Knowledge Base
Inventions, innovations, and the surprising stories behind the devices and systems people use every day.
In 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth trapped in a relay, causing the machine to malfunction. Grace Hopper's team taped the moth into the logbook with the note "First actual case of bug being found." The word "bug" to describe a technical defect predates computers, but this incident helped cement its use in computing.
The fax machine traces its invention to 1843, when Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a patent for a device that could transmit images over telegraph wires. That is more than three decades before Alexander Graham Bell received his telephone patent in 1876. The technology developed slowly, but the basic idea of transmitting images over wires arrived before transmitted speech became practical.
The QWERTY keyboard layout was developed in the 1870s for early mechanical typewriters. The arrangement separated frequently paired letters to prevent metal typebars from jamming at high speed. The design outlasted the mechanical problem it was built to solve by well over a century and remains the global standard today.
The Global Positioning System was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense and became fully operational in 1995. Civilian access was limited by a deliberate signal degradation called Selective Availability until President Clinton ordered it switched off in May 2000, immediately improving civilian GPS accuracy from roughly 100 meters to about 20 meters overnight.
On October 29, 1969, engineers at UCLA attempted to send the word "LOGIN" to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute over ARPANET — the network that would become the internet. The system crashed after just the first two letters. The very first message ever transmitted over a computer network was, unintentionally, "LO." The full login was completed about an hour later after the system was rebooted.
During the early 1960s, NASA's Apollo program was so dependent on miniaturized electronics for its spacecraft that it purchased more than 60 percent of the entire U.S. production of integrated circuits. The demand helped drive down costs rapidly, making microchips affordable for commercial manufacturers and ultimately accelerating the personal computer revolution that followed.
In 1966, NASA commissioned the development of a material to improve crash protection and comfort in aircraft seats. The result — originally called "temper foam" — was a viscoelastic, open-cell material that absorbs pressure and returns to its original shape. NASA released the technology to the public in the 1980s. Today it is used globally in mattresses, medical equipment, helmets, and footwear.
In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web while working at CERN, the European physics laboratory in Geneva. His original goal was to make it easier for scientists around the world to share research documents. The first web server ran on a NeXT computer in his office, marked with a handwritten label in red: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!" CERN made the web's underlying code freely available in 1993, opening it to the public.
For over a century before electronic computers existed, a "computer" was a person — often a woman — whose job was to perform complex mathematical calculations by hand. NASA employed hundreds of human computers, many of them Black women, to calculate flight trajectories during the Space Race. Their work was essential to early American spaceflight, including John Glenn's orbital mission in 1962.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors that could fit on a microchip doubled approximately every two years, with costs falling in proportion. This observation — known as Moore's Law — proved remarkably accurate for decades, driving the exponential growth of computing power and the shrinking price of electronics. A smartphone today carries more computing power than NASA had available during the entire Apollo program.