Quickly – do you know the answers to these little trivia questions?

1. How
many transistors were in the radio in the X-1 rocket plane that first broke
the sound barrier?

2. Did
Fairchild or Texas Instruments make the integrated circuits aboard the United
States’s first Explorer satellite?

3. Did
Hewlett Packard or Texas Instruments make the scientific pocket calculators
that Apollo engineers used to put a man on the moon?

The answers? All three were trick questions.

1. None. It was a tube radio.
   Chuck Yeager flew the X-1 to break the sound barrier on October
   14, 1947. The first workable transistor was made on December
   23, 1947.
2. Neither. There were no integrated circuits on the Explorer satellite when
   it went into orbit on January
   31, 1958. IC’s weren’t invented until 1959
   and not commercially available until 1961.
3. Neither. Apollo engineers used
   
   slide rules to put
   
   Neil Armstrong on the moon on July
   20, 1969. HP introduced the first scientific pocket calculator, the HP35,
   on February 1, 1972.

The moral – Don’t wait for future innovation to exercise your ingenuity, imagination and creative drive to do great things.

Tags: Transistor
Integrated Circuit
Calculator
Fairchild
Texas Instruments
Hewlett Packard
Sound Barrier
Apollo
Moon