Chaos Theory: How did we get to here? Flashcards
Smartphone
How did we get to here with the smartphone?//Lots of things happen that led to today’s smartphone. // Story starts with Samual Morris who invented Morris code. Morris was an artist and left for a job to paint a portrait for about a week. He left behind his very pregnant wife who was about due for her baby.
While Morris was away on his trip, his wife died in labor. In those days there was no way to communicate quickly over long distances. So when Morris returns home his wife already died and was buried in the ground.
He was devastated! He kept on thinking there had to be a way to communicate quickly over long distance.//Chaos: A short time later, he goes on a voyage by ship. On the ship he meets an electrical student and learns all he could about electricity. He experiments to see if he could use electricity as a switch. He can! He experiments to see if he could use electricity to send electrical impulses of different lengths and discovers that he can. So he perfects it with a tapping key to make dots and dashes with electrical signals. It works fine. Now he makes a legend of dots and dashes which corresponds with the alphabet and a signal for spaces between words and sentences.//After it gets it perfected he tests it with a wire running from his sender to his receiver and it works. He tests it over long distances and it still works. He is excited and the whole world buys into it. In a few years, all the nearby towns are connected with telegraph offices to send communication quickly over long distances.
Chaos: Later in history, Alexander Graham Bell is making diaphrams to convert sound to electrical impules then back again into sound.
Bell was trying to make hearing devices for the deaf but ends up inventing the telephone! So now they don’t need to go through a telegraph office. Now with the telephone, communication is instant and goes person to person through telephone wires.//Chaos: Next up comes Hertz. Hertz discovers electromagnic waves can be transmitted without wires, through thin air!//Chaos: Marconi makes a long distance machine that transmits wireless waves in open outside enviroment, through trees etc. //People thought that Marconi was crazy and belonged in the insane asylum.
Marconi installs wireless telegraph machines on two ocean liners and people are absolutely dumbfounded! //Chaos: Years later in 1912, the Titanic sinks and SOS calls go out from the sinking ship and other ships came and rescued 700 people who would have died without Marconi’s wireless telegraphs onboard.
When the world heard this news about the rescue, thousands of ships had the devices installed! Marconi became world famous and very rich.
The next chaos event was with the beautiful actress/Scientist Hedy Lamar. Hedy developed a system of frequency hopping that would stop the Nazis from jamming radio controlled torpedos.
The U.S. defense department rejected her idea but later used it in the Cuban missile crisis.
Hedy got the idea from watching a player piano play music off a rolled paper with holes in it to hit different notes.
Today the modern smartphone uses this frequency hopping to allow millions of cellphone users to share frequences. Without Hedy’s idea of frequency hopping, the frequencies would be used up with just a few hundred calls. With Hedy’s idea, the frequency hopping handles hundreds of millions of calls each day.
The next Chaos event was by Jack Kilby, a Texas instrument worker. At Texas Instrument, everyone left and went on vacation at the very same time. So vacation time was here and everyone left for a week of vacation. Since Jack Kilby was just hired, he didn’t have any vacation coming to him and so he had to work alone in the building.//Since everyone was gone, he worked on his own pet project, He tinkered with the idea of building an entire circuit out of one semi-conductor since manually making a circuit board out of many components was very, very labor intense and would cost way too much money to build. It just wasn’t worth the time and expense.//So he used some foil as a semi-conductor and invented the integrated circuit. Now electronic entertainment devices could become very much smaller and become PORTABLE!
From Kilby’s integrated circuit, it was a small jump to making the first microchip. Now the transistor radio was a modern marvel, and portable!
In 1973, Motorola invents the first cell phone. In a few more years the cell phone can not only make mobile phone calls, but it can also access the internet. With internet access, people build “Apps” to do all sorts of things, like sport scores, the weather, the stock market, send photos and videos. Then streaming videos on Netflix and Amazon Prime.//Today’s modern smartphone can do many wonderous things. But it never would have happened if Samuel Morris was home when his wife died. //Chaos Theory. Scarry and remarkable but that is how we got to here with the smartphone.
