Sunday, September 28, 2008
Brilliant Newfoundlander Invents the Solution!
Jim Meaney, owner of Cansolair Inc. displays how he converts pop cans into a powerful solar heating panel.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
The Origin of Air Conditioning
Conceptually speaking, air conditioning has been around since the first primitive humans ducked into cool, damp caves to take refuge from summer heat. But aside from fans of various shapes and sizes, the technology of temperature control didn’t progress beyond the stone age until the 1830s. That’s when John Gorrie, a doctor from Florida, decided to do something about the stifling heat in his hospital, which he reasoned wasn’t doing his malaria and yellow fever infected patients much good. In response, he created a simple contraption that was little more than a fan that blew over a bucket full of ice—and though it was mighty inefficient, it worked.
A more complex device was rigged up in the bedroom of dying president James Garfield in 1881. Naval engineers constructed a kind of box filled with ice water-soaked rags. A fan blew hot air overhead, forcing the cool air to stay low to the floor, where the ailing president’s bed was. Half a million pounds of ice and two months later, the president was dead, though the engineers had succeeded in lowering the room’s temperature an average of twenty degrees during that time.
But those were experiments, not the norm. Refrigeration first came into common use in some large cities during the late 1800s, typically piped from a central cooling station to meat lockers, keg rooms and even bank vaults where important documents were stored. “Manufactured air,” as it was known, was primarily an industrial-use phenomenon until the turn of the century, when men like Willis Carrier, an engineer and air conditioning pioneer, began to experiment with systems practical for use in commercial and residential spaces. The key was precise control of the temperature-humidity relationship in the air, achieved by a series of chilled coils that both lowered temperature and the moisture level. His invention, built for the Brooklyn-based Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company, was called the “Apparatus for Treating Air,” and it kick-started a revolution.
gates-castle.jpgSuddenly cooled air didn’t have to come from a centrally-located supply; any business with enough money could have their own local system. Schools, hospitals, printing plants and textile manufacturers lined up to have air conditioners installed (as well as one wealthy private citizen, Charles Gates of Minneapolis, the first person to have his home—pictured at left—air-conditioned). The thing stopping Carrier’s units from going into every home in America, however, was their gigantic size. Further, the potential danger of the toxic ammonia they used as coolant didn’t help. In 1922, however, Carrier solved those problems by replacing the ammonia with the relatively safe chemical dielene, and added a compressor to the systems, which reduced their size and expense.
Soon the inventions were popping up in movie theaters all over the country, which became refuges for sweltering cineastes during the summers. Before long, air conditioning was debuting in office buildings, department stores and in fancy trains everywhere. World War II slowed things down a bit since resources were scarce, but when the troops came home and embraced the suburban American dream, many of them wanted that dream air conditioned. Within a few years, window units began selling like hotcakes: from just 74,000 in 1948 to over a million in 1953.
A more complex device was rigged up in the bedroom of dying president James Garfield in 1881. Naval engineers constructed a kind of box filled with ice water-soaked rags. A fan blew hot air overhead, forcing the cool air to stay low to the floor, where the ailing president’s bed was. Half a million pounds of ice and two months later, the president was dead, though the engineers had succeeded in lowering the room’s temperature an average of twenty degrees during that time.
But those were experiments, not the norm. Refrigeration first came into common use in some large cities during the late 1800s, typically piped from a central cooling station to meat lockers, keg rooms and even bank vaults where important documents were stored. “Manufactured air,” as it was known, was primarily an industrial-use phenomenon until the turn of the century, when men like Willis Carrier, an engineer and air conditioning pioneer, began to experiment with systems practical for use in commercial and residential spaces. The key was precise control of the temperature-humidity relationship in the air, achieved by a series of chilled coils that both lowered temperature and the moisture level. His invention, built for the Brooklyn-based Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company, was called the “Apparatus for Treating Air,” and it kick-started a revolution.
