Facts About the History of Technology

Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century British mathematician, wrote the first published algorithm intended to be run on a machine, for Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine.

Lovelace's contributions were largely forgotten until the 1950s, when her notes were republished and her role in early computing was rediscovered.

The concept for the computer mouse was sketched by Douglas Engelbart in 1963, and the first working prototype was built by engineer Bill English in 1964 from a block of carved wood.

The mouse didn't become a mainstream computer accessory until the 1980s, after it appeared with the Apple Macintosh.

Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first handheld cellular phone call in 1973 using a DynaTAC prototype, but the phone wasn't sold commercially until the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X launched in 1983–84.

The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X weighed about 2 pounds and cost $3,995 when it went on sale.

The camera obscura — a dark chamber that projects an image through a small hole — was studied and refined by the 11th-century Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham, though the basic principle was known even earlier in ancient China and Greece.

The first permanent photograph, taken by Nicéphore Niépce around 1826, required an exposure of roughly eight hours and was captured on a pewter plate coated with a light-sensitive asphalt called bitumen of Judea.

The world's first website was published on August 6, 1991, by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, explaining the new World Wide Web project.

The first video game widely recognized as such, Tennis for Two, was created in 1958 by physicist William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory and played on an oscilloscope screen.

Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine in the 1830s–1840s, a mechanical, general-purpose computing device that used punched cards — it was never fully built in his lifetime but is considered a conceptual forerunner of the modern computer.

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated the first working television in 1925–26, using a mechanical scanning system later replaced by electronic television in the 1930s.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, built by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry and completed in 1942, is credited as the first electronic digital computer and used binary rather than decimal calculations.

Computer engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email in 1971, choosing the @ symbol to separate user names from host computers — a convention still used in every email address today.

The first SMS text message, reading "Merry Christmas," was sent in 1992 by engineer Neil Papworth over the Vodafone network in the UK.

The first PC computer virus, called Brain, was released in 1986 by Pakistani brothers Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi to track unauthorized copies of their software — it spread by infecting floppy disk boot sectors.

The transistor, invented at Bell Labs in 1947, replaced bulky vacuum tubes and made small, reliable electronics — and eventually the microchip — possible.