Article: From smoke signals to cell phones: tracing how technologies evolve. (The Space Place).

How many famous inventors can you name? We often give credit to people like Thomas Edison for inventing the electric light bulb, the Wright brothers for inventing the airplane, and Alexander Graham Bell for inventing the telephone. Do you suppose that these people, smart though they were, just all of a sudden got the ideas for their "inventions" with no help from anyone else? Do you think that the Wright brothers just sat down at a drawing board one day and designed their airplane from scratch?

No, of course you don't! Because no matter how smart inventors are, they almost always stand upon the shoulders of other smart people who have gone before them. There is a ...

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