gates-castle.jpgSuddenly cooled air didn’t have to come from a centrally-located supply; any business with enough money could have their own local system. Schools, hospitals, printing plants and textile manufacturers lined up to have air conditioners installed (as well as one wealthy private citizen, Charles Gates of Minneapolis, the first person to have his home—pictured at left—air-conditioned). The thing stopping Carrier’s units from going into every home in America, however, was their gigantic size. Further, the potential danger of the toxic ammonia they used as coolant didn’t help. In 1922, however, Carrier solved those problems by replacing the ammonia with the relatively safe chemical dielene, and added a compressor to the systems, which reduced their size and expense.
Soon the inventions were popping up in movie theaters all over the country, which became refuges for sweltering cineastes during the summers. Before long, air conditioning was debuting in office buildings, department stores and in fancy trains everywhere. World War II slowed things down a bit since resources were scarce, but when the troops came home and embraced the suburban American dream, many of them wanted that dream air conditioned. Within a few years, window units began selling like hotcakes: from just 74,000 in 1948 to over a million in 1953.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Air Powered Cars on the Way?
apparently the inventors are getting fairly close to a design that can be produced on a decent scale.
It uses no gas, no hydrogen, not even water; just compressed air from your standard compressor. It even has an on board compressor that can either be plugged in at your home for 3-4 hours, giving you 200+km of driving, or it can generate enough compressed air on the go to drive you from New York to LA on a single tank of gas, running as a hybrid. The compressor uses roughly $2 worth of electricity if you chose to recharge it in your home, soon to be the cost of a liter of gas no doubt. The public and mainstream media needs to start taking notice and give these garage inventors the praise they deserve.
Take a look at the demonstration below.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Wheels for paralyzed turtle
Jim Lee is a contributor to MAKE magazine, and is interested in turtles and bamboo. He built a set of wheels for an injured box turtle, shown here.
Little Bit, a young Eastern Box Turtle was hit by a car in September of 2000. Her shell was crushed and she was left partially paralyzed. There was no way she would ever be released to the wild as happens with most successful rehabs. I repaired her shell using velcro strips epoxied to anchor points on her carapace. After some weeks Little Bit seemed to have made a full recovery except for the use of her hind legs. So some wheels seemed to be the way to go. Some lightweight model airplane wheels on a wire frame did the trick. The removable wheels were secured by a velcro strip epoxied to her plastron. The velcro strips on the carapace were removed after four months. She was eating, drinking, and exploring all the rooms of my house. Eventually she was able to move around outside as well. She lived until early in 2002 when she died unexpectedly (and suddenly). After all she had been through I did not have the heart to order any kind of post mortem from the local vet school. I simply said goodbye and thanked her for what she had shared with me and others who met her.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
9 accidental inventions
1. Penicillin
Everybody knows the story – or at least, should – the brilliant yet notoriously absent-minded biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so threw it away. It wasn’t until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould.
Fleming didn’t even hold out much hope for his discovery: it wasn’t given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was slow-acting – it wasn’t until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.
2. The Microwave
In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer and inventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons, the devices used to produce the microwave radio signals that were integral to early radar use. Radar was an incredibly important innovation during the time of war, but microwave cooking was a purely accidental discovery.
While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His keen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves that had caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have told him from mischievous childhood ‘experiments’), exploded.
The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was about the size of a fridge.
3. Ice Cream Cones
This story is a perfect example of serendipity, and a single chance encounter leading to worldwide repercussions. It’s also rather sweet.
Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together.
At this particularly sweltering 1904 World’s Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were quickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn’t doing so well, selling Zalabia – a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia – and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into cone shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born – and it doesn’t look like dying out any time soon.
4. Champagne
While many know that Dom Pierre Pérignon is credited for the invention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictine monk’s intention to make a wine with bubbles in it – in fact, he had spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was considered a sure sign of poor winemaking.
