People leave more behind them than a name. Like her fictional protagonist Victor Frankenstein, Mary Shelley is survived by her creation: Frankenstein took on a life of his own within our collective imagination (Figure $15). Such legacies, and all the many other ways in which people achieve cultural immortality, fall beyond the scope of this initial examination. III.8. History of Technology A list of inventions from 1800-1960 was taken from Wikipedia (Ref $10). The year listed is used in our analysis. Where multiple listings of a particular invention appear, the year retained in the list is the one reported in the main Wikipedia article for the invention. (e.g. "Microwave Oven" is listed in 1945 and 1946; the main article lists 1945 as the year of invention, and this is the year we use in our analyses). Each entry's main Wikipedia page was checked for alternate terms for the invention. Where alternate names were listed in the main article (e.g. thiamine or thiamin or vitamin B,), all the terms were compared for their presence in the database. Where there was no single dominant term (e.g.MSG or monosodium glutamate) the invention was eliminated from the list. If a name other than the originally listed one appears to be dominant, the dominant name was used in the analysis (e.g. electroencephalograph and EEG - EEG is used). Inventions were grouped into 40-year intervals (1800-1840, 1840-1880, 1880-1920, and 1920-1960), and the median percentages of peak frequency was calculated for each bin for each year following invention: these were plotted in Fig 4B, together with examples of individual inventions in inset. Our study of the history of technology suffers from a possible sampling bias: it is possible that some older inventions, which peaked shortly after their invention, are by now forgotten and not listed in the Wikipedia article at all. This sampling bias would be more extreme for the earlier cohorts, and would therefore tend to exaggerate the lag between invention