Around 1827, Nicéphore Niépce photographed the view from a window of his house in Burgundy, on a pewter plate coated with bitumen that hardens in light. The exposure lasted at least several hours, perhaps several days. The Sun had time to move across the sky, so the buildings appear lit from both sides at once. It is the oldest surviving camera photograph taken from nature.
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.