50 Fun Facts About Electronics

What name did Sony give the portable cassette player it launched in 1979 for private listening on the move?

Walkman began as a modified Pressman, Sony's small recorder for journalists. Overseas offices disliked the name, so it first went on sale in the United States as the Sound-about.

Bluetooth wireless technology takes its name from a 10th-century king who united the tribes of which country?

Denmark's tribes were united by King Harald Bluetooth, and an Intel engineer borrowed the nickname for a standard meant to unite devices. The logo merges the runes for Harald's initials.

Which kitchen appliance is said to have grown from Percy Spencer noticing a radar set melt the candy bar in his pocket?

The microwave oven took shape once Spencer tried popcorn kernels next, which became the first microwaved popcorn. His employer Raytheon sold the first model, the Radarange, in 1947.

At which photographic film company did engineer Steven Sasson build the first self-contained digital camera in 1975?

Kodak's prototype weighed 8 pounds and took 23 seconds to record each 0.01-megapixel image onto a cassette tape.

Which 1978 Milton Bradley electronic game asks players to repeat ever-longer sequences of lights and tones?

Simon was launched with a party at New York's Studio 54 nightclub. Its tones were modeled on the notes of a bugle, so every sequence sounds in tune however long it grows.

Which South Korean electronics giant began in 1938 as a small trading company dealing in dried fish and noodles?

Samsung means 'three stars' in Korean, and the group did not enter the electronics industry until the late 1960s, three decades after it was founded.

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics honored the inventors of an efficient LED of which color, the key to white lamps?

Blue was the missing color for three decades after red and green LEDs appeared. A blue LED coated with a phosphor gives the white light of modern bulbs.

Which mineral vibrates 32,768 times a second to keep time in most electronic watches and clocks?

Quartz in nearly every watch is cut into a tiny tuning-fork shape. Its frequency is a power of two, so a cheap counter can halve it again and again down to one pulse a second.

Which music player did Steve Jobs unveil in 2001 with the promise of '1,000 songs in your pocket'?

The iPod was developed in less than a year and announced as a Mac-compatible product with a 5 GB hard drive.

Which rechargeable battery chemistry, honored by the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, powers most smartphones and laptops?

Lithium-ion cells first went on sale in 1991, and laureate John Goodenough was 97 when he shared the prize for making them possible.

At which New Jersey research laboratory did Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley build the first working transistor in 1947?

Bell Labs' three inventors shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. Their first device was a point-contact design pressed onto a sliver of germanium.

Which Intel co-founder predicted in 1965 that the number of components on a chip would keep doubling at a regular pace?

Gordon Moore first saw the count doubling every year, then in 1975 revised his forecast to every two years. The chip industry treated his law as a target for decades.

At which company did new hire Jack Kilby build the first integrated circuit in 1958 while colleagues were on vacation?

Texas Instruments had only just hired Kilby, so he had not yet earned a vacation of his own. His chip won him a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, was created for a Japanese company that made which product?

Calculators from Busicom were planned around a larger set of custom chips until Intel proposed one programmable processor. Intel later repaid Busicom's $60,000 so it could sell the chip to others.

Which American inventor's Audion, the first triode vacuum tube, could amplify a signal thanks to its added control grid?

Lee de Forest slipped a wire grid into an existing two-electrode tube, yet the Audion found little use until others recognized around 1912 how well it could amplify.

Which room-sized computer, dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, ran on about 18,000 vacuum tubes?

ENIAC burned out several tubes almost every day, which left the machine out of action about half the time. The press of the day nicknamed it the 'Giant Brain'.

Which American inventor built the first working all-electronic television system, sending a straight line in 1927?

Philo Farnsworth was a farm boy who took the idea of scanning a picture line by line from the back-and-forth rows of a plowed field.

Which company's engineer Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk in 1973?

Motorola's Cooper cheekily placed that first call to his counterpart at a rival firm. It then took him another ten years to bring the phone to market.

Which company introduced the compact cassette in 1963 and later co-developed the compact disc with Sony?

Philips let other manufacturers use its patented cassette design free of charge, which helped the little tape become a worldwide standard.

The Regency TR-1 of 1954 was the first transistor version of which consumer product sold to the public?

Radio sets had stayed with vacuum tubes because a transistor cost about $20 against $1 for a tube. Until the TR-1, only hearing aids had made the switch.

Which two-terminal component, drawn as a triangle pointing at a bar, lets current flow in only one direction?

Diode comes from the Greek for 'two' and 'path', a name coined in 1919. Its plumbing equivalent is the check valve, which lets water through one way only.

Which component, measured in farads, descends from the water-filled Leyden jars of the 1740s?

A capacitor was long called a condenser, a name that survives in the condenser microphone. Pieter van Musschenbroek, jolted by an early Leyden jar, wrote that he would not take a second shock for the kingdom of France.

Which type of circuit converts the alternating current from a wall socket into the direct current that electronics need?

A rectifier leaves the current flowing one way but pulsing, so power supplies smooth it afterward. An inverter does the opposite job, turning DC back into AC.

On the color code painted on resistors, which color band stands for the digit zero?

Black stands for zero and brown for one. From two to seven the bands simply follow the order of the rainbow, which makes the code easier to memorize.

Traditional solder for joining electronic components is an alloy of lead and which other metal?

Tin makes up 63% of the classic electronics blend, which has the lowest melting point of any such alloy at 183 °C. Health rules have since pushed makers toward lead-free solder.

