10 Little-Known Technological Firsts

When we think of “technology,” we generally think of our PC, or Smartphone, or electric nose hair trimmer. (We really like those.) But we tend to forget that the most mundane, taken-for-granted things were once cutting-edge technologies, and that the world didn’t come pre-populated with cars, radios, and car radios. Here are ten interesting technological firsts:

10

The First Public Radio Broadcast

January 13, 1910




Lee DeForest didn’t exactly invent radio—no one person did that—but he did invent threading, which greatly improved the existing technology, He also coined the term “radio,” which has stuck around for quite some time now. In 1907, DeForest was experimenting successfully with ship-to-shore radio communication, and claiming that he’d soon be broadcasting opera performances in all of New York City—and in 1910, he actually did it.

The first public radio performance was broadcast on January 13 of that year, from the Metropolitan Opera House, with performances of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, featuring famed tenor Enrico Caruso. The signal was broadcast with a five hundred watt transmitter, and was heard as far away as Bridgeport, Connecticut.

While the quality was obviously poor (with the New York Times reports that the static “kept the homeless song waves from finding themselves”—whatever that means), reporters were nevertheless impressed, and interest in the medium immediately began to grow.



9

Mary Ward, The First To Die In A Car Accident


Mary Ward was a female scientist at a time when they practically didn’t exist. She was fascinated with . . . Well, tiny things—and as a child would draw ants and other insects in great detail using a magnifying glass. She soon moved on to microscopes, and by her twenties was publishing her sketches of tiny things; her first book was appropriately titled “Sketches With The Microscope.”

Mary’s family had a strong scientific bent, too: a couple of her cousins built an early steam-powered automobile, which they liked to rumble around in at hell-raising speeds approaching five miles an hour. Out for a ride with them one day, Mary was thrown from the car while it was going around a bend; she fell directly under a wheel and broke her neck, thereby becoming the very first automobile fatality.

While her death was certainly noteworthy, her life was as well. She was a pioneer in microscopy, and shattered a glass ceiling or two for women in the scientific community.



8

WTBS, The First Basic Cable Network



In 1972, HBO became the first pay cable network. It was also the first to use a newly approved satellite-based distribution system, distributing its signal to cable operators nationwide. It was the only station to use this distribution system until 1975, when a local Atlanta UHF station owned by one Ted Turner decided it wanted to play, too.

Originally called WCTG, Turner’s station became the first non-pay network to broadcast over satellite on December 17, 1976. Its signal was beamed to four cable operators in Nebraska, Virginia, Alabama and Kansas, and showed Deep Waters already thirty minutes in progress.

The station changed its call letters to WTBS (for Turner Broadcasting System) in 1979. It was the first “Superstation,” meaning a local station transmitted by satellite to cable providers. TBS minus the W is still part of most cable packages today, and it was the very first basic cable channel.



7

Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, The First Album Released On CD




For many of you, the Compact Disc was the dominant musical format of your childhood. Vinyl records, the format of choice for over thirty years up until the ’eighties, were outsold buy the CD for the first time in 1988, and CDs were not outsold by another format—digital releases (and just barely)—until 2011.

The CDP-101, the world’s first commercially-available CD player, was rolled out in Japan on October 1, 1982, and the first CD was released the same day: Billy Joel’s 1978 classic, 52nd Street. It would be another five months before any more titles (sixteen of them, all of the CBS Records catalog) would be released, coinciding with the US debut of the player.

Why Sony chose Billy Joel to introduce the technology to the Japanese public is a mystery, but they could have done worse—52nd Street contains now-iconic tunes like Big Shot, Honesty and My Life, and it’s a damn good album.



6

Telstar I, The First Communications Satellite




The first privately-sponsored space launch on July 10, 1962, led to the first global television broadcast two days later. Telstar 1, a satellite owned by AT&T, was launched into orbit on that day by NASA at Cape Canaveral—the result of an unprecedented cooperation between those two entities as well as Bell (who built the satellite), the General Post Office of Britain, and France Telecom.

