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8 BCE
Hourglass
The hourglass first appeared in Europe in the eighth century, and may have been made by Luitprand, a monk at the cathedral in Chartres, France. By the early fourteenth century, the sand glass was used commonly in Italy. -
Milk man
The first home milk deliveries occurred in Vermont in 1785. When dairy farms began to appear more commercially, the milkman would come door to door with a metal barrel full of milk. People would bring out whatever containers they had jugs, pails, or jars, for example- and the milkman would fill it. -
Carbon Paper
Carbon paper was invented by Ralph Wedgewood in the 1800s in England, and was available in the United States by the 1820s. Because the copying technique did not work well with the quill pens of the time, carbon copies did not become common until the introduction of the typewriter. -
telegraph
Inventor Samuel Morse developed the telegraph system. Morse's system sent out a signal in a series of dots and dashes, each combination representing one letter of the alphabet “Morse code”. -
Moonlight Towers
James Jerome ("J.J.") Owens, publisher of the San Jose Mercury, came up with the idea for the tower after visiting the first electrical lighting station in San Francisco in 1879. -
Phone Booth
The world's first telephone box called "Fernsprechkiosk", was opened on 12 January 1881 in Berlin. To use it, one had to buy paper tickets called Telefonbillet which allowed for a few minutes of talking time. -
Period: to
Candlestick Telephone
The candlestick telephone was first introduced around 1892, and production on these models continued until the 1920s. They were manufactured in the United States and most often sold there as well. At that time wall-mounted phones became more commonly-used than these types so production of candlestick models ceased. -
pager
Invented in 1921, pagers (also known as beepers) were used by the Detroit Police Department when they successfully put a radio-equipped police car into service. -
overhead projector
Overhead projectors began to be widely used in schools and businesses in the late 1950s and early 1960s, beside the contemporaneously-developed carousel slide projectors with a horizontally mounted tray manufactured by Kodak -
vhs tapes
JVC released the first VHS machines in Japan in late 1976, and in the United States in mid 1977.