In 1839, Edmond Becquerel, aged 19, was working in his father's laboratory. He noticed that an electrode immersed in a solution produced more current when exposed to light. It took until 1954 for Bell Labs to make a genuinely useful silicon solar cell, with an efficiency of about 6%. The best commercial panels now exceed 20%.
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.