Images were relayed between Andover, Maine, and Brittany, France—and they were broadcast on both sides of the Atlantic for eighteen minutes. The first image was of a waving American flag, followed by portions of a press conference held by President Kennedy and shots of a Phillies-Cubs baseball game.

Telstar I handled hundreds of broadcast, phone, and fax transmissions for four months until cosmic radiation rendered it inoperable. This cosmic radiation came from the high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the US the day before its launch, which someone really failed to think through.

5

The First Commercial Flight

January 1, 1914


The first flight between two cities—and the first to carry a paying customer—was between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida, on New Years’ Day 1914. The journey, which would take a couple of hours by ship or at least four by train, lasted a scant twenty-five minutes or so; its passenger was St. Petersburg businessman and former mayor Abram Pheil (pronounced “fail”, we hope) who won the seat at auctions and paid the modern day equivalent of five thousand dollars for the privilege.


The pilot, twenty-five-year-old Tony Jannus, was a barnstormer and test pilot for military aircraft, who was already a somewhat popular public figure; his involvement, and the buzz generated by the auction, combined to raise public interest in the “airplane” as a method of travel.

And we’re glad for that; going home for the holidays is enough of a pain without having to spend three days on a damn steamship.



4

Xerox Alto, The First Graphical User Interface




The first commercially available home computer with anything resembling a familiar GUI—a graphical user interface, with windows, folders and a mouse—was the Apple Macintosh in 1984, which was famously adapted (seed: ripped off) by Microsoft for its Windows OS. But don’t feel too bad for Apple; the heavy lifting in designing the interface wasn’t done by their engineers, but by Xerox.

Xerox researchers internally debuted the Alto in 1972, and its features read like a list of everything standard in PCs today. Bit-mapped graphics, icons, windows, and the first-ever mouse—oh, and the Alto was also the first computer to feature something called an Ethernet local area networking protocol.

Being mainly in the photocopier business, Xerox chose not to bring the machine to the market in order to focus instead on its bread-and-butter—a decision which every single player in the personal computer industry would roundly applaud years later.



3

Video Station, The First Video Rental Store




In late 1977, Magnetic Video became the first company to market theatrical releases on Betamax and VHS videotapes. Their library consisted of fifty films—classics like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid and The Sound Of Music—in both formats, and they quickly began doing pretty well selling their videos by mail order.

George Atkinson was the owner of Home Theater Systems, a Super 8 film and projector rental company in L.A. Already being in the business of renting movies, Atkinson had a bright idea: he plunked down a pretty decent amount of cash for one Beta and one VHS copy of each of Magnetic’s fifty titles, opened a tiny storefront on Wilshire Boulevard, and took out an ad in the L.A. Times announcing “Videos For Rent”—the first time anyone had ever done so.

The cost was initially steep: fifty bucks for a year’s membership, one hundred for a lifetime’s, plus ten bucks a day for each rental (late ‘seventies money, remember). But the venture was a success, and Atkinson eventually licensed more than six hundred Video Station franchises—becoming the very first video rental chain.



2

Marsh Supermarket, The First Supermarket With A Barcode Scanner


Various inventors tried and failed to come up with a workable automated product scanning system throughout the ’forties, ’fifties and ’sixties. In 1972, a Kroger in Cincinnati experimented with a “bulls-eye” style code—but at the time, a committee was being formed within the grocery industry to produce a standard. IBM’s proposal, for what would become known as the UPC or Uniform Product Code, won out.

The first ever UPC scanner was installed at one checkout station in a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in June of 1974. At 8:01 in the morning on June 26th, a ten-pack of Wrigley’s gum became the first item to ever be scanned. The very same pack of gum now resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum Of American History, which begs the question: who bought the gum, and why didn’t they chew it?



