50 Fun Facts About Science and Technology

Which singer's name went to the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, a Scottish sheep born in 1996?

Dolly Parton got the honour because the clone grew from a mammary gland cell, as the Roslin Institute team cheerfully admitted. The lamb was born on 5 July 1996 in Midlothian.

Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king, whose runic initials make up the Bluetooth logo, of which country?

Denmark's King Harald Bluetooth united its squabbling tribes into one kingdom, so Intel's Jim Kardach proposed the name in 1997 to suggest uniting rival wireless protocols.

Which item was eBay's first sale in 1995, going for $14.83 to a buyer who collected that kind of thing?

A broken laser pointer went to a bidder who told founder Pierre Omidyar 'I'm a collector of broken laser pointers', settling his worry that the buyer had misread the listing.

The world's first webcam, set up at the University of Cambridge in 1991, kept watch over what?

A coffee pot in the Trojan Room was filmed so people elsewhere in the building would not trek over to find it empty; the pot later fetched £3,350 at auction.

Which two-word greeting was the first SMS, sent from a computer to a Vodafone phone in December 1992?

Merry Christmas was typed by Sema Group test engineer Neil Papworth on 3 December 1992 and received by Vodafone's Richard Jarvis on an Orbitel 901 handset.

Which puzzle game was bundled with the Game Boy at its 1989 launch in every region except Japan?

Tetris helped the Game Boy, designed by Gunpei Yokoi's R&D1 team at Nintendo, and its Color successor sell a combined 118.69 million units.

Who reversed Anders Celsius's scale, originally 0 at boiling and 100 at freezing, the year after he died?

Carl Linnaeus, the botanist who gave species two-part Latin names, turned the scale the right way up in 1745 so that warmer readings gave bigger numbers.

Which Hollywood actress co-patented a frequency-hopping torpedo guidance system in 1942, a basis of Wi-Fi?

Hedy Lamarr worked it out with composer George Antheil, borrowing the synchronised rolls of a player piano to make the transmitter and torpedo switch frequencies in step.

At which company did Steven Sasson build the first digital camera in 1975, saving each shot to cassette tape?

Kodak sat on the 100-by-100-pixel prototype, which weighed 8 pounds and took 23 seconds to write each image, and did not disclose it publicly until 2000.

Which nursery rhyme did Thomas Edison recite into his tinfoil phonograph in 1877 as its first test?

Mary Had a Little Lamb, recited onto a tinfoil cylinder, counts as the first recorded verse, though that 1877 recording was never preserved and a 1927 re-enactment is often mistaken for it.

Which 1979 Sony cassette player grew from co-founder Masaru Ibuka's wish for music on business trips?

Walkman was judged such bad English that early exports went out as the Sound-about in the US and the Stowaway in Britain before the Japanese name won everywhere.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk in 1973 for which company?

Motorola's Cooper dialled his rival Joel Engel at AT&T to gloat, using a 2.5-pound DynaTAC prototype that onlookers nicknamed 'the brick'.

Which Japanese company created VHS, the videotape format that beat Sony's Betamax by recording for longer?

JVC, then a Matsushita subsidiary, launched VHS in 1976, a year after Betamax, and Betamax's 100% market share melted away once buyers decided tape length mattered more.

Bitcoin's creator published its white paper in 2008 under which pseudonym?

Satoshi Nakamoto launched the network on 9 January 2009 and stamped its genesis block with a Times headline about a bank bailout, and the name's real owner was never publicly identified.

The word 'wiki', which Ward Cunningham took from a Honolulu airport shuttle bus in 1995, is Hawaiian for what?

Quick is the meaning: the Wiki Wiki Shuttle ran between the Honolulu airport's terminals, and Cunningham installed his WikiWikiWeb on c2.com on 25 March 1995.

Masahiro Hara of Denso Wave invented the QR code in Japan in 1994 to keep track of what?

Car parts at Denso's factories needed a label that held far more than a barcode, and Hara's square pattern was inspired by the black and white stones on a Go board.

Which ship took Charles Darwin on a survey voyage, billed as two years, that lasted almost five from 1831?

