Tesla was at the height of social acclaim. ibid.
Tesla’s life-long obsession: the wireless transmission of energy. ibid.
To his dying day Tesla believed it could be done. ibid.
Scientists still disagree on whether beam weapons are realistic. ibid.
You can only make a transistor if you understand how electrons behave. You need Quantum Theory. But essentially it was doing what a valve does – control the flow of electrons. But it did so using the laws of quantum mechanics. Now I would put the transistor right up there with the ten greatest inventions of all time, because it utterly transformed the world. Michael Mosley, The Story of Science: Proof & Passion, BBC 2010
One of the world’s greatest unsung heroes – ‘Boole is the father of information technology’ … and he would do this against a backdrop of Ireland’s darkest days. The Genius of George Boole, RTE One 2015
Nearly two hundred years ago George Boole made a revolutionary discovery … Boole argued that almost every value or question could be reduced to either true or false. A simplification of our would as a basic statement. ibid.
He dedicates every breathing moment to mathematics and in particular to a branch of maths known as calculus. ibid.
And then Boole develops a new branch of mathematics – invariant theory. ibid.
To prove the existence of God … He seeks to prove this by applying to the Bible the process of logical analysis. ibid.
Boole publishes his masterpiece – The Laws of Thought. ibid.
How did the Romans manage to defy gravity and make millions of litres of water flow uphill over mountains? How did the ancient Egyptians carve massive granite obelisks thousands of years before the Washington monument was built? And why would the Roman army build their own mountain? Monuments more colossal than our own … The ancient world was far from primitive. Ancient Impossible: Moving Mountains s1e1, H2 2016
The Romans completed the wall around Masada in just a few days. But what they didn’t realise was how well stocked the rebels were. ibid.
How do you get a thousand-ton obelisk onto a barge? … [A. Make it an axle] ibid.
Roman engineers kept the water moving through hills and valleys maintaining a steady gradient of less than one per cent. An astounding feat … uphill: the inverted syphon. ibid.
One of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs created this impossibly vast monument to himself at Abu Simbel … The largest temple ever carved out of solid rock. Ancient Impossible: Monster Monuments s1e2
Stonehenge: it appears to be a structure years ahead of its time. ibid.
‘These stones from this quarry were transported well over a hundred miles.’ ibid.
A 2000-year-old concrete dome found in the centre of Rome – it’s called the Pantheon … ibid.
The Egyptians built more than a hundred pyramids across their kingdom. ibid.
Ancient superweapons as mighty as today’s … Archimedes’ Claw … A group of men could grab and tip enemy ships … Just the first of Archimedes’ many game-changing inventions … A death ray … long debated … by harnessing the power of the sun. Ancient Impossible: Ultimate Weapons s1e3
Could Archimedes’ cannon have had the power needed for such destruction simply using steam? ibid.
Egypt: This floating superweapon appears to have carried more people than a modern aircraft carrier. ibid.
The ancient world clearly had more than one great scientific thinker … Colossal monuments, powerful ancient superweapons, and technology so precise it defies reinvention. Ancient Impossible: Ancient Einsteins s1e4
They’re a bunch of fools in the desert with nothing else to do so they invented me and they invented you. Randy Newman, The God Song, sung by God
Nicola Tesla … catapulted our civilisation into the new age. The use of alternating current, radio, fluorescent lighting, remote control, and robots – a total of 700 patents. Phenomenon: The Lost Archives s1e9: The Lost Lightning: The Missing Secrets of Nicola Tesla
Tesla laboratory mysteriously burns to the ground. ibid.
Tesla promises … free energy for everyone. ibid.
‘A man came to the airfield one day with a 1946 Buick Roadmaster. He had invented a carburettor that was water-injected and could get close to 100 miles per gallon. He told us that Shell Oil company had bought the patent from him which made him a millionaire. They told him he could keep the one on this Buick but he could build no more … What ever happened to this invention?’ Gashole, Ken Kunde, witness, 2008
We’ll be delving back to the first episode in 1965 to chart how technology has changed over the last half century. Tomorrow’s World Live: For One Night Only, BBC 2018
‘Whether there’s a market for this kind of disc [CD] remains to be seen.’ ibid. presenter
‘Computers offer an endless source of inspiration.’ ibid.
One of the most iconic inventions of the 1980s: the C5, a battery-operated car. ibid.
If we shift toward a model in which we are determining the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective we will change outcomes. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, Elizabeth Holmes, 2019
Elizabeth has raised more than $400 million; the company is valued at $9 billion. ibid. observer
Nestled in the foothills above Silicon Valley there is a 700-acre plot of land called the Stanford Research Park … In the fall of 2014 she [Holmes] moved her bio-tech start-up Theranos to the research park. The company employed 800 people and was valued at nearly $10 billion: 4 years later it was worth less than zero. ibid. commentary
The value of the story: this compelling tale of divining hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood. ibid.
She had a policy of controlling demonstrations and tightly guarding access to the Edison prototypes. ibid.
It was a mess inside. ibid. company worker on machine
Then after a whole people became paranoid of one another. ibid. worker
With the Walgreens rollout, the problems at Therenos were magnifying. ibid.
Their downfall was when they started giving us results that were not matching up with other labs. ibid. woman
Internally, we had so little faith in these tests but were still resulting them on patients. ibid. lab technician
Nothing works. We’re on a sinking ship. It’s a lie. ibid. worker
I knew that most of their blood tests were run on commercial analysers. ibid. John Carreyrou, The Wall Street Journal
In 2018 Theranos dissolved. Elizabeth and Sunny were charged with conspiracy and fraud. They pleaded not guilty. ibid.
In the year of our Lord 1448 in Mainz, Germany, a goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mould. His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper but what he did was to speed up history. Gutenberg’s invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern world of science and industry. Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing II: Words on a Page, BBC 2020
The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points of history and it coincides with a change in the technology of Europe. As papyrus disappeared so did the book as a relatively inexpensive everyday commodity. ibid.
The fact that parchment could be folded made it possible to stitch leaves together into a codex, the modern form of the book. ibid.
Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were prized in China every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe. But in a medieval manuscript the art is in the decoration around the text. The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment produced letters that were regular and repetitive. But in Chinese brush-calligraphy the art is in the brushwork that produces the characters themselves. And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface. Paper was invented in China in 2nd century A.D. ibid.
Paper was key to another Chinese invention: woodblock printing. Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman. This step was laborious and expensive. ibid.
The Islamic Golden Age: the arts and sciences flourished … We still count using an Arabic numbering system. ibid.
The secret of Gutenberg’s printing press was his ability to mass-produce copies of each individual letter. And in this he had a hidden advantage: ‘the letters of the alphabet are really simple shapes … These simple block-like letters can become blocks of metal and can become printed.’ ibid. expert
Astonishing machines flying at incredible speeds, and all powered by what seemed to be a technology from the future. That technology was a British invention. Cold War, Hot Jets, BBC 2013