Historical Perspective: 30 Inventions Younger Than Betty White

Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by professor Alexander Fleming.

Sliced bread was invented in 1928. Otto Frederick Rohwedder created the Chillicothe Baking Company, which sold the first loaf that utilized Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine.

June 25, 1951 was the day when CBS broadcast its first color TV show. Unfortunately, no one could tell because they all had black-and-white TV sets. The first program in color was called "Premiere."

1929 was the year when this life-saving tape was invented.

Although we've had canned beverages since 1813, mass production of them only started in 1935.

After witnessing an accident between an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage, African American inventor, Garrett Morgan, filed a U.S. patent for a traffic signal. Patent] was granted on 20 November 1923 for Morgan's three-position traffic signal.

Before 1929, frozen food was not a thing.

In 1928, Walter E. Diemer, an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia, was experimenting with new gum recipes. These experiments turned out to be successful.

In 1943, the mechanical engineer Richard James accidentally came up with the toy when he was trying to find a way of keeping products on ships undamaged.

The discovery of nuclear fission occurred in December 1938 by Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, and Otto Hahn. Meitner and Frisch were physicists and Hahn was a nuclear chemist.

Enovid, a drug the FDA approved for menstrual disorders, came with a warning: The mixture of synthetic progesterone and estrogen also prevents ovulation. Two years later, more than half a million American women were taking Enovid—and not all of them had cramps. In 1960, the FDA approved Enovid for use as the first oral contraceptive.

Automatic wrist watches became a thing back in 1923.

The first modern trampoline was built by George Nissen and Larry Griswold in 1936. Nissen was a gymnastics and diving competitor and Griswold was a tumbler on the gymnastics team.

LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938, by Dr. Albert Hoffman.

In 1927, Betty White was already five years old when the first jukebox that automatically shifted records was introduced to the public.

In 1959, the world was introduced to Barbie.

1969 was the year of Woodstock and when beanbag chairs became a thing.

The Big Mac wasn't introduced until 1967. McDonald's was originally a hot dog stand that only turned to burger-making in 1948.

Up until 1931, non-electric razors were not only a choice, but also the only possibility.

Coffee may have existed for centuries, but instant coffee has been here with us since 1938.

Fifteen-year-old Rich Skrenta created an application called Elk Cloner as a prank—and ended up creating the first virus to spread outside its home network. Elk Cloner spreads via floppy disk and attaches to the Apple OS II operating system. When users boot from the disk, Elk Cloner transfers the computer's memory; any additional disks inserted without rebooting are also infected. On every fiftieth boot, the computer displays text written by Skrenta:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality / It will get on all your disks / It will infiltrate your chips / Yes it's Cloner! / It will stick to you like glue / It will modify ram too / Send in the Cloner!

In the 1950s, first computers were created. By 1965, MIT released the first wide area network (WAN). Four years later, the first successful internet message was sent from UCLA to Stanford Research Institute. But it took a while for memes to become a thing.

In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer. In 1947, Raytheon built the "Radarange," the first commercially available microwave oven.

IBM released the first computer hard disk drive, the 2,000-pound-plus, refrigerator-sized IBM 305 RAMAC, which introduced magnetic disk storage. Up until then, files were either kept on spools of magnetic tape or on good old-fashioned paper, with no way to jump right to the record you wanted to pull up. With the RAMAC, a mechanical arm would retrieve data by storing data at a particular magnetic orientation. This technology went on to be used (at a smaller size) in laptops and computer servers everywhere.

C.G. Johnson invented the electric garage door opener in 1926.

The garbage disposal unit was invented in 1927 by John W. Hammes, an architect working in Racine, Wisconsin. He applied for a patent in 1933 that was issued in 1935.