In 1944, at Bletchley Park, engineer Tommy Flowers put Colossus into service, a machine with about 1,600 and later 2,400 vacuum tubes, built to crack the Lorenz cipher used by the German high command, not Enigma. After the war, most of the machines were dismantled and their existence kept secret until the 1970s. Hence the long-held belief that ENIAC came first.
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.