They’re a bunch of fools in the desert with nothing else to do so they invented me and they invented you. Randy Newman, The God Song, sung by God
Nicola Tesla … catapulted our civilisation into the new age. The use of alternating current, radio, fluorescent lighting, remote control, and robots – a total of 700 patents. Phenomenon: The Lost Archives s1e9: The Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nicola Tesla
Tesla laboratory mysteriously burns to the ground. ibid.
Tesla promises … free energy for everyone. ibid.
‘A man came to the airfield one day with a 1946 Buick Roadmaster. He had invented a carburettor that was water-injected and could get close to 100 miles per gallon. He told us that Shell Oil company had bought the patent from him which made him a millionaire. They told him he could keep the one on this Buick but he could build no more … What ever happened to this invention?’ Gashole, Ken Kunde, witness, 2008
We’ll be delving back to the first episode in 1965 to chart how technology has changed over the last half century. Tomorrow’s World Live: For One Night Only, BBC 2018
‘Whether there’s a market for this kind of disc [CD] remains to be seen.’ ibid. presenter
‘Computers offer an endless source of inspiration.’ ibid.
One of the most iconic inventions of the 1980s: the C5, a battery-operated car. ibid.
If we shift toward a model in which we are determining the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective we will change outcomes. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes, 2019
Elizabeth has raised more than $400 million; the company is valued at $9 billion. ibid. observer
Nestled in the foothills above Silicon Valley there is a 700-acre plot of land called the Stanford Research Park … In the fall of 2014 she [Holmes] moved her bio-tech start-up Theranos to the research park. The company employed 800 people and was valued at nearly $10 billion: 4 years later it was worth less than zero. ibid. commentary
The value of the story: this compelling tale of divining hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood. ibid.
She had a policy of controlling demonstrations and tightly guarding access to the Edison prototypes. ibid.
It was a mess inside. ibid. company worker on machine
Then after a whole people became paranoid of one another. ibid. worker
With the Walgreens rollout, the problems at Therenos were magnifying. ibid.
Their downfall was when they started giving us results that were not matching up with other labs. ibid. woman
Internally, we had so little faith in these tests but were still resulting them on patients. ibid. lab technician
Nothing works. We’re on a sinking ship. It’s a lie. ibid. worker
I knew that most of their blood tests were run on commercial analysers. ibid. John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal
In 2018 Theranos dissolved. Elizabeth and Sunny were charged with conspiracy and fraud. They pleaded not guilty. ibid.
In the year of our Lord 1448 in Mainz, Germany, a goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mould. His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper but what he did was to speed up history. Gutenberg’s invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern world of science and industry. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing II: Words on a Page, BBC 2020
The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points of history and it coincides with a change in the technology of Europe. As papyrus disappeared so did the book as a relatively inexpensive everyday commodity. ibid.
The fact that parchment could be folded made it possible to stitch leaves together into a codex, the modern form of the book. ibid.
Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were prized in China every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe. But in a medieval manuscript the art is in the decoration around the text. The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment produced letters that were regular and repetitive. But in Chinese brush-calligraphy the art is in the brushwork that produces the characters themselves. And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface. Paper was invented in China in 2nd century A.D. ibid.
Paper was key to another Chinese invention: woodblock printing. Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman. This step was laborious and expensive. ibid.
The Islamic Golden Age: the arts and sciences flourished … We still count using an Arabic numbering system. ibid.
The secret of Gutenberg’s printing press was his ability to mass-produce copies of each individual letter. And in this he had a hidden advantage: ‘the letters of the alphabet are really simple shapes … These simple block-like letters can become blocks of metal and can become printed.’ ibid. expert
Astonishing machines flying at incredible speeds, and all powered by what seemed to be a technology from the future. That technology was a British invention. Cold War, Hot Jets, BBC 2013
In 1939 a group of eccentric inventors were brought together by Winston Churchill. They fought the Nazis with British bulldog spirit and ingenuity. Churchill’s Toyshop, Discovery 2015
1856 when Henry Bessemer invented a process for producing mass-produced steel. Mark Williams, Industrial Revelations s1e7: Cutting Edge, Discovery 2002
The steam engine – invented in England in the early eighteenth century and perfected by James Watt. Michael Wood, The Great British Story 7/8: A People’s History: Industry & Empire, BBC 2012
‘The man who discovered how to power the world ... was James Watt, and his steam engine was to drive the industrial revolution.’ Genius of Britain II: A Roomful of Brilliant Minds, James Dyson, Channel 4 2012
The answer was to cool and condense the steam in a separate chamber outside the main cylinder. ibid.
Watt’s monsters throbbed day and night. ibid.
James Watt’s invention changed the world ... This was the start of the Industrial Revolution. ibid.
We are Innovators. Inventors. We transformed the resources of our planet into new powers. Mankind conquers Nature. But as Life accelerates, new perils and our greatest triumphs. On an unforgiving planet. One species learns to harness its bounty. To survive thrive and conquer. This is our story. The story of all of us. Mankind: The Story of All of Us XI
Our history looms large over us shaping our present and our future. We accept the great moments and ideas detailed in history books as a matter of fact. But what if our understanding of historical events isn’t actually all that accurate. As time passes our perception of history can become foggier, less reliable. History’s Greatest Myths s1e1: Inventions and Discoveries, History 2013
Transformative discoveries and inventions often seem as if they have emerged into our society fully formed, filling a space that was empty only moments earlier and quickly becoming the fabric of our daily lives. This perception drives prevailing myths about inventors and their inventions. Yet how history remembers these inventors is often embellished by clever marketing, propaganda, cloudy recollections, and at worst, out and out theft. ibid.
The notion that Edison solely invented the light bulb is a myth that has endured. ibid.
Four years after publishing her research, [Rosalind] Franklin tragically died at the age of 37 from Ovarian cancer before her contemporaries [Crick & Watson] won their Nobel Prize. ibid.
Imagine a magic carpet developed in secret by the United States’ military. How about a cage for babies that hangs from a 20-storey building. Or giant killer robots powered by facial expressions. Has the human drive to create new technology opened a Pandora’s Box? The UnBelievable with Dan Aykroyd s1e5: Outlandish Inventions, History 2024
The digital era was shaped by a handful of truly great inventions that changed our lives … One of those inventions was ours. One that changed the way we looked at the world for ever. But no-one knows our story. We were cheated out of it by Google. But we’re going to change that now. The Billion Dollar Code I, Netflix 2021
The only thing I was really good at was programming. ibid.
The complete mapping of the world on computer. ibid.
Computers can change your life for ever. Access to information must be free. ibid.
Let’s be realistic, we were all a little mad. ibid.
Everyone that day at the conference wanted to visit their home town. ibid.
So when did Google release Google Earth? So eleven years later. ibid. deposition rehearsal
How can Terravision and Google Earth be absolutely so identical? ibid.
After Kyoto we had caught the attention of the press. The Billion Dollar Code II
There was no hierarchy any more. Everyone had the same goal: write the best program there ever was. ibid.
Brian and Juri they wouldn’t be stopped … Brian and Juris were soulmates. ibid. deposition rehearsal
Suddenly we were a proper company. ibid.
Everything will be done on the internet in the future. ibid.
Imagine if you could also travel through time. ibid.