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When Grace Hopper wanted to explain a nanosecond to admirals who kept asking why satellites were slow, she handed each of them a piece of wire 11.8 inches long, the exact distance light travels in a billionth of a second, and told them to keep it in their pocket as a reminder that physics, not laziness, sets the limit.

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Grace Hopper kept a bundle of wires, each one cut to exactly 11.8 inches. She handed them out at lectures,…

In 1979, a Sony engineer named Nobutoshi Kihara built the first Walkman prototype in four days because his boss Masaru Ibuka wanted to listen to opera on long flights, and the team launched it with no advertising budget, no headphone jack standard, and an internal forecast of 5,000 units a month that the device beat in its first fortnight.

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In February 1979, Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka walked into the office of audio engineer Nobutoshi Kihara carrying a bulky TC-D5…