Hard Drive

Created by IBM in 1956, the first hard drive- a popular data storage device- was made form 50 24 –inch discs contained inside a cabinet that was as large as a cupboard! The whole thing had a whopping capacity of 5 MB and could only be leased at a cost of $3,200 per month. The first commercially available hard drive called profile was sold by Apple in 1981 for $3500 –that’s $700 per GB!

While hard drives became popular for widespread use in computers and later as external data storage devices, it may be news to you that even calculators, cash registers and VHS machines utilize hard drives to store varying amounts of data. This device is important because the size and speed of the hard drive in a system is directly proportional to how efficient the system will be.

What makes hard drives revolutionary is their infinite ability to be rewritten unlike traditional storage devices such as disks and tapes. Because the information is stored magnetically all the data can be rear-ranged, changed and moved around without disruption or loss of data. It actually took 51 years since the hard drive was first invented for disks to reach a capacity of 1 terabyte. This happened in 2007. Following shortly was the first 2TB storage hard dive in 2009. One can only wonder what the next level of storage will be and how soon it will come to the market.

Scanning Tunneling Microscope

Gerd Binning and Heinrich Rohrer developed the scanning tunneling microscope in 1981,presumably because they found viewing through standard microscopes ‘uncool’ An older version of the STM was the ‘topografiner’ invented by Russel Young and his colleagues between 1965 and 1971.

A super fine tip is taken and kept at a distance of one nano meter away from the sample. The tip is changed and hence electrons start flowing from the tip to the surface in a process called ‘tunneling’. The current flowing through the tip is kept constant by scanning the tip over the surface horizontally and by adjusting the height of the tip vertically. This results in a 3-D image of the surface, which in our opinion is pretty damn cool. Because of the 3-D structure, one could make characterize surface roughness, observe surface defects, and determine the size and conformation of molecules and aggregates on the surface.

STMs are also advantageous because they can be used in ultra-high vacuum, air, water, other gases, as well as foam temperatures as low as 273 degree Celsius to around 300 degree Celsius. Their only drawback is that they require quite a bit of skill to use and are very fragile so forget running and buying one for yourself. Also, it costs only about $8000 for the cheapest STM.

Radio Transmission

While some say that it was Nikola Tesla who invented the radio, others say it was Guglielmo Marconi. But the best version of these stories is that our own Jagadish Chandra Bose was the one who invented it. JCB demonstrated radio transmission in 1896 in Calcutta in front of the British Governor General and had solved the problem of waves not travelling through walls or water through his ‘Mercury Coherer with a telephone detector’ device. Marconi’s Coherer, which he used in 1901, was an exact replica of it. 

The story goes that Marconi stole JCB’s notebook in which the Mercury Coherer was drawn, and so when asked how he came up with the design, he fumbled like a snotty little boy and lied that he got it from someone else, but this lie was also found out. We’d like to believe that JCB met Marconi outside wherever scientists meet and made him regret that he did anything like that, but we can safely assume that JCB was a bigger man that. He even declined to file a patent for his device, believing in information to be free to allow more research, and only filed a patent by 1904 on the insistence of his friends. By then, slimy Marconi had already received his patent and international recognition, leading us to conclude that he was either very smart or that history is just trying to make us lose hope in humanity.