Unveiled in 1946, ENIAC weighed about 27 tonnes and had nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes. Programming it meant rewiring cables and setting thousands of switches, a job given to six women mathematicians. At the official unveiling, they weren't even introduced, and photos of them were later mistaken for models posing with the machine. Their role was only recognised in the 1990s.
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.