Modern Era
1900 – 1970
529 inventions from this era
The Modern era electrified civilization and conquered distance. Edison's power systems brought light and motors into homes and factories; Ford's assembly line made automobiles affordable; aircraft shrank travel time from weeks to hours; radio and television brought mass media into living rooms. Two world wars accelerated innovation—radar, nuclear fission, jet engines, antibiotics, computers. This era exhibits winner-take-all dynamics: dominant designs emerged and alternatives disappeared (internal combustion over steam cars, gasoline over electric vehicles, AC over DC power). The biological parallel is competitive exclusion—superior adaptations displacing alternatives. Petrochemicals created plastics; synthetic fertilizers enabled population growth; vaccines and antibiotics extended lifespans. By 1970, humans had walked on the moon and computation was poised to transform everything again.
Acrylic glass
Acrylic glass - requires enrichment
Acrylic paint
Acrylic paint - requires enrichment
Aerogel
Aerogel emerged from a bet. In 1931, Samuel Stephens Kistler at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California, wagered with fellow chemist Charle...
Aerosledge
The aerosledge emerged from Russian winters—a solution so obvious that multiple inventors converged on it within years of the Wright Brothers' flight....
Agent Orange
Weaponized plant death became inevitable the moment scientists discovered that plants could be killed by overdosing them on their own growth hormones....
Air conditioner
Air conditioner - requires enrichment
Airbag
The airbag emerged twice in thirteen months because the same problem generated the same solution on different continents. Walter Linderer filed a Germ...
Aircraft carrier
Aircraft carrier - requires enrichment
Aircraft carrier with full-length flight deck
Aircraft carrier with full-length flight deck - requires enrichment
Aircraft dope
Aircraft dope - requires enrichment
Aircraft steam catapult
Aircraft steam catapult - requires enrichment
Airplane
Airplane - requires enrichment
Alexanderson alternator
Alexanderson alternator - requires enrichment
Alkaline fuel cell
Alkaline fuel cell - requires enrichment
Amplifier
Amplifier - requires enrichment
Amplitude modulation
Amplitude modulation - requires enrichment
Analog optical disc
Analog optical disc - requires enrichment
Animal cloning
Animal cloning - requires enrichment
Animal cloning from adult cells
Animal cloning from adult cells - requires enrichment
Arc converter
Arc converter - requires enrichment
Armoured car
Armoured car - requires enrichment
Articulated tram
Articulated tram - requires enrichment
Artificial neural network
Artificial neural network - requires enrichment
Artificial satellite
Artificial satellite - requires enrichment
Aschheim-Zondek pregnancy test
Aschheim-Zondek pregnancy test - requires enrichment
Aspartame
James Schlatter was not looking for sweetness—he was synthesizing a tetrapeptide to study ulcers. But when he licked his finger to turn a page in his...
Atmospheric diving suit
Atmospheric diving suit - requires enrichment
Atomic bomb
Atomic bomb - requires enrichment
Atomic clock
The atomic clock didn't wait for genius—it waited for World War II to end. Not because the theory was missing; physicists understood quantum mechanics...
Autochrome
first commercially successful color photography process
Autoclaved aerated concrete
Autoclaved aerated concrete - requires enrichment
Autogyro
Autogyro - requires enrichment
Automated anti-aircraft fire-control system
Automated anti-aircraft fire-control system - requires enrichment
Automatic rice cooker
Automatic rice cooker - requires enrichment
Automatic teller machine
Automatic teller machine - requires enrichment
Automatic transmission
Automatic transmission - requires enrichment
Bacteriophages
Bacteriophages - requires enrichment
Bakelite
first fully synthetic plastic
Ballistic missile
Ballistic missile - requires enrichment
Ballistic missile submarine
Ballistic missile submarine - requires enrichment
Ballpoint pen
Ballpoint pen - requires enrichment
Basic oxygen steelmaking
Basic oxygen steelmaking - requires enrichment
Bass guitar
Bass guitar - requires enrichment
Bathyscaphe
The bathyscaphe emerged because Auguste Piccard understood a fundamental principle: depth-resistant cabins are heavier than water, and at extreme dept...
Bergius process
The Bergius process emerged in 1913 because Germany had plenty of coal and almost no petroleum—a resource constraint that would twice reshape global h...
Beta blocker
Beta blockers emerged because James Black understood that easing cardiac stress didn't require increasing oxygen supply—it required reducing the heart...
Bipolar junction transistor
The bipolar junction transistor emerged one month after the point-contact transistor because William Shockley understood that fragile mechanical conta...
Bomba kryptologiczna
The bomba kryptologiczna emerged because Poland sat between Germany and the Soviet Union, and survival required knowing what both were planning. In Oc...
Bombe (cryptology)
The bombe emerged because the Polish bomba's blueprints arrived at Bletchley Park just weeks before Germany invaded Poland—and Alan Turing understood...
Bombsight
The bombsight emerged because aerial bombing required solving a physics problem: how to release a falling object from a moving platform so it hits a s...
Bubble chamber
The bubble chamber emerged because Donald Glaser understood the cloud chamber's fundamental limitation: particles pass through gas and collide with me...
Bucket-wheel excavator
The bucket-wheel excavator emerged because Germany's lignite coal deposits demanded continuous extraction at scales no existing technology could achie...
Bulldozer
The bulldozer emerged because someone thought to attach a blade to a tractor—a conceptual leap so simple it seems inevitable in retrospect, yet took d...
Cable television
Cable television emerged because Pennsylvania's mountains blocked TV signals from Philadelphia—creating a niche where entrepreneurs could profit by so...
Calutron
The calutron emerged because Ernest Lawrence understood that his cyclotron's principle—charged ions deflected by magnetic fields—could separate uraniu...
Can opener with serrated wheel
The can opener with serrated wheel emerged because William Lyman's 1870 rotating-wheel design had a fundamental problem: it couldn't grip the can firm...
Carbon-14
Carbon-14's discovery emerged from a 'desperation' experiment. In January 1940, Martin Kamen placed a graphite target inside Berkeley's 37-inch cyclot...
Carbon-dioxide laser
The carbon dioxide laser emerged because Kumar Patel understood that molecules could transfer vibrational energy to each other. In 1964, the Indian-bo...
Carousel slide projector
The carousel slide projector emerged because gravity could solve what mechanics couldn't. Previous projectors used linear trays below the lens that li...
Cassette tape
The cassette tape emerged because Lou Ottens had a wooden block in his coat pocket. In the early 1960s, the Dutch engineer at Philips was tasked with...
Catalytic converter
The catalytic converter emerged because Eugene Houdry saw Los Angeles smog and understood its source. Around 1950, early studies linked automobile exh...
Cavity magnetron
The cavity magnetron emerged because German bombers were terrorizing England and existing radar systems required antennas 110 meters high. To fit rada...
Cellophane
Cellophane emerged because Jacques Brandenberger wanted a tablecloth that wouldn't absorb wine. In 1900, the Swiss chemist watched a wine spill ruin a...
