Modern humanity in its everyday life is completely dependent on technical inventions, which can be called revolutionary with full responsibility. You will probably be interested to know that many of these inventions were actually invented in the USSR, and not in the West, as is commonly believed.
1940s microwave
Since the start of scientific and technological progress, there has always been a struggle for authorship of discoveries and scientific inventions.
So, let's say, it was with the most ordinary light bulb: despite the fact that it was invented in 1876 by P. H. Yablochkov, in the West claim that this discovery was made by Thomas Edison in 1879. A similar situation has developed in the 20th century with a microwave oven, without which almost no Russian mistress can imagine its existence today.
The microwave oven gained widespread domestic distribution only in the late 1980s, but its first samples went on sale in the second half of the 1940s!
A resident of the American state of Massachusetts, Percy Spencer, was officially granted a patent for the invention of a microwave oven designed for defrosting and then heating food on October 8, 1945. There is a popular legend in the USA about how the researcher made his discovery. In his own words, one day a man noticed that a bar of chocolate had melted in his pants pocket. Moreover, the process of melting itself took place so quickly that it was impossible to blame the heat emanating from the scientist's body for it. When Spencer tried to analyze the incident, he found himself standing next to a magnetron generating microwave waves. The legend is beautiful, but hardly reliable. However, this is not the point.
The fact is that all over the world the copyright for a scientific discovery is assigned to a person who first announced his know-how in the open press. So, back on June 13, 1941, 4 years before the discovery of the American, the Trud newspaper informed its readers about a useful invention of Soviet scientists - a microwave oven for defrosting and heating food! Thus, legally, the authorship of the invention of the microwave oven belongs to scientists from the laboratory of magnetic waves of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of the Meat Industry, and not to an inventor from the United States.
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Soviet mobile phone
As you know, the era of mobile phones in our country began with a call from M. S. Gorbachev to the USSR Ministry of Communications with the help of a mobile phone manufactured by one of the Western firms in 1987.
In the United States, the first mobile phone went on sale in 1979. At the same time, Martin Cooper, who was one of the employees of Motorola Corporation, is officially considered to be the head of the work on the opening of mobile communications. After arguing with the head of Bell Laboratories that mobile communications are not fiction, Cooper, while in a street crowd in Manhattan, made a call to his opponent using a cell phone weighing about a kilogram. It is believed to have been the world's first mobile phone call. But this is not the case!
Experts who are well acquainted with the history of radio communication claim that the first mobile phone was invented by the Soviet engineer L. I. Kupriyanovich in 1957. At the same time, the scientist received a copyright certificate for "Radiofon", which was an automatic radiotelephone with direct dialing. She dedicated a long article "Science and Life" in No. 8, 1957 to this revolutionary invention.
"Radiofon" worked on the principle of modern cell phones. Within a radius of up to 30 kilometers, it connected to the city telephone network on short waves, making it possible for its owner to talk with any subscriber with a home telephone. The first apparatus L. I. Kupriyanovich weighing 500 grams was tested in 1958. Thus, the mobile phone was officially invented and tested in the USSR 15 years earlier than in the USA.
Internet for country management
Science, as you know, is driven by war. Most of the outstanding scientific inventions were originally intended for military purposes. The internet is no exception.
For the first time the idea of creating a prototype of the Internet was proposed to the Soviet government in 1959 by Colonel Anatoly Kitov. The military scientist, who was the creator of the computing center of the Ministry of Defense, as well as the author of a thesis on missile programming, sincerely believed that computers were the future. In a note sent to the government, the perspicacious colonel proposed to create a single social system in the country that would unite the computing centers of the USSR into one whole.
However, N. S. Khrushchev ignored this proposal. Following Anatoly Kitov, Academician Viktor Glushakov became interested in the idea of creating a unified electronic network.
Given the centralized management of the country, the scientist in 1961 proposed to create a National Automated System. The discussion of this idea was so loud that soon in the United States in the Washington Post there was an article "Punch card controls the Kremlin." But, despite all the advantages of introducing a computer network that controls the state, the USSR government did not dare to take this step. And in vain. Almost a decade later, in 1969, the Arpanet system was launched in the United States, combining the computers of the US Department of Defense into a single network according to the principles of Anatoly Kitov and Viktor Glushakov.
The mainframe is a miracle of the 1950s
These days, not having a computer at home, or at worst a laptop, is considered almost indecent. Nevertheless, half a century ago, there was nothing to think about that each apartment would have its own personal computer.
Scientists from the USA are considered to be the inventors of computers. However, the first copyright certificate for the invention of an electronic computer (and this is not denied in the United States) was issued to the Soviet scientist Isaac Brook and his colleague Bashir Rameev.
Scientists presented the idea of the world's first computer to the scientific community of the Soviet Union in the distant post-war year, having received an inventor's certificate No. 10475 for the invention of a digital computer dated December 4, 1948. From the inception of the idea to its implementation, 4 years of hard work and the most complex engineering research have passed. Only in 1952 the first working model of a computer was officially presented and put into operation in the USSR. Later, in 1968, Arseny Anatolyevich Gorokhov patented a personal computer in the USSR, ahead of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, by as much as 8 years.
TV box from the Russian empire
In different sources, you can find several different names of the inventors of television and the television itself: Byrd, Rosing, Zworykin, Kataev, Persky, Nipkov, Takayanagi, Farnsworth.
Despite the fact that the West traditionally brings to the fore its own inventors, the discovery of television belongs to several of our compatriots. For the first time, the word "television" was spoken by the teacher of the cadet corps in St. Petersburg K. D. Persky. In 1900, at the IV International Electrotechnical Congress, the scientist made a report "Television by means of electricity".
This was the first public acquaintance of humanity with the term "television". The very principle of transmitting a video signal over a distance using an electron beam was proposed by the Russian physicist B. L. Rosing, having received a patent for his invention in 1907. At the same time, already in 1911, the talented inventor presented to the scientific community the first picture tube that took the simplest images. Subsequently, the ideas of B. L. Rosinga was developed by two physicists of Russian origin - S. I. Kataev and V. K. Zvorykin, who received a patent for the invention of the television. Moreover, Zvorykin called his first apparatus rather symbolically - "information box".
Dmitry SIVITSKY