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Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
Just so we could strap it to a shark's head and use it in nefarious ways to kill James Bond, Theodore Maiman perfected the laser in 1960. From bar code readers to precise medical procedures to accurate measurement devices, lasers have become an essential part of our lives and it was Maiman's determination at a time when others were losing interest in the subject. -
Light Emitting Diodes
It was British born H.J Round who first reported a light-emitting solid-state diode in 1907 but his work was to languish, along with that by Oleg Vladimirovich Losev, until 1962. In this year, while working at General Electric Company, Nick Holonyak Jr created the first practical visible-spectrum LED. Described as the "father of the light-emitting diode", Holonyak's LEDs were red and not really bright enough to light an area effectively. -
The first computer mouse
Douglas Engelbart completely changed the way people interacted with computers when he invented the computer mouse in 1964. His creation was made from wood and had two gear-wheels that sat perpendicular to one another so as to allow movement on one axis. When you moved the mouse the horizontal wheel moved sideways and the vertical wheel slid along the surface. He filed for the patent in 1967 as the "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System." -
The first video game console
Ralph Baer for when he envisioned the original in 1966. In May of 1967 he played the very first two-player video game, which he lost, and in the 1968 he completed the working prototype. -
Dynamic Random Access Memory
While not technically the man who invented RAM, Robert Dennard was the man who redesigned and modified it to create Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). His insights into how RAM could function more efficiently over a smaller space mean that computers got more memory for less cost and, frankly, took up less space.