37 years ago today the Apollo 13 splash landed in the Pacific Ocean four days after an oxygen tank explosion in space which spawned on of the most endlessly misquoted quotes: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

Apollo 13 was supposed to land in the Fra Mauro area but the explosion 3 days into the mission forced Apollo 13 to circle the moon without landing. In case you aren’t familiar with the plight of Apollo 13, everyone survived.

It’s safe to say they didn’t enjoy the ride though - there was a lack of food, water and power, making sleep almost impossible because of the cold, it was also calculated that the crew would run out of water - needed both for them and for the cooling systems - before reentry. As a result the crew had to be very strict in their conservation of their resources and became severely dehydrated, they also set a record among all the Apollo missions: the crew lost a total of 31.5 pounds, nearly 50 percent more than any other crew. Probably not the kind of fame they had hoped for!

On the subject of technological failures, I’m sure we’ve all had our share of nightmare gadgets. Wired’s readership certainly have and they’ve decided they’re not going to take it lying down! Check out Wired’s Top 10 Gadget Revenge killings if you’re brave enough… I’m not sure it’s safe viewing for the technologically squeamish - I feel a bit more protective of my gadgets now!

Today is the 35th anniversary of the first mobile phone call.

On April 3rd, 1973 Dr. Martin Cooper, Motorola’s Corporate Director of R&D and patent holder for the “Radio Telephone System”, used the DynaTAC handset to make the first ever portable phone call. Who did he call? Joel Engel, Head of Research at Bell Labs and his rival in the field, to let him know he was too late! I’m not sure I could’ve resisted making that call in his place.

Martin Cooper holds a Motorola DynaTAC (for DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage), a 1973 prototype of the first handheld cellular telephone.
Photo: Eric Risberg/AP
Last year it emerged Cooper only began working on portable communications because of an episode of Star Trek -

“Suddenly there was Captain Kirk talking on his communicator. Talking! With no wires!”

“To the rest of the world it was a fantasy. To me it was an objective.”

In the same article you discover Cooper is not alone in having Kirk and co as his muses:

Robert Haitani, the designer of the Palm Pilot, revealed to the San Francisco Chronicle, “my first sketches were influenced by the Enterprise bridge panels…Years later the first Treo (a combo phone and wireless PDA) had a form factor similar to the communicator. You could stand there and talk into it like Captain Kirk.”

Over at Crave there is this fantastic pictorial history of the digital camera - from cameras that recorded onto analogue tape (like videos), to the first true digital handheld cameras, and then the advances in miniaturisation and storage which means we have cameraphones today. We’ve come a long way since this prototype from Kodak way back in 1975:

A really interesting story - but it misses once crucial detail. What was the first digital photograph of? It’s amazing that we have the world’s first ever photo still to hand from over 180 years ago, but not the first digital one from a mere 32…