The fax machine was invented the same year as the Oregon Trail.

Both happened in 1843. The fax machine is older than the telephone.

#history #inventions #didyouknow

Now isn't that fascinating? A bicycle bell operating on a narrow sound frequency so it can be heard despite noise cancelling headphones! That's clever.
I didn't know that Škoda originated as a bicycle company, that's interesting in itself.

#inventions

https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/the-bicycle-bell-that-noise-cancelling-headphones-cant-ignore-90082/

💁🏻‍♀️ TIL: ✍️🎭 #BenjaminFranklin kept creating fictional characters – Silence Dogood, Poor Richard Saunders, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim – to publish opinions his real name couldn’t carry.

These alter egos let the Founding Father critique authority, satirize slavery apologists, and experiment with #ideas, all from behind a mask. Historian David Waldstreicher says it gave Franklin "the most freedom" he ever knew.

👉 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/among-all-great-things-benjamin-franklin-invented-discovered-alter-egos-gave-him-most-freedom-180988824/

#history #inventions #satire #pseudonyms #philadelphia #london #freespeech #abolition #almanac #printing #science #media

The Viral Story of a “SIM-less Phone” Inventor—and Why It Doesn’t Quite Add Up

Dear Cherubs, every few months the internet discovers a “genius ignored by the world” story and runs with it. This time, it’s a young man from Namibia, often named Simon (or Simo) Petrus, said to have invented a SIM-less phone—and then been overlooked.

It’s a compelling narrative. It’s also… a bit shaky.

THE VIRAL CLAIM
The story, widely shared across blogs and social media, claims that Petrus built a phone capable of making calls without a SIM card by using radio frequencies directly. According to these reports, he demonstrated the device locally but failed to receive global recognition or support.

If true, it would be a breakthrough. SIM cards, after all, are part of how mobile networks authenticate users. Removing them isn’t impossible—modern phones already use eSIM technology—but bypassing telecom infrastructure entirely is another matter.

And that’s where the story starts to wobble.

There is no widely verified coverage from major outlets like BBC News or The Guardian confirming a working, SIM-free phone that can operate globally outside existing networks. The claim tends to circulate in secondary blogs and reposted articles, often without technical detail or independent verification. In short, it’s reported—but not confirmed.

TECH REALITY CHECK
Let’s be clear: making calls without a physical SIM card is already a thing. eSIM technology, used in devices from companies like Apple and Google, allows phones to connect to networks digitally. No plastic chip required.

But that still relies on telecom providers.

A truly SIM-less phone that independently connects anywhere would require either a new global communication network or the ability to tap into existing frequencies without infrastructure. Both scenarios are, politely speaking, ambitious.

According to general telecom principles outlined by organizations like the International Telecommunication Union, mobile communication depends on coordinated spectrum use, infrastructure, and authentication systems. You don’t just “skip” that with a clever circuit and a good idea.

So what’s more plausible? Either the invention has been misunderstood, exaggerated, or exists at a prototype level that hasn’t been validated.

None of this means Petrus didn’t build something interesting. Many young inventors create impressive prototypes that don’t scale or get documented properly. But “ignored genius who solved global telecom” is a much bigger claim than the evidence supports.

WHY THE STORY SPREADS
Stories like this thrive because they hit a familiar nerve: the overlooked innovator, the system that fails talent, the idea that brilliance can come from anywhere and be dismissed.

And to be fair, that part is true—sometimes.

As noted by thisclaimer.com in discussions around viral tech claims and overlooked innovators, the internet tends to amplify narratives that feel emotionally satisfying, even when the facts are thin. It’s less about accuracy and more about the story we want to believe.

There’s also a geopolitical angle. A young African inventor being ignored by the global tech industry fits a broader conversation about inequality and access. That doesn’t make this specific claim true, but it does explain why it resonates.

So where does that leave us?

With a story that’s intriguing, possibly rooted in a real person and project, but inflated into something much bigger than the available evidence supports.

Hot take: the real issue isn’t that the world ignored a revolutionary phone—it’s that we’re very quick to believe we did.

