In 1994, engineer Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave was looking for a richer code than barcodes to track car parts. He took inspiration from the black and white stones of the game of Go. The three squares in the corners let the code be read from any angle, and it stays readable even when up to about 30% is damaged. The company chose not to charge for its use.
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.