Cellophane adhesive tape
Scotch tape emerged because Richard Drew had already solved the adhesive problem once and DuPont had just made cellophane commercially available. The...
Cellulose acetate film
Cellulose acetate film emerged because the explosive popularity of motion pictures had created a literal fire hazard. Nitrocellulose film—the only pra...
Central dogma of molecular biology
The central dogma emerged because Francis Crick needed to articulate what could not happen in biology—a constraint that would guide research for decad...
Central processing unit
The central processing unit emerged because the von Neumann architecture required a single component to execute the instructions stored in memory. On...
Charged-coupled device
The charge-coupled device emerged because Bell Labs was trying to build a better memory chip and accidentally invented digital imaging. On October 17,...
Chatbot
The chatbot emerged because Joseph Weizenbaum wanted to demonstrate the superficiality of human-computer interaction—and accidentally created a phenom...
Chemically strengthened glass
Chemically strengthened glass emerged because thin glass cannot be thermally tempered, yet the applications demanding thin glass were multiplying. Ste...
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy emerged because World War II forced scientists to study chemical weapons—and in doing so, they discovered that the same agents that kille...
Chess automaton
El Ajedrecista emerged because Leonardo Torres Quevedo wanted to prove that machines could make decisions—not just follow predetermined sequences. In...
Chromatography
Chromatography emerged because Mikhail Tsvet wanted to separate the pigments in plant leaves—and in doing so, invented a technique that would become o...
Chromosome theory of inheritance
The chromosome theory of inheritance emerged because two scientists on different continents—studying completely different organisms—arrived at the sam...
Clark electrode
The Clark electrode emerged because Leland Clark needed to measure oxygen in blood to prove his bubble oxygenator worked—and a journal rejection force...
Claude air liquefaction
The Claude air liquefaction process emerged because Georges Claude recognized that existing methods wasted too much energy—and that the waste could be...
Cloud chamber
The cloud chamber emerged because C.T.R. Wilson was trying to recreate the beautiful optical effects he had seen on Scottish mountaintops—and accident...
CMOS
CMOS emerged because Frank Wanlass realized that pairing opposite transistor types would solve the power consumption problem that made earlier logic i...
Cochlear implant
The cochlear implant emerged because William House read a newspaper article about French researchers who had electrically stimulated a deaf patient's...
Cockcroft–Walton generator
The Cockcroft-Walton generator emerged because physicists needed to accelerate particles to high energies without building impossibly large transforme...
Coffee filter
The paper coffee filter emerged because Melitta Bentz was tired of bitter, gritty coffee and had the insight that her son's school supplies might solv...
Color motion picture film
Color motion picture film emerged because Edward Raymond Turner recognized that the principles of color photography could be applied to moving images—...
Color television
Color television emerged because John Logie Baird—the Scottish inventor who had demonstrated the first television in 1926—recognized that electronic d...
Combined oral contraceptive pill
The combined oral contraceptive pill emerged because a 71-year-old activist, a 47-year-old scientist disgraced by academic politics, a 75-year-old hei...
Communications satellite
The communications satellite emerged because Arthur C. Clarke imagined the infrastructure of a global civilization—and then the Cold War provided the...
Compound bow
The compound bow emerged because a Missouri inventor asked a simple question: why must an archer work hardest at the moment requiring most precision?...
Compton scattering
Compton scattering emerged because a physicist in St. Louis asked what happens when X-rays collide with electrons—and the answer shattered the remaini...
Computer mouse
Command-line interfaces required users to memorize commands and type them perfectly. Light pens let users point at screens but required holding an arm...
Computer network
The first computer network that became the Internet was born on October 29, 1969, at 10:30 p.m., when a graduate student at UCLA typed 'login' to conn...
Computer-assisted instruction system
The computer-assisted instruction system emerged because a 25-year-old lab assistant at the University of Illinois thought he could build what a commi...
Computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery emerged because an experimental filmmaker realized that military surplus could create art—and repurposed an 850-pound anti-...
Condenser microphone
The condenser microphone emerged because a 25-year-old engineer at Western Electric needed to measure telephone audio quality—and invented a technolog...
Conex box
The Conex box emerged because the Korean War forced the U.S. Army to solve the oldest problem in logistics—how to move supplies without unloading them...
Container ship
The container ship emerged because a North Carolina truck driver with no shipping experience asked why cargo had to be touched by human hands so many...
Continuous track snow vehicle
The continuous track snow vehicle emerged because polar explorers and northern industries needed machines that could traverse terrain where wheels and...
Continuous track tractor
The continuous track tractor emerged because California's richest farmland was also its softest—and Benjamin Holt's solution would transform both agri...
Continuous track vehicle
The continuous track vehicle emerged because wheels could not conquer the terrain that industry needed to cross—and two inventors on opposite coasts,...
Controlled-access highway
The controlled-access highway emerged because an Italian engineer recognized that automobiles needed roads designed specifically for them—roads where...
Convection oven
The convection oven emerged because troops crossing the Atlantic during World War II needed hot meals instead of cold emergency rations—and an invento...
Convulsive therapy
Convulsive therapy emerged because a Hungarian neuropathologist noticed something strange in post-mortem brains: patients with epilepsy had abundant g...
Cooling tower
The cooling tower emerged because power plants needed to dissipate enormous quantities of waste heat—and Dutch engineers at a coal mine developed an e...
Corneal contact lens
The corneal contact lens emerged because early contact lenses were too large and uncomfortable for daily wear—and the discovery that a lens covering o...
Cornu helicopter
The Cornu helicopter emerged because a French bicycle maker from Normandy believed that vertical flight was possible—and on November 13, 1907, he prov...
Credit card
The credit card emerged because Bank of America decided to discover what would happen if you mailed 60,000 unsolicited pieces of plastic to the reside...
Cruise control
Cruise control emerged because a blind engineer was annoyed by his lawyer's inconsistent driving—and invented a device to solve a problem he could hea...
Cruise missile
The cruise missile emerged because Germany needed a cheap weapon to terrorize London—and created a flying bomb from plywood, sheet metal, and a buzzin...
Crystal oscillator
The crystal oscillator emerged because World War I demanded radio frequencies that wouldn't drift—and the piezoelectric properties discovered in 1880...
Crystal radio
The crystal radio emerged because Hertz's 1887 demonstration of electromagnetic waves created a detection problem—and the answer had been hiding in mi...
Cultured pearl
The cultured pearl emerged because humans had understood for centuries that pearls form when oysters coat irritants with nacre—but nobody could reliab...
Curta calculator
The Curta calculator emerged because three centuries of mechanical calculation had converged into a design problem that only extreme miniaturization c...
Cyanoacrylate
Cyanoacrylate—Super Glue—was invented by accident twice, its extreme stickiness recognized as a defect before becoming its defining feature. The adhes...
Cyclotron
The cyclotron emerged because nuclear physics in the late 1920s faced an energy ceiling—particles needed to be accelerated to millions of electron vol...