1

CERN’s “World Wide Web Project,” The First Website




“The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” So reads the text at the top of the first website ever to be published, by Tim Berners-Lee—the inventor of the World Wide Web—on August 6, 1991.

The page (originally at Info. CERN. each) was created on a NeXT workstation at CERN labs in Geneva, Switzerland. It pretty much just states that the “Web” is now a thing that exists, and lists some of the people involved with the project and some technical information.

Since nobody but Berners-Lee and his CERN colleagues had any software resembling web browsers, most of the outside world remained ignorant of this ridiculous monumental development until the Mosaic browser debuted in 1993.

The page has been preserved, and though it looks like something a grade schooler could whip up in ten minutes today, it led directly to every website that has ever existed, including the incredibly awesome one you’re reading right now. The server it resided on is still powered on at CERN to this day, with a sign reading, “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!”

Do not, indeed. Father of all web servers, we salute you.

10 Old Wives’ Tales That Are True

Most old wives’ tales are just that: tales. Nobody really believes money spiders bring money, or pulling a face when the wind changes direction will curse you to a life of looking like Carrot Top. Trouble is, we’ve gotten so used to being skeptical we now dismiss the handful of tales that are demonstrably true.

10

Colds

Old Wives’ Tale: The Cold Causes Colds

As anyone who’s ever heard of science knows, the common cold is nothing more than a bunch of viruses living it up in your snot glands. Since low temperatures can’t cause viruses to spontaneously appear, being cold can’t cause colds, right?

Maybe not, but it can definitely cause the symptoms. As far back as 2005, researchers at Cardiff University were testing the correlation between temperature and illness. By making a bunch of people stand in icy water while a control group waited in the warm, they found that those exposed to the cold were more likely to catch one than those who weren’t. Specifically, twenty-nine percent of the ‘cold feet’ group developed a cold in the next few days, compared to nine percent for the control. So what gives?

Well, according to the study director, most of us spend the winter months with mild infections we don’t even notice. But lower our body temperature and our defense system take five, allowing the virus to go supernova. It’s one of those weird situations where both science and your Green managed to be simultaneously right and wrong.

9

Apples

Old Wives’ Tale: An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

Nobody seriously believes apples are a magical illness-fighting wonder fruit. Good for you, maybe; delicious in a pie, absolutely—but life saver? Come on.

Not so fast. According to researchers at Ohio State University, apples may help fight off everything from cancer to strokes. Thanks to something called phytochemicals, eating a whole bunch allows your body to break down cholesterol twenty percent faster, freeing up your arteries to do important stuff like keeping you alive. This in turn decreases your chance of taking a fatal nosedive into your morning pizza; while increasing your lung capacity to Brian Blessed proportions. And while we’re on the subject of fruit . . .

8

Going Bananas

Old Wives’ Tale: Bananas Make Boys

Let’s say you and your partner are trying for a boy. You don’t fancy IVF, but are willing to play loose with nature’s rules. What do you do?

You could try eating all the bananas. A comprehensive study by Oxford University found a high potassium intake around breakfast time increases your chance of having a boy. And guess what? Bananas are the kings of potassium. From a sample of 740 mothers, the researchers found that those on the banana diet had a fifty-six percent chance of having a boy, compared to forty-five percent on a separate deed. An eleven percent difference may not sound like much, but holy hell, when you consider the amount of children born each year, that’s potentially quite significant.

7

Full Moon

Old Wives’ Tale: Seizures Increase during a Full Moon

The ‘Transylvania Hypothesis’ is a theory that states weird stuff happens around a full moon. Since the dawn of time people has reported dogs going mad, cats getting their love on and seizure rates shooting through the roof. So in 2004, a bunch of researchers got together to measure the phenomenon and found . . . Nothing.

So much for Dracula theory, right? Wrong. Five years later, Dr Sallie Baxendale decided her colleague’s research sucked so she started her own study. By correlating for cloud cover, she found that seizures really did increase during a full moon—but only so long as sufferers could see it. The theory is that the seizures are triggered by the super-luminosity of a full moon, rather than moon magic or vampires. Which is kinda disappointing, come to think about it.

