inventmesomething

Solar paint could transform houses into giant electricity generators

2011-12-29T19:18:00.000-08:00

t's common to see houses with solar panels on the roof harvesting energy to power household electricity, and if lucky the electrical grid. Now, a team from the University of Notre Dame is swinging back around on the idea of solar paint, and using semi-conducting particles to produce energy. This paint would be cheap enough to cover your entire house and turn it into a massive solar powered generator.

The goal was to find a way to move beyond silicon based solar technology. The team centered in on nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide, coated with either cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide. The particles were mixed with a water-alcohol base to create a paste.

When the paste was brushed onto a transparent conducting material and exposed to light it created electricity.

While this is a huge stride in re-envisioning solar power there are still some hurdles. According to Prashant Kamat, John A. Zahm Professor of Science in Chemistry and Biochemistry and an investigator in Notre Dame's Center for Nano Science and Technology (NDnano), which is leading the research, "The best light-to-energy conversion efficiency we've reached so far is 1 percent, which is well behind the usual 10 to 15 percent efficiency of commercial silicon solar cells."

"But this paint can be made cheaply and in large quantities. If we can improve the efficiency somewhat, we may be able to make a real difference in meeting energy needs in the future," he added.

The team has christened the new paint "Sun-Believable and in addition to looking at increasing the efficiency of the product they will also measure stability. Their work on the solar paint has been published in the research journal ACS Nano.

While it is still early days, it does sound like the paint has a bright future.

New Car Engine Sends Shock Waves Through Auto Industry

2011-12-29T18:55:00.000-08:00

Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer's green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.

However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.

The engine has a rotor that's equipped with wave-like channels that trap and mix oxygen and fuel as the rotor spins. These central inlets are blocked off, building pressure within the chamber, causing a shock wave that ignites the compressed air and fuel to transmit energy.

The Wave Disk Generator uses 60 percent of its fuel for propulsion; standard car engines use just 15 percent. As a result, the generator is 3.5 times more fuel efficient than typical combustion engines.

Researchers estimate the new model could shave almost 1,000 pounds off a car's weight currently taken up by conventional engine systems.

Last week, the prototype was presented to the energy division of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is backing the Michigan State University Engine Research Laboratory with $2.5 million in funding.

Michigan State's team of engineers hope to have a car-sized 25-kilowatt version of the prototype ready by the end of the year.

New Israeli invention - intercepts antiaircraft missile!

2011-10-24T15:34:00.000-07:00

slamists are rioting, pirating, terrorizing and destroying our world, while Israelis are innovatively protecting it!!!

Elbit "C Music" intercepts anti aircraft missile

MIT Figures Out a Way to Refuel Electric Cars with Liquid Fuel

2011-06-07T04:48:00.000-07:00

By Adam Clark Estes Jun 06, 2011

A group of young MIT students have developed a new type of battery that runs on a rechargeable liquid fuel. The inventors call the fuel "Cambridge Crude," and if the technology makes it to market, refueling an electric car could be as easy as pulling up to a pump. The batteries are powered by semi-solid flow cells, an innovative architecture in which charged particles floating in a liquid electrolyte between two containers--one for storing energy and one for discharging energy. Separating out the functions and other innovations make the new battteries ten times as efficient as similar existing technology and cheaper to manufacture than lithium-ion batteries. In short, the new batteries make irrelevant the size and cost limitations that have kept this kind of technology out of electric cars to date. The MIT News Office reports:

The new design should make it possible to reduce the size and the cost of a complete battery system, including all of its structural support and connectors, to about half the current levels. That dramatic reduction could be the key to making electric vehicles fully competitive with conventional gas- or diesel-powered vehicles, the researchers say.

Another potential advantage is that in vehicle applications, such a system would permit the possibility of simply “refueling” the battery by pumping out the liquid slurry and pumping in a fresh, fully charged replacement, or by swapping out the tanks like tires at a pit stop, while still preserving the option of simply recharging the existing material when time permits.

