Great Inventions and Discoveries

Preserving food for any length of time in the late 1700s, was something of a problem. Especially when it came to wars and long marches for thousands of soldiers. So it came about that in 1795, a body known as the French Directory offered a prize of 12,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a […]

So many inventors participated in the development of television that it is impossible to give one individual credit for its invention. A few people, however, can be recognized as pioneers in this field.Paul Nipkrow proposed the first practical mechanical scanner in Germany in 1884. The scanner was a rotating disk with holes arranged in a

In the 1870’s two inventors Elisha Gray, and Alexander Graham Bell both independently designed devices that could transmit speech electrically. Both men rushed their respective designs to the patent office within hours of each other. Alexander Graham Bell patented his telephone first. Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell entered into a famous legal battle over

In November of 1902, American President Theodore Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Mississippi while trying to settle a boundary dispute between Mississippi and Louisiana. Being an accomplished outdoorsman, he liked to bag big game. However, his hunt was going poorly that day, and he couldn’t seem to find anything worthy of discharging his

Without a doubt, Thomas Edison was one of the greatest inventive minds of modern times. But occasionally his inventions were accidental, resulting from totally unrelated observations of other things he was working on.For example, he first came up with a printing telegraph machine, which consisted of a pen punching symbols into paper, marking it with

Early sunglasses served a special purpose and it wasn’t to block the rays of the sun. Smoke tinting was the first means of darkening eyeglasses, and the technology was developed in China prior to 1430. These darkened lenses were not vision-corrected, nor were they initially intended to reduce solar glare. For centuries, Chinese judges had

French doctor Rene Laennec wanted to listen to his patients’ lungs and heart, but was perhaps shy of putting his ears to their chests. Instead, he listened through a wooden tube and found that this could transmit various body sounds. After he published his findings, in 1819, other doctors improved on this instrument, eventually creating

In 1943. During World War II, an engineer in the United States Navy was on a new ship’s run. As he worked, a torsion spring suddenly fell to the floor. The spring flip-flopped as the ingenious man watched. The naval engineer’s name was Richard James, and when he returned home, he remembered the spring and

The first sewing machine was the invention of perhaps Thomas Saint, an Englishmen. In 1790, he patented a machine that had many of the features of the modern chain-stitch one. It was mainly intended for work on leather. But it was never used and the inventor made no profit by it. In 1830, a poor

The safety pin was invented while Walter Hunt was twisting a piece of wire, trying to think of something that would help him pay off a fifteen-dollar debt. On April 10, 1849, the safety pin was patented. Walter Hunt thought so little of his safety pin as an invention that he sold off the patent

Today safety glass, which will not splinter when exposed to shock, is everywhere—in windshields for cars, goggles for machinists, and windows and doors for many public buildings. Essential as it is, safety glass was the result of a clumsy mistake. Edouard Benedictus, a French scientist, was working in his laboratory. The year was 1903. Benedictus

Every invention has an official birth date. For the Cube this date is 1974 when the first working prototype came into being and a patent application was initially drafted. The place was Budapest, the capital of Hungary. The inventor’s name is now a household word, Rubik’s Cube.Although 1974 marks the inauguration of the Cube, the

Refrigeration is the process of making and keeping things cold. The way to make things cold is to remove heat from them. In ancient times people used snow and ice mainly to refrigerate things. They also knew about the process of dissolving certain salts in water for cooling. Compounds like saltpeter and ammonium nitrate, remove

Radio owes its development to two other inventions— the telegraph, and the telephone. In fact, all three technologies are closely related. Few radio broadcasts travel through the air exclusively, while many are sent over telephone wires. In the 1860s, James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist, predicted the existence of radio waves, and in 1886 Heinrich

Heinrich Hertz in Germany calculated that an electric current swinging very rapidly back and forth in a conducting wire would radiate electromagnetic waves into the surrounding space. Today we would call such a wire an ‘antenna’. He created such a wire in 1886, and detected such oscillations in his lab, using an electric spark, in