5 Disturbing Origins Of Everyday Technology

5

We Have Modern GPS Because Of A Horrifying Airline Mix-Up

You probably know that the Global Positioning System was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense. So have you ever thought how weird it is that this system designed to help missiles and submarines navigate can now be used by all of us to track the pizza guy or whatever? GPS is to this day operated and maintained by the U.S. military, at a cost of nearly $1.5 billion annually. But it's available to everyone, for free, even to those in other countries, even in countries hostile to us. To understand why, we have to go back to 1983.

Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (yes, that was its actual number) was flying from New York to Seoul. Its planned route included a stopover in Anchorage and then a nice little arc over the Pacific. But this was not the route Flight 007 ended up taking. Despite all kinds of correct information going into the flight computer, the plane got on the wrong bearing and found itself going through Russian airspace.

Russia shot the plane down. They didn't admit it at first -- they're not great at admitting things -- but officials eventually confirmed that yep, they'd sent an interceptor jet after the civilian aircraft and brought it down with a missile. They claimed they thought it was a spy plane. All 269 aboard died, including a hundred Koreans and citizens of a dozen other countries. Among them were 62 Americans, including a sitting congressman, Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia.

4

The First Baby Monitor Was To Prevent Kidnapping

Charles Lindbergh's two-year-old son was grabbed from his crib on March 1, 1932, and the kidnapping became approximately the biggest news story in history. Two months later, the child's body turned up on the side of a road, sparking widespread panic in every parent in the country. One of these parents was the president of Zenith Radio, Eugene F. McDonald Jr., who began tinkering with a device that could let him monitor the sounds in his young daughter's room.

It's worth noting that "someone will break in and steal my baby" isn't exactly a rational fear, even after it happens once in an extremely high-profile manner. Kidnapping in general is less common than you may think, and baby-napping is rarer still. (And when it does happen, it's usually from childcare facilities, not your home nursery.) Really, babies are more trouble than they're worth. There are probably more criminals out there putting their own fussy babies in strangers' homes than ones taking other people's babies.

But when Zenith put together the first baby monitor, which they named the Radio Nurse, they marketed it to parents scared of kidnapping in the wake of the Lindbergh case. And now let's look and laugh at the hilarious old-timey design that these primitive 1930s folk came up with:

Suzanne Long, Flickr Creative Commons

3

Samuel Morse Revolutionized Communications After Missing His Wife's Funeral

Everyone agrees that Samuel Morse and his telegraph kick-started the communications revolution. And yet to start with, Morse wasn't a scientist at all. He was an artist. He paid his way through college by painting, and he found he was so good at it that he apparently abandoned whatever science he'd been studying there. He sailed to England to now study painting for three years at the Royal Academy. When he came back home, he made it his mission to get Americans to appreciate the Old Masters as much as Europe did, founding the National Academy of Design in New York. He did portraits full-time for over a decade.

In 1825, Morse received his biggest commission by far: to paint Marquis de Lafayette for the 1825 equivalent of $26,000. The day he reached D.C. for the job, his father wrote to him about how Morse's pregnant wife was recovering from an illness. After that letter came another: His wife had died. Morse abandoned the painting and traveled to Connecticut for the funeral, but it had already happened in his absence. He'd received the news too late to get to her in time.

2

Football Has The Forward Pass Because Of Dead Students

It seems impossible to believe, but football actually used to be even more dangerous than it is today. Players straight-up died on the regular. In the 1905 season alone, 18 players Super Bowl Shuffled right off this mortal coil.

Those weren't professional players; this was before the NFL. They were all students -- three of them playing for colleges, and the rest in high school. Americans began debating whether it was such a good idea to have kids kill each other for entertainment, and President Theodore Roosevelt even addressed the topic when he gave a commencement address at Harvard. "Brutality in playing a game," he said, "should awaken the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty of it." Schools took note and started eliminating their football programs.

But that hadn't been Roosevelt's intention. After all, he liked football. When he heard Harvard, his alma mater, was planning on abolishing football, he called the idea "doing the baby act," and made a bunch of new statements in support of the game. "It would be a real misfortune to lose so manly and vigorous game as football," he said, and he pushed for reform rather than elimination. So reps from various schools came together and made changes to the rules to make things safer. The biggest change was the introduction of the forward pass.

1

The Bicycle Was Invented After A Volcanic Eruption

1816 was the Year Without a Summer. As we've told you before, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted, and the resultant ash cloud dampened the sun around the world. It snowed in New England ... in July. Crops failed in Europe, with oats in particular becoming a lot more scarce and thus expensive. So among all the many other insane after-effects, people were suddenly unable to feed their horses. Plus, plenty of folks took to killing their horses anyway. When you're starving and can either feed a dozen meals to a lumbering animal or butcher that animal and gain hundreds of meals, it's really no choice at all.

So Europe suddenly ran short of horses. Which was bad, because horses were basically the main way to get anywhere. But it was thanks to this shortage that Germany's Baron Karl von Drais decided it was time to create a new form of transportation -- one powered by man. He first worked on a contraption with four wheels joined by conveyor belts, as he was trying to replace the four-legged horse, but then he figured two wheels were plenty for his Laufmaschine ("running machine"). You'd be able to keep balance on two wheels as long as you were going fast enough (for reasons still unknown), and if you weren't going fast enough, well, you clearly weren't using the Laufmaschine correctly.