Around 1945, engineer Percy Spencer was working on magnetrons, the tubes that generate radar waves. He noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. Intrigued, he tried corn kernels, which popped, then an egg, which exploded. The first commercial oven, launched in 1947, stood about 1.8 metres tall and weighed over 300 kg.
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.