Enigma, Germany's World War II cipher machine, offered an astronomical number of settings. But because of its design, an A never became an A. Codebreakers, first Polish and then British at Bletchley Park, exploited this quirk: by guessing a likely word, such as “weather”, they could rule out thousands of impossible positions. One small flaw brought down a system thought unbreakable.
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.