UNDATED – From the wheel, to the Commodore C64, to today’s smartphones, technology is constantly changing the world.
January 6th is the day to mark those achievements, and celebrate the inventors who create new things every day. It’s National Technology Day. A Las Vegas based tech company, AXEL, filed to make the day commemorative in 2016.
So to celebrate, we’ve put together some trivia facts that you may not have known about some of the things we use everyday.
- Can you imagine using a wooden computer mouse? That’s what Douglas Engelbart used in the 1960’s to create the outer shell for the first ever computer mouse. That shell housed a circuit board and sat on metal wheels.
- The guy who invented the early version of the digital circuit was only 21-years old. Claude Shannon, a.k.a the “Father of the electronic communications age”, was a grad student at MIT when mixed electrical switches and logical algebra.
- The garage: where cars are parked and multimillion dollar companies are founded. Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Microsoft all started in Garages. HP has made its into a museum, Apple’s was designated as a historic site, and Microsoft named a division after it.
- A 1940’s Hollywood star helped make Wi-Fi a reality. Hedy Lamarr, famous for dozens of on-screen roles with MGM, was also quite the inventor. In 1942, she, alongside American composer George Antheil, was granted a patent for a communication system that used frequency hopping to guide radio-controlled missiles underwater. It’s now used in modern wireless communications.
