One of those TRIVIA LISTS that everyone reads if they are honest about it.
17. CD, 1965
For the US inventor James Russell, the crackly sound of vinyl ruined music, so he patented a disc that could be read with a laser rather than a needle. Philips and Sony picked up the trail in the early 1970s, when they perfected the Compact Audio Disc or CAD, later shortened to CD. The first discs appeared in shops in the early 1980s and could play 74 minutes, on the insistence of Sony chief Akio Morita, who stipulated one disc could carry Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
So now you know why CD's are generally 74 minutes long.
As for the idiot's lantern...
Not that CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, was impressed. He said in 1920: "Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of it."
I award this man uncommonly prescient award of the early 20th century.