Just over 100 years ago, the practice became more widely available with the invention of the electric tattoo machine in the United States.

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Who, for example, can name the inventor of the hair-dryer (Chester Beach), the electric washing machine (Alva Fisher) or the ice lolly (Frank Epperson)?

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He set up a one-man lab in Boston, where he invented and patented an electric vote-counting machine.

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The Segway Human Transporter, a self-balancing, electric-powered human transportation machine, was hailed as something that was going to dramatically change the way we got from point A to point B.

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He gave electric shocks to people in an MRI machine, and then gave them the option of either getting an intense shock immediately or a less intense shock later.

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Before he died in 1905, Verne had depicted--in some 60 novels--a world eerily like ours: airplanes, movies, guided missiles, submarines, the electric chair, air conditioning and the fax machine.

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The EV1 is a full scale, 100% electric-powered race car built to resemble a modern Class 1 unlimited open-wheel machine.

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In contrast, its competitor General Electric reallocated capital from commodity plays that had paid in the 1970s to new real enterprises like magnetic resonance machine-manufacturing, betting that discretionary income for health care was going to soar with the coming rise in affluence.

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The machine let the E. coli multiply, mixed them with the DNA strands, and applied an electric shock to open up the bacterial cells and let the DNA get inside.

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