Technology
Five real newspaper headlines about technology, printed between 1901 and 2022, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.
There are 5 rounds of five in this topic, and a new one appears whenever the archive has enough for it.
Headline one
The Times
1901
On 12 December 1901 Guglielmo Marconi received the first transatlantic radio transmission at Signal Hill in St John's, Newfoundland. The signal — the Morse code letter S — had been sent from Poldhu in Cornwall, spanning 3,500 kilometres. The achievement demonstrated that radio waves followed the curvature of the Earth and could cross oceans.
Headline two
Chicago Tribune
1973
On 3 April 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first public call on a handheld mobile phone on the streets of New York City, calling a rival engineer at Bell Labs. The prototype device, the DynaTAC, weighed about 1.1 kilograms and offered 30 minutes of talk time. It took another decade before mobile phones became commercially available to consumers.
Headline three
New Scientist
1992
On 3 December 1992, 22-year-old software engineer Neil Papworth sent the world's first SMS text message, reading 'Merry Christmas', from a computer to the mobile phone of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis during a company Christmas party in Newbury, England. The Short Message Service protocol had been developed by a consortium of European telecommunications companies as part of the GSM mobile standard. Text messaging would go on to become one of the most widely used communication technologies in human history.
Headline four
The Boston Globe
2004
Mark Zuckerberg launched 'TheFacebook' from his Harvard dormitory room in February 2004. The social networking site spread rapidly through university campuses and within a month had over 10,000 users. Zuckerberg left Harvard later that year as the platform expanded beyond colleges.
Headline five
The New York Times
2022
OpenAI launched ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, releasing to the public a large language model capable of generating remarkably fluent and coherent text on almost any subject. The chatbot reached one million users within five days and 100 million users within two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. ChatGPT's capabilities ignited a global debate about the future of artificial intelligence, education, creative work and employment.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
More science & tech: Space · The internet · Computing · Medicine · Science · all challenges