Beneath a smartphone's glass lies a grid of transparent electrodes that creates a weak electric field. Your finger, conductive because it is full of salty water, disturbs that field where it touches, and a chip works out the position, even for several fingers at once. That's why the screen ignores a plastic stylus or ordinary gloves, but responds to gloves with conductive threads.
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.