Pérignon’s original wish was to cater for the French court’s preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to grow in the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white juice from them. But since Champagne’s climate was relatively cold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spending the second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Pérignon tried but failed to eradicate. Happily, the new wine was a big hit with the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.
5. Post-It Notes
The invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidental collaboration between second-rate science and a frustrated church-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the large American corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but nobody took any notice.
4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver, leading to an epiphany – the church being a good a place as any to have one, I suppose – and later applied some of Silver’s weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today you’d find it hard to imagine life without them.
6. Potato chips/crisps
In 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, a particularly fussy diner (railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had been served with his meal, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy. After he had sent back several plates of increasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decided to get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato in grease and sending them out.
Vanderbilt initially protested that the chef’s latest efforts were too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody in the restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipe appearing on the menu as “Saratoga Chips”, before later being sold all over the world.
7. The Slinky
What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound? Well, originally it was just a spring falling off a desk. To be more precise, it was the desk belonging to marine engineer Richard James, who sometime in 1940 noticed that when the spring fell, it stumbled and tumbled across the floor for a while before laying to rest. After a few prototypes, the Slinky was ready to be introduced to toy stores in 1948, where it became one of the most popular and iconic toys of all time.
James’ wife Betty was the one who came up with the name “Slinky”, and has been CEO of the company since 1960. Over 250 million Slinkies have been sold worldwide, and they were even used as mobile radio antennae during the Vietnam war.
8. The Pacemaker
Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker.
Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patient’s body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.
9. Superglue
More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value, unlike Silver’s Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldn’t work, so research moved on.
6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (or “Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition”, to give it its full name) was born.
It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam – the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.
Everybody knows the story – or at least, should – the brilliant yet notoriously absent-minded biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so threw it away. It wasn’t until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould.
Fleming didn’t even hold out much hope for his discovery: it wasn’t given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was slow-acting – it wasn’t until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.
2. The Microwave
In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer and inventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons, the devices used to produce the microwave radio signals that were integral to early radar use. Radar was an incredibly important innovation during the time of war, but microwave cooking was a purely accidental discovery.
While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His keen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves that had caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have told him from mischievous childhood ‘experiments’), exploded.
The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was about the size of a fridge.
3. Ice Cream Cones
This story is a perfect example of serendipity, and a single chance encounter leading to worldwide repercussions. It’s also rather sweet.
Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together.
At this particularly sweltering 1904 World’s Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were quickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn’t doing so well, selling Zalabia – a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia – and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into cone shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born – and it doesn’t look like dying out any time soon.
4. Champagne
While many know that Dom Pierre Pérignon is credited for the invention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictine monk’s intention to make a wine with bubbles in it – in fact, he had spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was considered a sure sign of poor winemaking.
Pérignon’s original wish was to cater for the French court’s preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to grow in the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white juice from them. But since Champagne’s climate was relatively cold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spending the second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Pérignon tried but failed to eradicate. Happily, the new wine was a big hit with the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.
5. Post-It Notes
The invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidental collaboration between second-rate science and a frustrated church-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the large American corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but nobody took any notice.
4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver, leading to an epiphany – the church being a good a place as any to have one, I suppose – and later applied some of Silver’s weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today you’d find it hard to imagine life without them.
6. Potato chips/crisps
In 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, a particularly fussy diner (railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had been served with his meal, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy. After he had sent back several plates of increasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decided to get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato in grease and sending them out.
Vanderbilt initially protested that the chef’s latest efforts were too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody in the restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipe appearing on the menu as “Saratoga Chips”, before later being sold all over the world.
7. The Slinky
What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound? Well, originally it was just a spring falling off a desk. To be more precise, it was the desk belonging to marine engineer Richard James, who sometime in 1940 noticed that when the spring fell, it stumbled and tumbled across the floor for a while before laying to rest. After a few prototypes, the Slinky was ready to be introduced to toy stores in 1948, where it became one of the most popular and iconic toys of all time.
