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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous, Raju Rishi, and Jason Black will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Will: Most things were going on in Mesopotamia right around then, including some of my other favorite inventions.
Raju: Yeah, man. That was, like, the place to be. If there was, like—I love this place in New York, this club called Ketchy Shuby. So, it’s a night—it’s a dance club. I love dancing—and Mesopotamia was the Ketchy Shuby of that era. It was the place to head.
Will: [laugh]. You mean, if you could, anyone you wanted to know was there, right? They were living in Mesopotamia?
Raju: Yeah, exactly. That was the place to hang out.
Raju: I’m Raju Rishi.
Will: And I’m Will Porteous. Welcome to RRE POV, the show in which we record the conversations we’re already having among ourselves, our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Raju: Hello listeners. This is Raju Rishi, and I’m joined by my partner, Will Porteous, and welcome to our RRE POV. Today, we have a different and fun format for our podcast. We’re going to be talking about the 20 greatest inventions in history—
Will: [laugh].
Raju: —from my perspective, [laugh]. I’m going to ask Will a question or two about each of them, followed by a little dialog.
Will: I feel like I’m going to be a contestant on a game show.
Raju: You are a contestant on a game show. It’s my game show. [laugh]—
Will: [laugh].
Raju: —and everybody’s my [product 00:01:31] here tonight. And so, I would love the listeners to play along and test your knowledge of tech history. So, Will, I’m going to start. I’ll mention a technology or an invention, and I’ll ask you one or two questions about it, but I would like you to pause to give your answer, so our listeners have time to think about what their response would have been.
Will: Sure.
Raju: Okay? And then we’ll talk about it a little bit and kind of move on to the next one. This is just outside the norm. It’s something that, you know, while I was on holiday, I was thinking, man, what are the 20 greatest, most impactful things in our lifetimes? And underwear was one of them in my list, but I crossed it off.
Will: Sure.
Raju: [laugh].
Will: Soft serve? Was that on your list? Were you at the beach?
Raju: Soft serve was on my list. Actually, there is a fantastic soft serve place in South Florida. If anybody’s around and wants to visit with me, I will never say, no. I will never say no.
Will: I bet there’s, like, a soft serve museum in South Florida. You guys got everything.
Raju: It is a museum. This should be—well, there, you know, there’s always a museum of ice cream. Okay, so we’re going to start chronologically, so you have some [gauge 00:02:40] here.
Will: Okay.
Raju: So, the first question is, when was it invented—your best guess—okay?
Will: Okay.
Raju: And I want you to pause before you say anything.
Will: Okay. Are we starting with the wheel?
Raju: We’re going to start with the wheel. We’re going to start with the wheel. The wheel is the first one. And the second is, who made it? Who was the inventor? Okay?
Will: Sure.
Raju: So, we’re going to start with the wheel.
Will: Okay, well—and you want me to take my time on this? I mean—
Raju: Well, you can, you don’t take your time because we’ve already laid the groundwork on this one, and I don’t think people have a lot of thoughts, but like, give me the year.
Will: Well, I think we’re really into pre-history here in Mesopotamia. So, we’re probably in the kind of 3 to 4000 Before Christ Era, when you basically had settled communities in Mesopotamia, and you had trade in the region, and you probably had some, like, wheeled carts. I don’t think we’ve got, like, the guy Mr. Wheel, or Mrs. Wheel who invented it.
Raju: No. Okay. I don’t know. I don’t know—there is a Mister—you are dead on. I mean, you got it within 1000 years. I mean, it’s between 3000 and 4000. It’s actually 3500 BCE, before the Common Era. That’s the nomenclature now—
Will: Ah, okay. All right.
Raju: —Before Common Era—
Will: Sure.
Raju: And the inventors were indeed, the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.
Will: Most things were going on in Mesopotamia right around then, including some of my other favorite inventions.
Raju: Yeah, man. That was, like, the place to be. If there was, like—I love this place in New York, this club called Ketchy Shuby. So, it’s a night—it’s a dance club. I love dancing—and Mesopotamia was the Ketchy Shuby of that era. It was the place to head.
Will: [laugh]. You mean, if you could, anyone you wanted to know was there, right? They were living in Mesopotamia?
