The invention of the television often generates very heated discussion even amongst friends as to who actually invented the TV. Unfortunately several people were all working on television independently of each other, and a variety of different technologies were tested, all of which contributed to the actual design of the first commercial televisions. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone actually demonstrated sending images over a telegraph wire in 1880, but this has never […]

The Compact Disc (CD) player has revolutionized music recording and completely changed the way people enjoy audio playback in less than thirty years of production. CD players use a system of lasers that read digitally encoded bits of information that are assembled in the main processor into their original audio tracks. The very first commercially available CD player was released in Japan in 1982 by Sony and was an immediate hit with the press and […]

The American flag, a symbol of the enduring power of the United States of America, was first hoisted in 1776 with the Union Jack, the flag of Great Britain in the canton, but in 1777 the United States Congress approved changing the flag, and a short while later the original thirteen stars representing the 13 colonies was adopted and used by American forces in the War of Independence. America’s first flag was very similar to […]

The invention of football dates back thousands of years, and every continent has at least one ancient game that could be described as football, but most have very little to do with each other. Dictionaries describe football as a team game that involves kicking a ball around a field, though some games such as rugby and gridiron are mostly passing games with minimal kicking. In Asia, the Chinese game of cuju spread from 200 AD […]

Chocolate is a type of food that is usually sold as a sweet, dessert, or in drink form, and is processed from the Cacao bean which is native to South America. The cacao bean is actually considered a vegetable and the pulp within the fruit is edible, thought the seed inside the fruit needs to be roasted before it can be used to make chocolate. Indian people from South America have used the pulp of […]

Basketball is unique amongst all the world’s team sports because its history is well known and documented so we know exactly when the rules were first drawn up, we know when the first games were played, we even know where the first teams were formed. Basketball is an American institution that has spread throughout the world to become one of the most popular college, social, and even professional sport. In the winter of 1891 at […]

The telephone, that dinosaur of 20th century technology that seems to be rapidly going out of favor as cellphones and the Internet take over, is also probably one of the most influential inventions of the post industrial age era. For more than a hundred years business has depended on having access to phones, and it is no accident that the wealthiest of nations have very high telephone use across all parts of society. In the […]

Video games in the 21st century are one of the biggest selling products in the entertainment industry, in some markets even starting to overtake conventional music sales. Video games are roughly described as an electronic game with some rudimentary form of interaction in terms of the player having control of some aspect of the game, and there being a point to playing. Video games weren’t invented until after the invention of the computer since a […]

Opera is a form of stage musical, quite different from typical Broadway musicals, and is often considered more cultural because it incorporates classical music and period costumes. Despite the use of classical orchestras, and a distinctive style of singing, opera actually describes a type of stage drama where singing is the main method of delivering lines instead of the more usual method of speaking a part. The renaissance era in Europe, especially in Italy, was […]

Radio refers to both the technology used to broadcast programs, and also the underlying science of radio waves, which are actually electromagnetic radiation that travels in waves just like light. Radio, even though it is used to broadcast audio signals is not in fact sound, though sound also travels in waves, but much much slower than radio waves. Because radio is electro magnetic, it’s discovery goes back to around the same time that electricity was […]