On 9 September 1947, operators of the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth stuck in a relay. They taped it into the logbook with the note “first actual case of bug being found”. The joke worked precisely because the word already existed: Edison was talking about “bugs” in his machines as early as the 1870s. The page, made famous by Grace Hopper, is kept at the Smithsonian.
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.