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VCR, Light Dimmer Switch, Answering Machine
The VCR first came to life thanks, in part, to American singer Bing Crosby. In 1951, engineers at the Bing Crosby Studios in Los Angeles tested the first videotape recorder. This recorder had to run so fast, it only recorded for 16 minutes before they ran out of tape! It took nearly 10 years for the Sony Corporation's system, known as the helical-scan, to change all that. This system spun a drum at a high speed to read the tape. Finally entire movies fit onto a single tape. Next, early 20th-century engineers created something called a rheostat. With the creation of more advanced circuits in the 1960s, engineers were able to redesign the entire system. Instead of burning off extra electricity, dimmers learned to economize by only using the electricity they needed. Then, the first recording device specifically designed for the phone was built by none other than Thomas Edison in 1914. Strangely, privacy laws made it illegal for Americans to record telephone conversations for several decades, but by the '70s manufacturers began recording on compact cassette tape. This helped to lower prices and started to make answering machines a common sidekick of the phone.

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