Curated category
American inventions
- USBUSB, the Universal Serial Bus, sits at the back of nearly every device you own. In 1996, when the first specification launched, a typical desktop computer…
- Bass guitarThe bass guitar sits at the bottom of the guitar family, anchoring the sound of popular music for decades with a voice no other instrument quite matches.
- Liquid-crystal displayA liquid-crystal display does something strange for a screen. It makes no light of its own. The liquid crystals at its heart do not glow.
- Electric guitarThe electric guitar was invented in 1932, and the first one ever sold to the public was a cast aluminium lap steel nicknamed the "Frying Pan".
- Debit cardA debit card pulls money directly from a bank account the moment a purchase is made. No credit extended, no bill arriving at the end of the month.
- Commodore 64The Commodore 64 went on sale in August 1982 for $595, and within months Atari engineers were standing at its Consumer Electronics Show booth with their…
- Multitrack recordingMultitrack recording is the technology that made the modern sound of recorded music possible. Before it existed, every musician, singer, and orchestra member…
- KeroseneKerosene powers the jet engines that carry people across oceans, and as of July 2023 the world burns roughly 5,500,000 barrels of it every day.
- SupermarketThe supermarket is so familiar that most people stop seeing it. On the 4th of August 1930, inside a 6,000-square-foot former garage in Jamaica, Queens, a man…
- StoryboardIn the early 1930s, Walt Disney Productions developed the storyboard process as it is known today. Before this moment, most filmmakers shot their films like…
- SynthesizerIn 1969, Mort Garson used a Moog to compose a soundtrack for the televised footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. That single choice linked electronic music and…
- Breakfast cerealBreakfast cereal sits in nearly every kitchen cabinet in the Western world, yet its origins trace back to a hand oats grinder in the back room of a small…
- Coca-ColaCoca-Cola first sold for five cents a glass at Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, on the 8th of May 1886. The man behind it was a Confederate colonel…
- AmigaThe Amiga arrived in July 1985 with a party at Lincoln Center in New York, and Andy Warhol was on stage drawing a digital portrait of Debbie Harry.
- TransistorThe transistor sits inside your phone, your laptop, your car, your refrigerator. It is so small that billions of them fit on a chip the size of a fingernail.
- Credit cardA credit card lets its holder buy goods, pay for services, or withdraw cash on credit, then repay the debt later. That simple deferral has made it one of the…
- Nuclear weaponNuclear weapons are explosive devices capable of destroying a city with a yield measured in the low kilotons of TNT. Nine sovereign states are believed to…
- Radiocarbon datingRadiocarbon dating is the method that gave humanity its first reliable clock for the deep past. Imagine holding a fragment of bone from an ancient burial, or…
- Polio vaccineIn 1988 polio paralysed an estimated 350,000 people in a single year. By 2018 the worldwide count of reported cases had fallen to 33.
- Random-access memoryRandom-access memory, the technology most people simply call RAM, is the reason your computer can hold a thought. It is the working space where a machine…
- JavaScriptJavaScript was born in ten days. In the spring of 1995, Brendan Eich sat down at Netscape to build a scripting language for the web.
- Solar cellA solar cell begins with light and ends with electricity, and that transformation happens in silence, with no moving parts.
- AirplaneThe airplane is a fixed-wing aircraft pushed forward by thrust from a jet engine, a propeller, or a rocket engine. Every year, commercial aviation carries…
- Curiosity (rover)Curiosity is a Mars rover the size of a car, and on the 6th of August 2012, it arrived on another planet in a way no machine had ever done before.
- Rapid transitRapid transit moves more people through a city than almost any other machine on earth, and yet most riders never see how strange its engineering really is.
- Space tourismSpace tourism is human space travel for recreational purposes, and it began in earnest on a day in April 2001 when an American businessman named Dennis Tito…
- Video game consoleThe video game console is an electronic device built around a single promise: connect it to a television and play. That simple premise, first realized by…
- Adobe FlashAdobe Flash once lived inside nearly every computer on Earth. By 2005, more machines worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other web media format…
- NTSCNTSC, the National Television System Committee standard, gave the United States its first unified analog television system in 1941.
- InternetThe word internetted appeared as early as 1849, meaning interconnected or interwoven, long before anyone could send a message across the planet in a…
- TelevisionIn 2013-79% of the world's households owned a television set. This was a medium that began as a spinning disk with holes punched into it, a contraption that…
- Integrated circuitA modern integrated circuit can pack many billions of transistors into an area the size of a human fingernail. That single fact captures a transformation…
- LaserOn the 16th of May 1960, Theodore H. Maiman switched on the first functioning laser at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California.
- Personal computerA personal computer is a computer designed for one person to operate directly, not a technician, administrator, or company.
- Field-programmable gate arrayA field-programmable gate array, or FPGA, is a circuit that you can rewrite after it leaves the factory. Most chips are fixed at the moment they are made.
- Video gameOn the 25th of January 1947, two men named Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a "cathode-ray tube amusement device." Inspired by…
- Space telescopeSpace telescopes changed what humanity could see of the universe, and the idea began with a single paper. In 1946, American theoretical astrophysicist Lyman…
- Golden Dome (missile defense system)On the 27th of January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the United States Armed Forces to construct a missile shield before…