Raju: Yeah, exactly. That was the place to hang out. And initially it was a potter’s wheel. It was invented as a potter’s wheel, and later, you know, it moved on to transport.
Will: So, someone turned it on its side, and—
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, somebody turned it on its side. So, it revolutionized transport, trade, agriculture, machinery, and its ultimate use: Mario Kart. You cannot play Mario Kart. So, that’s like the, you know, sort of the pentultimal—pentulumate? Yeah, penultimate use of the wheel. Okay, so we’re going to move on to just number two. Number two is writing systems and languages. When was the writing systems and languages… what year and who did it?
Will: Well, I mean, it's hard to go back beyond the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, but at the same time, you have, sort of, I think you have writing happening sort of around the same time in a bunch of different societies. Because the Egyptians are simultaneous with the Mesopotamian society, and I think the Chinese are also kind of around that same period. Or maybe that’s later, but developing their own initial script. But we’re talking about, like, people making marks on walls and on bones, and the transition from, like, hieroglyphics and pictographics to, you know, something approaching language is a whole other thing. That’s all I kind of know.
Raju: You, my friend, you’re like a wizard. You’re like Harry Potter. You’re like Harry Potter.
Will: I studied this kind of ancient stuff.
Raju: No, you nailed it. You nailed it. Sumerian, that was a cuneiform. And then Egyptians, hieroglyphics, roughly the same timeframe, and I just need a year.
Will: Uh… 3000?
Raju: Dude—
Will: Same time as the wheel?
Raju: This is—you’re not even making this challenging at all. You’re not even making this challenging at all. Thirty-two—
Will: [laugh]. Everything that was good happened around then.
Raju: 3200 BCE.
Will: Okay.
Raju: 3200. Yeah, yeah.
Will: All right, yeah. I mean, they had everything in Mesopotamia. They had, you know, hanging gardens of Babylon and, you know, all of that. So, yeah.
Raju: Yeah.
Will: Civilization.
Raju: Yeah, a lot of hanging gardens. Yeah, it enabled record keeping, law, literature, preservation of knowledge. I mean, this is, like, just, you know, major, major changes because you know what happened before that? People were like, “I didn’t say that.”
Will: [laugh]. Well, totally. Well, and once you have trade, you need to keep track of what people owe you. So you—
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Will: Basically you, like, “Last time you passed through this town in Mesopotamia, I loaned you a whole bunch of beads, and you owe me a bunch of beads back, buddy. And it says right here on this bone that I marked it [unintelligible 00:07:35].”
Raju: I know. I know. That’s the thing. That’s the thing because before that, it was just like, “Nah, I didn’t do that. No, that wasn’t me. That was Joe over there. He owes you.” You know? Okay, number three: compass.
Will: The compass. Ooh, I think we’re moving way forward, maybe as far forward as, like, the Renaiss—maybe, like, the era of the Renaissance, kind of like 1200, 1400… I don’t have my bearings on this one at all.
Raju: You don’t have your bearings on this one. And who invented it?
Will: I mean, I really don’t know. I don’t think I can loop in a Mesopotamian or a Sumerian. But you have compasses once you use star—like, you have navigation by the stars, but it takes a long time to go—
Raju: I was talking about the real estate agency. I was talking about the real—
Will: [laugh].
Raju: No, no, no, you’re right. You’re right, you’re right. No, the compass itself, yeah, you’re—
Will: So, I’m going to go with, like, Renaissance era, and I have no idea.
Raju: Okay. 200 to 100—200 BCE to 100 CE.
Will: Way off. Okay.
Raju: So, right at—and the inventor? The Chinese. And it was refined by the Song Dynasty in the 11th century. And obviously, you know, reliable navigation.
Will: Yeah. Wow.
Raju: Global trade.
Will: Global trade. But I’m off by 1200 years.
Raju: Yeah. So, yeah. Listen, listen you can’t get them all right, Will. I know you're the smartest guy I know. You’re the smartest human I know and literally, like, one day ChatGPT is going to figure out it needs to index you.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: But it hasn’t.
Will: Hardly. I just want to meet the guy who turned the wheel on its side. That’s the guy we should be backing. Like, we’re looking for the guy.
Raju: I know. I know. He’s like, “What is this, just for, like, making pottery. How about we… turn it this way?” That’s fantastic. Number four: paper.
