麻省理工大学对世界影响最大的50件事(五),生活在美国微信公众号文章

No. 10 GPS

1933年麻省理工大学的毕业生Ivan Getting 创立了 Aerospace 公司。正是他在第二次世界大战时在麻省理工大学的辐射实验室设计了雷达系统，并曾在Raytheon公司（雷神公司，美国大型国防合约商）工作。同时，他也是全球定位系统的开发者之一，也就是如今广为应用的GPS。

Where am I?

Like knowing where you’re going? Ivan Getting founded the Aerospace Corp. A 1933 graduate, he designed radar systems at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory during World War II and later worked at Raytheon Co. He was also one of the developers (and major advocates, in the face of Pentagon resistance) of a satellite-based global positioning system for navigation. You know it as GPS.

No. 09 BOSE

麻省理工大学电气工程教授Amar Bose在1964年时有一个简单的任务：设计一个接近现场演出音效的立体扬声器。他的公司立刻在短时间内创造出了十几种全新的产品。Bose已经将他大部分股票捐赠给了麻省理工大学，如今麻省理工大学是这家公司的大股东。Bose拥有18亿美元的年利润。

Bose

MIT electrical engineering professor Amar Bose had a simple mission in 1964: design a stereo speaker that could come closer to reproducing the sound of a live musical performance. His company led the rush to create dozens of game-changing products, from noise-canceling headphones to a better bedside alarm clock. Its newest product is a flat-panel TV that eliminates the need for external speakers. Bose donated most of his stock to MIT last month making MIT the company’s majority owner. Bose has more than $1.8 billion in annual revenues and about 8,000 employees.

No. 08 饮用水

麻省理工大学的先驱者【Ellen Swallow Richards】（1842~1911）是食物营养方面的专家，并领导了美国第一次水质调查！这次调查促使马萨诸塞州建立了第一个水质标准和污水处理厂。她也是麻省理工大学中第一位女性导师，并积极倡导女性对于自然科学学科的学习。

Drink up

Healthy eating and clean drinking water have been issues of concern a lot longer than you realize. MIT home economics pioneer Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) was an expert in the preparation of nutritious foods and led the first survey of water quality in America. The survey prompted Massachusetts to establish the first water-quality standards and municipal sewage treatment plant in the country. Richards was also the first woman admitted to MIT, its first female instructor, the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist of her era, and a huge advocate of educating women in science.

No. 07 机器人

麻省理工大学的毕业生：Helen Greiner和Colin Angle知道他们想要制造机器人，于是他们在1990年创立了iRobot公司。当时的他们甚至还不知道自己的商业模式。2002年时他们第一个功能性机器人Roomba吸尘器进入了美国家庭。该公司同时也为军队制造了侦查机器人PackBot。

The new robots

When they started iRobot Corp. in 1990, MIT grads Helen Greiner and Colin Angle knew they wanted to build robots; they’d figure out their business model later. Did they ever. The Roomba vacuum arrived in 2002, the first truly functional robot to find its way into American households. Last year it earned iRobot more than $400 million in revenue. On a more serious note, iRobot developed a reconnaissance robot for the military. PackBot acts as eyes and ears for troops and neutralizes roadside bombs, screens vehicles and people for devices, and goes into caves. iRobot has built about 3,500 PackBots for US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

No. 06 迷你电脑

Ken Olsen和Harlan Anderson在1950年时，都在麻省理工大学林肯实验室工作，并在1957年创立了Digital Equipment公司。该公司研发出了用于商业的互动型迷你电脑，其第一个型号PDP-1卖了十二万美金。继IBM之后，此公司曾为世界上第二大的科技公司。

The minicomputer

Ken Olsen, pictured, and Harlan Anderson, who both worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s, formed a start-up called Digital Equipment Corp. in 1957 to build what they called “interactive minicomputers,” which would be smaller and less expensive than mainframes and designed with business use in mind. Digital’s first minicomputer, the PDP-1, sold for $120,000 and came standard with 9K of internal memory. Digital became the second-biggest tech company in the world at one point, after IBM Corp.

