The History of Three Things You Probably Use Every Day
How many days go by in which you don't check your email messages? How many days do you not slip your iPod buds into your ears? And how often can you get through the day without tapping away on your computer keyboard?
If we had to guess? You use all three of these devices nearly every day. Some of us use these things all day every day.
But do you know the history behind these products? You might be surprised at how they were developed.
Headphones
Mashable writer Fran Berkman credits the rise of headphones to Utah inventor Nathaniel Baldwin, who developed the first pair of these devices in his kitchen way back in 1910.
According to the legend, Baldwin shipped a prototype for his headphones to Lt. Commander A.J. Hepburn of the U.S. Navy in 1910. Hepburn was skeptical at first—according to the Mashable story, Baldwin's instructions regarding the headphones came on decidedly unprofessional blue-and-pink paper—but was amazed once he tested the devices. They actually worked!
It wasn't until 1958, though, that headphones were first used for listening to music. Credit for this goes to John Koss, who introduced the SP3 Stereophones designed to be used specifically for listening to music.
Koss certainly made an impact. According to Mashable, the company he created, The Koss Corporation, is still in business and is still making headphones.
The Qwerty keyboard
If you type on a computer, you use a Qwerty keyboard. The name comes from the first six letters appearing on the top left of the keyboard: Q, W, E, R, T, Y.
But how did this configuration come to be? Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer in Milwaukee, gets part of the credit. He developed and built a writing machine that he patented in 1867. Unfortunately, the machine suffered frequent jams. To avoid this problem, the inventor, along with his clever friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, moved commonly used letter pairs apart from each other so that typists didn't jam these keys together.
Sholes worked on his invention for several years, all the while studying how frequently pairs of letter were typed in succession. In 1873, manufacturing rights for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer were sold to E. Remington and Sons. Remington officials finally rearranged the keyboard so that it looks like the one we use today.
Email
How many email messages do you send on a given day? If you're like most people, probably dozens, at least.
It's hard to remember, but there was a time—not too long ago—when most people survived without email. In fact, it's difficult to say that email was ever really invented. Ian Peter, in his History of the Internet website, claims that email actually evolved.
He points to MAILBOX as the first example of an email-like product. Basically, this program placed a message in another user's directory in a place where that user would see it when they logged in. MAILBOX was first used at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965.
The big challenge with email came when computer users wanted to talk with each other over different networks. That required, as Peter writes, that messages come with their own addresses showing where the message should go and from where it came.
Ray Tomlinson, in 1972, created a solution and is widely credited with "inventing" email. Tomlinson picked the @ symbol as a way to indicate a message being sent from one computer to another. And with that advancement, email was born.
Other email advancements came fairly quickly. Larry Roberts developed email folders so that his boss could sort his electronic messages. As Peter writes, that was a major advance in the functionality of email. In 1975, inventor John Vital developed software to help organize email.
So the next time you listen to music while commuting to work on the subway, type a Word document, or send that Word document by email to your bosses, remember just how difficult life would be without these three amazing inventions.
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