Credit Card

There have been many inventions that have affected our lives, some slipped in and we didn't even notice them, until they became popular and then we forgot that we didn't always have them. One of these inventions was the credit card. This piece of plastic has become indispensable in the modern world. Not only is it used to purchase items in place of cash, it is also used as identification and plays an important role in our credit ratings. With this card, people can buy things when they are broke and then pay for them later. On paper it sounds good, but in reality many people are paying a premium every time that buy something. If cash was used you would pay the asking price for the object, but with a credit card you are not only paying the price of an object, but also the interest fee on the card which can be extremely high, afterall what is a credit card? It is a way of making an instant loan. Here is an example. If you purchase an item and the total cost is $100 and you use a credit card to buy it and you have one of those high. interest cards at 27%, over 3 years you would pay $4.08 a month. This doesn't sound like much, but it works out to you paying $146.97 for a $100.00 item. Still a credit card can be quite handy if you can pay it off every month. The trick is not to buy more than you have cash for. No one really knows who invented the credit card. A credit card was used in the 1890s in Europe but it was not like the cards we have today. The first person credited with inventing the modern credit card was John Biggins from the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklyn in 1946. With the card he invented the program that allowed charges to be made. The first major credit card was from the Diners Club, which issued a credit card in 1950, but this was really a charge card, because the entire balance had to be repayed every month.

Solar Cells
Photo Source: NASA

Sometimes an invention goes unnoticed and only becomes popular years later. The solar cell is a good example of this. The first solar cell dates back to France in 1839 when Antoine-Cesar Becquerel noticed that when light shone on an electrode that was in a conductive liquid, it created an electric current. In 1941 the first true solar cell was invented by an American named Russell Ohl. Today we are beginning to hear a lot about solar cells, but we have yet to produce them cheap enough and have them operate efficiently enough, to power the average house. We are getting there though and there is a promise of a more efficient and cheap solar cell that is on the way. Hey we have waited almost 170 years, I guess a few more won't matter.

The first satellite that was ever launched was Sputnik I, I guess everyone knows that. It went up in 1957 and only 50 years later, there are hundreds and maybe thousands of these thing orbiting the Earth. We are getting so dependant on them, that if anything ever happens to them we will not only be without communications, we will have no tv, radio, navigation and who knows what else. The more of them we launch and the more dependant we get on them, the more vulnerable we get. It someone were to figure out a way to disable them, our goose would be cooked.

LED stands for Light Emitting Diode. These are used mostly in displays of different kinds. For example your computer may have an led that lights up when you are copying something to your CD or DVD player. They have become so common place, that we don't even notice them anymore. At least we don't think of them as anything other than a light, when in fact, they are a lot more sophisticated than that. The man who is credited with the invention of the led is Nick Holonyak and he was honored by MIT and given a $500,000 award for his 1960s invention. The actual year the led was invented is said to be 1962.

Fiber Optics

Fiber Optics is something that we really don't give much thought to, yet it is a very important component that allows us to communicate and connect to things at almost the speed of light, after all, it is light that is traveling down an optical wire. The concept is a lot older than most of us suspect. In 1854 a demonstration was conducted by John Tyndall in front of the Royal Society, that showed that light could travel around a curve. Then in 1880 Bell invented the photophone which used light to transmit voices. The invention was not practical at the time, since the method of sending and receiving the light was too fragile and open to interference. In 1888 glass rods were used by doctors to light the inside of people's bodies. Up to this point, there were no optical fibers and these are the key to today's Fiber Optics. That changed in 1930 when Heinrich Lamm was the first one to create bundles of optical fibers. The fibers began to be perfected and by 1961 tiny fibres were theorized that could carry light with one wave mode. A purer form of glass was needed to cut down on light loss and in 1970 fused silica came along and so did an optical wire capable of carrying 65,000 times more information that copper wire. Modern Fiber Optics was born. This stuff has become so common that over 80 percent of all the telephone calls made in the world are carried over fiber optics.

Computer Mouse

What about the computer mouse? Did you ever wonder who invented it and when? It has become very common today and you can even find one in the dollar store. Douglas Engelbart invented the device in 1964. From then until 1997 he only received one check for his invention and it was for $10,000. Talk about being screwed, wow. In 1997 he finally received a check for $500,000 which was still probably far less than he was entitled to. He only got this money because he won the Lamelson-MIT prize for American Innovation. Hundreds of millions of computer mice have been sold since his invention.

Barcode

One humble invention that sort of crept up on us is the barcode. Before the barcode, all the items in the supermarket had prices stamped on them. After the bar code, it became much easier for stores because they could just enter a tiny entry into their databases that stated that anything with a particular barcode was a particular price. Not only that, but they could keep a running inventory by subtracting the item sold from the total amount on hand. Even better, when the amount dropped below a certain point, the computer could automatically order a predetermined amount from the supplier. I think that you can see how much easier this made things for the stores. Now the next time you look at a can and try and figure out the cost, just say to yourself, I am so happy that I could help this store out. The Uniform Product Code or U.P.C. was invented in 1973 and the first scanner was installed in June 1974. A company named McKinsey & Co and the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council devised the barcode.

Inkjet Printer

The inkjet printer is something that many of us have become dependant on. We use it to print our letters, homework, photos and such, It usually does a reasonably good job and is able to give us clear graphics, not like the old dot printers that made our work look like something only slightly resembling the finished product. Today even a photo can be printed that rivals the ones we take with our film cameras, if anyone has a film camera anymore. I gave mine up long ago. If we are industrious, we can find places on the internet that sell the ink for these things at a fraction of the store price. I use a Canon Pixma 3000 and only pay about $3.15 per cartridge and the last batch I bought was even cheaper since there was a special sale. The inkjet printer was invented in 1976, but didn't reach homes until 1988. The first ones were just as bad as the impact printers that had 9 pins.

There are just so many things in our homes, that we never give a second thought to, that would have been considered miracles 60 years ago.