6

Long Labor

Old Wives’ Tale: A Long Labor Means a Boy

This one just sounds like bull. Why would squeezing a tiny male fetus through a narrow hole take longer than a female one? Honestly, I have no idea. But for some reason it happens.

A comprehensive Irish study logged the circumstances of over 8,000 births and found boys simply took longer to deliver than girls. At the same time, mothers delivering male children were slightly more likely to run into complications and need either forceps or a caesarean. Again, no-one’s really sure why this happens—physical differences aren’t pronounced enough to account for the swing. After three years of intensive research the best we’ve managed to come up with is ‘it just does’.

5

Hot Baths

Old Wives’ Tale: Hot Baths Make You Impotent

After a day’s work, nothing is more relaxing than taking five in your gym’s hot tub. It lowers stress, relaxes tense muscles, and kills your sperm. Truly.

Exposing your boys to just thirty minutes of ‘wet heat’ a week is enough to lower your sperm count to almost non-existence. In a Californian study, doctors recruited a bunch of hot tub addicts and asked them to steer clear of hot baths for a year or so. After just three months, nearly half the guys involved saw their sperm count increase by 491 percent—a transformation that puts them on the ‘John Shaft’ scale of sexual potency. It’s not just Jacuzzi’s either, various studies have also linked TV watching and being French with a low sperm count. So yeah, if you want to ever conceive, give up doing everything you love now.

4

Gaydar

Old Wives’ Tale: You Can Tell Someone’s Sexuality By Looking At Them

We all have that friend who won’t shut up about their ‘awesome’ gaydar, even though in 2013 we all know that gay people look like everyone else. Well, bad news—turns out, science is on your annoying friend’s side.

In 2000, a Californian study found a correlation between finger length and sexuality. Specifically, they concluded that men with short index and long ring fingers tended to be straight, while those with fingers of similar length tended to be gay. Even weirder was a 2004 study that found you could tell if someone was gay by looking at their hair. According to the paper, an anti-clockwise swirl around your crown means you’re more likely to enjoy same-sex action. Before you go rushing out to check everyone you know, bear in mind the percentage of gay people with the anti-clockwise swirl was under thirty. It’s only when compared to the 8.4 percent of straight people that it becomes significant—though probably less reliable than just simply asking.

3

Chicken Soup

Old Wives’ Tale: Chicken Soup Fights Colds

Chicken soup really does fight colds. According to multiple studies, it’s basically Kryptonite for respiratory viruses, only easier to come by and vastly more delicious. Like so much on this list, scientists stop short of telling us exactly why or how, but there are a couple of theories. One is that it somehow slows your white blood cells, reducing the symptoms of your immune system. Another is that the compound Carnosine soothes inflammation while strengthening the little hair follicles in your nose that look gross but are actually preventing you from catching all the viruses. So . . . Chalk another point up to grandmothers.

2

Ho Ho Ho

Old Wives’ Tale: Fat People Are Jolly

Aside from being dead, John Candy and John Belushi both have one thing in common: they’re hilarious. Ever since Animal House, we’ve known with fundamental certainty that fat guys are life-loving party animals, no matter how often we hear about the link between obesity and depression. And guess what? Science has proved us right!

Well, sort of. A study published late last year concluded variants of the gene FTO raised the risk of obesity while lowering risk of depression in certain people. While that’s great news for a fat guy with those genes, it’s less reassuring for those whose waistline has nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with McDonalds. Also, it’s worth noting that the subjects’ risk of depression was only eight percent lower than those without the gene—which isn’t a great payoff, statistically speaking.

1

Nightmares

Old Wives’ Tale: Cheese Gives You Weird Dreams

In a list of ‘scientifically valuable studies’, one funded by the British Cheese Board about cheese dreams would probably rank on an entirely separate list simply labelled ‘no.’ But luckily their findings were awesome, so I’m including it anyway.

