Technology & Innovation

In 1938, Lee Byung-chul started Samsung in Daegu, South Korea as a small trading company selling dried fish, vegetables, and noodles. The name Samsung means "three stars" in Korean — chosen to symbolize something big, numerous, and powerful. Today Samsung's annual revenue equals roughly 20%% of South Korea's entire GDP. From noodles to semiconductors. The stars delivered.

On May 22, 2010, programmer Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 Bitcoin for two Papa John's pizzas — the first real-world Bitcoin purchase. At the time, those coins were worth about $41. At Bitcoin's peak, they would have been worth over $700 million.

Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne sold his 10% share in 1976 for $800. Today, that stake would be worth over $300 billion.

In 1998, Google's founders offered to sell their search engine to Yahoo for $1 million. Yahoo said no. In 2002, Yahoo had another chance to buy Google for $5 billion. They negotiated it down to $3 billion, and Google walked away. Google is now worth over $2 trillion.

In the 1840s, Charles Babbage designed a mechanical calculator with 8,000 parts to compute error-free mathematical tables. The project was too ambitious for Victorian-era resources and was never completed. Over 150 years later, the Science Museum in London built it to his exact specifications — and it worked perfectly.

The inventor of the lithium-ion battery gave away his patent for free, refusing to profit from a technology that could help the planet.

The first digital camera was invented at Kodak in 1975. They buried the project to protect their film business, bankrupting the company decades later.

The world's first computer programmer was a woman, Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm for Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical computer in 1843. Her work included the revolutionary idea that machines could process more than just numbers, envisioning computer-generated music and art.

The creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has never profited directly from his invention—and he even gave away the code for free so the internet could grow.

It’s not possible to create a folder named “con” on a Windows computer.

The inventor of the Game Boy, Gunpei Yokoi, started at Nintendo as an assembly line maintenance worker fixing machines before being discovered by the company president and becoming one of gaming's most influential designers.

Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind. Blue is the only color he can see clearly. "Blue is the richest color for me — I can see all of blue," he told The New Yorker in 2010. One man's biology dictated the look of a platform used by 3 billion people.

The Sprout pencil is a plantable pencil that contains a seed inside. When it's too short to use, you can plant it and watch it grow herbs and vegetables.

There's a bot called the 'Random Darknet Shopper' that was given $100 in Bitcoin each week to purchase random items from darknet markets. Among its purchases were 10 ecstasy pills, which led Swiss police to seize the artwork—though the case was later dropped and the items returned.

The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.

A computer programmer named Maneesh Sethi hired a woman to slap him across the face every time he uses Facebook during working hours.

Netflix has invented a 'Netflix and Chill' button that can be programmed to automatically order food, dim the lights, silence your phone, and put Netflix on the TV.

It would take 76 work days (8 hours a day) for the average person to read the Terms and Conditions they agree to in a year.

A man from Newport, UK, accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013. Now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he has spent over a decade trying to get permission to excavate the landfill where it's buried.

In 2012, a national survey found that 51% of people thought stormy weather affected cloud computing.