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300 BCE
clock
The world's first mechanical clocks are thought to have been tower clocks built in the region spanning northern Italy to southern Germany from around 1270 to 1300 during the renaissance period. These clocks did not yet have dials or hands, but told the time by striking bells. -
telephone
While Italian innovator Antonio Meucci (pictured at left) is credited with inventing the first basic phone in 1849, and Frenchman Charles Bourseul devised a phone in 1854, Alexander Graham Bell won the first U.S. patent for the device in 1876. -
telephone booth
The world's first telephone box called "Fernsprechkiosk", was opened on 12 January 1881 at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin. To use it, one had to buy paper tickets called Telefonbillet which allowed for a few minutes of talking time. In 1899, it was replaced by a coin-operated telephone. -
disc
Disc golf was first invented in the early 1900s. The first game was held in Bladworth, Saskatchewan, Canada, in 1927. Ronald Franklin Gibson and a group of his Bladworth Elementary School buddies played a game of throwing tin lids into 4-foot wide circles drawn into sandy patches on their school grounds. -
fax machine
When was the fax machine invented? The first recognizable version of what we consider the telephone fax was invented in 1964 by the Xerox company, but the technology that led to that advancement was created much earlier. In fact, it was Alexander Baine in 1843 who invented the electric printing telegraph. -
cassette
Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips in 1963, Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either already containing content as a prerecorded cassette (Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. -
game boy
The Game Boy is an 8-bit fourth generation handheld game console developed and manufactured by Nintendo. It was first released in Japan on April 21, 1989, in North America later the same year, and in Europe in late 1990. -
portable dvd player
Industry-first portable DVD players, two models, were produced in 1998. The DVD-L10 was a portable DVD player with a 16:9 LCD screen, the world's first, that allowed users to "enjoy DVD any time, anywhere." The DVD-P10 was the world's smallest and lightest portable DVD player. -
polaroid instant camera
The first Polaroid camera, called the Model 95, and its associated film went on sale in 1999 at a department store in Boston. The cameras sold out in minute. -
iphone
Announced in January 2007, the original iPhone was introduced by Steve Jobs as a combination of the iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communicator.