Will: Ah, paper. Well, okay, the Egyptians got us papyrus. They were taking reeds and basically pressing them into scrolls. So, to get to paper, you’re later than the Egyptians, but I think you’ve got paper by, like, the time of the Romans? So, you’re kind of about same era, like, 100 to 200 BCE is where I’m going to land.
Raju: Okay? And who invented—who? Just [unintelligible 00:10:07]—
Will: I’m going to go with the Chinese.
Raju: [snaps fingers] Dead on accurate.
Will: Really? All right.
Raju: Yes. Chinese invented it. It was a guy named Cai Lun in the Han Dynasty. It was 105 CE, so 100 years after, you know, Common Era. And obviously, this is the most you know, other than the writing system, this was really important to, like, basically say, “You owe me money,” and what the law was, lay down the law. And oddly, the pen wasn’t invented for 700 more—no, no, no, no, [laugh] it was. But yeah, this is, yeah, 105 CE. I mean, huge, paper, like, paper.
Will: Amazing.
Raju: Yeah.
Will: Wow.
Raju: All right, next one, number five on the list: gunpowder.
Will: Ooh. Gunpowder. Uh… so when I think of gunpowder, I always think of Cecil Rhodes and, like, the growth of munitions, but I think that’s a 19th century event, and gunpowder comes way before that. So, I mean, I’m going to say, like, the someone in Italy in, like, 1200.
Raju: Italy, 1200? Okay, ninth century—
Will: Oh.
Raju: Chinese Taoist alchemists.
Will: [laugh]. They’re working so hard there in China. Oh, my gosh.
Raju: Initial use was used to crack walnuts. No [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Raju: They’re so—I mean, they’re hard to crack. You need something. I mean, like—
Will: So, China in 900. So, I was pretty far off.
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got the wrong geography and the wrong—
Will: I got the wrong geography, and I’m off by 400 years.
Raju: Yeah. That’s okay, dude, like, you were on a roll there for—
Will: It probably took a few hundred years to get to the Europeans.
Raju: Yeah. I mean, listen, it’s fine. It’s fine. Like, you had—like, the first few you were on a roll.
Will: There wasn’t much going on back then. All right, what’s next?
Raju: Number six: printing press.
Will: Um… okay, that’s… I mean, we’re at this point, you’ve got books right through, kind of the 1000 AD. And I think it’s probably around 1000 AD that you started to see mass production of books. My references are all European on this, so what was going on in China, I have no idea, at that point. We associate sort of the printed Bible with the Gutenberg Bible, but that’s, like, Renaissance era. So, I’m going to go with, like, 1000 to 1200, and I don’t know where.
Raju: Okay. You had it nailed. The inventor was Johannes Gutenberg in Germany.
Will: Okay.
Raju: And it was 1440 that it was invented, so a little later. And it obviously enabled mass communication, the Renaissance, reformation, the scientific revolution, and documentation en masse and a way to disseminate to a lot of people. I mean, so, yeah, it’s amazing.
Will: Yeah, books became accessible, popular objects for the first time. Big deal. Knowledge is not just for the elites.
Raju: Yeah. I mean, and by the way, Will, you can absolutely contest any of my choices here, if you so choose.
Will: [laugh]. I think they’re great choices. I think you’re skipping over indoor plumbing, which I’m a little—you know.
Raju: Ehh, we’re going to get to plumbing. We’re going to get to plumbing. We’re going to get to plumbing. Okay, the next one: steam engine.
Will: Ah, steam engine is, like, I want to say, 1700s in Great Britain.
Raju: Mmm. Damn.
Will: Because you have basically the beginnings of industrialization in the late-1700s. But I may be off by 100 years or so.
Raju: Nope, you are almost exactly on. 1712 by a guy named Newcomen. And then in 1760s, Watt made some improvements, James Watt. Powered the Industrial Revolution, factories, mechanized industry. Really, really cool stuff, man. And yeah, by the way, people don’t realize this, but our RRE was backing all of these, so far.
Will: [laugh]. Totally. Yeah, such a long-established firm.
Raju: Yeah, a long-established firm [laugh].
