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# Tech History

2026-10-17

100 Products That Changed the World · #24: Honda Super Cub

Born in Tokyo in 1958, with over 110 million units built — surpassing the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, and the Toyota Corolla to become the most-produced motor vehicle in human history. Engineered around a legendary product brief ('A soba noodle delivery boy must be able to ride it one-handed while balancing a tray of bowls, and a woman in a skirt must be able to step through with dignity'), Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa invented the automatic centrifugal clutch, the step-through frame, and the plastic leg shield — turning a biker's toy into Asia's everyday legs. Ranked #24 among the 100 products that changed the world, with an overall score of 91.65 (displayed as 92) — durability 97, scale 95, experience 92, business 90, originality 88, impact 88.

2026-10-16

100 Products That Changed the World · #23: The Safety Elevator

At the 1854 New York Crystal Palace exposition, 42-year-old mechanic Elisha Graves Otis stood high on an open hoisting platform and ordered an assistant with an axe to sever the only rope holding him up. The platform dropped a few inches and locked solid into iron ratchets. Raising his top hat, he declared: 'All safe, gentlemen, all safe!' Before that moment, human buildings were capped at five stories and top floors were cheap garrets for the poor; after it, cities grew vertically into the clouds, giving birth to the penthouse and the modern skyscraper. Ranked #23 among the 100 products that changed the world, with an overall score of 91.70 (displayed as 92) — durability 97, originality 95, impact 95, scale 92, experience 85, business 85.

2026-10-15

100 Products That Changed the World · #22: The ARM Architecture

Born in a converted barn in Cambridge, England in 1985. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber designed the first ARM1 processor with just 25,000 transistors — so frugal that during its first test, engineers forgot to switch on the power supply and the chip ran flawlessly on leakage current from the signal pins alone. Owning zero fabs and manufacturing zero physical chips, ARM licensed "low power" to the world, powering over 300 billion chips and 99% of all smartphones. Ranked

2026-10-14

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #29: Jan Koum

Co-founder of WhatsApp. Raised in Soviet Ukraine without hot water and surviving on US food stamps as a teenage immigrant, he developed a visceral hatred for surveillance and advertising. Guided by a note taped to his desk — "No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!" — he scaled WhatsApp to 450 million users with just 55 employees, sold it to Facebook for $19 billion, and later walked away from nearly $1 billion in unvested stock rather than compromise user privacy for targeted ads. Ranked

2026-10-13

100 Product Managers Who Changed the World · #28: Liang Wenfeng

Founder of quantitative fund High-Flyer and architect of DeepSeek. Uncomfortable with Silicon Valley-style evangelism, he led a small team of engineers to crush AI pricing monopolies with Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), FP8 mixed-precision, and hyper-efficient training — and with DeepSeek-R1's pure reinforcement learning reasoning, gave Silicon Valley its first genuine existential anxiety from native Chinese innovation. Ranked