James’ wife Betty was the one who came up with the name “Slinky”, and has been CEO of the company since 1960. Over 250 million Slinkies have been sold worldwide, and they were even used as mobile radio antennae during the Vietnam war.
8. The Pacemaker
Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker.
Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patient’s body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.
9. Superglue
More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value, unlike Silver’s Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldn’t work, so research moved on.
6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (or “Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition”, to give it its full name) was born.
It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam – the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.
Brothers Team Up To Create 100-Mile-Per-Gallon Car
Motorists Looking For Fuel-Efficient Options As Gas Prices Surge
Reporting
Dana Kozlov
DU PAGE COUNTY, Ill. (CBS) ― With gas prices seeming to go up every single day, some people are more determined than ever to find different, more cost effective ways to get around.
As CBS 2's Dana Kozlov reports, the Ewert brothers have a rather advanced science project. But instead of a typical dry ice experiment, Chris and Andrew used batteries and a charger to make their hybrid Toyota Prius get 100 miles per gallon.
"My brother and I built this, and car companies should be able to do it, too," Chris Ewert, an electric vehicle enthusiast, said.
The car is the Wheaton brothers' way of lessening the dependence on oil and helping the environment.
It's something the DuPage County Forest Preserve has been focused on for close to a decade.
"Oh, we're making a significant difference in the environment," said the district's John Walton.
The district has hybrids and vehicles that run on four different types of alternative fuels, including natural gas.
"It burns at less than 10 percent of the pollutants of gasoline, and for the mile per gallon dollars, it's costing us about a dollar a gallon," Walton said.
If you want to forget about fuel sources altogether, you can go electric. Small electric cars get 40 miles per charge, costing three cents a mile, and are meant for local neighborhood use.
"With the gas prices going up and with the green movement, it's really unbelievable the number of cars we're selling today," said Dan Mack of the Electric Avenue Auto Mall.
The hitch is the vehicles are not legal in Illinois.
That's frustrating, considering Mack, Walton and the Ewerts are convinced gas is not the way of the future.
"There is no gas shortage today; there will be in the very near future," Walton said. "We are not going to have gasoline the way we have it."
Reporting
Dana Kozlov
DU PAGE COUNTY, Ill. (CBS) ― With gas prices seeming to go up every single day, some people are more determined than ever to find different, more cost effective ways to get around.
As CBS 2's Dana Kozlov reports, the Ewert brothers have a rather advanced science project. But instead of a typical dry ice experiment, Chris and Andrew used batteries and a charger to make their hybrid Toyota Prius get 100 miles per gallon.
"My brother and I built this, and car companies should be able to do it, too," Chris Ewert, an electric vehicle enthusiast, said.
The car is the Wheaton brothers' way of lessening the dependence on oil and helping the environment.
It's something the DuPage County Forest Preserve has been focused on for close to a decade.
"Oh, we're making a significant difference in the environment," said the district's John Walton.
The district has hybrids and vehicles that run on four different types of alternative fuels, including natural gas.
"It burns at less than 10 percent of the pollutants of gasoline, and for the mile per gallon dollars, it's costing us about a dollar a gallon," Walton said.
If you want to forget about fuel sources altogether, you can go electric. Small electric cars get 40 miles per charge, costing three cents a mile, and are meant for local neighborhood use.
"With the gas prices going up and with the green movement, it's really unbelievable the number of cars we're selling today," said Dan Mack of the Electric Avenue Auto Mall.
The hitch is the vehicles are not legal in Illinois.
That's frustrating, considering Mack, Walton and the Ewerts are convinced gas is not the way of the future.
"There is no gas shortage today; there will be in the very near future," Walton said. "We are not going to have gasoline the way we have it."
