The stud-and-tube system of Lego bricks was patented in 1958, and bricks made since then still fit together. For the grip to be neither too tight nor too loose, the moulds are machined to a precision of a few thousandths of a millimetre. It's a striking example of mass production: tens of billions of pieces every year, almost all of them interchangeable.
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.