HMS Beagle's captain Robert FitzRoy wanted someone aboard to investigate geology, and the 22-year-old Darwin, planning to become a parson, took the berth and saw the Galápagos.

In which year did patent examiner Albert Einstein publish four landmark papers, including special relativity?

1905 is physics' 'miracle year': the four Annalen der Physik papers covered the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence.

Which 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim beside two elephants was the first video uploaded to YouTube in 2005?

Me at the zoo was shot at the San Diego Zoo by Karim's high-school friend Yakov Lapitsky and went up on 23 April 2005, with Karim remarking on the length of the elephants' trunks.

Which DuPont fibre was first sold in 1938 as toothbrush bristles, two years before its famous stockings?

Nylon stockings sold 64 million pairs in their first year, 1940, and post-war shortages sparked 'nylon riots', with 40,000 people queueing in Pittsburgh for 13,000 pairs.

Who discovered rubber vulcanisation in 1839 when a sulfur mix hit a hot stove, yet died $200,000 in debt?

Charles Goodyear never saw a tyre; the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded in 1898, four decades after his death, and simply borrowed his name.

Which Czech playwright's 1920 drama R.U.R. gave English the word 'robot', from a term for forced labour?

Karel Čapek later credited his brother Josef, a painter, with coining the word, adapted from robota, the labour serfs owed their masters.

Walter Hunt twisted which fastener from brass wire in 1849 to clear a $15 debt, selling its patent for $400?

The safety pin patent went to W.R. Grace and Company for $400, about $15,000 today; Hunt paid the $15 and pocketed the remaining $385.

Which plant, carbonised into a filament, let Thomas Edison's early light bulbs burn for more than 1,200 hours?

Bamboo from Japan, carbonised into a thread, was the long-lived filament Edison's team settled on after their first successful bulb test of 22 October 1879.

Which science-fiction author proposed geostationary communication satellites in a 1945 Wireless World article?

Arthur C. Clarke's October 1945 paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' is why the geostationary orbit is sometimes called the Clarke orbit or Clarke belt.

Which AT&T satellite relayed the first live transatlantic TV in 1962 and named a chart-topping instrumental?

Telstar 1 went up on 10 July 1962, and the Tornados' tune named after it became the first US number one single by a British group.

America's first satellite, launched in 1958, carried James Van Allen's cosmic-ray detector and was called what?

Explorer 1 was built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and flown on a Juno I rocket four months after Sputnik, and the belts it found now carry Van Allen's name.

Hubble's primary mirror was polished too flat at the edge by 2,200 nanometres, causing which optical flaw?

Spherical aberration makes light from a mirror's edge focus at a different point from its centre; the 1993 servicing mission installed COSTAR's corrective optics to fix it.

The James Webb Space Telescope's 18 hexagonal, gold-plated mirror segments are made of which metal?

Beryllium stays stiff and stable at the telescope's cryogenic operating temperatures, and the segments together form a 6.5-metre mirror parked at the Sun–Earth L2 point.

Which NASA rover was lowered into Gale crater on a 20-metre tether from a rocket-powered 'sky crane' in 2012?

Curiosity weighs 899 kg, including 80 kg of instruments, and draws power from a radioisotope thermoelectric generator like the Viking landers of the 1970s.

What pushes the ink out of the Fisher Space Pen, letting it write upside down and in a vacuum?

Pressurised nitrogen at about 310 kPa forces the ink out; Paul Fisher spent around $1 million of his own money on it, and NASA later bought 400 pens at $2.95 each.

Which singer's album 52nd Street, released in Japan on 1 October 1982, is usually cited as the first CD album?

Billy Joel's record was one of 50 CDs that CBS/Sony put out that day, but it carried the first catalogue number, 35DP-1, so it gets the credit.

Which element, number 106, was the first named after a living person, over IUPAC's 1994 objection?

Seaborgium honours Glenn Seaborg, who called it a greater honour than his Nobel Prize; oganesson, element 118, is the only other element named for someone then alive.

Four elements are named after which Swedish village's quarry, on an island in the Stockholm archipelago?

Ytterby gave its name to yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium, and its minerals also yielded holmium, thulium, scandium, gadolinium and tantalum, nine elements in all.

