Some call the ‘Babble’, a device offering audio privacy, ‘the Cone of Silence’ for its resemblance to the device used by secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1965 TV comedy series ‘Get Smart’. And in Texas, the project ‘Clock of the Long Now’, a mechanical clock designed to tick once a year, advance once every century, and have a cuckoo come out every millennium, is under construction — the project is planned to last for 10,000 years.

On July 8, 1958, the New York Times published an article titled “NEW NAVY DEVICE LEARNS BY DOING: Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser”. The article reported that “the Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence” The somewhat enthusiastic report was based on a press conference organized by the US Navy and hosted by Frank Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt, born in 1928, a graduate of social psychology and holder of a Ph.D. …

Near the end of World War I, German engineer Arthur Scherbius invented a cipher device, patented it and around 1920 began marketing it, calling it the Enigma machine. Eventually, the machine was adopted by the military and government services of Nazi Germany before World War II. German military planning emphasized…

Charles Babbage, was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer, born in Devonshire, in 1792. The son of Benjamin Babbage, a banker, he was privately educated because of poor health as a child, until he went to college at Cambridge in 1810. …

At the end of the 18th century, the enormous improvement in productivity brought on by the Industrial Revolution established irrevocably the premise that automating production is better — mass production produced faster and cheaper than anything before. …

Great music producers are like magicians: they have the power to transform music, to add colors and new unexpected dimensions. Sir George Martin transformed the Beatles taking them from ‘Love me Do’ to ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, Phil Spector created the ‘Wall of Sound’ style and Teo Macero…

In the ’70s, France had a collapsing communications structure, with 7 million telephone lines struggling to accommodate some 47 million subscribers, and long waiting times for new lines — Paris residents had to wait up to 6 months for a new line. …

William Stanley Jevons (1835–1882) was an economist and logician born in Liverpool, England. At the age of fifteen, Jevons attended the University College School in London, focusing mainly on chemistry and botany. …

Maybe you own a Roomba, a small autonomous vacuum cleaner robot that can clean a floor with no supervision or you have probably followed the evolution of the Mars Rovers, the robotic vehicles that help to map the Mars surface and conduct a series of experiments. …