Monday, April 21, 2008
The Machine That Made Us The Printing Press
Stephen Fry, best known (to me anyway) for playing Jeeves in the P.G. Wodehouse adaptation Jeeves and Wooster, recently hosted a BBC4 documentary on the Gutenberg Press entitled The Machine That Made Us. The title refers to the movable-type printing press invented by Johann Gutenberg in the fifteenth century.
In the course of the one-hour documentary, Fry travels through Europe to understand Gutenberg’s story. He also builds a modern replica of the press, which turns out to be a tough job. You can watch the entire documentary online via YouTube (embedded videos below — one hour spread across six ten-minute clips), or if you’re in the UK you can watch via the BBC’s iPlayer.
This documentary is an interesting exploration of Gutenberg and his invention; the story of the printing press is one we don’t often think about, but of course it’s central to the development of modern thought and education. Have a look:
You can read more about Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press at Wikipedia. See also: the Gutenberg Bible.
1
2
3
4
5
6
In the course of the one-hour documentary, Fry travels through Europe to understand Gutenberg’s story. He also builds a modern replica of the press, which turns out to be a tough job. You can watch the entire documentary online via YouTube (embedded videos below — one hour spread across six ten-minute clips), or if you’re in the UK you can watch via the BBC’s iPlayer.
This documentary is an interesting exploration of Gutenberg and his invention; the story of the printing press is one we don’t often think about, but of course it’s central to the development of modern thought and education. Have a look:
You can read more about Johannes Gutenberg and his printing press at Wikipedia. See also: the Gutenberg Bible.
1
2
3
4
5
6
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Airplane
Of all of the dreams of humanity throughout the ages, the thought of traveling though the air seemed the most fantastical. Truly a multitude of people spent countless years thinking, building, testing and ultimately failing in the efforts to create a heaver-than-air flying machine.
Electric Adding Machine
In a certain way, this started the whole computer thing going. An operator would handle about 50-80 cards per minute (say 1 per second). Hollerith electric tabulating system, including tabulating machine, card reader, pantograph punching machine, and sorting machine, 1890, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
8
Light Bulb
Contrary to popular knowledge, Thomas Edison did not actually invent the light bulb. The patent is for ‘an improvement in Electrical Lamps, and in the method for manufacturing the same’. It was part of the genius of Edison that also created the Edison Electric Light Company (with the backing of some of the most famous financiers of the day) to market not only the light bulb itself, but also the electric power needed by all those bulbs.
Phonograph
The ability to store information is so pervasive today that it is hard to remember that the whole concept of ‘a media storage device’ is only 130 years old. Mr. Edison didn’t call it that, but the path from his phonograph to you multi-gig thumb drive is fairly impressive. This meme was developed at the first industrial research facility – Menlo Park, New Jersey, USA. The patent was one of the few inventions of Edison that did not describe an improvement of ‘prior art’, but a new and unique way to record, save and reproduce sounds on demand.
Improvement in Telegraph
By the early 1870’s the telegraph was in widespread use. Many inventors worked on the problem of sending multiple signals over one wire, increasing the scalability of the systems in place. Alexander Bell took the path of sending multiple tones on a wire which evolved into the transmission of human voice. Teamed with Tom Watson he was issued patent 1764465 – the first telephone.
Ice Machine
Modern life would be vastly different without refrigeration and air conditioning. The patent that started it all was issued to John Gorrie, a doctor in Florida looking to keep his patients cool. Unable to commercialize his ice making machine, he died four year later at age 54, a ruined man.
Electric Motor
At the heart of the industrial revolution is the ability to take electric power and convert it to mechanical energy. Developed based on the discoveries of Faraday in 1821 and Sturgeon in 1832, Thomas Davenport patented the first commercial electric motor. Unfortunately, because there was no practical electric distribution system in place, Davenport’s invention did not sell and he went bankrupt.
Cotton Gin
No, the ‘Gin’ has nothing to do with drinking. It is a shortened form of ‘engine’ . This device, that separates the cotton from embedded seeds, was instrumental in the explosion of wealth of the United States.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)