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The Difference Engine
Charles Babbage designed the difference engine to workout mathmatical tables. The difference engine, which is considered to be the first computer in the world, is an automatic mechanical calculator which sorts polynomial functions into tables. -
The Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage built a simple part of the analytical engine before he died later that year. The analytical engine, the successor of Babbage's difference engine, was a mechanical general-purpose computer. Although partially built in 1871, Babbage pioneered the idea in 1837. -
Cathode Ray Tube
Boris Rosing designed a mechanical scanner with a cathode ray tube (CRT) in the receiver to form a picture from a video signal. This marked the first time cathode ray tubes were used in television. -
First TV Picture with a Greyscale Image
John Logie Baird transmitts the first television picture with a greyscale image of the head of a ventriloquist's dummy. A dummy was used as the contrast in the face was higher than that of an actual person. -
Demonstration of a Mechanical TV System
AT&T demonstarted a mechanical television system -
CRT Based System
Philo T. Farnsworth demonstarted his CRT based system to press in San Francisco. A year prior to the demonstration the first image was transmitted by Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube. The image was of a straight line. -
RCA's All Electronic TV System
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) demonstarted their version of an all-electronic TV system at the World's Fair in New York -
The First Fully Automatic Digital Computer
The Z3 was an electromechanical computer designed and built by German civil engineer Konrad Zuse between 1938 and 1941. The original Z3, previously named the V3, was destroyed two years after its completion (1943) by a bomb. A replica model of the Z3, built in the 1960's by Zuse's company Zuse KG, is on display at Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. -
The Colossus Computer
Alan Turing invents the Colossus computer, the machine that, for the remainder of the second world war, was operated at Bletchley Park and unscrambled codes. In June of the following year, Colossus Mark 2 began to operate and worked at five times the speed of Colossus Mark 1. Colossus computers decoded messages which had been encrypted by a device unknown to the British. -
Invention of the Touchscreen
Between 1965 and 1967, E.A. Johnson of the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, England invented the touchscreen for air traffic control. During the early 1970's Frank Beck and Bent Stumpe, who were engineers for CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear research, developed a transparent touchscreen which was based upon Stumpe's work at a television factory during the early 1960's. -
The First Mobile Phone
On April 3rd 1973, researcher and executive of Motorola, Martin Cooper, made the very first phone call from a handheld mobile phone. The phone Dr Cooper used was a prototype weighing 1.1kg and measure 23 centimenters in length and 13 centimetres in depth. The phone allowed for half an hour of talk time and required ten hours to charge. -
The First Digital Camera
Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera at Eastman Kodak.The camera was just 0.1 megapixels, weighed eight pounds and photographed in black and white onto a cassette tape; the images would then be viewed on a television screen. -
Removable Memory Cards
In 1988 the company, Fuji, revealed their Fujix DS-1P camera at the Photokina trade show in Köln, Germany,between October 5th and October 11th. This four hundred thousand pixel camera displayed a removable static RAM memory card which was developed by Toshiba and was the first of its kind.
