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The touch lamp; a neat idea, and older than you'd think!

Technology Connections · 1.8M views · 2020-09-12 · 17:24

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Overview

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as an example of Google's search answers confidently giving the wrong date for the invention.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2020–2022

Topics

Electronics & circuit designEngineering & making (other)
Search by tags
touch lamppatentselectronics historytechnology connectionscapacitive sensing

What people said

hbn · 2022-09 · Reference

There's also something to be said about how Google should be returning information, not answers. Skip to the 1:00 mark in this Technology Connections video where he demonstrates how if you ask Google when the touch lamp was invented it'll pop up with a giant, confident answer of 1984, despite the fact that if you do the research yourself you can find the first patent for it was filed in 1954. [1] [VIDEO]

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BrazzVuvuzela · 2021-12 · Criticism

Taking google's answer for things they're calculating with math is probably safe, but if you get into the habit of reading google's answers to queries it will have you believing a lot of nonsense because many of the answers google offers are not calculated at all, but instead are regurgitated nonsense that google read on the internet and took at face value (example from Technology Connections: [VIDEO] )

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slipframe · 2021-06 · Reference

Technology Connections had a great observation about this in his video about touch lamps: the problem with Google's knowledge graph is that it takes everything it reads on the internet at face value. [VIDEO] (0:58 through 4:20)

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Sources

Video by Technology Connections, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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