Top 50 Achievements
1952 - First fare-paying passengers in a Comet jet airliner
1953 - Cinemascope. First film is the religious epic The Robe
1954 - TV dinner 1955 - Non-stick saucepan
1956 - TV remote control
1957 - Sputnik escalates the space race by taking the first animal into space - a dog called Laika.
1958 - Ultrasonic image of unborn child
1959 - The first Mini produced
1960s
1960 - Implanted pacemaker
1961 - The Pill on sale in UK
1962 - TV satellite relays live pictures
1963 - Cassette tape and birth of portable music machines
1964 - Home kidney dialysis
1965 - Packet switching - a system whereby information is made into a computer generated 'package' so it can be sent down a phone line
1966 - Whole-earth satellite viewing of the weather
1967 - Breathalyser introduced
1968 - First supersonic airliner, the Soviet T-144
1969 - Astronauts make first steps on the Moon (second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin above)
1970s
1970 - Watches with LCD displays
1971 - CAT scan
1972 - Pocket calculator
1973 - Cars with air bags
1974 - Barcodes on supermarket products
1975 - Birth of home computer
1976 - VHS and Betamax video recorders
1978 - Birth of Louise Brown (below with mother), who was conceived by IVF
1979 - Xerox shows off the graphical-user interface - which led to the Windows system - to Apple engineers
1980s
1980 - Ghetto blaster and Sony Walkman
1981 - Maiden voyage of space shuttle
1981 - Compact discs go on sale. The first was Billy Joel's 52nd Street album
1982 - Video keyhole surgery
1983 - Synthetic human insulin cleared for sale
1984 - DNA fingerprint
1985 - First registered dot com
1986 - Laptop computer
1987 - Prozac goes on to market
1988 - First Internet worm unleashed. Disables 10 per cent of computers
1989 - Toaster becomes first machine controlled by Internet
1990 - First gene therapy takes place, on a four-year-old girl with a rare disorder that strips the body of the ability to fight infection
2000s
1991 - First Internet browser
1992 - Mobile phone text message
1993 - Global Positioning Satellites
1994 - GM tomatoes
1995 - First entirely computer generated feature film, Toy Story (right Buzz Lightyear)
1996 - First ever 'deep field' photos of the universe, showing how it looked 10billion years ago
1997 - Dolly the sheep, first mammal cloned from an adult cell
1998 - First section of the international Space Station launched
1999 - The world's first electronic, reusable paper
2000 - Knock-out pigs. Pigs with a gene removed - the first step to overcoming the problem of humans rejecting transplanted animal organs
2001 - Bionic eye - microchips inserted into retinas of three blind men, restoring their vision
2002 - Iris scanner, installed at Schipol airport, Amsterdam, at entrances to high security areas