According to supervising professor Yet-Ming Chiang, the group originally set out "to reinvent the rechargeable battery" and expects to have a fully operational prototype that could be manufactured for electric cars in the next 18 months.

How baseballs are manufactured

2010-11-11T06:55:00.001-08:00

License to Print Money

2010-11-07T05:52:00.000-08:00

by Robert X. Cringely
Photovoltaic solar cells have been part of renewable energy planning for as long as such planning has existed, with most of those solar cells made from crystalline silicon with energy conversion efficiencies above 20 percent. But crystalline cells are expensive and take a lot of energy to create, reducing their net energy contribution. Fortunately there are other types of solar cells including thin film, amorphous, plastic, and others. All of these are cheaper than crystalline cells though they also tend to have shorter working lives and lower efficiencies. We care about them, though, because organic plastic solar cells in particular offer the prospect of producing the cheapest electric power of all. That is if one of our Startup Tour companies — Solarmer Energy Inc. — meets its design goals. I think they will.

Solarmer is effectively a Chinese company operating in America. Located in Baldwin Park, CA, Solarmer’s management is entirely from Taiwan, though many U. S. nationals are employed at the company. Solarmer is well funded, has been operating for several years now, and is moving relentlessly toward the goal of creating very large plastic solar cells that are 10 percent efficient, have a 10-year service life, and can be manufactured for $0.50 per watt or less.

Crystalline solar cells last for 25 years or more, but plastic or polymer solar cells have traditionally operated for only 2-3 years. Through the use of special UV-resistant coatings, Solarmer is attacking this longevity issue, though since the cost of plastic cells is so much less than silicon, 10 years is good enough.

Solarmer is steadily pushing cell efficiency, too, with their current world record in excess of eight percent efficient. Their goal is 10 percent and I believe they will make it.

Solarmer’s target of $0.50 per watt is based on low material cost and especially on low cost of production. The capital cost for producing Solarmer plastic cells is almost nothing as you’ll read below.

Plastic solar cells are made with a roll-to-roll printing process that starts with a clear plastic substrate on which multiple photo-sensitive semiconducting layers are printed, followed by a clear coat. Solarmer has a pilot printing plant operating in a clean room at its facility, though the world record cells have to this point been mainly built by hand.

Solarmer didn’t invent plastic solar cells, nor are they the only manufacturer. Another company — Konarka Technologies Inc. — is already producing such cells that can be found in many products. Both companies make flexible plastic solar cells, but there is a significant difference in their manufacturing strategies that made one company more interesting to me than the other (both were nominated for the Startup Tour).

Konarka builds its plastic solar cells in a 250,000 square foot former Polaroid photographic film plant in New Bedford, MA. With total control of its own production Konarka is already selling product where Solarmer is not. Unlike Konarka’s Big Factory strategy, Solarmer says it intends to license its technology to commercial printers. The difference between printing Parade magazine for your Sunday paper or printing hundreds of thousands of plastic solar cells per day is the addition of an extra drying stage at the output end of the web printer.

That’s why Solarmer quietly works-away, relentlessly pushing its technology to produce a little more power for a lot less cost. Once the specs are where the company wants them to be, their process will be released to a magazine publishing industry that has been slowly dying, killed by a combination of economic recession and Internet publishing. Hundreds of web printers originally costing tens of millions each will be repurposed for inexpensive energy production at that target $0.50 per watt — not just grid-parity but a quarter the cost of power from coal.

Flexible plastic solar cells will go everywhere the sun shines, produced in long rolls, covering roofs and even windows (the cells can be made transparent). Efficiencies are lower, sure, but so will be the cost. Any structure can produce at least some of its own energy. And though the plastic cells will have only a 10-year life, that’s longer than a paint job lasts in Charleston.

It’s a strategy of ubiquitous good-enough solar power that I find very compelling as part of our energy future.

