In 1896, Henri Becquerel believed uranium salts gave off rays after being exposed to sunlight. But the Paris sky stayed overcast for days, so he put his salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer. Just in case, he developed the plate anyway: it was fogged, because uranium emits rays on its own, without any light. Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie.
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.