Sources list:
International Telecommunication Union — https://www.itu.int
Medium (reported story on Simon Petrus) — https://medium.com/@projectnightfall/a-namibian-inventer-who-created-a-simless-phone-that-can-make-calls-anywhere-in-the-world-66425fddde4f
thisclaimer.com — https://thisclaimer.com

“Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the work of any one mind. Every great invention is really an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. . It is not usually a creation, but a growth, as truly so as is the growth of the trees in the forest.”*…

Our old friend (and here and here) Brian Potter thinks deeply about scientific and technological advance. Here, he ponders the pace of progress…

In her book on the history of the laser, historian Joan Bromberg notes that the technological and scientific predecessors of the maser (which itself preceded the laser – two critical technologies whose developmental histories I sketched in this piece two months ago) were in place for decades before physicist Charles Townes had the insight to combine them…

… This sort of decades-long wait between when a technology first becomes possible, and when it actually appears, seems common, or at least seems like it might be common. I’ve previously written about why it took so long for wind power to be widely deployed after it became technologically possible, and people often idly speculate whether inventors in the Roman Empire could have built a steam engine, or why we waited so long to put wheels on luggage.

Knowing how long this gap between when an invention becomes possible, and when it actually appears, is useful, because it tells us something about the nature of technology and technological progress. What factors govern whether some new technology appears? How much does mere technical possibility matter, and how much do things like cross-pollination of knowledge, economic feasibility, and political factors contribute? Knowing more about how long it takes for an invention to appear once it becomes technically possible can help us answer these sorts of questions.

I wanted a better sense of how long it takes for some technology to appear once its necessary predecessors are in place. So I used AI to try and find out…

[Potter explains his method, then unpacks his results…]

We can clearly see a few trends on this graph. One is that for most inventions, the gap between when it could have been invented and when it was actually invented is not particularly large. Of the 166 inventions Claude estimated a date for, 107 of them (64%) had an “earliest plausible” date 50 years or less from the actual date, and 150 of them (90%) had an “earliest straightforward” date 50 years or less from the actual date. For more than half the inventions, the average earliest straightforward date of invention was 10 years or less from the actual date.

Conversely, there were a relatively small number of inventions where the gap between “could have been invented” and “was invented” was very large. 30 inventions (18%) had an average gap of more than 100 years between “earliest plausible” and actually invented, and eight inventions had a gap of more than 1000 years. You can see this clearly on a histogram, which shows a large bump of small time gaps, and a long tail of fewer, larger gaps.

The inventions with the longest period between “could have been invented” and “was invented” are below.

There’re a few interesting trends observable here. Many of the longest-delayed inventions — the hypodermic needle, general anaesthetic, stethoscope — are medical inventions. (You could argue the surgical mask could be in this category as well). For the hypodermic needle, this probably needed to wait until the existence of some substance that needed to be injected (such as morphine, first synthesized in 1804), but for other medical inventions this possibly also reflects folks’ reluctance to do inventive-tinkering in a medical context. For general anaesthetic, for instance, the trial and error of getting the dose right was incredibly dangerous, and the inventor Hanaoka Seishu “crippled his mother and blinded his wife perfecting the dose.”

Several of the longest-awaited inventions are ones where the version in the list is an early, impractical version of the one that actually solved a problem. So the “dandy horse” — a two-wheeled, wooden vehicle that was a predecessor of the bicycle — could have been built in antiquity, but the dandy horse wasn’t particularly practical as a means of transportation, and actually useful bicycles had to wait for the improved manufacturing technology of the later 19th century. Likewise, the version of the ballpoint pen that Claude thinks could have been invented much earlier is John Loud’s 1888 version, but Loud’s pen worked poorly and wasn’t successful. Actually useful ballpoint pens are surprisingly difficult to manufacture (China famously couldn’t manufacture them until very recently), and credit for the “useful ballpoint pen” is usually given to Lazlo Biro in 1938. (Claude correctly notes that “useful” versions of both these inventions would need to wait until much later.) Judson’s early zipper and de Martinsville’s early sound-recording device are also examples of early, not-particularly-useful inventions.

