Word: took
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hard to overstate the impact of the global system he created. It's almost Gutenbergian. He took a powerful communications system that only the elite could use and turned it into a mass medium. "If this were a traditional science, Berners-Lee would win a Nobel Prize," Eric Schmidt, CEO of Novell, once told the New York Times. "What he's done is that significant...
...early 1900s engineers first appreciated how easily radio waves can be bounced off almost any object. In 1925 physicists took advantage of this, firing signals at the ionosphere and using the reflection to measure its altitude. By World War II, British scientists had refined the technology, and the government began to dot the coast of England with civil-defense radar stations. As the hardware got simpler, radar found its way into airplanes, boats and air-traffic-control towers, improving navigation and ensuring that even a cow-pasture airport could operate safely. By the end of the century, the same basic...
What good is a brilliantly intense, tightly focused beam of light? It can make a dandy weapon or torture device, as Sean Connery found to his dismay in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But while laser weaponry never really took off, lasers certainly did. Today they are used for, among other things, dentists' drills and delicate eye surgery, recording and playing back compact discs, measuring the distance to the moon, creating and viewing holograms, industrial cutting and welding, sending voices and data through the air and down optical fibers, surveying roads and building sites, generating energy in controlled-nuclear-fusion...
Edwin Land had long since dropped out of Harvard, founded a successful corporation and come up with scores of inventions when he took on the challenge of instant photography just after World War II. Until then, photographers had to develop their film and then print it on paper--or send it off to a professional lab--before they actually had a picture in hand. Land was convinced he could shortcut this laborious process by creating a camera that did all the work itself, and by 1947 he had done it. Instead of conventional film, the Polaroid Land Camera was loaded...
...standardized tests in use today can be traced back to it: the now ubiquitous and obsessed-over SAT; the Wechsler, taken by several million people a year, according to its publisher; and Terman's own National Intelligence Test, originally used in tracking elementary school children. All these tests took from the Army the basic technique of measuring intelligence mainly by asking vocabulary questions (synonyms, antonyms, analogies, reading comprehension...