

The probes date from the dawn of the home computer: they left Earth in the same year that the Apple II, one of the first mass-produced personal computers, went on sale. Each Voyager carries three kinds of computer, two of each for safety: one runs commands, one keeps the craft pointed in the right direction and one packages the science data. Together the six hold about 68 kilobytes of memory, far less than a single photo taken on a modern phone. Data were stored on a tape recorder and sent home by radio. In November 2023 a failed memory chip left Voyager 1 sending meaningless data. Each command took nearly a day to reach it, yet engineers moved the affected code to other parts of its memory, and by April 2024 the probe was sending usable data again.

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In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN, proposed a way to link the lab's scattered documents so that anyone could jump from one to another. His boss, Mike Sendall, wrote 'Vague but exciting...' on the cover and let him carry on. The idea became the World Wide Web.

The proposal, 'Information Management: A Proposal', described a real problem. Most scientists stayed at CERN for about two years and then left, so knowledge was constantly being lost, and even written records were hard to find among the lab's many incompatible computers. His answer was hypertext: documents containing links that lead straight to other documents, spread across a network. He had tried a small version of the idea for himself in 1980, a program called ENQUIRE. The proposal drew little interest at first. He sent it round again in May 1990 and, with the Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau, turned it into a formal project plan that November. Sendall let him build the system on a newly bought NeXT computer, and after considering names such as 'Information Mesh', Berners-Lee settled on World Wide Web.

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In 1905, while working as a technical expert at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Albert Einstein, then 26, published four papers that changed physics: on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, on special relativity and on the link between mass and energy, E = mc². Physicists call it his miracle year.

Einstein had failed to find a university post after graduating, and in 1902 he joined the patent office in Bern, helped by the father of his friend Marcel Grossmann. His job was to assess patent applications, many of them for electrical and mechanical devices. In his spare time he debated physics and philosophy with friends in a small reading group they jokingly called the Olympia Academy, and he talked his ideas through with a colleague, Michele Besso, the only person thanked in the relativity paper. Alongside the four papers he completed a doctoral thesis on measuring the size of molecules. His paper on Brownian motion, the jittery movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid, gave strong evidence that atoms really exist. He stayed at the patent office until 1909, when he became an associate professor at the University of Zurich.

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WonderHistory

On 17 December 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville Wright flew 37 m in 12 seconds. Others had engines too; what the Wright brothers had solved was control. The pilot could tilt the wings, raise or lower the nose and turn, keeping the aircraft balanced in the air.

Most experimenters of the time concentrated on more powerful engines and thought of steering like a ship's rudder. The Wrights, who built bicycles in Dayton, Ohio, saw that a flying machine had to be balanced like a bicycle and lean into turns like a bird. Wilbur noticed that birds change the angle of their wingtips to roll, and the brothers copied this with wing-warping: cables twisted the ends of the wings to tip the aircraft left or right. With a front elevator for climbing and diving and a movable rudder for turning, the pilot could control all three directions of movement, known as three-axis control. They tested wing shapes in a home-made wind tunnel in 1901 and learned on gliders before adding an engine. Four flights were made that day; the longest, by Wilbur, lasted 59 seconds and covered 260 m. Aeroplanes still use three-axis control today.

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