Will: I mean the steam engine, though, in the beginning of industrialization, is really important when you think about how, kind of, a technology overrunning society’s ability to know what to do with it, right? Like we can—suddenly you have factories, suddenly you have mass production, suddenly people go from being, like, farm laborers to working in these buildings, moving things around. And it’s like, the social consequences took, you know, hundreds of years to come to terms with.
Raju: Yeah.
Will: Powerful.
Raju: It’s interesting that you say that because it was true. First of all, it was absolutely true. Like, you know, it really changed the labor pool and how the labor pool needed to, you know, kind of figure out how to adapt and what professions and what jobs. Now, people are talking about AI in the same vein.
Will: Exactly.
Raju: You know? Like, steam engine came and factories came, and the industrial revolution came, and people were like lost for, you know, several hundred years, frankly, in terms of figuring out how they’re going to adapt to it. I don’t think it’s going to take quite that long for us to figure out how to adapt with AI, but there is going to be an adaptation period. Okay, next one is vaccination.
Will: When do we get the first practical vaccination? That’s a good question. I want to say it’s 20th century, and I’m going to be wrong. I know I’m going to be wrong. Jonas Salk was like 1950… early-50s, but I’m wrong. What is it?
Raju: You’re definitely wrong. It’s 1796.
Will: [incredulously]1796? Wow.
Raju: Yes. And it was a gentleman by the name of Edward Jenner in England.
Will: All right, got it.
Raju: That was the, you know, OG. And then it took a long time before other, you know, sort of illnesses became that—you know, vaccinations were developed for them. But this was sort of like the OG one. Okay. The next one: anesthesia.
Will: Well, I mean, you know, as soon as you had alcohol, you had anesthesia.
Raju: Boom, boom, boom.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: I’m still—I mean, I use anesthesia quite often.
Will: [laugh]. Yeah, I mean—
Raju: [laugh]. I’m an expert. No, no, no, actually, I don’t drink that much anymore. I just collect. But nonetheless—
Will: I mean, there’s a lot of different kinds of what would constitute anesthesia from, like, here a bite on this stick to drink—you know, here’s some beer, here’s some rum, to nitrous oxide to, I don’t know, ether-based things. Like, there’s a lot of things we call anesthesia, so—
Raju: Yeah.
Will: —do you have someone in mind, yeah.
Raju: I mean, I have a date, and I have a guy who did the first public demonstration, but—and I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what it is. 1846, there’s a guy named William T. G. Morton, and he was the first to sort of bring this up. Now, do you know where the term bite the bullet comes from?
Will: I would assume from soldiers, wounded soldiers with no anesthesia, being told, bite this while I cut your leg off kind of thing.
Raju: Correct. Yeah, that is correct. That it seems so horrible, but-and the bullet, by biting it, they would crack their teeth, but it was a way of distracting them from this other thing. So, I mean, geez, I—
Will: How did people survive that kind of pain? I just cannot imagine.
Raju: I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, it’s like we take it for granted. I mean, this is just profound in terms of the amount that’s used, even in just simple ways, like, across healthcare, every day, just any kind of pain medication, but anesthesia itself for complex surgeries. And it really allowed advanced modern medicine to get to where it is. But, yeah, okay. All right. And this is, you know, the one that—number ten on the list.
Will: Okay.
Raju: Sanitation systems. Modern sewage, clean water.
Will: Okay. I think we’re going as far back as well, certainly you have—it all depends on where you want to call the beginning of this. So, Roman roads always had good gutter systems, you had good indoor systems, but you didn’t have running water. So, if running water is the key, you got to go a little later. But I, you know, I think you can look at Mesopotamians or even Romans and point towards, kind of, some amount of sewage.
Raju: Yes. Definitely, you can point to some of those in terms of the genesis of it. But when would you say, like, we actually had modern sewage and clean water?
Will: Well, modern sewage and clean water is actually much later, and it really ties to evolutions in England and the identification of how disease was being spread, particularly cholera, through the lack of a water system, to the fact that people were just dumping stuff and it was flowing into the river, and then they were going and getting their water from the river.
Raju: That’s amazing. First of all, you’re absolutely perfect in terms of the timing and the history around it. Pin a year on it.
Will: Ooh, it really coincides with the organization of modern London. I’m going to say 1800 but I’m going to be wrong.
