Inventors
It took some time for the United States to process the Sputnik shock at the end of 1957/early 1958. In quick succession, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 (October 4, 1957), Sputnik 2 (with the dog Laika, November 3, 1957) and Sputnik 3 (May 15, 1957) into space. The Soviets thus demonstrated their technological superiority in the middle of the Cold War.
The United States stepped up its efforts to boost military research in a variety of ways. One of the initiatives was the creation in 1962 of a new research organization called the Advanced Research Project Agency, better known as ARPA. Her assignment was to coordinate all new ideas and projects from universities and government institutions and to support them financially with National Defense funds. It was abundantly clear to the military that the still young computer technology would play a major role in all this, and they therefore set up the Information Processing Technique Office (IPTO) subsection.
Elpee
"You know how it feels when you're making love and the phone rings every few minutes," said Peter Goldmark many years after the invention of "his" LP. “Well, that's how I felt one night when I listened to a new recording after lunch with friends in New York that they were very proud of. It happened during the first part. There was a click, silence, some strange noises, and then the music continued. Again and again the music of Johannes Brahms was interrupted. I counted twelve sides for the four parts and eleven intermissions, eight of which were not foreseen by the composer. So eight terrible moments in one rendition. I was enchanted by the music and at the same time the recording got on my nerves. Gritting my teeth, I asked my friends to play the concerto again, so that I could experience the horror again.'
Electromagnetic fields
Heinrich Hertz, called Heins by his friends, is the man who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves for the first time in history. He was the first to generate radio waves and also to determine their length and speed. He also showed that light and radio waves are of the same nature and have the same speed, namely 300,000 kilometers per second. This makes him the true founder of wireless telegraphy and radio. But also television, communication via satellite and radar, you name it. He died very young so he didn't get to experience any of those uses.
Electric razor
In addition to light bulbs, the Philips factories in Eindhoven mainly marketed radio sets in the 1930s. Already in 1932 the millionth copy was shipped. A Philips delegation that visited RCA (Radio Corporation of America) at Rockefeller Center in New York in 1936 included the promising young engineer Alexandre Horowitz. Despite the crisis, RCA was a thriving company at the time, pouring millions of dollars into the development of television, among other things. Undoubtedly an inspiring place for the Philips engineers.
Electrical motor
Michael Faraday laid the foundation for everything we know today about electrical and magnetic phenomena. In 1831 he discovered the way in which mechanical energy could be converted into electrical energy. He thus became, as it were, the inventor of the electric motor. The greatest British genius of the first half of the nineteenth century was born the son of a poor blacksmith in the suburbs of London. He barely went to school and had to earn his living as a child as an apprentice to a bookbinder. His parents were members of the Sandemanians, a cult that viewed nature as "a book written by the finger of God."
Doppler effect
One fine day in 1845, a Dutch scientist had a brilliant idea to find out if the Doppler effect really existed. He drove a locomotive with a bugler on board on the railway between Utrecht and Maarssen. On the platform, a music connoisseur absolutely listened with a number of experts to the tone of the passing horn player. They found that the tone of the approaching blower rose, that it was at its highest as it passed the platform and that it became increasingly lower after passing the locomotive. Although the horn player always blew the same note. The experiment was repeated several times. The difference in tone also appeared to decrease or increase as the locomotive drove slower or faster. With this, the young meteorologist Christophorus Buys Ballot (1817890) had proven the theory of Doppler in practice.
Diesel engine
On September 29, 1913, the 55-year-old world-famous German engineer Rudolf Diesel took the boat from Antwerp to Harwich, England. When the ship arrived at six o'clock in the morning, he had disappeared. The British and Germans lived at odds in those days. Barely a few months later, the First World War would break out. Had Diesel underestimated the situation and had he been killed by the German secret service? He had mismanaged his wealth and lost most of his fortune through various misfortunes. Had he committed suicide in a depressed mood? The hard work had ruined his health. Had he ended up in the sea after another heart attack?
Frozen products
Clarence Birdseye, the American inventor who devised that you could freeze meat, fish and vegetables in such a way that they remained tasty, was not easy to catch. If you click on the internet bookstore Amazon, you will still find a book about growing forest plants in your garden. He wrote it together with his wife. It gives an overview of two hundred wild plants that you can easily bring to bloom with Birdseye's book. As a twelve-year-old boy in Brooklyn, New York, he placed small advertisements in the newspaper offering to put animals on, or even better: to teach the customer how to do it yourself.
CT scanner
Few old newspapers are as interesting as the British ones. Each day they contain one or more pages of the famous obits, an abbreviation of obituaries or in memoriams. The obligatory obituaries of singers, actors, writers, politicians and athletes are only a small part of it. Mathematicians, ornithologists, booksellers, hoteliers, priests, technicians, engineers… it doesn't matter, if they have been even a little special in their profession, they get a generous place. In a reader's response to Sir Godfrey Hounsfield's obituary in The Independent, a certain Heather Rowe writes: 'We were together in a walking club who went on long country walks in the 1960s, the walks that you say gave him his best ideas. I often found him a bit absent and vague; he never said anything about his work.
English 
Nederlands