EMERGING TeCh Chapter 1 Past and Present W e live in an exciting time for technology It seems like cool new gadgets are coming out almost constantly Many of the most inter esting products to hit the market in recent years are electronic devices you can wear Wearable electronics serve many purposes They are video games and toys They are virtual play grounds They are learning devices They are health Many people use wearable devices to pay for things instead of using cash or credit cards 44
Today’s hearing aids are much smaller and work much better than earlier versions monitors They are personal odometers They are cameras But they are not new They have been around for more than a century Travel back in time to 1898 That was the year electrical engineer Miller Reese Hutchison invented the first wearable electronic It was a hearing aid known as the Akouphone It used electricity to make sounds louder But it only worked if it was attached to a large tabletop machine So much for leaving the house to visit friends 5 Wearable electronics
EMERGING TeCh The Amazing Ring of the 17th Century Can you believe that a wearable calculator was invented nearly 500 years ago The abacus was a counting tool used in China A full-size abacus featured nine beads on each of 10 wires strung between two boards It allowed people to figure out complex math equations This device was made much more convenient early in China’s Qing Dynasty a period that began in 1644 One clever designer created an abacus ring that could fit on a finger It featured beads so small they had to be moved with tiny tools such as a pin The abacus ring had just seven wires with seven beads on each The invention of the transistor led to the creation of tiny hearing aids in the 1950s They could be worn behind the ears Advancements in the 1970s further shrunk the devices and brought greater clarity Digital hearing aids invented in the 1990s were placed inside the ear and were nearly invisible to others Hearing aids are not the only wearable electronics to boast a long history The first watches were created centuries earlier The earliest of these timepieces was invented by German clockmaker Peter Henlein in the early 1500s The invention of digital wristwatches would have to wait for centuries The first of these devices was invented in 1972 and sold for more than 2,000 6
Though they were once cutting-edge technology digital watches are cheap and widely available today They featured numbers that popped up on a screen instead of moving hands Their popularity resulted in sales that dropped the price to 10 by the end of the decade Soon they were so common that they were given away as prizes in cereal boxes There would be no free handouts of the watch introduced by Hewlett-Packard in 1977 It boasted more functions than a pocket calculator The HP-01 featured 28 keys that could be operated with a stylus built into a bracelet It allowed users to solve math 7 Wearable electronics