Raju: [snaps fingers] Right on the money.
Will: Really? Oh, wow.
Raju: Mid-1800s. And it was a guy named Sir Joseph Bazalgette from London, and it was directly correlated with epidemic reduction, like cholera and other things. And I have to tell you, even though 1800s, I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts after grad school, I’m going to tell you, I’m going to tell you, like, it’s still—like, we’re still waiting. We’re still waiting. I think it’s probably clean by now, but I was, like a grad student from MIT, and I lived in this one apartment, and I’m telling you, it was—yeah. I mean—
Will: That’s how grad students are supposed to live.
Raju: Yeah, I guess so. But, like, you know, it’s a—I’m so glad now we have it, you know, in all the facilities. I don’t go to places that don’t have it anymore. Often. Often. I do go to India every once in a while; there are some places that don’t have it. Okay, number 11 on the list. I’ve only got 20, so we’re halfway through.
Will: All right.
Raju: Electricity.
Will: I mean, I think of this in terms of Thomas Edison and in terms of the late-19th century, but I don’t have a better answer than that. I mean, electricity is a phenomenon I think we’ve been aware of forever. Certainly Ben Franklin flew his kite, and, like, we think about the kite and the key on the kite being struck by lightning, but actually capturing electricity and being able to maintain charge, we’re probably, like, talking about people like Nikola Tesla, and I don’t know when to date him. So, maybe Faraday.
Raju: Yeah. Well, you had some names right. You had some names right. Franklin started with the experiment, 1752.
Will: Okay.
Raju: Yeah, and Alessandro Volta—
Will: Ah.
Raju: —the battery in 1800—
Will: Got it.
Raju: And that was storage.
Will: Yeah, the battery is probably a pretty deterministic moment because you’ve captured the power of the voltage difference at that point.
Raju: Exactly. Michael Faraday, electromagnetic induction in 1831. Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, distribution systems in the late-1800s.
Will: Okay. All right. Tesla was later. Got it.
Raju: But yeah. I mean, listen, this is, like, modern society. Without this, I don’t know. Like, imagine having… imagine having a smartphone, like an iPhone, no battery. No battery.
Will: Yeah, yeah.
Raju: It [unintelligible 00:23:00]. Yeah, yeah. No, it’s very useless. Very useless.
Will: You know, just as an aside, we live so much of our life in this hyper-developed world, we have a portfolio company that ships solar home systems called BioLite that basically allows people in rural parts of the world that have never had steady electricity to power their homes, just with solar capacity on the roof. Which sounds very standard and conventional, but the miracle of illumination is recreated over and over again by that company. Houses that don’t have lights at night, that don’t have a way to power a radio, that don’t have a way for kids to study their—do their schoolwork late into the evening, suddenly have that ability. And that societal transformation is still going on in 2025.
Raju: Wow. That’s crazy, Will. That’s crazy. I mean, look, we are blessed. We live in a great, you know, world, you know, we have the luxury of having occupations where we’re looking at the frontier of all this stuff, but if you look at the 20 biggest, most impactful things in history, you know, electricity, electricity. Okay, number 12 on the list—and I have to say this one because I worked at Bell Labs, dude—telephone. Who and when?
Will: So, Alexander Graham Bell, and I think we’re in the late-19th century, I’m pretty sure.
Raju: 1876.
Will: Okay. All right.
Raju: 1876. And what was his first words over a telephone?
Will: Oh, I don’t know.
Raju: “Mr. Watson, come here.”
Will: Oh, yes [laugh] because Mr. Watson was in the next room.
Raju: Yeah, “And bring a cold Heineken,” I think he said. I think that was—it was like, that was cut off. That’s cut off from a lot of literature, but like, having worked at Bell Labs for, like, ten years of my life, yeah, the cold Heineken.
Will: “When are we going for drinks, Mr. Watson?” Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Raju: Yeah, exactly. Okay. Number 13, just so we’re going to move this along. Number 13: light bulb.
Will: Thomas Edison… I want to say late-19th century.
Raju: Yeah. 1879.
Will: Okay.
Raju: That’s when it’s commercialized. But he was actually building on the work of Joseph Swan, Humphry Davy, and a bunch of others, and obviously, you know, not having the risk of burning down your house, being able to work at night is a good thing. It is a—
Will: Indeed, yeah.