Czochralski method
The Czochralski method emerged from one of science's most fortuitous accidents: a Polish chemist dipping his pen into molten tin instead of his inkwel...
DDT insecticide
DDT emerged because the compound had been synthesized in 1874—65 years before its insecticidal properties were recognized—waiting for someone to ask t...
Decaffeinated coffee
Decaffeinated coffee emerged because a storm-soaked cargo hold inadvertently demonstrated that caffeine could be extracted from coffee beans without d...
Defibrillator
The defibrillator emerged because cardiac surgeons understood that ventricular fibrillation—the chaotic electrical storm that stops effective heartbea...
Deuterium
Deuterium emerged because mass spectrometry had revealed that chemical elements were not pure but contained isotopes—atoms with identical chemistry bu...
Diamond anvil cell
The diamond anvil cell emerged because high-pressure physics was imprisoned by opacity—existing pressure devices crushed samples in total darkness, al...
Diesel locomotive
The diesel locomotive emerged because Rudolf Diesel's compression-ignition engine had matured to where its power-to-weight ratio could finally challen...
Diesel power shovel
The diesel power shovel emerged because steam shovels—which had dominated excavation since William Otis's 1839 patent—required enormous infrastructure...
Diffusion pump
The diffusion pump emerged because conventional vacuum pumps could not reach the pressures required for emerging technologies like radio tubes and par...
Digital programmable computer
The digital programmable computer emerged because the mathematical foundations for automatic calculation had been laid by Turing and others in the 193...
Dilution refrigerator
The dilution refrigerator emerged because cryogenics had reached a temperature wall—evaporating helium-3 could only cool to about 0.3 Kelvin—and Heinz...
Disappearing-filament pyrometer
Disappearing-filament pyrometer - requires enrichment
DNA as the carrier of information
DNA as the carrier of information - requires enrichment
DNA ligase
DNA ligase - requires enrichment
DNA polymerase
DNA polymerase - requires enrichment
Dolby noise-reduction system
Dolby noise-reduction system - requires enrichment
Domestic refrigerator
Domestic refrigerator - requires enrichment
Double-edge safety razor
Double-edge safety razor - requires enrichment
Dragline excavator
Dragline excavator - requires enrichment
Drink can
Drink can - requires enrichment
Drone
Drone - requires enrichment
Drum (container)
Standardization enables logistics. This principle—creating a universal container size that humans can handle without machines—explains why the 55-gall...
Duct tape
Duct tape emerged in 1943 because a mother's terror created a problem the military couldn't ignore. Vesta Stoudt worked at the Green River Ordnance Pl...
Dumaresq
A brass disc and sliding bar turned the deadliest weapons of the industrial age from lottery tickets into precision instruments. By 1900, naval guns c...
Dynamic random-access memory
Dynamic random-access memory - requires enrichment
Ejector seat
Ejector seat - requires enrichment
Electret microphone
Most common type of microphone today
Electric arc steel furnace
Electric arc steel furnace - requires enrichment
Electric chainsaw
The electric chainsaw emerged in 1926 not because Andreas Stihl was uniquely brilliant but because three conditions had converged in Stuttgart, German...
Electric drip coffee maker
Electric drip coffee maker - requires enrichment
Electric guitar
Electric guitar - requires enrichment
Electric shaver
Electric shaver - requires enrichment
Electric toaster
Electric toaster - requires enrichment
Electric toothbrush
Electric toothbrush - requires enrichment
Electric traffic light
The electric traffic light emerged in 1912 Salt Lake City not because someone had a bright idea, but because automobiles had finally reached the densi...
Electrical tape
Electrical tape emerged in 1946 because the materials science of plasticizers finally solved a problem that had plagued electricians for decades. The...
Electrocardiography machine
The electrocardiography machine emerged in 1901 Leiden because Willem Einthoven solved a problem that had frustrated physiologists for decades: the el...
Electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy emerged in 1938 Rome from an unlikely source: the city's Testaccio slaughterhouse. There, Ugo Cerletti observed something th...
Electroencephalography
Electroencephalography emerged in 1924 Jena not from a quest to understand the brain, but from one man's obsession with telepathy. Hans Berger, a Germ...
Electroluminescence
Electroluminescence was discovered in 1907 not through systematic research but through attentive observation during unrelated work. H.J. Round, a Brit...
Electrolytic detector
The electrolytic detector emerged in 1903 through the kind of accident that only happens to prepared minds. Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian-American en...
Electromechanical programmable computer
The electromechanical programmable computer emerged in 1930s Berlin in near-complete isolation from the rest of the computing world. While American an...
Electron microscope
The electron microscope emerged in 1931 Berlin not from a theoretical prediction but from practical oscillography work. Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll were...
Electronic calculator
The electronic calculator emerged in late 1961 when the Bell Punch Company in Britain launched the ANITA, beating American and Japanese competitors to...
Electronic digital computer
The electronic digital computer emerged in 1942 Iowa not from a grand vision of universal computation, but from a physics professor's frustration with...
Electronic general purpose computer
ENIAC emerged in 1945 Philadelphia because the U.S. Army needed to calculate artillery firing tables faster than human computers could manage. Each ne...
Electronic television
Electronic television emerged on September 7, 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory when a 21-year-old inventor transmitted a single straight line to a...
Enigma machine
The Enigma machine emerged from the collision of two forces in post-World War I Germany: the demonstrated vulnerability of wartime communications to i...
Epinephrine (medication)
Epinephrine became the first hormone isolated in pure form in 1901, a milestone that required the convergence of organic chemistry techniques, glandul...
Epoxy resin
Epoxy resin emerged in 1936 when Swiss chemist Pierre Castan sought an alkali-resistant binder for coatings. Working at a dental products manufacturer...
External DC defibrillator
The external DC defibrillator emerged from a fundamental insight: alternating current, which Claude Beck had used for the first successful defibrillat...
External pacemaker
The external pacemaker emerged in 1950 Toronto from an unlikely collaboration between a surgeon, a trainee, and an electrical engineer solving a probl...
Fax machine
The fax machine's origins predate the telephone by over three decades, a reminder that the adjacent possible often opens earlier than practical adopti...
Ferrofluid
Ferrofluid emerged in 1963 from a peculiar problem: how do you pump liquid fuel in zero gravity? At NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, mechani...
Fiberglass
Fiberglass emerged from an accident during the Great Depression, when Owens-Illinois Glass Company was searching for new markets. Engineer Russell Gam...
Field-effect transistor (concept)
The field-effect transistor was conceived two decades before the famous Bell Labs transistor—a concept waiting for the materials science to catch up....
Fighter aircraft
The fighter aircraft emerged in 1915 when Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker solved the problem that had stymied armed aviation: how to fire a machine gun...
Fire-control system
Fire-control system - requires enrichment
Firefighting foam
Firefighting foam emerged in 1902 Baku from a teacher watching oil fires he couldn't forget. Aleksandr Loran, a Moldovan engineer teaching at a school...
