In 1956, the world’s population was about 2.8 billion. Everest had only been climbed twice, the Mariana trench was unconquered and only the third ever expedition to the South Pole reached its goal 3 weeks before The New Scientist was launched. The idea that was “fairly well established”. In quite a few other ways, too, science and technology were unrecognisable.
The standard model of particle physics didn’t exist, just a confusing menagerie of subatomic particles. Quarks, the fundamental building blocks whose combinations explain this profusion, weren’t proposed until 1964. Big bang theory was still on the fringes. The cosmic microwave background, a sea of radiation produced in the aftermath of the big bang that supports many of modern cosmology’s discoveries, had been predicted but not yet observed.
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Another theory struggling for acceptance was plate tectonics; two papers published in 1956 helped sway the doubters. Also in earth sciences, a paper called “” provided an inkling of what would be a major preoccupation 60 years later.
DNA’s structure had been determined in 1953, but whether or not DNA was the genetic material was unclear. The oral contraceptive pill, the most influential medical breakthrough of the 20th century, was still in development.
One of the world’s first commercial computers, the Bendix G-15, went on sale in 1956 for $49,000; it computed with vacuum tubes rather than transistors. Only about a third of homes in the UK had a television. Both the US and USSR had announced plans to put a satellite into orbit but success still looked miles away; the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 shocked the world.
“The world has entered a phase of spectacular technological advances.” So said The New Scientist in its debut leader column in 1956. The editors got it spot on. We asked some historians of science to nominate the most influential innovations of the past 60 years
1957: Artificial satellites
On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union sent the first artificial satellite into orbit. Although launched under the auspices of the International Geophysical Year, a project intended to unite nations, it was a decisive moment in mounting cold war tensions. It escalated the space race as the Soviet Union and the US vied for supremacy.
Beyond the geopolitical posturing, the launch of the satellite and its 21-day orbit heralded a new era for how we understand our planet and life on it. Today, in addition to a myriad of scientific uses such as observing the thickness of polar sea ice, satellites are fundamental to global communication networks. Without them, the Olympics would have never been broadcast to an international audience and you wouldn’t be able to find your way around via GPS. Although not all are still active, today there are more than 600 geostationary satellites, orbiting 35,000 kilometres above our heads.
Alexander Hall, Newman University, Birmingham, UK
1965: Kevlar
In 1965, US chemist Stephanie Kwolek was working for the DuPont chemical company developing fibres that could withstand extreme conditions, mainly for use in car tyres. She observed entirely novel properties in one polymer she synthesised: it would form liquid crystals in solution and possessed straight molecules. When the polymer solution was “spun”, a new class of synthetic fibres emerged, ones which were exceptionally stiff, lightweight and strong. The best known of these is Kevlar. It has hundreds of wide-ranging applications including bulletproof and stab-proof vests, which have saved thousands of lives around the world. Kwolek’s research also led to a new field of polymer chemistry. For this, in 1995 she was awarded the DuPont Company’s Lavoisier medal for outstanding technical achievement, the first woman to receive this honour.
Elizabeth Bruton, Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, University of Manchester
1966: CCTV
When the real Nineteen Eighty-Four arrived, Big Brother technology was no longer the stuff of fiction. Closed-circuit television was already in action, and it was here to stay. If you are in a public space right now – on a train, at a shopping centre or an airport – chances are that hidden cameras are watching and recording your every move.
CCTV originated as a product for ordinary people to use at home. In 1966, Marie van Brittan Brown, an African American nurse, finally lost patience with the reluctance of the New York emergency services to investigate calls from her neighbourhood of Queens. Along with her husband Albert, she filed a patent for a movable camera that could show images on a TV screen of whoever was at the front door.
CCTV soon became a ubiquitous instrument of surveillance, now relied on for tracking terrorists, recognising number plates and monitoring industrial processes. Worldwide, 100 million concealed cameras are in operation. Critics question whether the benefits justify this expensive invasion of privacy. Although crimes in car parks have been halved, the evidence suggests that CCTV provides little deterrent in other public settings.
Patricia Fara, University of Cambridge, president of the British Society for the History of Science
1967: Home pregnancy test
In 1967, Margaret Crane was designing cosmetic packaging at Organon Pharmaceuticals in New Jersey when she paid a visit to the company’s pregnancy testing lab. Struck by the rows and rows of urine samples that doctors had sent in, she had an idea: why not give women the power to find out if they were pregnant without going through a doctor?
This was a time when abortion was illegal and birth control inaccessible. If a single woman became pregnant, she faced widespread condemnation. Married women who did not want to have any more children – or didn’t want children at all – were often criticised as “unnatural” by their husbands, doctors and wider communities.
Crane developed a prototype using a plastic paper-clip container and the same chemical compound used in the lab. Her managers rejected her invention, fearing the hysterics a woman would experience if she discovered she was pregnant without a doctor’s supervision.
Despite this, the company secretly went about developing its own prototype. Crane showed up at their final product design meeting uninvited, entered her own design and, when it was deemed the best, voluntarily signed away her rights to it for $1. Ten years later, the home pregnancy test was available, and women were finally able to find out if they were pregnant without a doctor – and without judgement. This was revolutionary in giving women control over their own bodies, and led to wider feminist campaigns regarding effective birth control and safe access to abortion.
Jessica van Horssen, University of Leeds
1970s: Solar power
Strictly speaking, solar cells are a Victorian technology: the first one was built in 1883. It converted only 1 per cent of the solar energy into electricity, though, and failed to set the world alight. It was not until the late 1950s that the technology found a real-world application in the space race.
