The huge phone tower in Stockholm
In 1886, there were more telephones in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, than in any other big city in the world. A year later, Stockholm’s Allmanna Telefon AB ordered an 80-meter telephone tower to be built in the city so that 5,500 phone lines could connect to it. By 1913, the tower was no longer needed because more and more cables were being put underground in cities. In July of 1952, a fire caused a lot of damage to the tower. A year later, it was taken down for safety reasons.
Faster-than-sound plane
The Concorde was an expensive plane to fly on, but it could get you to your destination in style. The plane was also going twice as fast as sound. This means that a person could easily get from London to New York in just three hours, which is a lot faster than the seven hours it would take on other planes. But the plane was taken out of service in 2003 because of a drop in air travel around the world after the September 11 attacks, the crash of Air France Flight 4590, and a lack of maintenance support. The only other commercially used supersonic plane was the Soviet-made Tupolev TU-144.