Fischer–Tropsch process
Fischer–Tropsch process - requires enrichment
Float glass
Inventor and company have the same name by coincidence
Floating-gate MOSFET
Floating-gate MOSFET - requires enrichment
Floating-point arithmetic
Floating-point arithmetic emerged from the practical problem of handling very large and very small numbers in scientific calculation. When Leonardo To...
Fluid catalytic cracking
Fluid catalytic cracking - requires enrichment
Fluorescent lamp
Fluorescent lamp - requires enrichment
Flying bomb
Flying bomb - requires enrichment
FM radio
FM radio - requires enrichment
Foam extinguisher
Foam extinguisher - requires enrichment
Focal plane tomography
Focal plane tomography - requires enrichment
Fracking
Fracking - requires enrichment
Frog pregnancy test
Frog pregnancy test - requires enrichment
Froth flotation
Froth flotation - requires enrichment
Functional programming language
Functional programming language - requires enrichment
Gallium arsenide
Gallium arsenide - requires enrichment
Gallium nitride
Gallium nitride - requires enrichment
Gas centrifuge
Gas centrifuge - requires enrichment
Gas mask
Gas mask - requires enrichment
Gas turbine
Gas turbine - requires enrichment
Gaseous diffusion
Technique for uranium enrichment
Geiger counter
Geiger counter - requires enrichment
General relativity
General relativity - requires enrichment
Genetic code
Genetic code - requires enrichment
Geographic information system
Geographic information system - requires enrichment
Geothermal power
Geothermal power - requires enrichment
Geothermal power plant
Geothermal power plant - requires enrichment
Glass-ceramic
Glass-ceramic - requires enrichment
Glucose meter
First biosensor of any kind
Green fluorescent protein
Green fluorescent protein - requires enrichment
Gyro gunsight
Gyro gunsight - requires enrichment
Gyrocompass
Gyrocompass - requires enrichment
Haber process
The Haber process is perhaps the most consequential invention of the 20th century, responsible for feeding roughly half the world's population today....
Half-track
Half-track - requires enrichment
Halogen lamp
Halogen lamp - requires enrichment
Hand-drawn animated film
Hand-drawn animated film - requires enrichment
Handheld film camera
Handheld film camera - requires enrichment
Handheld hair dryer
Handheld hair dryer - requires enrichment
Hard disk drive
Early computers stored data on magnetic drums—cylinders rotating past fixed read/write heads. Capacity was severely limited, and access time depended...
Head-mounted display
The first head-mounted display is often called "The Sword of Damocles", but this was a joke name.
Helical scan
Helical scan - requires enrichment
Helicopter
the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 was the first practical helicopter
Helicopter drone
Helicopter drone - requires enrichment
Helium-3
Helium-3 - requires enrichment
Heterodyne
Heterodyne - requires enrichment
Hidden Markov model
Hidden Markov model - requires enrichment
High-level programming language
High-level programming language - requires enrichment
High-pressure sodium-vapor lamp
High-pressure sodium-vapor lamp - requires enrichment
High-speed rail
High-speed rail - requires enrichment
High-speed steel
High-speed steel - requires enrichment
High-vacuum tube
High-vacuum tube - requires enrichment
Holography
Holography - requires enrichment
Home pregnancy test
Home pregnancy test - requires enrichment
Hook-and-loop fastener
Hook-and-loop fastener - requires enrichment
Hovercraft
Hovercraft - requires enrichment
Hunter process
Hunter process - requires enrichment
Hybrid electric car
Hybrid electric car - requires enrichment
Hybrid integrated circuit
Hybrid integrated circuit - requires enrichment
Hydraulic excavator
Hydraulic excavator - requires enrichment
Hydrogen bomb
Hydrogen bomb - requires enrichment
Ibuprofen
Ibuprofen - requires enrichment
Implantable pacemaker
Implantable pacemaker - requires enrichment
Impulse generator
The impulse generator emerged in 1924 not because Erwin Otto Marx was uniquely brilliant but because three conditions had converged in Germany: high-v...
In vitro fertilisation
In vitro fertilisation - requires enrichment
Induced radioactivity
Induced radioactivity - requires enrichment
Information theory
Information theory - requires enrichment
Infrared LED
Infrared LED - requires enrichment
Inkjet printing
Inkjet printing - requires enrichment
Instant film
Instant film didn't emerge because Edwin Land was clever on February 21, 1947—it emerged because his three-year-old daughter asked why she couldn't se...
Instant noodles
Instant noodles - requires enrichment
Insulin
Insulin's isolation in 1921 Toronto transformed diabetes from an invariably fatal diagnosis into a manageable chronic condition. Frederick Banting, a...
Integrated circuit computer
Integrated circuit computer - requires enrichment
Intercontinental ballistic missile
R-7 Semyorka was both a military missile and a rocket that led to the development of the Vostok rockets, which launched Sputnik and the Vostok capsule...
Intermodal container
Intermodal container - requires enrichment
International system of units
International system of units - requires enrichment
Iron lung
The iron lung emerged in 1928 at Harvard not because Philip Drinker was brilliant, but because polio epidemics were paralyzing children's respiratory...
Isotopes
Isotopes - requires enrichment
Jet aircraft
Jet aircraft - requires enrichment
Jet airliner
Jet airliner - requires enrichment
JFET
JFET - requires enrichment
Josephson junction
The Josephson junction emerged not from a laboratory but from a graduate seminar. In 1962, a 22-year-old Cambridge student named Brian Josephson sat i...
Kaplan turbine
The Kaplan turbine emerged because rivers refused to cooperate with existing technology. By 1910, the Francis turbine dominated hydropower, but it dem...
Ketamine
Ketamine exists because phencyclidine worked too well. By 1958, Parke-Davis had tested PCP as an anesthetic and found it remarkable—patients felt no p...
Kevlar
Kevlar emerged from a solution that should have been thrown away. In 1964, DuPont chemists began searching for a lightweight fiber to replace steel in...
Kroll process
The Kroll process exists because carbon fails where titanium is concerned. Unlike iron, which eagerly sheds its oxygen to carbon in a blast furnace, t...
Lambda calculus
Lambda calculus emerged from the wreckage of a grander ambition. In 1932, Alonzo Church at Princeton attempted to create a complete formal system for...
Laminated glass
In November 1903, French chemist Édouard Bénédictus knocked a glass flask off a shelf in his Paris laboratory. The flask shattered but didn't disinteg...
Laser
The laser emerged from a race so intense that multiple teams were convinced they would win, and at least one spent thirty years in patent litigation t...
Laser cutting
Laser cutting emerged not from a single inventor's vision but from a cascade of discoveries that made it inevitable by 1965. When Theodore Maiman fire...
Leaded gasoline
On December 9, 1921, Thomas Midgley Jr. discovered that tetraethyl lead eliminated the metallic pinging that limited engine performance—and set in mot...
LED display
The LED display emerged from a convergence so precise it could only have happened in 1968. Nick Holonyak Jr., working at General Electric's Syracuse l...
