Inventions By Year

The year some items were invented might be related to why less than ten percent of people owned them.
1913 The zipper
1916 Electric power drill
1917 Radio tuners
1929 Car radio
1930 Jet engine
1931 Electric razor
1932 Electric can opener
1935 Radar
1939 Helicopter
1940 Color television
1941 Artificial heart
1944 Kidney dialysis machine
1950 Alkaline batteries
1958 Pacemaker
1962 LED.. light-emitting diode
1964 Plasma television
1976 Lithium batteries
1982 IBM PC
1988 Digital mobile phones
1989 World Wide Web (1991 live)
2001 Apple iPod
2003 Blackberry 6210
2004 Samsung OLED TV
2007 Apple iPhone
2009 Twitter
2010 Apple iPad

Pagers were originally designed and built during the 1950's, but did not take hold in terms of popularity until the 1980's. These one-way communication devices were often used by emergency services, doctors, and others who needed to be reachable at all times.
Original mobile phones basically did nothing, but call and send text messages. They are now mostly obsolete. The precursor to the modern smartphone, they were extremely useful in their time and ran for days without requiring a charge.
Fax machines were essentially a modern version of the telegram. For many years, they allowed people and businesses to transmit scanned documents from one phone number to another. They are almost gone now, except for medical and legal offices.

We originally connected to the World Wide Web via analogue and dial-up modems.