According to the ‘study’, 200 volunteers stuffed their faces with cheese before bed and recorded their dreams the following morning. Amazingly, the cheese they ate appeared to affect the type of dreams they had. Those who chowed down on Stilton reported intense, weird dreams, while Red Leicester lovers had nostalgic dreams about the past. Those who ate Cheddar were more likely to dream about celebrities. If this all sounds like a stupid PR stunt to get you buying cheese, that’s because it probably is—but any press release that includes the words ‘one man reported having a drunken conversation with a dog’ needs to be seen by as many people as possible.

Insects That Belong in an Alien World

10 Insects That Belong in an Alien World

It’s easy to forget sometimes, but nature is full of wonders. There are more than one million different species of insect on the planet—that we know of—which accounts for over half the world’s living organisms.

So yeah, some of them are bound to be pretty strange. Freakily strange. So strange, in fact, that you’ll probably want to forget they exist once you find out about them. Unfortunately, this is Listverse, and strange is what we do. Here are ten insects stranger than anything science fiction could ever dream up.

10

Puss Moth Caterpillar

With their soft bodies and high protein content, caterpillars are usually incredibly vulnerable. To fend off predators, they often resort to scare tactics. Sometimes it’s in the form of bright, flashy colors; sometimes it’s in the form of mimicry—looking or acting like another, more dangerous insect. The Puss Moth caterpillar opts for mimicry, forming a bizarre looking “face” that resembles a vertebrate face scary enough to send most curious predators the other way.

The caterpillars are bright green and will often have a row of white spots on either side of their body. On the head is a pair of black “eye spots”—directly above a gaping “mouth” through which the true head of the caterpillar protrudes. The effect is startling, but it’s even creepier in action: if the caterpillar is touched anywhere on its body, it will instantly turn its “face” directly towards the attacker. Touch it somewhere else, and the head follows you, like a Mona Lisa from hell.

And if that doesn’t work, it can always spray out a mist of formic acid from the two horns on its back.

9

Devil’s Flower Mantis

Idolomantis Diabolica

One of the largest types of praying mantis, the Devil’s Flower Mantis is also one of the strangest. And that’s saying a lot when you’re talking about praying mantids. Females of the species can measure up to 5 inches (13 cm) long, and have developed a range of natural coloring that allows them to mimic the Devil’s Flower, a type of orchid.

Mantids are predators, and their hunting style usually involves sitting motionless until their prey comes within reach, and then whipping their forearms out at lightning speed to snag flies, beetles, even, in some cases, birds. The Devil’s Flower Mantis uses color patterns that mimic a flower to actually lure its prey within reach.

8

Brazilian Treehopper

The image shown here is a model created by Alfred Keller, a German sculptor, in the 1950′s. But don’t let the fact that it’s a model fool you—the Brazilian Treehopper is definitely a real insect, and it’s barely even the strange looking member of the treehopper family.

Similar to cicadas, treehopper insects are sort of like the Addams family of the insect world. Many of them sport some sort of odd structures on their backs, and we’re still not sure what the point of most of them are. In the case of the Brazilian Treehopper, the ball-like appendages are hollow chitin, and may be for the sole purpose of making it harder to eat.

7

Dasychira Pudibunda Caterpillar

Also known as the Pale Tussock, the Dasychira Pudibunda is a moth native to Denmark. Its bright yellow caterpillars are covered in patches of spiky hair that resemble porcupine quills, and along the center of their back is another row of hair tufts, one on each segment of its body, culminating in a large black or brown spine at the rear end.

From a distance the caterpillar resembles a sponge, but up close, where you can actually see the double row of mandibles, it’s not quite so cuddly. Every now and then, Pale Tussock populations will explode, resulting in a carpet of these caterpillars covering the trees. In 1988, a wave of Pale Tussocks demolished 20 hectares of beech forest in Denmark.

