19 Gadgets That Changed The World
Every so often, a device comes along that changes the way we live our daily lives and things are never the same again. With today's digital technology, such devices may come more frequently than in the past, but our list revolutionary gadgets extends back two centuries.
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The personal computer debuted in the 1970s, but the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh set the standard for how they would operate from then on. A Mac-like computer had debuted a year earlier -- the Lisa -- but at nearly $10,000, it was a flop. At $2,495, the Macintosh wasn't exactly cheap by 1984 standards, but it revolutionized the way people interacted with their computers, establishing the interface and metaphor that every current OS uses.
We do love our gadgets. They serve as tokens of tribal identification, but they also make our lives easier. And sometimes they change everything. Who would have thought fifteen years ago that we could have our entire music libraries in our pockets to listen to whenever we wanted? For that matter, who would have thought 35 years ago that we could take music with us wherever we went?
Some of the 19 gadgets on our list are obsolete or nearly so, but even those changed the world by paving the way for what comes after. They represented a paradigm shift: they caused a permanent change in our idea of what was possible, and they created new standards that later devices had to meet.
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For our money -- get it? -- this is probably the most revolutionary gadget in the list. It's hard to believe there was a time when the money you had in hand by 3 PM on a Friday afternoon was all the money you had for the weekend. Experiments with cash-dispensing and deposit-taking machines at individual banks started in the early sixties, but it was in 1963 that the first networked ATM made its debut. Nightlife would never be the same.
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These days we can always know where we are and how to get where we're going, thanks to the portable satellite receiver known as a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit. The system was first conceived by the U.S. military in the 1970s, and the satellites that let the units triangulate their locations were launched between 1989 and 1994. Magellan claims to have been first out with a hand-held unit, in 1989.
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First introduced in 1963, the VCR may now be almost obsolete, but it revolutionized Americans' relationship with their TV entertainment. We no longer had to make sure we watched something when it was first broadcast or risk missing it forever, and it enabled us to watch our shows whenever we wanted rather than when the networks thought we should.
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It might come as a surprise that the microwave has been around for more than 60 years, but in fact, there was a commercial model (almost 6 feet tall and weighing 750 pounds) on the market in 1947, two years after a chocolate bar melted in the pocket of an engineer working around a source of radio waves. College students and harried homemakers everywhere owe their ability to eat something resembling real food to that happy accident in 1945.
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Our modern world would not exist without the personal computer, full stop. (For one thing, you wouldn't be reading this.) It's hard to settle on a firm date for its invention. The first commercial unit that didn't require assembly from a kit made its appearance in France in 1972. That Micral N would be followed by the Commodore PET and the Apple II in 1977 and in 1981 by the machine that lent its name to the whole category: the IBM PC.
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"Mobile" phones were available for cars in the mid sixties, but it wasn't until 1973 that the first truly hand-held model came along (not that it would fit in your pocket). The first call was made by Motorola researcher Martin Cooper to his rival at Bell Labs, Dr. Joel S. Engel. Current estimates are that there are more than 4.5 billion mobile phones in use today.
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The Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii owe their existence to the debut in 1977 of the Atari 2600. There were other video gaming systems for home use before that, but they were dedicated units that were hardwired to play only one or two games -- basically, arcade machines for the home. The 2600 introduced the idea of a single machine that could play multiple games (then stored on cartridges) and led to the $20 billion industry we know today.
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If there's a theme to these gadgets, it's portability. In 1979, Sony revolutionized our expectations of how we relate to music by giving us a way to have our choice available wherever we were, without having to rely on the radio. As with other devices on this list, the Walkman and the tape cassettes it played are almost obsolete now, but they laid the foundation that today's MP3 players could build on.
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The battery is the sine qua non for most of the other gadgets on our list. We love gadgets that are small and portable, and they wouldn't be possible without a small, portable source of power. Alessandro Volta managed to put together a voltaic pile -- literally, a pile of metal disks separated by wet cloth -- as early as 1800, but it wasn't until 1881 that the dry battery came along, making it possible to carry a source of electricity around in your pocket.
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The digital camera meant photography was no longer a relatively expensive, materials-intensive activity and enabled the sea of photos we're awash in today. One of the leading photo sharing sites, Flickr, holds upwards of 4 billion photos, and an estimated 2.5 billion photos are uploaded to Facebook every month. The first true digital camera -- one that saved images as a digital file -- was the Fuji DS-1P, featured in a 1989 issue of Popular Mechanics, while the first commercially available model in the U.S., the Dycam Model 1, came on the market in 1990.
