6 The earliest hints of smallpox vaccine date back to 10th century in China and the first successful smallpox inoculation was done in 1796. 

The Chinese documented a practice known as “nasal insufflation” in which powdered smallpox material, usually made from smallpox scabs, is blown up the nostrils to prevent smallpox. Various insufflation techniques were recorded in China between the 15th and 17th century. Reports of these techniques were received at the Royal Society in London in 1700 by Dr. Martin Lister from an employee of East India Company working in China and by Clopton Havers.

In the 1760s, Edward Jenner who was an apprentice surgeon heard about dairy workers in rural areas not being affected by disfiguring and often fatal smallpox because they already had cowpox. Cowpox is often transferred to dairymaids who touched the udders of the cows they were milking, but it only had mild effects in humans.

So, in 1796, Jenner took the pus from the arms of a milkmaid with cowpox and rubbed it into the arm of an 8-year-old boy. Six weeks later, he introduced the boy to a small dose of smallpox and found that he did not catch it.

Jenner did further research and by 1798 reported that his vaccine was safe for both children and adults. By 1840, since vaccination with cowpox was much safer than smallpox inoculation, which was still practiced in England, smallpox vaccination was banned.(source)

7 3D printing was first invented in 1981, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that small companies could introduce more affordable and less industrial printers to the general public. 

Additive manufacturing or printing, also known as “3D printing,” is a technique in which an object is “printed” by gradually laying or adding material and then fusing it. Hideo Kodama of Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute first invented two methods for additive printing of 3D plastic models using a photo-hardening thermoset polymer in 1981.

Two other methods of stereolithography, the process in which chains of polymers form links upon exposure to light, were patented independently in both the US and France in 1984.

Several other techniques and printers were invented and patented in the following years by various universities and industries. 3D printing became widely used at the industrial level making the creation of quick prototypes before mass production a norm. It was also used for manufacturing custom parts such as engine brackets and nuts that were otherwise made from metal bars or plates.

The potential of 3D printing was speculated by many writers and social commentators since the 1950s. Though the technology was used industrially for decades, patents and copyrights prevented any use of it by the public.

During the early 2010s, places of higher education became a major buyer of desktop and professional 3D printers and libraries started using smaller printers for educational use. The recent demand for an affordable 3D printer for home use by DIY and Maker culture enthusiasts has encouraged several companies and projects to develop them.(source)

8 The fax machine was first patented in 1843 and built in 1846. 

Alexander Bain, a Scottish inventor, received a patent for chemical, mechanical fax-type devices on May 27, 1843. In 1846, he was able to successfully reproduce his designs in laboratory experiments to which Frederick Bakewell made several improvements.

In 1865, Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli, who also invented the Pantelegraph, introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon 11 years before the invention of the telephone.

In 1880, English inventor Shelford Bidwell constructed the “scanning phototelegraph,” the first telefax machine that could scan using selenium photocells. American engineer Elisha Grey further developed the fax machine in 1888 to let users send signatures over long distances allowing verification of identification or ownership.

Scientists at AT&T managed to send 15 photographs suitable for newspaper reproduction from Cleveland to New York City on May 19, 1924, over the telephone, while previously they were sent over the radio.(source)

9 The modern headphone jack was invented in 1878 and has only changed in size since then. 

The audio jacks that we normally use come in three different sizes. The original 1/4 inch (6.35 mm) jack was created by George W. Coy back in 1878 and was used for the first commercial manual telephone exchange in New Haven, Connecticut. It is still used for mainstream musical equipment, especially the standard guitar models, making it the oldest jack still in use.

The other two sizes of audio jacks, 1/8 inch (3.5 mm) and 3/32 inch (2.5 mm), were originally designed for earpieces of transistor radios in the 1950s and are still used as standard sizes. The 3.5 mm jack that is commonly used in today’s portable devices became popular in 1964 with the release of Sony’s radio and even more so with the release of Walkman in 1979.(source)

10 The world’s oldest color film footage was shot by inventor Edward Raymond Turner way back in 1899. 

In March 1899, Edward Raymond Turner, initially with the financial backing from cricketer Frederick Marshall Lee, began working in the workshop of color photography pioneer Frederic E. Ives. There he developed a camera which uses a rotating disk of three color filters to photograph color separations on one roll of black-and-white film.

The image is recorded on three frames, one filtered by red, one by green, and one by blue. When the finished, film is then projected three frames at a time. There were, however, two drawbacks in his camera: recording an object in three different frames caused the image to blur if the object moved too fast, and mechanical instabilities caused the images to jitter.

Before he could make any improvements, Turner died at the age of 30 of a heart attack. The research was passed on to George Albert Smith who created an entirely new process called “Kinemecolor” which used only red and green filters.(1, 2)