1976 to 2000

Bob Gore yanked heated PTFE instead of pulling it slowly, discovering expanded nodes-and-fibrils microstructure in 1969. The 1976 ...

Xerox PARC's Metcalfe designed the collision-sense multiple-access network in 1973, patenting with Boggs and Thacker in 1977. DEC,...

Sasson's 1975 breadbox prototype captured 0.01 megapixels to cassette tape, 23 seconds per image, patented 1978. Kodak shelved it ...

Naval Research Lab's Easton patented Timation-based satellite navigation, granted 1980 as GPS's passive-ranging foundation. The 24...

Goodenough's 1980 cobalt-oxide cathode at Oxford, unpatented by the university, met Yoshino's carbon anode at Asahi Kasei, patente...

Hull, working nights at a furniture-sunlight-cure shop, patented stereolithography in 1986 and founded 3D Systems. His STL file fo...

Palmaz, an Argentine radiologist, hand-etched his wire-mesh tube and partnered with cardiologist Richard Schatz; Johnson and Johns...

Ericsson's Haartsen built the short-range frequency-hopping spec in 1994, patents filing through the decade. The 1998 SIG with Nok...

Australia's science agency CSIRO patented OFDM-based wireless LAN methods in 1996, solving indoor multipath echoes that defeated o...

Kary Mullis conceived the polymerase chain reaction in 1983 while driving through the California hills at night. Repeated cycles o...

GE microbiologist Ananda Chakrabarty engineered a Pseudomonas bacterium carrying plasmids that let it break down several component...

Harvard geneticists Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart created a mouse carrying an activated cancer gene, making it highly susceptib...

After the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer were identified in the mid-1990s, Myriad Genetics o...

Amazon patented a method for placing an online order with a single click, using stored payment and shipping details. It quickly wo...

Tim Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext information system at CERN in 1989 and by the end of 1990 had built the first web server, bro...