In October 1957, two young American physicists listened to the beeps of the first satellite, Sputnik. They noticed the frequency shifted as it approached and receded (the Doppler effect), and used this to reconstruct its entire orbit. A colleague then flipped the idea: if you know the orbit, you can calculate your own position on the ground. That principle led to the first satellite navigation systems.
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.