Therefore many new technologies have emerged in the previous half-century that it is impossible to list all of them. However, these 10 high-tech discoveries stick out within the previous 50 years since they have altered the way Americans live. We return in their infancy, in addition to where they have taken us now.
Advertising transplants. Back in 1954, Dr. Joseph Murray eliminated the kidney from a human patient and implanted it in a different. The receiver accepted the kidney because of its own instead of regretting it as a foreign body. Soon afterward, however, other researchers developed a medication that may squelch a transplant recipient’s immune system enough to allow the organ to become integrated into its body. Now, some 25,000 Americans annually get a brand new heart, liver, kidney, lung, liver, or liver — and a brand new lease on life.
Robots and artificial intelligence. Five decades after, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in a pursuit to mechanically mimic human minds in addition to hands. Today, robots build products better, faster, and often more affordable than manual laborers, while over 8 million U.S. airline flights annually are scheduled, directed, and flown together with the assistance of innovative applications. However, some Americans eye such systems together with the cynical view of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, whose 1952 narrative “Player Piano” cautioned that the machines may leave people with no purpose — or even a project. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco set a paperless transport system using the Los Angeles division in 1972. From the close of the decade, instant transfers of tens of thousands of dollars in worth involving banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions had become prevalent.
The actual allure of EFT now is its own trickle down to the person: You get catch cash out of your bank accounts anywhere in the world and use PayPal to buy and sell things online without sending checks or money through the mail.
Atomic power. Whenever the Queen herself threw the change on the planet’s first nuclear power plant in Calder Hall out London in 1956, atomic reactors were viewed as a supply of cheap, energy. But, the United States now has approximately 100 active plants which produce 20% of the nation’s power — second only to coal as a source of power — also are steadily increasing their capacity. Will the next 50 years deliver a much better choice?
Mobile telephones. The concept of mobile telephone service dates back to 1947, but the very first call was made on the sidewalk away from the Manhattan Hilton in 1973 by Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher that rang his rival in AT&T Bell Labs to check the brand new phone. Ten decades later, over half of Americans have one and mobile networks are starting to function Internet access at broadband speeds through thin air. Americans from 50 decades ago would be unwilling to learn that we never went farther than the Moon — no Mars colony, no more 2001 odyssey into Jupiter, no speed-of-light spaceships. However, the space race against the Russians that dominated the national mind (and a fantastic chunk of the funding ) from the’60s and’70s pushed the evolution of countless enabling technologies, such as artificial fibers and integrated computer circuits, needed to fly guys to the Moon and back. Along with the astronauts brought back a lesson out of the area: “We watched the ground the size of a quarter, and we understood then that there’s but 1 earth. We’re all brothers.”
Earlier IBM recast the desktop computer from hobbyist’s gadget into office automation instrument in 1983 — followed closely by Apple’s people-friendly Macintosh a year after — a”minicomputer” was that the size of a washing machine and demanded a distinctive living space. Nevertheless, the trained technicians that operated the previous mainframes already understood computers were cool: They might rely on them to play games, keep diaries, and exchange messages with friends throughout the nation while looking busy. Now, as a result of the PC, most of us seem occupied.