Lidar
LIDAR emerged just one year after Theodore Maiman fired the first laser at Hughes Aircraft Company in Malibu—an almost instantaneous recognition that...
Light-emitting diode
In 1907, British engineer Henry Joseph Round noticed that silicon carbide crystals glowed yellow when voltage passed through them. In 1993, Shuji Naka...
Line printer
The line printer emerged because batch computing generated output faster than any existing technology could render it. By 1952, UNIVAC I could process...
Linear motor
In 1841, Charles Wheatstone received a patent for a device that seemed obvious: take a rotary electric motor, cut it open, and roll it flat. By 1845 a...
Liquid-crystal display
The liquid crystal display didn't emerge from a singular eureka moment. It was the inevitable convergence of a botanical curiosity, two world wars, Co...
Liquid-propellant rocket
On March 16, 1926, in a snow-covered field on Aunt Effie's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, Robert Goddard's 11-foot gasoline-and-liquid-oxygen contrapt...
Low-pressure sodium-vapor lamp
The low-pressure sodium lamp achieved the highest luminous efficacy of any electrical light source—200 lumens per watt—by sacrificing everything excep...
LSD
On April 19, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann pedaled his bicycle through Basel streets experiencing terrifying hallucinations. Wartime vehicle rest...
Lunar lander
The Apollo Lunar Module didn't emerge from a single breakthrough—it crystallized from three simultaneous streams converging in the early 1960s: the se...
Magnetic detector
The magnetic detector—affectionately called "Maggie" by wireless operators—emerged because the coherer was killing radio's commercial promise. By 1900...
Magnetic tape
Magnetic tape emerged from a peculiar convergence in 1920s Germany, where a chemical engineer who coated cigarette papers with metal realized he could...
Marimbaphone
The modern marimba emerged from three continents converging on a single instrument. African balafons traveled to Central America with enslaved peoples...
Markov chain
In 1906, Andrey Markov was 50 years old and semi-retired from St. Petersburg University—stubborn, contrarian, and deeply atheist in Tsarist Russia. Th...
Maser
The MASER emerged from the collision of Cold War physics programs on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. In May 1952, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prok...
Masking tape
Masking tape emerged from the collision of Roaring Twenties fashion and 3M's sandpaper business. Two-tone automobile paint jobs had become status symb...
Mass spectrometer
The mass spectrometer didn't emerge from a single inventor's eureka moment. It crystallized in 1913 at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory because three...
Measles vaccine
The measles vaccine materialized when three separate rivers of knowledge converged in the early 1950s. John Franklin Enders' 1949 poliovirus breakthro...
Mechanical television
Television's first incarnation was mechanical—a spinning disk with holes that carved images into flickering scan lines. On Christmas Eve 1883, Paul Ni...
Mellotron
The Mellotron emerged from an act of industrial espionage that inadvertently created progressive rock's defining instrument. In 1946, Harry Chamberlin...
Mercury battery
The mercury battery emerged from a wartime crisis that revealed the limitations of existing power sources. In 1942, the U.S. Army Signal Corps approac...
Mercury-arc valve
The mercury-arc valve emerged from a twenty-year convergence of observations that no single inventor could have assembled alone. In 1882, Jules Jamin...
Mercury-vapor lamp
The mercury-vapor lamp emerged from Peter Cooper Hewitt's converted greenhouse workshop in New York City, but its roots stretched back through half a...
Merge sort
In 1945, John von Neumann sat at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School, staring at blueprints for the EDVAC—a machine that didn't yet exist. H...
Messenger RNA
On 25 April 1953, when Watson and Crick published their double helix structure, they solved one mystery but created another. DNA's elegant twisted lad...
Metal-halide lamp
The metal-halide lamp waited fifty years for its adjacent possible to assemble. In 1912, Charles Steinmetz at General Electric filed a patent adding m...
Metalorganic vapour-phase epitaxy
By 1968, three separate technological streams—organometallic chemistry, vacuum deposition, and compound semiconductor theory—had matured independently...
Microcentrifuge
The microcentrifuge materialized in Hamburg in 1962 because five separate technological streams converged at precisely the moment molecular biologists...
Microcode
Microcode emerged from Maurice Wilkes's frustration with control unit complexity. After completing EDSAC—the first stored-program computer in regular...
Microkeratome
The microkeratome crystallized from a convergence of precision technologies, cryogenic capabilities, and a Colombian ophthalmologist who saw possibili...
Micropipette
By 1957, molecular biologists faced a maddening bottleneck. Theodor Bücher's lab at the University of Marburg was developing optical enzyme assays dem...
Microwave oven
The microwave oven wasn't invented—it was discovered, accidentally, by an engineer standing too close to hardware built to kill submarines. On a day i...
Mills bomb
The Mills bomb emerged from a marine engineer's workshop in Birmingham to become the template for every hand grenade that followed. William Mills had...
Miniature neon lamp
The miniature neon lamp emerged when three separate technological streams converged at exactly the right moment. Daniel McFarlan Moore, working at Gen...
Mobile radio telephone
Mobile radio telephony emerged on June 17, 1946, when a driver in St. Louis pulled a handset from under his dashboard and placed the first call on the...
Modem
By 1949, two incompatible networks blanketed the developed world. The first—AT&T's telephone system—carried analog sound waves across copper wire, opt...
Modern cryptography
Modern cryptography emerged twice—once in secret, once in public—and the secret version came first. In 1970, James Ellis at Britain's GCHQ proposed "n...
Modern evolutionary synthesis
The modern evolutionary synthesis crystallized in the 1930s and 1940s because three previously isolated intellectual currents finally reached confluen...
Moka pot
The moka pot emerged from a convergence unique to 1930s Italy: Mussolini's campaign to make aluminum the national metal, a century of espresso machine...
Monolithic integrated circuit
The integrated circuit emerged twice within six months, invented independently by two engineers who had never met, working at companies nine hundred m...
Monosodium glutamate
Monosodium glutamate emerged from a question at dinner. In 1908, Kikunae Ikeda asked his wife what gave her vegetable and tofu soup its savory depth....
Monte Carlo method
The Monte Carlo method emerged from a game of solitaire during illness. In 1946, Stanislaw Ulam lay convalescing at Los Alamos and wondered about the...
Moog synthesizer
The Moog synthesizer emerged simultaneously on opposite coasts from composers who had never heard of each other. In fall 1963, Robert Moog—a Cornell d...
Moon landing
The moon landing emerged from the most expensive peacetime convergence in human history. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface at 02:56 U...
MOS DRAM
MOS DRAM emerged from a living room eureka on November 9, 1966. Robert Dennard, an IBM engineer discouraged after seeing a competitor's memory approac...
MOS SRAM
By 1964, when John Schmidt built the first metal-oxide-semiconductor static RAM at Fairchild Semiconductor, the invention was the inevitable convergen...
MOSFET
The MOSFET waited thirty-four years for silicon dioxide to cooperate. Julius Lilienfeld patented the field-effect transistor concept in 1925, but ever...
