• The first microwave was 5 ½ feet tall and weighed 750 pounds.



• The New Horizons spacecraft is headed to Pluto. It's the size of a piano and goes 36,000 miles an hour. When will it give NASA photos of Pluto? 2015—How old will you be then?



• Digital cameras have been outselling traditional cameras for the past several years.



• Check out NASA's podcasts.



• No, Blue Tooth is not a tooth from a Great Blue Whale. It's wireless tech that connects different electrical devices. Check out King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark to guess where the name came from. By the way, Great Blue Whales don't have any teeth.



• What is high definition television? It's television that has better pictures and digital sound. It's supposed to have pictures that are six times better than those on regular TVs. Check out How Stuff Works.



• Computer bugs have been around since problems in a 1945 Harvard Mark II unit were blamed on a moth trapped in a relay. Of course, this is also when the term "debugging" was invented. See a photo of the famous bug at this Website.



• When you are using a computer, you (if you are an average user) will blink 7 times a minute.



• ENIAC, the first all-electronic computer, was introduced in 1946. It took 18,000 vacuum tubes to keep it going, and at 30 tons, it wasn't exactly a laptop.



• The shinbone of a wolf was the first known computing device. Wolf bones with notches were found in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and may be from about 5000 BC.



• In 1968 the computer mouse was invented as a gadget that would help people who had trouble using keyboards, but it didn't become popular until over a decade later.



• Grace Hopper, who worked with the famous "bug" computer, could be called the "Mother of Computing".



• In 1977, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer. Their "computer factory" was in a garage.



• What part did beavers and raccoons play in the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, New York? Before the Olympics, ABC-TV crews laid electrical wires across Whiteface Mountain so that they could bring the event to people's televisions. When they had trouble broadcasting, they found that beavers and raccoons were having a good time chewing on the wires.



• The typewriter was invented in 1866 and patented in 1868, but the keys (small metal rods that had the letters on them) were always getting jammed when people typed. This problem was solved by placing the letters that were used the most farther apart. That's why the letters on the keyboard are not in alphabetical order.



• Thomas Edison held 1093 patents for his inventions. Here's a list of his patents, including water-proofing paint and a flying machine.

Back to Top