On 17 December 1903, Orville Wright took off at the controls of the Flyer, the aircraft he had designed with his brother Wilbur. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered about 37 metres, less than the wingspan of a Boeing 747 or an Airbus A380. The brothers flew three more times that day, up to 260 metres in 59 seconds. Less than 66 years later, humans walked on the Moon.
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.