Other inventions on this list seem like they might be a case of the surrounding social or technological conditions needing to be right for the invention to appear. So Otis’ elevator safety brake needed to wait until elevators were in higher demand, which probably didn’t occur until steam engines or some other similar power source came along (though maybe you could have water-driven elevators much earlier). Barbed wire perhaps needed to wait until enclosing very large areas of land for grazing became something people needed to do.

And some inventions seem like they might have been genuinely useful had someone thought of them earlier, and simply nobody did. Blanchard’s pattern-tracing lathe, Neilson’s hot blast, and the safety pin all seem like they fall into this category, though perhaps there were good reasons these didn’t appear earlier.

Going back to the scatterplot, the other obvious trend on this chart is that the gap between when an invention becomes possible and when it appears has narrowed over time. If we graph the average and median gaps for inventions by 20-year time periods, we can see that they have fallen over time.

For the 60 post-1900 inventions, every one has a “straightforward” invention date of 50 years or less than the actual date, and 75% of them have a straightforward date of 10 years or less before the actual date. Of the 30 inventions with a gap of more than 100 years between when they could have been invented and when they actually appeared, 29 of them were invented before 1900. So the process for creating new inventions seems to be getting more and more efficient — opportunities are getting noticed and exploited sooner and sooner, up through 1970 at least (which is when the list of major inventions extends to).

We can also look at how wait times vary by type of technology. The chart below shows average wait times by different categories, for both inventions overall and for just post-1900 inventions. We can see that medical inventions have the longest wait, while electronic inventions have the shortest wait…

… We can also look at what types of factors tend to be bottlenecks. For some inventions, the bottleneck is primarily scientific: the limiting factor for the transistor is the band theory of quantum mechanics, and the limiting factor for the radio was Hertz’s demonstration of electromagnetic waves. But for other inventions, it’s primarily technological: the turbojet had to wait not for some new physical theory, but until compressor technology and high-temperature steels appeared; likewise the airplane had to wait not for some novel theory of aerodynamics but until a light enough engine appeared. The chart below shows how often “science” or “technology” was the limiting factor for a given invention, for both inventions overall and post-1900 inventions.

In both cases, technology is the bottleneck far more often than science (though of course if you removed enough technological bottlenecks eventually you’d hit a scientific one, and vice versa).

There is of course only so much you can learn from this sort of exercise: at the end of the day, this is based on an AI’s best guess, not a thorough analysis of the various controlling factors by experts. But while I wouldn’t swear to its accuracy, I think the answers are probably mostly pretty good, and enough for us to draw some general (if tentative) conclusions about the nature of technological progress.

My main takeaway is that we mostly don’t wait all that long for new inventions. Since 1800 most inventions have appeared within a few decades of when it was possible to build them, and since 1900 these gaps been even narrower. It also seems likely that medical inventions are more likely to have long wait times than other types of inventions, and that the limiting factor for how early some new technology could appear is most likely to be technological, rather than scientific.

On the (maybe suprisingly) quick– and quickening– pace of progress: “How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz

* Robert Henry Thurston

###

As we analyze advance, we might send inventive birthday greetings to William Webster (W. W.) Hansen; he was born on this date in 1909. A physicist and one of the founders of the technology of microwave electronics, he had a central hand in the development of klystron technology (essential to high frequency amplification, thus central to microwave technology, radar, and UHF television transmission), and linear accelerators (he led the development of SLAC), and along with the Varian brothers and Edward Ginzton, co-founded Varian Associates (in 1948)–one of the first high-tech companies in Silicon Valley.

source

Foolproof. I can't see any possibility of something going wrong with this contraption.

https://youtu.be/K1c28meto3c

#1920s #Inventions

Greg Hyman, Co-Creator of Tickle Me Elmo, Dies at 78

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/greg-hyman-dead.html

#Obituaries #Toys #Inventions