For centuries, the English word computer meant a person whose job was to do calculations. Entire teams, often made up of women, worked out astronomical tables, trajectories and orbits by hand. At the Harvard Observatory, one of them, Henrietta Leavitt, discovered around 1912 a law that made it possible to measure distances across the universe. Machines later inherited the name of the job.
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.