In 1958, a solar cell was used as a backup power source for NASA’s Vanguard 1 satellite, and soon all satellites were powered by the sun. Space applications drove a steady improvement, but also kept the price high, which meant that it was not until the 1970s that the first solar panels were installed on Earth. Since then, prices have dropped dramatically while the cells themselves have continued to improve. Solar panels for general use now peak at around 25 per cent efficiency, which makes solar power a potential game changer. It is finally able to compete with fossil fuels, both in terms of price and efficiency.
Kanta Dihal, University of Oxford
1974: Personal computing
The emergence of personal computers is just the kind of slow, cumulative process that human perversity likes to attribute to a single origin point. Many popular histories go for 1974 and the launch of the MITS Altair 8800, although single-user computers were in fact much older. IBM had marketed one in 1957, but it was a business machine costing $55,000. The Altair cost $400 and inspired a legion of new enthusiasts. Yet it was a bare-bones box with input switches and indicator lights, appealing only to technical minds.
The familiar keyboard and monitor set-up became mainstream in 1977, when firms including the fledgling Apple achieved major US sales. In the less affluent UK, personal computing caught on in the early 1980s with the Sinclair ZX81, a basic, cut-down tool that proved ideal for understanding future possibilities. The BBC Micro also defined many youngsters’ first experience of computers because of its use in schools.
The conventions of the PC were laid down by IBM and its PC 5150 (or simply the IBM Personal Computer) of 1981. Ever cheaper, increasingly user-friendly and boosted from the mid-1990s by public internet access, the machines laid the groundwork for a mass digital culture. Traditional computers have now been joined by smartphones, media-streaming televisions and online control systems for the home.
James Sumner, University of Manchester
1978: MRI
When René Laennec developed the stethoscope in the early 1800s, his aim was simple: to “see” inside the living body. His invention became the symbol of medical practice and sparked a search for ever more precise ways of visualising our inner workings.
The discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895 was a huge breakthrough, but arguably the most important technique of all was magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). It has complex origins, starting with Nikola Tesla’s discovery of the rotating magnetic field in 1882. But the key insight came in 1971, when physicist Raymond Damadian showed that tumours and other bodily tissues responded differently when exposed to strong magnetic fields and pulses of radio waves.
Realising the possible application, Damadian filed a patent for an “apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue”, but his design was never put into production. Instead, a team led by Peter Mansfield at the University of Nottingham, UK, took up the challenge. His team presented the first image of real clinical value at a conference in Virginia in 1978. Since then, the use of MRI scanners in hospitals has expanded rapidly: around 60 million scans are now performed worldwide every year. They have transformed early cancer diagnosis and more recent developments, including functional MRI (fMRI), allow us to see the workings of the human brain in ways previously unimaginable.
James Stark, University of Leeds
1980: Tamoxifen
Today, tamoxifen is one of the world’s best-selling breast cancer drugs. However, it almost did not see the light of day. Compound ICI 46,474, as it was first known, was synthesised in 1962 by Dora Richardson, who was working on developing a contraceptive pill for ICI. The compound was found to stimulate rather than suppress ovulation, and ICI nearly stopped the project. It was saved partly because the team’s leader, Arthur Walpole, threatened to resign, and pressed on with another project: to develop tamoxifen as a treatment for breast cancer.
Even then, its market appeared small – it was mainly used as a palliative treatment for advanced breast cancer. A turning point came in 1980 when clinical trials showed that it was also beneficial when used alongside surgery and chemotherapy in the early stages of the disease. Later, trials demonstrated that it could prevent occurrence or recurrence in women at risk. Although tamoxifen has side effects, its usefulness in treating and preventing a major cause of death makes it a medical breakthrough of huge significance.
Viviane Quirke, Oxford Brookes University
1993: Automated collaborative filtering
You may not have heard of automated collaborative filtering, but you have almost certainly used it. It mediates nearly all of your online experiences. Without it, the internet would be very different and much less useful.
The term “collaborative filtering” was first used in 1993 by Doug Terry, a software developer for Xerox, in descriptions of an information filtering system he was working on. This system, Tapestry, was designed to defeat the growing menace of information overload by prioritising documents according to its users’ preferences. Previous systems only let users search according to predetermined categories. Tapestry allowed them to annotate documents, then included these annotations in searches. Gradually, users would collaboratively rank, or filter, the most useful information.
Over the next 20 years, this method developed further and required fewer inputs from the user. Automated collaborative filtering (ACF) software is now vital to navigating the estimated 4.5 billion websites that make up the internet. It structures our searches, prioritises our social media and news feeds, generates suggestions on shopping sites, filters email and acts as a romantic and professional matchmaker. However, it isn’t without downsides. ACF is behind the echo-chamber effect. By reinforcing our connections to people who have similar views and interests, it obscures other perspectives, with important social consequences.
Elizabeth Haines, Science Museum research associate
1990s: The mobile phone
For an invention to be great it has to do two things: touch many people’s lives, and make a big difference. The cellular mobile phone has achieved both. Nearly all of us use them. We spend our lives prodding a screen. Truly personal computers, they entertain us, organise our diaries, play our music, interface with our social media and, once in a blue moon, we use them to talk.
The aptly named Douglas Ring first described the cellular idea in the 1940s in an internal report at Bell Labs, where it gathered dust for more than two decades. The first cellphones you could buy date from the 1970s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that, in one country after another, they became ubiquitous. What’s more, unlike televisions, washing machines and other widespread gadgets, the mobile phone is a rare case of a technology that is so important we carry it everywhere. If I look at myself, I find only a handful of essential inventions: clothing and shoes (Palaeolithic), keys and money (Neolithic), glasses (medieval) and, the sole newcomer for 600 years, the mobile phone.
Jon Agar, University College London
This article appeared in print under the headline “What a difference 60 years makes”