Moving-coil loudspeaker
The moving-coil loudspeaker crystallized when four technological streams converged. Ernst Siemens described the moving-coil transducer principle in 18...
Multivibrator
The multivibrator emerged from WWI's urgent need for reliable wireless communications. In 1918-1919, French physicists Henri Abraham and Eugene Bloch...
Napalm
On Valentine's Day 1942, in Harvard's Gill Laboratory basement, chemistry professor Louis Fieser perfected a weapon that would reshape modern warfare....
Nd:YAG laser
The Nd:YAG laser that emerged from Bell Laboratories in 1964 was not a breakthrough—it was a harvest. By the time Joseph Geusic, LeGrand Van Uitert, a...
Neon lighting
By 1910, cities had electricity but lacked spectacle. Incandescent bulbs were workhorses, not showstoppers. Meanwhile, Georges Claude's French company...
Neptunium
By 1940, element 93's discovery was not a matter of if but when. Every component needed had converged at Berkeley: Ernest Lawrence's cyclotron provide...
Neutrino
The neutrino's discovery was an inevitability—the only path forward when conservation laws collided with experimental reality. By 1930, physics had co...
Neutron
In February 1932, James Chadwick published a paper with one of history's most cautious titles: "The Possible Existence of a Neutron." After just two w...
Nichrome heating element
In 1905, Albert Marsh, a 28-year-old metallurgist in a Chicago laboratory, solved a problem that had stymied inventors for decades: making electricity...
Nixie tube
The Nixie tube emerged from the convergence of gas discharge physics, cold cathode technology, and neon sign aesthetics. Inside the glass envelope, te...
Nuclear fission
Nuclear fission was discovered in Berlin on the eve of World War II, by scientists who didn't understand what they had found until a physicist fleeing...
Nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion wasn't discovered in a laboratory—it was first proposed as the power source of stars. In 1920, Arthur Eddington published "The Internal...
Nuclear magnetic resonance
Nuclear magnetic resonance was inevitable by 1946 because three separate stockpiles had accumulated: quantum mechanics had matured enough to predict n...
Nuclear power
Nuclear power didn't emerge from a single breakthrough—it required the convergence of three distinct technological lineages, a discovery that defied i...
Nuclear power plant
The nuclear power plant crystallized in 1954 when three separate inventories finally intersected: half a century of atomic physics discoveries, Victor...
Nuclear reactor
The nuclear reactor didn't arrive in a flash of genius on December 2, 1942. It crystallized from a cascade of discoveries that made its emergence inev...
Nuclear submarine
When the S1W pressurized water reactor achieved criticality at Idaho's Naval Reactors Facility in March 1953, it marked the convergence of four stream...
Nuclear-powered surface ship
The nuclear-powered surface ship was inevitable the moment USS Nautilus surfaced in 1955. Admiral Hyman Rickover's submarine thermal reactor had prove...
Nylon
Nylon emerged from a corporate experiment in pure science and claimed its inventor before he could witness its triumph. In 1926, DuPont's Charles Stin...
Ocean thermal energy conversion plant
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion arrived as an idea in 1881 when the convergence point hadn't yet formed. Jacques-Arsène d'Arsonval, immersed in thermo...
Ondes Martenot
The Ondes Martenot emerged in 1928 not from musical genius but from the convergence of three prerequisites: vacuum tube technology, heterodyne oscilla...
One-time pad
The one-time pad has a more complex origin than commonly acknowledged. While credit typically goes to Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne for WWI-era...
Operating system
Early computers were operated manually—each program loaded by hand, each job run in sequence, the machine idle between tasks. The waste of expensive c...
Optical amplifier
By 1985, telecommunications faced an exquisite irony: optical fiber could transmit light across oceans, but electronic repeaters strangled the signal...
Optical fiber
In January 1966, Charles Kao and George Hockham at Standard Telecommunication Laboratories in Harlow, England, published a paper that would earn Kao a...
Oral polio vaccine
When Jonas Salk announced his inactivated polio vaccine in 1955, he solved one problem but left another: polio is an enteric virus living in the intes...
Oriented strand board
By 1963, when Armin Elmendorf filed his patent for oriented strand board, the invention was less breakthrough than convergence. Three decades of engin...
Ostwald nitric acid process
The Ostwald process—converting ammonia to nitric acid via platinum catalysis—existed as an unrealized possibility for six decades before becoming indu...
Oxy-fuel welding and cutting
By 1903, when French engineers Edmond Fouché and Charles Picard combined oxygen and acetylene into a controlled flame hot enough to melt steel, they w...
Oxygen mask
The oxygen mask didn't require genius—it required altitude. By 1917, military aircraft could climb to 20,000 feet, but human physiology couldn't follo...
p–n junction
p–n junction - requires enrichment
p–n junction isolation
p–n junction isolation - requires enrichment
Pacemaker
On October 8, 1958, surgeon Åke Senning implanted a small disc-shaped device into the chest of Arne Larsson, a 43-year-old Swedish engineer whose hear...
Packet switching
In August 1964, Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation published an eleven-volume analysis titled 'On Distributed Communications' for the U.S. Air Force....
Pager
The pager crystallized in 1949 because three distinct technological rivers converged. Al Gross's patent represented the inevitable collision of WWII-e...
Parabolic radio telescope
The parabolic radio telescope was not invented—it crystallized. By 1937, every component needed was already scattered across laboratories and scrapyar...
Particle board
Before 1932, sawmills threw away 60% of every felled tree. Wood chips, sawdust, and offcuts accumulated in piles or burned as waste. Then Max Himmelhe...
Payment card
The credit card crystallized from the convergence of post-war business travel, telephone networks, and magnetic recording technology. Store charge acc...
Penicillin
Penicillin's journey from accidental observation to life-saving medicine spans thirteen years, three countries, and a world war. The discovery came in...
pH
By 1909, chemistry faced an irritating problem: the concentration of hydrogen ions in solution—critical for understanding everything from enzyme activ...
pH meter
In October 1934, Arnold Beckman filed his patent for the "acidimeter"—later renamed the pH meter—but the invention wasn't his idea. It was the citrus...
Phage therapy
Bacteriophage therapy could not have emerged before 1917. Not because Félix d'Hérelle was uniquely brilliant, but because the adjacent possible had on...
Phase array antenna
The phased array antenna was inevitable the moment radar operators realized they needed to see everywhere at once. By 1940, WWII fighter planes moved...
Phase-contrast microscope
In 1930, Dutch physicist Frits Zernike was studying ghost lines flanking primary spectral lines in diffraction gratings at the University of Groningen...
Photocopier
On September 16, 1959, the Haloid Xerox company unveiled the Model 914 at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City. For the first time, anyone cou...
Photolithography
Photolithography emerged from the same printing technique used to mark rivet holes in aircraft wings. In 1957, Jay Lathrop and James Nall at the U.S....
Photomultiplier tube
The photomultiplier tube emerged not from a single flash of inspiration but from the inevitable convergence of three separate discoveries that had bee...
