Basile Bouchon was a French inventor who is credited with creating the first successful weaving loom control mechanism in 1725. His mechanism used perforated paper tapes to control the movement of the loom, allowing for the creation of intricate weaving patterns. Bouchon’s invention was later improved upon by his compatriot,...
English mathematician Charles Babbage was tired of typographical errors in his books of mathematical tables. These books had lists of pre-computed numbers, which were used in navigation, astronomy, and statistics. Babbage drew up the design for the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator that could produce these tables automatically. While his...
A transposition cipher changes the position of the letters in a message using a specific rule, called a key. The recipient, who also knows the key, reverses the process to get the original text. Writing a message backwards is a transposition cipher, although it is not a secure one, as...
Developed in 1956, the IBM RAMAC 350 was the first computer to have a magnetic disk drive similar to those used today. It weighed 1 tonne (1 ton) and had 50 disks that stored a total of 5 MB of data. That’s around the file size of one high-resolution jpeg...
Most people find binary numbers difficult to work with. The hexadecimal system is based on multiples of 16 and uses the digits 0 to 9 followed by the letters A to F. A 24-bit binary number defining a colour can be written as six hexadecimal digits, making life easier forprogrammers.
Braille is a tactile writing system used by people who are blind or visually impaired to read and write. It was developed by Louis Braille in 1824, and is based on a series of raised dots that are arranged in patterns to represent letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. Braille is...
The human brain is constantly searching for familiar patterns. So much so that people often see patterns that aren’t there. This phenomenon, where a person might think a cloud looks like a particular object, or see a face in a cup of coffee, is known as pareidolia. Computers can only...
The first integrated circuit was created in 1958 by American electrical engineer Jack Kilby (1923-2005). Before Kilby’s Invention, machines used vacuum tubes, which were bulky and unreliable. Kilby’s IC was based on tiny transistors, and all the parts were made on the one piece of material: the integrated chip was...
Greek inventor Hero devised a large number of machines. His steam engine, which he called an aeolipile, used the force of heated steam to make a metal sphere spin around. It was a clever idea, but never put to practical use.
The D-wave quantum supercomputer has the same processing power as 100 million regular computers.If 100 million computer chips were stacked on top of each other, they would be the same height as 23 Mount Everests.