CAR BANDAID JUMBO

2010-08-21T07:35:00.001-07:00

CAR BANDAID JUMBO

Magnetic car bandage is the way to fix damages. Easy to apply and can be removed without damage to the car. Put it over dents, rust, or any surface that needs healing (or hiding). It's much cheaper than bringing your car in for repairs and sure to get a laugh from passersby. Magnet, 17 x 5".

now $6.98

The amazing Shoedini!

2010-08-14T06:56:00.000-07:00

TV-Hat

2010-07-04T16:39:00.001-07:00

solution for Mexico Gulf Oil Spill Clean-up

2010-06-12T04:42:00.000-07:00

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been tragic. To help clean up the mess, a team from the University of Pittsburgh have designed a new way to removing oil from water.

It’s made of cotton dipped in a polymer which lets water through but repels oil. Here is a video of it in action.

On a large scale spill such as the Gulf of Mexico, the team envisages making large troughs out of the material and scooping it along the surface of the water. Not only would it clean the water, but the oil collected can recovered and the filter reused.

Ford Model T - 100 Years Later

2010-06-10T17:36:00.000-07:00

DIY: Turn Your Bic Into A Laser Lighter

2010-05-23T10:03:00.000-07:00

Salt Water Fuel

2010-04-20T05:55:00.001-07:00

GOOD IDEAS

2010-03-20T06:08:00.000-07:00

Roboplow

2010-03-09T16:05:00.001-08:00

Rudess Meets Bebot

2010-01-17T05:10:00.000-08:00

Jordan Rudess demonstrates and performs with Bebot, a new multi-touch performance synthesizer for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Be sure to check out the HD version of this clip for the best image and sound.

Top Gear - General Motors hy wire

2010-01-03T09:15:00.000-08:00

Car of the future.

Writing On The Wall

2009-12-25T13:02:00.000-08:00

IdeaPaint, Cambridge, Mass. Want to spur innovation? Turn every wall, no matter the surface, into a whiteboard. Three recent Babson College graduates created a paint that dries to create a surface that does just that, and any dry-erase marker wipes it completely clean. The paint sells for $3.50 to $4.00 per square foot of coating. After closing a $5 million venture round in December 2009 (following a $5 million round in November 2008), the founders plan to have it in at least one big-box store in early 2010.

MooBella Icecream custom made

2009-12-24T05:44:00.000-08:00

The Art of IndulgenceThe makers of MooBella® are as unique as the ice cream itself. Were a team of ice cream experts and world-class engineers committed to innovating ice cream and changing it forever. Each team member has a passion for ice cream. MooBella® is the creation of people using new technologies to create the highest quality ice cream experience in places where it simply would not have been possible before.
Simply stated, MooBella® is where taste meets technology. The MooBella® team has created a multi-patented, fully automated ice cream process that will change ice cream forever! Only MooBella® lets you make your own ice cream fresh and on-the-spot - just the way you want it. MooBella® uses only 100% natural real dairy ingredients, select flavors and scrumptious mix-ins to give you an amazing, rich and delicious personalized ice cream experience. If you are passionate about ice cream, you need to try MooBella® - we guarantee it will become your favorite ice cream brand ever!

Best Inventions of 2009

2009-11-23T16:04:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow Television, 1945

2009-11-06T12:03:00.000-08:00

A U.S. Armed Forces film about the future of television.

1939 worlds fair.chrysler 3d exhibit

2009-05-30T18:28:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted to drive on water!

2009-05-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

The Aquada is a revolutionary showcase of High Speed Amphibian (HSA) technology.

This radical new breed of vehicle has been precision engineered to the most exacting standards. It has undergone an extensive safety testing programme and complies with appropriate marine and road safety regulations.

Entry to the water is via beach, boat ramp, slipway or directly from the water's edge. Once afloat, the transition from road vehicle to High Speed Amphibian (HSA) is effortlessly achieved.

Simply press a button and drive into the water. The wheels automatically rise and as you press the accelerator nearly a ton of thrust pushes the Aquada onto the plane. The whole process takes less than 12 seconds. The Aquada can plane at over 30mph.

