Sir James Dewar invented vacuum insulation (~ 1872) for improving high temperature calorimetry. He improved the vacuum in his double walled containers with charcoal for cryogenics use. He further enhanced the effectiveness of his dewars by silvering the inner walls. Dewar liquefied hydrogen for the first time on May 10, 1898 and Kammerlingh Onnes won the race of liquefying helium by 1908. Onnes discovered superconductivity in the year 1911. The heat capacity of materials at cryogenic temperatures provided some of the earliest scientific validation of quantum theory. The American space program gave the impetus for developing the multi layer insulation (MLI) to reduce the weight of launch vehicles and spacecraft. Cryopumping is providing clean ultra high vacuum in many high tech systems including semiconductor fabs and accelerators. Jefferson Lab’s accelerator (CEBAF ) has three independent vacuum systems (vacuum insulation, wave guide vacuum and beam line vacuum) and all of them benefit from cryopumping. The beam line vacuum inside the CEBAF cryomodules is extremely low. Diamond field emitter based extreme high vacuum instrumentation is being developed presently to measure such low pressures. High efficiency dewars are also being used in high tech medical diagnostic systems such as magnetic source imaging (MSI). These historic and present developments will be reviewed in this paper on the occasion of the centenary of the liquefaction of hydrogen by Sir James Dewar. This work supported by the U.S. DOE under contract No. DE-AC05-84ER40510.