In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman published a revolutionary idea: two strangers can agree on a shared secret by exchanging only public messages. The RSA algorithm followed in 1977. But in 1997, British intelligence revealed that three of its mathematicians, including Clifford Cocks, had found equivalent methods in the early 1970s and kept them secret. This principle now protects every secure connection.
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.