In the mid-19th century, extracting aluminium from its ore cost a fortune. Napoleon III reportedly kept aluminium cutlery for his most honoured guests, while the others made do with gold. Everything changed in 1886, when Charles Martin Hall in the United States and Paul Héroult in France independently invented the same electrolysis process. Coincidence: both were born in 1863 and died in 1914.
In 1843, inventor Alexander Bain patented a way to send images over telegraph wires using synchronized pendulums. By the 1860s, a commercial fax service was already linking cities. The telephone wasn't patented until 1876, more than three decades after that first fax patent. The fax is really a child of the telegraph age.
On 8 October 1958, in Stockholm, 43-year-old Arne Larsson received the very first implanted pacemaker. The device, designed by engineer Rune Elmqvist and implanted by surgeon Åke Senning, worked for only a few hours and had to be replaced. Larsson went on to receive more than twenty pacemakers in his lifetime. He died in 2001 aged 86, outliving both the engineer and the surgeon.