Raju: —good thing. Okay: automobile.
Will: Uh, I mean, we’re talking, you know… so the period, first of all, is basically, early-1900s, if we’re talking about the internal combustion engine, we’re talking, I think, kind of late-19th century, early—yeah, late-19th century. And I recall that a lot of it was in Germany. That’s sort of what I think of as the internal combustion engine and the beginning of the automobile. But you have steam engines that predate that considerably.
Raju: Yeah. No, but you are on the money. I like you. I like you, William. You’re good at this game. I think we’re going to do this one—
Will: Well, we have some friends in the car business [crosstalk 00:26:12][laugh]—
Raju: Okay, yeah, we do. We do. We have some limited partners that are very if they’re listening, kudos to you guys. 1886, Carl Benz.
Will: Ah, yes. Okay.
Raju: And it was the Benz Patent, the Motorwagen. Yep. Mass mobility, reshaped cities, economies, whatever. 15: airplane.
Will: Well, we have flight beginning with the Wright brothers in… I’m going to get this wrong. Kitty Hawk was… well, hang on, we’ve got regular mail service aviation by, I want to say, 1900, so I think we’re in late-19th century with the first flight. But I don’t have more than that.
Raju: 1903.
Will: 1903? That late? Okay.
Raju: Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Will: 1903.
Raju: Okay, number 16: antibiotics, penicillin, in specific.
Will: Penicillin, I mean, we’re in the first half of the 20th century. I want to say in the 30s, but I’m going to be wrong, and—
Raju: Dude your, like, memory of history—you’re, like, less than a fraction of the timeline. 1928.
Will: 1928, and funny, my first thought is always Watson and Crick, but it’s not Watson and Crick. They’re DNA. I don’t know.
Raju: Alexander Fleming.
Will: Ah, okay.
Raju: Alexander Fleming. And thank God for antibiotics. I mean—
Will: Thank God for antibiotics. Maybe top three on this list—
Raju: Yeah. Yeah.
Will: —in terms of eradicating suffering.
Raju: Yeah, exactly. All right. Computer.
Will: Well, how do we define a computer? I mean, like, as in a collection of integrated circuits, or as in, you know?
Raju: Yeah, yeah. Like something with an input-output.
Will: Something with an input-output. So, I’m going to go with Alan Turing and the mathematical model—the computational model, that allowed you to produce a non-computational answer.
Raju: You’re absolutely on the money. Now, the concepts were him. He didn’t actually develop the computer. The computer was—the first one—Konrad Zuse, called the Z3 in 1941, and then the ENIAC team in 1945.
Will: Ah, okay. Great. Yes, I should know that.
Raju: But you were right. Alan Turing set the stage for all of this stuff. And frankly, I mean, if you think about his contributions to modern science, so profound, my friend. I mean the Turing test, you know, all notions of what he did. And that movie with Benedict Cumberbatch is unbelievable about his life. Okay. Transistors. Semiconductors, transistors.
Will: So, we’re in the—
Raju: Don’t get this wrong.
Will: Well, hang on, we’re in the, we’re in the late—
Raju: No. You don’t get to get this wrong [laugh].
Will: [laugh]. You know, this is—this is more your history than mine [laugh]. I want to say we’re in the late-40s, early-50s, integrated circuit and then transistors. And I started thinking about, kind of, the origins of Fairchild and kind of… those guys. But I may be later. I should be later.
Raju: You’re… date-wise you’re right. 1947.
Will: Okay.
Raju: Invented at Bell Labs, my friend.
Will: Of course, yeah. Well, you guys invented everything.
Raju: In fact, I have a two book ends—I’ll show them to you someday—and one has the original transistor—like, a copy of it—embedded in, like, this plexiglass, and then another that shows, like, I don’t know, a million transistors or something like that in a chip, and I think it was like in 2000 or something. Now, we’re far, far better than that. But—
Will: Shouldn’t there be a guy at Bell Labs who gets the credit? Or a woman? Like—
Raju: No. I mean, there was the three of them: Bardeen, Brayton, Shockley.
Will: Right. Shockley is the one I think of.