Which chemical element, the second most abundant in Earth's crust after oxygen, is the main material of computer chips?

Silicon makes up about 28% of Earth's crust, locked in sand and rock, and it gave California's Santa Clara Valley its famous nickname.

What is the term for deliberately adding impurities such as boron to a semiconductor to change how it conducts?

Doping needs only a trace: even the most heavily doped silicon holds impurity atoms on the order of parts per thousand, yet that transforms how it carries current.

A bipolar junction transistor has three terminals: the emitter, the collector and which third one in the middle?

The base is a thin middle layer, and a small current fed into it controls a much larger one between the other two terminals. That is how the device amplifies.

Which precious metal is plated onto the contacts of many electronic connectors because it resists corrosion so well?

Gold plating on connectors is the metal's most important industrial job, though audio experts often dismiss gold-tipped cables as a marketing ploy for ordinary listeners.

Which unit of electrical resistance is written with the Greek capital letter omega?

Ohm and omega sound alike, which is exactly why William Preece suggested the symbol in 1867. The unit honors the German physicist Georg Ohm.

Which unit of frequency honors the German physicist who first proved that electromagnetic waves exist?

Hertz the man saw no use in his own discovery: asked what would come of it, he replied, 'Nothing, I guess.' The unit took over from 'cycles per second' in 1960.

On a flat-screen LCD television, what do the letters L and C stand for?

Liquid crystal gives off no light of its own, so an LCD television needs a backlight shining through it. The strange state of matter was first spotted in 1888 in cholesterol taken from carrots.

In OLED screens, found in many phones and televisions, what does the letter O stand for?

Organic here means carbon-based: a thin film of such compounds glows when electricity passes through it, so each pixel makes its own light and needs no backlight.

Which type of vacuum tube, first built by Ferdinand Braun in 1897, lit up television screens before flat panels?

The cathode-ray tube steers beams of electrons onto a phosphor-coated screen that glows wherever they strike. Braun was the first to imagine using it as a display.

Which piece of electronic test equipment draws a moving graph of a signal's voltage against time on its screen?

An oscilloscope lets engineers read a signal's amplitude, frequency and distortion at a glance. Its mechanical ancestor, the oscillograph, was invented by André Blondel in 1893.

Which reusable plastic board lets hobbyists build and test a circuit by pushing parts into holes, with no soldering?

A breadboard owes its name to early hobbyists, who nailed wires and terminal strips to a wooden board that was often literally a bread-cutting board.

In the name of the USB connector found on computers and chargers, what does the letter U stand for?

Universal was the whole point: seven companies set out in the mid-1990s to replace the muddle of serial, parallel and game ports with one standard connection.

Which English mathematician's 1854 book The Laws of Thought set out the true-or-false algebra behind digital logic?

George Boole was a shoemaker's son, and his algebra waited decades before engineers used it to design relay systems and then digital computers.

The 555, one of the most popular chips ever made, does which basic job in a circuit?

A timer was what Hans Camenzind designed in 1971, working alone under contract. By 2017, some estimates put production of the 555 at over a billion a year.

In the name of the op-amp, a staple building block of analog circuits, what is 'op' short for?

Operational amplifiers earned the name from their first job, carrying out mathematical operations inside analog computers.

Which Cambridge physicist discovered the electron in 1897, the first subatomic particle ever identified?

J. J. Thomson was also a remarkable teacher: several of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes, among them Ernest Rutherford.

Which company, started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939, sold audio oscillators to Walt Disney for the film Fantasia?

Hewlett-Packard got its name order from a coin toss between its two founders, who began work in the rented garage with just $538.

Which Japanese company introduced the VHS videotape format in 1976, which went on to beat Sony's Betamax?

JVC, the Victor Company of Japan, called its format the Video Home System, and it outsold every rival tape standard to become the most popular choice for home recorders.

Which 1972 machine, designed by Ralph Baer, was the first commercial home video game console?

The Magnavox Odyssey showed little more than moving dots, so players stuck plastic overlays on the television screen. It came boxed with dice and paper money.

Which early electronic musical device, patented in 1928 by a Russian physicist, is played without being touched?

The theremin grew out of Soviet government research into proximity sensors, and it takes its name from its inventor, known in the West as Leon Theremin.

Early television remote controls, such as Zenith's Space Command of 1956, signaled the set using which kind of wave?

Ultrasound was produced when a button press struck a bar inside the handset. The audible click that came with it is why remotes were nicknamed 'clickers'.

Which German physicist's two circuit laws govern the currents meeting at a junction and the voltages around a loop?

Gustav Kirchhoff formulated both laws in 1845, two years before he graduated from university. The junction rule is really the conservation of charge in another form.

Whose 1937 MIT master's thesis showed that relay circuits could carry out logic, founding digital circuit design?

Claude Shannon's paper has been called the most important master's thesis of all time and the birth certificate of the digital revolution.

Which chip-making process exposes a coated wafer through a patterned mask to print microscopic circuits onto it?

Photolithography relies on a light-sensitive coating called photoresist: where light passes the mask the coating changes, and the pattern is then etched into the surface below.

Which effect, named from the Greek for 'to squeeze', makes certain materials produce a voltage when they are pressed?

Piezoelectricity was first demonstrated in 1880 by the brothers Pierre and Jacques Curie. It supplies the spark in gas stove igniters and cigarette lighters.