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The first wireless television remote came out in 1956, operating via ultrasonic waves and actually clicked. It was the forerunner of today's couch potato talisman and created the expectation that we shouldn't have to touch our appliances to enjoy them. In fact, some modern remotes have more buttons than the devices they control, and still no one has figured out how to avoid losing them. But no one gets up to change the channel anymore, and for that we can thank the remote.
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In the same way that digital cameras have led to an explosion of still images, digital camcorders have led to seemingly every event being recorded for posterity. They've brought down politicians and revealed official misbehavior; they've also let us watch teenage girls unpack their shopping bags. The first shoulder-carried video camera that didn't require a separate recording deck debuted in 1983, but the market really took off with the hand-held Sony Handycam in 1989. Video cameras that fit in your shirt pocket date to the introduction of the Pure Digital Point & Shoot in 1996, now known as the Flip.
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When the Game Boy was released in 1989, at $90, it gave every kid and every gamer a way to entertain themselves wherever they were, fulfilling two qualities of a revolutionary gadget: changed expectations and portability. As of 2008, the Game Boy and its successor, the Game Boy Color, were reported to have sold more than 118 million units worldwide. And thanks to that, untold numbers of car and plane trips have gone much more smoothly.
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The pocket-sized digital assistant put your contact lists, to-do lists and calendars in your pocket in 1996. The Palm is yet another example of a device that not only did something new, but also created the expectation that other devices would be able to do the same. The company stumbled in its attempt to catch up with the burgeoning smartphone market and has recently been acquired by HP with an outcome that remains to be seen. But Palm owners still speak lovingly of them, earning the device a spot on our list.
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The DVR took the trend started by the VCR to another level. Providing the same time-shifting and programming choice capabilities as the VCR, the DVR was easier to program and eliminated the need to rewind a tape to find the show you wanted to watch. The first DVRs were introduced in 1998 by TiVo (whose name has practically become a synonym for their use) and ReplayTV. They've raised what we demand from our TV service to another level and put pressure on networks and advertisers to meet our new standards.
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One can object that there were other MP3 players before Apple's iPod, and one would be correct: the Audio Highway Listen Up was the first on the market, in 1996. But how many people did you know that had one before the iPod arrived on the scene in 2001? The integration with an easy way to buy and download music plus the gadget's iconic advertising vaulted the iPod over all other contenders and established it as the leader in a category it still dominates.
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From its humble beginnings as a two-way pager in 1999, Research In Motion's BlackBerry has grown to become an icon of corporate life. The familiar cell phone-plus-email device was introduced in 2002 and quickly became a must-have gadget for connected workers. It still commands nearly a third of the U.S. smartphone market, despite strong challenges from the iPhone and Android devices.
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The iPhone makes this list because it's so much more than a mobile phone. When it debuted in 2007, it revolutionized the notion of a web-enabled phone and launched a million -- well, several hundred thousand -- apps. It's done the most so far of any gadget to fulfill a gadget-lover's dream of a full-fledged computer in your pocket and as such, it defined a new category.
FURTHER READING:
The iPhone makes this list because it's so much more than a mobile phone. When it debuted in 2007, it revolutionized the notion of a web-enabled phone and launched a million -- well, several hundred thousand -- apps. It's done the most so far of any gadget to fulfill a gadget-lover's dream of a full-fledged computer in your pocket and as such, it defined a new category.
FURTHER READING:
The personal computer debuted in the 1970s, but the 1984 introduction of the Macintosh set the standard for how they would operate from then on. A Mac-like computer had debuted a year earlier -- the Lisa -- but at nearly $10,000, it was a flop. At $2,495, the Macintosh wasn't exactly cheap by 1984 standards, but it revolutionized the way people interacted with their computers, establishing the interface and metaphor that every current OS uses.
We do love our gadgets. They serve as tokens of tribal identification, but they also make our lives easier. And sometimes they change everything. Who would have thought fifteen years ago that we could have our entire music libraries in our pockets to listen to whenever we wanted? For that matter, who would have thought 35 years ago that we could take music with us wherever we went?
Some of the 19 gadgets on our list are obsolete or nearly so, but even those changed the world by paving the way for what comes after. They represented a paradigm shift: they caused a permanent change in our idea of what was possible, and they created new standards that later devices had to meet.
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