Carving patterns just a few nanometres wide requires extreme ultraviolet light, which is absorbed so easily that even air stops it, so everything happens in a vacuum. Lithography machines create it by firing lasers at tin droplets around 50,000 times a second. Each droplet becomes a plasma dozens of times hotter than the Sun's surface. For years, only one company in the world could build these machines.
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.