Photon and photoelectric effect
The photoelectric effect had been observed for eighteen years before anyone understood what it meant. In 1887, Heinrich Hertz noticed that ultraviolet...
Photostat
The Photostat machine emerged from a simple problem: how to copy documents without retyping them. By 1906, the conditions for photographic document co...
Phototypesetting
For five centuries, setting type meant casting metal. Johannes Gutenberg's movable type gave way to the Linotype machine's automated slugs, but the fu...
Planar process
One historian called it the most important innovation in the history of the semiconductor industry. The planar process—leaving a protective oxide laye...
Plasma display
The plasma display emerged from an unlikely source: the need to teach computing to students who couldn't afford expensive CRT terminals. Donald Bitzer...
Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition
Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition - requires enrichment
Plutonium
Plutonium was not discovered; it was manufactured. Unlike the elements found in nature, element 94 had to be created atom by atom in a cyclotron, iden...
Polarizing filter
Polarizing filter - requires enrichment
Polio vaccine
The polio vaccine emerged from a scientific competition that played out over two decades, with two fundamentally different approaches—killed virus ver...
Polyester
Polyester emerged from a research thread that DuPont had abandoned. In the 1930s, Wallace Carothers at DuPont had explored many polymer combinations,...
Polyimide
Polyimide - requires enrichment
Polyphonic synthesizer
At the Winter NAMM show in January 1978, Dave Smith and Sequential Circuits unveiled the Prophet-5 to an astonished audience. Here was a polyphonic sy...
Polyurethane
Polyurethane waited 89 years after chemist Wurtz discovered the isocyanate group in 1848—not because chemists missed it, but because manufacturing eco...
Population genetics
Population genetics - requires enrichment
Portable defibrillator
Portable defibrillator - requires enrichment
Portable operating system
Portable operating system - requires enrichment
Positron
Positron - requires enrichment
Power MOSFET
In 1969, Hitachi introduced the first vertical power MOSFET, launching a revolution in power electronics that would eventually displace the bipolar tr...
Powered vacuum cleaner
first vacuum cleaners using suction and an engine, invented independently by Booth and Kenney
Pressure suit
Pressure suit - requires enrichment
Pressurized aircraft cabin
Pressurized aircraft cabin - requires enrichment
Programmable calculator
At the 1965 New York World's Fair, Olivetti unveiled the Programma 101—a desktop machine that could be programmed to execute sequences of calculations...
Programmable electronic computer
Programmable electronic computer - requires enrichment
Programmable read-only memory
Programmable read-only memory - requires enrichment
Programmable synthesizer
Programmable synthesizer - requires enrichment
Proportional counter
Proportional counter - requires enrichment
Protein sequencing
Protein sequencing - requires enrichment
Proximity fuze
On January 5, 1943, the cruiser USS Helena fired two salvos at a Japanese Aichi D3A dive bomber approaching off Guadalcanal. Neither shell directly st...
Pulsejet
Pulsejet - requires enrichment
Quantum tunneling
Quantum tunneling - requires enrichment
Quark
Quarks weren't invented—they were discovered in 1968 when deep inelastic scattering experiments at SLAC revealed that protons and neutrons have intern...
Quartz clock
In October 1927, Warren Marrison and J.W. Horton demonstrated a new kind of clock at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York—one that kept time using...
Quartz wristwatch
Quartz wristwatch - requires enrichment
Rabbit pregnancy test
Rabbit pregnancy test - requires enrichment
Radar
Radar emerged simultaneously in at least eight countries during the 1930s—the most dramatic case of convergent evolution in military technology. By 19...
Radial engine
First purpose-designed aircraft engine, for the unsuccessful Langley Aerodrome
Radial tire
Radial tire - requires enrichment
Radio broadcasting
Radio broadcasting - requires enrichment
Radio control
Radio control - requires enrichment
Radio telescope
In 1931, Karl Jansky was not looking for the universe. He was looking for static. Bell Telephone Laboratories had assigned the 26-year-old radio engin...
Radiocarbon dating
Radiocarbon dating - requires enrichment
Radiofax
Radiofax - requires enrichment
Radioimmunoassay
Radioimmunoassay - requires enrichment
Radioluminescent paint
Radioluminescent paint - requires enrichment
Ramjet
Ramjet - requires enrichment
Rectified linear unit
Rectified linear unit - requires enrichment
Reflector sight
Reflector sight - requires enrichment
Ribbon microphone
Ribbon microphone - requires enrichment
Rotor ship
The rotor ship emerged when Anton Flettner, a German mathematics teacher turned aviation engineer, found a way to exploit physics that had been unders...
Rotoscoping
Tracing creates motion. This principle—converting filmed movement into drawn animation frame-by-frame—explains why rotoscoping emerged when technologi...
Samarium–cobalt magnet
Samarium–cobalt magnet - requires enrichment
Satellite navigation system
First such system: Transit. First to enter widespread civilian use: GPS
Satellite television
Satellite television - requires enrichment
Scanning electron microscope
Scanning electron microscope - requires enrichment
Schrödinger equation
Schrödinger equation - requires enrichment
Scintillation counter
Scintillation counter - requires enrichment
Scuba set
In June 1943, Jacques Cousteau took his first real dive with a new apparatus in the Mediterranean Sea near Bandol, France. Strapped to his back were c...
Seaplane
Seaplane - requires enrichment
Seat belt
Three points beat two. This principle—distributing crash forces across pelvis and chest rather than abdomen alone—explains why the modern seat belt em...
Semi-automatic shotgun
Semi-automatic shotgun - requires enrichment
Silica gel
Silica gel - requires enrichment
Silicone
Silicone didn't emerge in 1931—it emerged twice. Frederic Stanley Kipping synthesized the first silicone polymers in 1904, coining the term itself. Bu...
Singing arc
Arguably one of the first instances of electronic music
Smoke detector
Smoke detector - requires enrichment
Snowmobile
Snowmobile - requires enrichment
Solar cell
The solar cell emerged from an accidental discovery at Bell Labs, when researchers working on silicon semiconductor technology noticed something unexp...
Solar furnace
Solar furnace - requires enrichment
Solar thermal power station
Solar thermal power station - requires enrichment
Soluble cellulose acetate
Soluble cellulose acetate - requires enrichment
Somatic cell nuclear transfer
Somatic cell nuclear transfer - requires enrichment
Sound film
Sound film - requires enrichment
Space blanket
Space blanket - requires enrichment
Space capsule
First human spaceflight (Yuri Gagarin)
Space suit
Space suit - requires enrichment
Space telescope
First space telescope: the OAO-1, but OAO-2 was the first successful launch
Spandex
Spandex emerged in 1958 when DuPont chemist Joseph Shivers solved a problem rubber couldn't: creating elastic fibers that wouldn't degrade, yellow, or...
Special relativity
Special relativity - requires enrichment
Spectrophotometer
Spectrophotometer - requires enrichment
Spherical deep-sea submersible
Spherical deep-sea submersible - requires enrichment
Spirit duplicator
Spirit duplicator - requires enrichment
SQUID
SQUID - requires enrichment
Stainless steel
On August 13, 1913, Harry Brearley melted a steel alloy containing 12.8% chromium at the Brown Firth research laboratory in Sheffield, England. He was...