Harry Brearley, who made the first true stainless steel in 1913 and called it 'rustless steel', worked in which city?

Sheffield's cutlery trade boomed once Brearley's chromium alloy meant knives no longer rusted, and a local cutler, Ernest Stuart, coined the name 'stainless steel'.

Which particle did Wolfgang Pauli postulate in 1930, so light and elusive that it went undetected until 1956?

Neutrino was jokingly coined by Edoardo Amaldi in conversation with Enrico Fermi, and about 65 billion solar neutrinos stream through every square centimetre of Earth each second.

Godfrey Hounsfield built the first CT scanner, used on a patient in Wimbledon in 1971, at which record company?

EMI, the company that brought the Beatles into its fold, saw Hounsfield share the 1979 Nobel Prize with Allan Cormack for computer-assisted tomography.

Which antimatter particle did Carl Anderson find in cloud-chamber tracks in 1932, four years before his Nobel?

Positron tracks curving the 'wrong' way past a lead plate revealed the electron's antimatter twin, which Paul Dirac had predicted in 1931 and called an 'anti-electron'.

Which Hungarian-born biochemist, demoted by her university in 1995, shared the 2023 Nobel for mRNA vaccine work?

Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman found nucleoside modifications that stop RNA triggering immune alarms, the trick that made mRNA vaccines workable; she later became a BioNTech senior vice president.

Which Glasgow surgeon's carbolic-acid antisepsis of the 1860s earned him a namesake mouthwash in 1879?

Joseph Lister's germ-killing approach, built on Louis Pasteur's germ theory, inspired St. Louis chemist Joseph Lawrence to name Listerine, first sold as a surgical antiseptic and floor cleaner.

Which godson of Elizabeth I devised England's first flushing toilet, the Ajax, and wrote a 1596 book about it?

John Harington installed the Ajax at his manor in Kelston, and its name puns on 'jakes', Elizabethan slang for a privy; he was one of the childless queen's 102 godchildren.

Which fencing product, patented by DeKalb farmer Joseph Glidden in 1874 at age 61, changed ranching across the West?

Barbed wire as Glidden made it placed the barbs along one strand and twisted a second strand around it to hold them in place; the patent was granted on 24 November 1874.

Under what name did Raytheon sell the first commercial microwave oven in 1947, a water-cooled, 750-pound unit?

Radarange won an employee naming contest; the oven stood 1.8 metres tall, drew 3 kilowatts and was leased for about $5 a day.

Who staged a death-defying 1854 demonstration of his elevator brake at the New York Crystal Palace?

Elisha Otis's 1853 device stops a lift falling if the hoisting cable fails, and demand after the show let him start the Otis Elevator Company, which still bears his name.

Who drove her husband's car 106 km from Mannheim to Pforzheim in 1888, refuelling at a pharmacy on the way?

Bertha Benz, investor and wife of Carl Benz, made the first long-distance car journey with her sons aboard, and the Wiesloch pharmacy counts as the world's first filling station.

What did Tim Berners-Lee call the first web browser, written at CERN in 1990, which doubled as a page editor?

WorldWideWeb was renamed Nexus to stop people confusing the program with the web itself, and it let users edit pages as well as read them.

Bubble wrap's inventors, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes, were trying to make what in 1957?

Textured wallpaper was the failed goal; the sheets turned out to be superb packing, and shipping IBM's 1401 computers in 1960 was one of the first big uses.

Which Soviet engineer behind Sputnik was known publicly only as 'Chief Designer' until his death in 1966?

Sergei Korolev had survived Stalin's purges, spending months in a Kolyma Gulag camp after his 1938 arrest, before leading the Soviet space programme.

Which company sold the first instant camera, the 1948 Model 95, after Edwin Land's daughter asked to see a photo now?

Polaroid's founder answered Jennifer Land's question 'Why can't I see them now?' with instant film, unveiled in New York a year before the camera went on sale.

Which language, begun in 1959 and partly based on Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC, ran behind 95% of card swipes in 2020?

COBOL, the Common Business-Oriented Language, was reckoned by Gartner in 1997 to underpin 80% of the world's business with over 200 billion lines of code.