10 Little-Known Technological Firsts

When we think of “technology,” we generally think of our PC, or smartphone, or electric nose hair trimmer. (We really like those.) But we tend to forget that the most mundane, taken-for-granted things were once cutting-edge technologies, and that the world didn’t come pre-populated with cars, radios, and car radios. Here are ten interesting technological firsts:

10

The First Public Radio Broadcast

January 13, 1910





Lee DeForest didn’t exactly invent radio—no one person did that—but he did invent the Audion, which greatly improved the existing technology, He also coined the term “radio,” which has stuck around for quite some time now. In 1907, DeForest was experimenting successfully with ship-to-shore radio communication, and claiming that he’d soon be broadcasting opera performances to all of New York City—and in 1910, he actually did it.

The first public radio performance was broadcast on January 13 of that year, from the Metropolitan Opera House, with performances ofCavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, featuring famed tenor Enrico Caruso. The signal was broadcast with a five hundred watt transmitter, and was heard as far away as Bridgeport, Connecticut.

While the quality was obviously poor (with the New York Times reporting that the static “kept the homeless song waves from finding themselves”—whatever that means), reporters were nevertheless impressed, and interest in the medium immediately began to grow.



Top 10 Unknowable Things

There are lots of things we don’t know; personally I’m a veritable cornucopia of ignorance. But there is a difference between things we don’t know and things that can’t be known. For example, no-one knows when Shakespeare was born (although we do know when he was baptized). However, it’s not impossible that in the future we could find out – a long lost document might be found that mentions his birth, so Shakespeare’s true date of birth is not unknowable, just unknown. This list contains 10 things that are unknowable in principle. Not only are they unknown now, they can never be known.

Most of these are mathematical; I’ve tried to make it as nontechnical as possible – apart from anything else, I’m no mathematician so I’ve tried to dumb it down enough so that I can understand it.

10

Sets and More Sets

Unknowable Thing: What’s in a set of sets that don’t contain themselves?

We have to do a little mathematics for several of these items! This is the first on the list because, in a sense, the concept of the “unknowable” starts with this paradox discovered by Bertrand Russell in 1901.

Let’s start with the idea of a set. A set is a collection of objects – for example, you could have the set of positive even numbers that contains 2, 4, 6, 8… or the set of prime numbers containing 2, 3, 5, 7, 11… so far so good.

Can sets contain other sets? Yes, no problem – you could have a set of sets that contain other sets – and that set would, obviously, contain itself. In fact, you can split sets into two types – those that contain themselves and those that don’t.

So, consider a set (S, say) of sets that don’t contain themselves. Does S contain itself? If it does, then it shouldn’t be in the set, but if it doesn’t, then it should. So S is continually hopping in and out of itself.

This paradox caused quite a lot of consternation amongst mathematicians. Imagine someone proving that a number could be simultaneously even and odd, it’s similarly worrisome to that. Ways have been gotten around the paradox – essentially by redefining set theory.