In December 1947, at Bell Labs, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain unveiled an odd contraption: a plastic triangle wrapped in gold foil, pressed onto a germanium crystal by a spring made from a bent paper clip. It amplified signals. This makeshift device, which earned them the 1956 Nobel Prize alongside William Shockley, is the ancestor of all modern electronics.
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.