Cosmic rays striking the atmosphere create showers of particles, some of which pass through our devices. Occasionally one flips a bit in memory: a 0 becomes a 1. In a 2003 Belgian election, one candidate received exactly 4,096 extra votes — that's 2¹² — most likely a cosmic-ray bit flip. Servers use error-correcting memory to guard against it.
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.