Built and invented
Inventions
The machines and ideas that changed daily life, who made them, when they first worked, and how they work today.
Fact files
All topics ›Grace Hopper
1947
Year the moth was taped into the Mark II logbook
The microwave oven
8 October 1945
Date Raytheon filed the cooking patent
Photography
several days
Sunlight exposure for Niépce's heliograph of about 1827
The microprocessor
2,300 transistors
Transistors in the Intel 4004, 1971
The electric telegraph
24 May 1844
Date of Morse's first official message
The automobile
1886
Year of Benz's patent for a gas-engine vehicle