No. 05 生物科技的诞生

Phillip A. Sharp 领导了麻省理工大学对于癌症的研究长达30多年，并帮助建立了生物科技公司Biogen（也就是如今的Biogen Idec公司），这家公司是现在世界上最早的生物科技公司之一。专门从事神经系统疾病、自体免疫疾病和癌症药物开发。

Birth of biotech

If we have anyone to thank for helping take advanced medical research into our lives, it’s probably Phillip A. Sharp. A leader in cancer research at MIT for three decades, he helped found Biogen (now Biogen Idec), one of the first and now the oldest independent biotech firm in the world. Biogen has developed treatments for hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, and cancer, among other diseases.

No. 04 电子邮件

1971年，麻省理工大学校友Ray Tomlinson在剑桥市的一所咨询公司中工作。当时他利用互联网的前身阿帕网（Arpanet）发出了第一封电子邮件，并用@ 符号来区分两个不同的电脑。当他向其他员工展示他的电子邮件系统时他说：不要告诉任何人，这不是我们在工作时该做的事。

Send. Reply. Delete.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an MIT alum working at Bolt Beranek and Newman, a Cambridge consulting firm founded by other MIT alums, sent the first e-mail between two computers on the Arpanet (the Internet’s predecessor). He picked the @ to separate the user’s name from the computer “host” where he could be reached. When Tomlinson showed his e-mail system to another BBN employee, he reportedly said: “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”

No. 03 晶体管

这项发明被一些人认为是20世纪最重要的发明。固态晶体管来源于新泽西州的贝尔实验室。实验室中有3位诺贝尔奖的获得者，其中一位William Shockley（图片中间）在1936年时从麻省理工大学获得了他的博士学位。第一批利用了晶体管的产品包扩：助听器、收音机、电视。

Transistor radio

Considered by some to be the most important invention of the 20th century, the solid-state transistor was born at Bell Labs in New Jersey. One of the three Nobel Prize laureate inventors wasWilliam Shockley, pictured, center, who earned his doctorate at MIT in 1936. Among the first products to take advantage of transistors were hearing aids, portable radios, and televisions.

No. 02 人体地图

还记得【人类基因组计划】吗？在2000年时，人类第一次绘制了自身基因组草图。绘制过程中，麻省理工大学由Eric Lander领导的小队完成了整个草图的三分之一。Lander还利用高速计算机寻找几十个在患病细胞中的基因，并因此发现了一整套发现疾病的方法。

Mapping the body

Remember the Human Genome Project – the first-ever map of our genetic code – in 2000? J. Craig Venter claimed the glory. But a squad led by MIT’s Eric Lander sequenced one-third of it. While most geneticists hunted for each gene they thought was involved in a disease, Lander used fast computers to search for dozens of abnormal genes in a diseased cell. This process has led to the discovery of a whole set of clues to disease. Lander also helped create the Broad Institute, a consortium of MIT, Harvard, and other scientists, now on the cutting edge of genomics research.

No.01 互联网

在互联网诞生之前，没有人能想象出我们能通过万络找到一切，而第一个网站还不得不在第一句话就向浏览者解释这究竟是什么。Tim Berners-Lee，一个柔声细语的英国人，于1989年在日内瓦粒子物理实验室工作时发明了网络，他于1994年来到麻省理工帮助创建了万维网联盟。他最伟大的行为，实际上在于他并没有这么做：为他的发明申请专利或向那些使用他的发明的人收费，这使得网络在短短几年就传遍全球。 “这个东西能传播得这么快，主要是因为我没有在1991年注册万维网公司，”Tim Berners-Lee说。当英国女王伊丽莎白二世封他为爵士时，他表示，伟大的事情可能发生在普通人身上，如果他正好承担了一个碰巧能完成的项目。

World Wide Web Consortium

The first sentence on the first World Wide Web site had to explain to visitors what exactly this thing was. It described the Web as a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.” Oh. Nobody could have imagined that would one day include classified war documents, videos of talking dogs, and the ability to stream movies and instant message with friends. Tim Berners-Lee, the soft-spoken Briton who invented the Web in 1989 while working at a particle physics lab in Geneva, came to MIT in 1994 to help create the World Wide Web Consortium, to help spread technical standards for building websites, browsers, and devices (like televisions) that offer access to Web content. His greatest act of all was actually something he didn’t do: patent his invention or extract licensing fees from those who used his ideas – decisions that helped the Web go global in a few years. “The thing spread largely because I didn’t make World Wide Web Incorporated in 1991,” Berners-Lee has said. When Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee, he said it showed that great things could happen to ordinary people who took on projects that “happen to work out.”