Powerful enough to tow a water-skier and with a style and class of its own, the Gibbs Aquada is the perfect leisure vehicle. It combines the thrill of an open top car with the sheer exhilaration experienced in a high performance speedboat.

The Aquada is the new name for freedom!

OriginOil's Modest Plan To Make Money Off Oil From Algae

2009-04-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

OriginOil (OOIL.BO) has a plan for algae based oil, and it's not to save the world by using algae-oil to replace petroleum. Rather, it's a modest plan that involves selling technology to algae farmers in the near term, then moving on to selling its technology to other companies.

OriginOil CEO Riggs Eckelberry swung through The Business Insider's HQ this afternoon to explain how he plans on turning the green of algae into the green of money*.

Last Friday the company applied for a patent that Eckelberry thinks will set the company on its course. That patent is for a technology that makes extracting oil from algae an efficient, cheap, one-step process. As pictured above, algae enters one of OriginOil's tanks, and is quickly seperated into biomass and oil afterwards. Eckelberry says OriginOil hasn't tested the technology in on a massive scale, but he's confident that it will work as it scales upward.

The business plan for OriginOil is to sell its technology to algae farmers who will use the extraction process to produce oil. Eckelberry says there are about 30 algae companies now, and he expects there to be over a 100 in the next year when he actually commercializes the technology.

He tells us that many companies are interested in working with OriginOil, though he wouldn't name any. He says that OriginOil has a waiting list of clients.

If the company can advance this technology, the next step in its business is to sell modular systems to companies with factories throwing off CO2. He says those companies can channel their CO2 into tanks that have algae in them. The algae will grow off the CO2, then it can be processed and turned into fuel.

It's a win-win for companies. They cut back on CO2 emissions, which are pricey in Europe where a cap and trade system exists, and might soon exist in the U.S. And companies also get a new source of fuel for themselves.

The best part of the business, from our perspective, is that he doesn't want to be a "land baron" as he puts it. He doesn't want to use loads of space to develop his technology. That's up to someone else.

Of course, for the business to really thrive, Eckelberry will have to sell his technology to other companies. He'll have to get customers lined up, and he'll have to prove his technology not only works, but is the best.

Iiamo self-heating baby bottle requires no stove, batteries

2009-04-17T16:00:00.001-07:00

If you want to heat up a baby bottle when you're out and away from your kitchen, you're usually out of luck. Not so with the Iiamo self-heating baby bottle, which uses some form of magic to heat up milk without any batteries required.

It uses a "100% organic heating cartridge that only contains salt and water." How does that generate heat? I have no idea, but it apparently works, and in just 4 minutes at that. For people who take their babies out on the town often, this could be a pretty great product.

Sliding House

2009-03-04T15:15:00.000-08:00

The brief was simple: to build a house to retire to in order to grow food, entertain and enjoy the East Anglia landscape. The outcome was as unconventional as they come. A structure that has the ability to vary or connect the overall building's composition and character according to season, weather or simply a desire to delight. Wallpaper* took a trip to the site to capture the physical phenomenon in the only medium that serves it justice - film.

Light Transmitting Concrete.

2009-02-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

Litracon as tough as concrete, yet light can get through it. Litracon is a combination of optical fibers and concrete. A wall made of Litracon has the strength of traditional concrete but thanks to an embedded array of optical glass fibers, which lets in the view of the outside world, such as the silhouette of trees, or passersby, that are displayed inside the building.
The glass fibers allow light to travel by points between the two sides of the blocks. Due to their parallel placement, the light-information on the brighter side of such a wall seems unchanged on the darker side. Also there is no change in the color of the light.
An array of thousands of optical glass fibers runs parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of each block. Theoretically, there is almost no loss in light up to 20 meters due to the fibers in such a block and hence a wall structure built from light-transmitting concrete can be several meters thick.
In 2001 Hungarian architect Aron Losonczi invented Litracon, the first light transmitting concrete and in spring 2004 he founded his own company, Litracon Bt., located in the Hungarian town Csongrád.

