Red LEDs have existed since 1962, with green ones soon after. But without blue, efficient white light was impossible. Despite the efforts of major labs, it took until the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the work of Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura on gallium nitride. Awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics, they made LED bulbs and backlit screens possible.
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.