Technology In the field of communications, Italian electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi sent his first radio signal across

the Atlantic Ocean in 1901. American inventor Lee De Forest invented the triode, or vacuum tube, in 1906. The triode eventually became a key component in nearly all early radio, radar, television, and computer systems. In 1920 Scottish engineer John Logie Baird developed the Baird Televisor, a primitive television that provided the first transmission of a recognizable moving image. In the 1920s and 1930s American electronic engineer Vladimir Kosma Zworykin significantly improved the televisions picture and reception. In 1935 British physicist Sir Robert Watson-Watt used reflected radio waves to locate aircraft in flight. Radar signals have since been reflected from the Moon, planets, and stars to learn their distance from Earth and to track their movements (see Radar Astronomy). In 1947 American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley invented the transistor, an electronic device used to control or amplify an electrical current. Transistors are much smaller, far less expensive, require less power to operate, and are considerably more reliable than triodes. Since their first commercial use in hearing aids in 1952, transistors have replaced triodes in virtually all applications. During the 1950s and early 1960s minicomputers were developed using transistors rather than triodes. Earlier computers, such as the electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC), first introduced in 1946 by American physicist John W. Mauchly and American electrical engineer John Presper Eckert, Jr., used as many as 18,000 triodes and filled a large room. But the transistor initiated a trend toward microminiaturization, in which individual electronic circuits can be reduced to microscopic size. This drastically reduced the computers size, cost, and power requirements and eventually enabled the development of electronic circuits with processing speeds measured in billionths of a second . Further miniaturization led in 1971 to the first microprocessora computer on a chip. When combined with other specialized chips, the microprocessor becomes the central arithmetic and logic unit of a computer smaller in size than a portable typewriter. With their small size and a price less than that of a used car, todays personal computers are many times more powerful than the physically huge, multimillion-dollar computers of the 1950s. Once used only by large businesses, computers are now used by professionals, small retailers, and students to perform a wide variety of everyday tasks, such as

keeping data on clients, tracking budgets, and writing school reports. People also use computers to interface with worldwide communications networks, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web, to send and receive e-mail, to shop, or to find information on just about any subject. During the early 1950s public interest in space exploration developed. The focal event that opened the space age was the International Geophysical Year from July 1957 to December 1958, during which hundreds of scientists around the world coordinated their efforts to measure the Earths near-space environment. As part of this study, both the United States and the Soviet Union announced that they would launch artificial satellites into orbit for nonmilitary space activities. When the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik satellite in 1957, the feat spurred the United States to intensify its own space exploration efforts. In 1958 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded for the purpose of developing human spaceflight. Throughout the 1960s NASA experienced its greatest growth. Among its achievements, NASA designed, manufactured, tested, and eventually used the Saturn rocket and the Apollo spacecraft for the first manned landing on the Moon in 1969 (see Apollo Program). In the 1960s and 1970s, NASA also developed the first robotic space probes to explore the planets Mercury, Venus, and Mars (see Mariner). The success of the Mariner probes paved the way for the unmanned exploration of the outer planets in Earths solar system. In the 1970s through 1990s, NASA focused its space exploration efforts on a reusable space shuttle, which was first deployed in 1981. In 1998 the space shuttle, along with its Russian counterpart known as Soyuz, became the workhorses that enabled the construction of the International Space Station.