With a volume of 16cm³, the Quantum Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) from Symmetricom Inc., San Jose, Calif., is not only a third the size of its predecessors, it runs on just 1 percent of the power.

When Alexander Graham Bell called Mr. Watson one Friday back in March 1876, he probably wanted to celebrate the invention of the telephone. But Bell’s first phone call should have been to his team of patent attorneys so they could begin preparing for the decades-long legal battles that followed.

David Van Dusseldorp, who arrived at Rockwell Collins Inc., Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as a young engineer in 1976, remembers sitting atop the company’s research building in the middle of the night during the summer of 1977. His job was to reposition an antenna every 5 minutes in an effort to capture the first signal from a satellite as part of the company’s Generalized Development Model project, the result of which was a five-channel global positioning system (GPS) receiver.

As televisions such as Sony’s Bravia KDL-40ZX1 reach a thinness of 9.9mm and protrude from the wall less than my last drywall patch job, I can’t help getting a little nostalgic for the huge 19", full-color set my parents brought home in the early ’70s. It wasn’t just a piece of furniture—it was just about our most prized piece of furniture, its fine wood grain taking center stage in a recreation room cloaked in dark wood paneling and adorned with a brass replica of the Spanish Armada, framed against a red velvet background.