Static random-access memory
Static random-access memory - requires enrichment
Steelpan
Steelpan - requires enrichment
Stem cell
Stem cells weren't invented—they were discovered by accident when conditions aligned to make the invisible visible. Ernest McCulloch and James Till at...
Stereo slide viewer
Stereo slide viewer - requires enrichment
Stereophonic sound
Stereophonic sound - requires enrichment
Stored-program computer
Shortly after 11 o'clock on the morning of June 21, 1948, the Small-Scale Experimental Machine—nicknamed 'Baby'—executed the first program ever run on...
Stratonautical space suit
Stratonautical space suit - requires enrichment
Strong focusing
Strong focusing - requires enrichment
Structure of DNA
On February 28, 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge and announced they had 'found the secret of life.' They ha...
Subtractive color film
Subtractive color film - requires enrichment
Sunscreen
Sunscreen emerged in 1928 when conditions aligned: UV radiation's dangers were scientifically documented, beach culture made sun exposure fashionable,...
Super heavy-lift launch vehicle
Super heavy-lift launch vehicle - requires enrichment
Supercomputer
In 1964, the CDC 6600 arrived at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, three times faster than any computer on Earth. Designed by Seymour Cray at Co...
Superconducting magnet
Superconducting magnet - requires enrichment
Superconductors
Superconductors - requires enrichment
Superheterodyne radio receiver
In February 1918, Edwin Howard Armstrong conceived the superheterodyne receiver while serving as a US Army Signal Corps officer in Paris. The American...
Supersonic airliner
Supersonic airliner - requires enrichment
Supersonic flight
On October 14, 1947, at 10:26 AM over the Mojave Desert, Captain Chuck Yeager's Mach meter jumped from 0.965 to 1.06. For fourteen minutes, the Bell X...
Surface-to-air missile
Surface-to-air missile - requires enrichment
Synchrotron
independently invented by Veksler in 1944 and MacMillan in 1945. First one built in 1945
Synthetic diamond
The same carbon atoms, whether formed 150 kilometers below Earth's surface over billions of years or in a Swedish laboratory over minutes, crystallize...
Synthetic rubber
Synthetic rubber - requires enrichment
Tachometric bombsight
Tachometric bombsight - requires enrichment
Tank
invented roughly at the same time, and roughly independently, in France and the UK during WWI, but it seems the Mark I dates from September 1915 and t...
Tape recorder
Tape recorder - requires enrichment
Technetium
First synthetic element
Technetium-99m radioactive tracing
Most common radioisotope in medicine
Television set
Television set - requires enrichment
Terrestrial television
Terrestrial television - requires enrichment
Theremin
Theremin - requires enrichment
Thermionic diode
first vacuum tube and first diode
Thin-film transistor
Thin-film transistor - requires enrichment
Three-point hitch
Three-point hitch - requires enrichment
Three-strip color film
Three-strip color film - requires enrichment
Thyratron
Thyratron - requires enrichment
Thyristor
Thyristor - requires enrichment
Tidal power station
Tidal power station - requires enrichment
Time-sharing
Time-sharing - requires enrichment
Titanium white
Titanium white - requires enrichment
Tokamak
The tokamak emerged in 1958 at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow not because Soviet physicists were uniquely brilliant, but because magnetic confineme...
Transformer read-only storage
Transformer read-only storage - requires enrichment
Transistor
The transistor didn't emerge from Bell Labs in 1947 because Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain were geniuses—it emerged because the adjacent possible had...
Transistor computer
Transistor computer - requires enrichment
Transistor radio
first transistor radio: the Regency TR-1. Prototypes were made earlier, in 1952
Transistorized electronic calculator
Transistorized electronic calculator - requires enrichment
Trautonium
Trautonium - requires enrichment
Triode
Triode - requires enrichment
Tritium
Tritium - requires enrichment
Tuberculosis vaccine
Tuberculosis vaccine - requires enrichment
Tuned radio frequency receiver
Tuned radio frequency receiver - requires enrichment
Tungsten filament
Tungsten filament - requires enrichment
Tunnel diode
Tunnel diode - requires enrichment
Turbocharger
Turbocharger - requires enrichment
Turbofan
The turbofan emerged on May 27, 1943, when Daimler-Benz ran the DB 007—a jet engine with a bypass fan that pushed air around the combustion core rathe...
Turbojet
Turbojet - requires enrichment
Turing machine
Abstraction reveals limits. This principle—reducing computation to its bare essentials to prove what cannot be computed—explains why Turing's theoreti...
TV remote control
TV remote control - requires enrichment
Two-color additive color film
Two-color additive color film - requires enrichment
Ultracentrifuge
Ultracentrifuge - requires enrichment
Ultramicroscope
Ultramicroscope - requires enrichment
Umami
Umami - requires enrichment
Uranium-235
Uranium-235 - requires enrichment
V8 engine
V8 engine - requires enrichment
Vacuum fluorescent display
The vacuum fluorescent display emerged from the intersection of vacuum tube technology and phosphor chemistry, but its transformation from European cu...
Van de Graaff generator
Van de Graaff generator - requires enrichment
Vector bombsight
Vector bombsight - requires enrichment
Ventilator
Ventilator - requires enrichment
Verneuil method
Verneuil method - requires enrichment
Vibraphone
Vibraphone - requires enrichment
Video camera tube
first video camera tube: the Image dissector. Soon replaced by the iconoscope and then other designs
Video game
arguably the first video game
Video tape recorder
Video tape recorder - requires enrichment
Vinyl record
Vinyl record - requires enrichment
Visible-light LED
Visible-light LED - requires enrichment
Visual receptive field
Visual receptive field - requires enrichment
Vocoder
Vocoder - requires enrichment
Von Neumann architecture
Von Neumann architecture - requires enrichment
Walkie-talkie
Walkie-talkie - requires enrichment
Wave–particle duality of matter
Wave–particle duality of matter - requires enrichment
Wearable pacemaker
Wearable pacemaker - requires enrichment
Weathering steel
Weathering steel - requires enrichment
White phosphorus munition
White phosphorus munition - requires enrichment
Wide-area computer network
Wide-area computer network - requires enrichment
Williams tube memory
Williams tube memory - requires enrichment
Wirephoto
Wirephoto - requires enrichment
X-Acto knife
The X-Acto knife emerged because surgeons rejected it. Sundel Doniger, a Polish immigrant, had founded a medical supply company in New York in 1917, m...
X-ray crystallography
X-ray crystallography - requires enrichment
X-ray tube
X-ray tube - requires enrichment
Xerography
Xerography - requires enrichment
Yagi–Uda antenna
Yagi–Uda antenna - requires enrichment
Zeppelin
first Zeppelin: LZ 1
Zippe-type centrifuge
Technique for uranium enrichment
Zoom lens
Zoom lens - requires enrichment