6

Extatosoma Tiaratum

Anybody who’s ever seen Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom should instantly recognize this monstrosity, commonly referred to as the Giant Prickly Stick Insect. As the largest known stick insect, the extatosoma tiaratum can reach lengths of 8 inches (20 cm) and is usually covered with large thorny spikes, which double as both camouflage and defensive armor.

Most of the time this insect attempts to blend in with its surroundings, but if it feels threatened it will rear up on its hind legs and spread out its front legs, like a scorpion. Interestingly enough, it also releases a chemical that is meant to scare away predators. To humans, it smells like peanut butter.

5

Pipevine Swallowtail Caterpillar

The Pipevine Swallowtail is a beautiful fluorescent blue butterfly that’s commonly found in North and Central America. Its larvae, on the other hand, is an armored congealed-blood-red caterpillar with tinted visor shades for eyes and a quadruple row of blunt horns running across its body.

The caterpillars live in groups while they are young, but over time they will wander off on their own before entering the chrysalis stage. They also change color as they grow, shifting from red to black, while their horns take on a bright orange hue. The bright colors are a warning—Pipevine Swallowtail caterpillars feed primarily on the Pipevine, a poisonous plant, and retain the toxins from the leaves in their own bodies.

4

Atlas Moth

Most of the time, it’s the caterpillar of a moth species that looks the strongest, while the moth itself is drab and uninteresting. Apparently, the Atlas moth didn’t get the memo. With a 10 inch (25 cm) wingspan, Atlas moths are believed to be the largest moth species on the planet. They also have a very unique trait—the front tips of their wings almost perfectly resemble a snake head poised to strike.

Nicknamed the Cobra moth for obvious reasons, Atlas moths are found in Southeast Asia, where they’re farmed for their silk.

3

Tailed Emperor Butterfly Caterpillar

Take a trip to the east coast of Australia around March or April and you might run into one of these strange creatures. The caterpillar of the Tailed Emperor butterfly looks pretty normal—from the neck down. Its head, though, definitely secures it a spot on this list.

From abroad, armor-plated forehead extends four bizarre horns that would be more at home on a dinosaur than anything from this millennium. The butterflies lay their eggs in groups, usually on Illawarra Flame trees, and the alien caterpillars emerge sometime around late March.

2

Spiny Flower Mantis

Pseudocreobotra wahlbergi

Another incredible looking mantis, the Spiny Flower Mantis (Pseudocreobotra wahlbergi) is, again, a flower mantis, pulling its bizarre ornamentation from the appearance of a flower. This mantis is very small, measuring only 1.5 inches (38 mm) and is found in select locations in Southern Africa.

And like most mantids, the Spiny Flower Mantis is a voracious cannibal, and the older they get the more likely they will be to eat other mantids that come across their path. Another interesting fact is that the female’s egg sac can be nearly three times larger than its own body.

1

Scorpionfly

While this insect looks like the result of some bizarre genetic experiment that spliced a scorpion stinger onto a wasp, that “stinger” is actually something much more innocuous: the fly’s genitals.

Nevertheless, it makes for a bizarre looking creature. Scorpionflies, or mecoptera, can be found all over the world, and have been around since the Mesozoic age. In fact, they’re believed to have been the forerunners of most of our modern moths and butterflies, collectively grouped in the Lepidoptera order.

+

Calleta Silkmoth Caterpillar

If Jackson Pollock and God had a design meeting, they would probably come up with something similar to the Eupackardia calleta larva, also known as the Colette Silkmoth caterpillar. With a massive color range and dangerous looking barbs, the Calleta Silkmoth caterpillar is something most predators stay away from.

The moth is found in the Southern US, and the color pattern of the caterpillar changes based on age and environmental factors. It feeds mostly on the Mexican jumping bean, a plant found throughout Mexico, Texas, and Arizona.