Smittens

2009-02-07T08:06:00.000-08:00

What Are Smittens?
Smittens are mittens specially designed so that two people can hold hands inside of one mitten.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN:

I created the idea of Smittens while on a romantic walk with my husband. We were trying to hold hands through our bulky mittens, when it dawned on me to create a mitten that was large enough for both our hands. That way, I thought, we could truly hold hands.
WHAT’S INCLUDED:
One set of Smittens includes one pair of regular size mittens, and one oversized mitten for hand-holding (shown in photo).
http://www.smittens.biz/Smittens/Shop.html

Woody Norris: Inventing the next amazing thing

2009-02-04T10:07:00.000-08:00

Woody Norris is a serial inventor of electronics, tools and cutting-edge sonic equipment -- such as the LRAD acoustic cannon.

Drinking Straws...

2009-01-31T18:51:00.000-08:00

In 1888, Marvin Stone patented the spiral winding process to manufacture the first paper drinking straws. Stone was already a manufacturer of paper cigarette holders. His idea was to make paper drinking straws. Before his straws, beverage drinkers were using the natural rye grass straws.

Stone made his prototype straw by winding strips of paper around a pencil and gluing it together. He then experimented with paraffin-coated manila paper, so the straws would not become soggy while someone was drinking. Marvin Stone decided the ideal straw was 8 1/2-inches long with a diameter just wide enough to prevent things like lemon seeds from being lodged in the tube.

The product was patented on January the 3rd, 1888. By 1890, his factory was producing more straws than cigarette holders. In 1906, the first machine was invented by the Stone's "Stone Straw Corporation" to machine-wind straws, ending the hand-winding process. Later other kinds of spiral-wound paper and non-paper products were made.

In 1928, electrical engineers began to use spiral-wound tubes in the first mass produced radios. All made by the same process invented by Stone. Spiral-wound tubing is now found everywhere -- in electric motors, electrical apparatus, electronic devices, electronic components, aerospace, textile, automotive, fuses, batteries, transformers, pyrotechnics, medical packaging, product protection, and packaging applications.

Can openers invented 48 years after cans

2009-01-31T18:47:00.000-08:00

Cans were opened with a hammer and chisel before the advent of can openers. The tin cannister, or can, was invented in 1810 by a Londoner, Peter Durand. The year before, French confectioner, Nicolas Appert, had introduced the method of canning food (as it became known) by sealing the food tightly inside a glass bottle or jar and then heating it. He could not explain why the food stayed fresh but his bright idea won him the 12,000-francs prize that Napoleon offered in 1795 for preserving food. Durand supplied the Royal Navy with canned heat-preserved food while Appert would help Napoleon's army march on its stomach.

Tin canning was not widely adopted until 1846, when a method was invented to increase can production from 6 in an hour to 60. Still, there were no can openers yet and the products labels would read: "cut around on the top near to outer edge with a chisel and hammer."

The can opener was invented in 1858 by American Ezra Warnet. There also is a claim that Englishman Robert Yeates invented the can opener in 1855. But the can opener did not become popular until, ten years later, it was given away for free with canned beef.

The well-known wheel-style opener was invented in 1925. Beer in a can was launched in 1935. The easy-open can lid was invented by Ermal Cleon Fraze in 1959.

Since 1972, some 64 million tons of aluminum cans (about 3 trillion cans) have been produced. Placed end-to-end, they could stretch to the moon about a thousand times. Still, cans represent less than 1% of solid waste material - about one quarter of all cans are recycled. Worldwide, some 9 million cans are recycled every hour. Which is good news, considering that it takes a can about 200 years to degrade if you bury it. It takes paper about a month to bio-degrade, a woolen sock about a year, and plastic hundreds of years.

Recycling cans saves 95% of the energy required to make aluminum from ore, or the equivalent of 18 million barrels of oil, or 10.8 billion kilowatt hours.

Used aluminum cans that are recycled return to store shelves within 60 days.

Canned petfood was introduced by James Spratt in 1865.