Raju: Those are the three inventors. They’re on the patent at Bell Labs. And if you’ve seen, if you’ve gone to Bell Labs in Holmdel, they have a water tower in the shape of a transistor.
Will: Really.
Raju: It’s massive. You can’t miss it. The building has changed hands from Bell Labs. It’s now called Bell Works, and it is the location for the filming of severance.
Will: Ah, yes. That famous campus. Yes.
Raju: So, if you’ve seen S—I worked in that building for seven years.
Will: Wow.
Raju: Yeah. I mean, I’m not going to say what we did there, but like, hey, was a precursor to a lot of the Severance stuff.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, it was cool. Okay, 19. Number 19, we’re almost at the end: internet.
Will: Well, I mean, the internet was a DARPA project to connect computer systems on campuses and research institutions, begun, really in the late-60s as a way of modeling alternative routing and switching networks that could determine, kind of, least cost paths in the event of a global crisis, so like, a nuclear war.
Raju: You are right. A hundred percent correct. 1969 ARPANET—
Will: 1969 ARPANET.
Raju: —US DOD. And worldwide web. 1989 Tim Berners-Lee. And we all know what the impact was that. And the last but not least, on this list: the smartphone.
Will: Ah, who gets credit for the smartphone? Which phone was smart for the first… I mean, you have, like, handhelds for a long time, right? Like, you had the Blackberry, you had the Palm Pilot, you had Nokia phones that you could turn on their side, and they had little keyboards. We’re kind of in the early to mid-90s. I think there might even have been an IBM, like, kind of thing you could walk around that wasn’t quite as big as a PC.
Raju: Number one, that’s the first one, my friend. IBM Simon. 1994, Frank Canova, first commercially sold smartphone. And then Nokia had the communicator in 1996, Ericsson had something called the R380 in 2000, BlackBerry in 2002, Palm Treo—which was before the Palm Pilot—in 2002, and then iPhone in 2007, and Steve Jobs changed the world and created an app store. [laugh] So, those were my 20.
Will: Pretty amazing, yeah.
Raju: Yeah, listen, those are my 20. Is there anything I left off the list… in your opinion?
Will: I mean, we talked about electricity and indoor plumbing and all the computing and computational devices and writing and the wheel. I mean, I think you got the big ones [laugh].
Raju: Yeah, Playstation. What I was toying around putting the PlayStation 3 on there. I love that box. That box was amazing. The PlayStation 3 was, like, big. It’s a big change. 2 was okay. 3 was great. But yeah, and I was talking about maybe, like, you know, just post-prohibition alcohol. You know, that’s, like, such a good—
Will: Yeah, that’s a good one. So, I heard one over the weekend that I hadn’t thought properly about, which is vulcanization, which none of us think about. But rubber would freeze if it were not for the vulcanization process. So, if you think about every tire, every belt, all of the everything that depends on a rubber-based apparatus, it’s all contingent on the existence of the vulcanization process. Our highway system, the success of our automobile industry, all depends on, you know, the emergence of tires.
Raju: Really? I didn’t even think that Spock was on this planet.
Will: Au.
Raju: I mean but, like, fine. I’ll take it.
Will: Yeah. Someone had to go to Vulcan and get it [laugh].
Raju: Yeah. Well, fine. No, I get it. I get it. That’s amazing. Look, there was a lot I toyed around with, Will, that I kind of threw off, but just, I wanted to focus on the things that, like, nobody could contest. I mean, these are, like, obvious. But there’s probably a couple on here, like, you know, you could think about, like, distribution of energy, or something like that, where it was like, okay, that was, you know, power plant or something, that really enabled societies to build, you know? So anyway, and, like, I was going to put Chick-fil-A on there. I love Chick-fil-A [laugh].
So anyway, that’s all I had for today. And I appreciate you humoring me. You were actually really good. I’m telling you. Like to be able to peg within, you know, a handful of years, even though the names are kind of difficult because so many people were involved in some of these adventures, you were really, really, really good, my friend.
Will: Wow, you’re awfully nice to say that. This was fun, and I hope it was fun for you, our listeners. Thank you for joining us for another episode of RRE POV. Raju does an amazing job bringing these episodes together. I hope you guys had fun like I did today. We’ll see you soon. Take care.
Raju: Thank you for listening to RRE POV. You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on X or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.