Consumer Technology

Everything's relative. Speed, mass, space and time are all subjective. Nor are age, motion or the wanderings of the planets measures that humans can agree on anymore; they can be judged only by the whim of the observer. Light has weight. Space has curves. And coiled within a pound of matter, any matter, is the explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT. We know all this, we are set adrift in this way at the end of the 20th century, because of Albert Einstein.

From Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod to the Hubble Space Telescope, this timeline covers some of America's technological innovations and inventions.

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In accordance with the mandate to study the "Transformation of Canada," the collection of the Canada Science and Technology Museum encompasses a broad cross-section of Canadian scientific and technological heritage. National in scope, this unique collection consists of artifacts, photographs, technical drawings, trade literature, and rare books, all of which are complemented and supported by library holdings of monographs and serials.

AT&T brought its former president, Theodore Vail, out of retirement to help it fight off competition erupting from the expiration of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patents. Vail's solution: transcontinental telephone service.
In 1906, the eccentric American inventor Lee De Forest developed a triode in a vacuum tube. It was a device that could amplify signals, including, it was hoped, signals on telephone lines as they were transferred across the country from one switch box to another. AT&T bought De Forest's patent and vastly improved the tube. It allowed the signal to be amplified regularly along the line, meaning that a telephone conversation could go on across any distance as long as there were amplifiers along the way.

acorn
The Acorn computer really set off following the choice of the BBC in the UK to use an Acorn designed system for a TV series. Let's not forget, Acorn systems based on the principles of the early 8-bit's are still in use today.
amstrad
Amstrad were relative latecomers to the homecomputing arena, but produced some nice machines.
atari
Atari had an early start in the industry and used it well.
commodore
Affectionately known as the Commode, well to Sinclair users anyway. The Commodore 64 was an excellent system let down by a poor BASIC.
sinclair
The ZX Spectrum launched in 1982 revolutionised homecomputing and gave birth to many memorable names from the era.

From their inception in the late 1800s, the movies have taken on many shapes and sizes, not just on the screen but also a variety of film gauges were used in the early days. Thomas Edison is generally credited with the creation of the 35mm format that became the norm. Edison and many others had also done work with 70mm and other film widths. The 35mm standard pioneered by Edison has remained almost unchanged. With a nearly square aspect ratio of 1.33:1, later altered to 1.37:1 in the early 1930s with the addition of sound on film, this frame shape is still seen on television, 8mm and 16mm film. Experiments with 56mm, 65mm, 70mm and other film widths were done throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s. A few films were produced in these larger formats but they quickly died as the depression made the expense to re-equip theatres with new projectors and screens an economic impossibility