Plasic will replace paper

2009-01-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

From toothpaste to solar energy

2009-01-13T11:20:00.000-08:00

TECHNOLOGY

From toothpaste to solar energy
By Abigail Klein-Leichman January 13, 2009

While searching for an ingredient to make toothpaste flow more easily, an Israeli chemist came across a novel way to produce inexpensive, clean solar energy. 3GSolar, the company born of that serendipitous discovery, is now poised to light up the developing world.

"There are maybe a billion and a half people living without electricity," Dr. Jonathan Goldstein, the British-born inventor and battery scientist who founded 3GSolar in Jerusalem in 2003. "Many governments of developing countries are keen on bringing people forward to improve their living standards."

Goldstein's deceptively simple solution is set to revolutionize dye-sensitized solar cell (DSC) technology, invented in 1988 by Swiss scientist Michael Graetzel. The cells are photovoltaic (PV), meaning they convert radiant energy - such as sunlight -- into electricity with the help of a layer of semiconductor.

"As a battery scientist, I saw why nothing commercial had come out of the invention: Cells were tiny and nobody knew how to scale them up to be something practical," Goldstein tells ISRAEL21c.

He knew that if he were able to make a larger DSC, it could be a cheaper and more available alternative to silicon, the relatively expensive and scarce semiconductor currently used in most solar-energy panels. Silicon solar panels are also costly to produce.

Here's where the toothpaste tinkering came in handy. Goldstein had invented a toothbrush with toothpaste preloaded in its handle. In looking for ways to ease the flow of paste to brush, he learned about a cheap white powder called titanium dioxide - and discovered that it not only solved his toothpaste problem but also had a track record in DSC technology. If treated with an absorbable dye, titanium dioxide becomes sensitive to light.

"You can easily screen-print thin layers of titanium dioxide on surfaces and churn out plates of this material and then oven-bake the layer on firmly - it can even be baked on in the air, with no need for expensive equipment," he explains.

Extracting generated current

Goldstein's low-cost current collector enabled building tablemat-sized cells and extracting the generated current.

Initially, 3G was funded by an Israeli government incubator program. In its second year, it caught the attention of New York-based venture-capital fund 21 Ventures. With a staff of 18 scientists working on the project, the concept quickly took shape.

"We're on schedule for pilot production in early 2009, with initial plant production in Israel in 2010," says Goldstein, adding that 3GSolar is on track to be the first PV manufacturer in Israel. It is also soon to become the first Israeli company on the Toronto stock exchange.

Government officials in Senegal and India are eagerly awaiting the first panels. "There is a lot of interest because PV is clean energy and it's always there on the roof if you get a blackout," says Goldstein. "People like to have that security."

He has an ambitious yet prudent business plan. "We will build ourselves up slowly within those [developing] markets and then move to industrialized countries in our second generation," he says. "These countries may buy just one or two panels per family -- not for air conditioning, but for the basic needs of someone who might have electric light in his home for the first time."

The glass-based titanium-dioxide-treated panels are expected to debut at half the cost of similarly sized silicon panels. "We believe as we make more plants, that will drive our cost down even more," says Goldstein.

He envisions maintaining a plant, and R&D facility in Israel, as well as licensing the technology to countries that will be using the panels. "The manufacturing plants can be put in anywhere because all you need is a screen-printing machine and some sort of oven," he explains.

Brilliant Newfoundlander Invents the Solution!

2008-09-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

Jim Meaney, owner of Cansolair Inc. displays how he converts pop cans into a powerful solar heating panel.

The Origin of Air Conditioning

2008-07-13T06:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Air Powered Cars on the Way?

2008-06-18T07:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Wheels for paralyzed turtle

2008-04-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

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.

9 accidental inventions

2008-04-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

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.

Brothers Team Up To Create 100-Mile-Per-Gallon Car

2008-04-24T10:11:00.000-07:00

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."

The Machine That Made Us The Printing Press

2008-04-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

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.
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Airplane

2008-04-01T06:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T06:29:00.000-07:00

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.
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Light Bulb

2008-04-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T06:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T06:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-01T06:16:00.000-07:00

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.