Great Inventions and Discoveries

A Red Indian was lost in the jungles of the Andes. He was burning with fever from malaria. He stumbled upon a pool of water. Raging with fever, he threw himself down at the edge to satisfy his thirst. He did notice that the bark of the cinchona tree nearby had fallen into the water. […]

As a world food, potatoes are second in human consumption only to rice. And as thin, salted, crisp chips, they are America’s favourite snack food. Potato chips originated in New England as one man’s variation on the French-fried potato, and their production was the result not of a sudden stroke of culinary invention but of

Everyone knows what Post-it notes are: They are those great little self-stick notepapers. Most people have Post-it Notes. Most people use them. Most people love them. But Post-it Notes were not a planned product. No one got the idea and then stayed up nights to invent it. A man named Spencer Silver was working in

One day in 1905, Frank Epperson of US, mixed some soda water powder and water, which was a popular drink in those days. He left the mixture on the back porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. The temperature dropped to a record low that night and the next day Frank had a

The Scottish veterinarian John Dunlop, who lived in Belfast, was constantly concerned about the accidents his son had riding his tricycle, with its metal wheels, over the rough cobblestone streets. The wheels would bump, tip the bike, send the lad sprawling. Determined to make the tricycle ride more smoothly, Dunlop got hold of rubber tubes,

Before the 16th century, guns were large, cumbersome weapons requiring two hands, one to hold the gun and one to light the gunpowder. The first pistol came into existence after the invention of the wheel lock, a complicated firing mechanism with a wheel that was wound like a clock. When the trigger was pulled, the

In 1937, an American law student Chester Carlson invented a copying process based on electrostatic energy called Xerography. Xerography became commercially available in 1950 by the Xerox Corporation. The word ‘Xerography’ comes from the Greek for ‘dry writing.’ Carlson had been frustrated with the slow mimeograph machine, and the cost of photography, and that lead

The first true photographs, exposed on metal that had been sensitized to accept an image, were named for their French inventor L.J.M. Daguerre in 1837. The inventor of the first process, which used a negative from which multiple prints were made, was William Henry Fox Talbot, a contemporary of Daguerre. Tintypes, patented in 1856 by

Penicillin is a widely used antibiotic agent, derived from the Penicillin mould. Penicillin was discovered by bacteriologist Alexander Fleming at St. Mary’s Hospital in London in 1928. He observed that a blue—green mould had contaminated a plate culture of Staphylococcus, and that colonies of bacteria, adjacent to the mould, were being dissolved. Curious, Alexander Fleming

At first penknives were used to sharpen pencils. They got their name from the fact that they were first used to shape feather quills used as early pens.In 1828, Bernard Lassimone, a French mathematician applied for a patent for a invention to sharpen pencils. However, it was not until 1847 that Therry des Estwaux first

Graphite is a form of carbon, first discovered in the Seathwaite Valley on the side of the mountain Seathwaite Fell in Borrowdale, near Keswick, England, about 1564 by an unknown person. Shortly after this the first pencils were made in the same area. The breakthrough in pencil technology came when French chemist Nicolas Conte developed

Modem is a device that converts between analog and digital signals. Digital signals, which are used by computers, are made up of separate units, usually represented by a series of 1/s and 0’s. Analog signals vary continuously; an example of an analog signal is a sound wave. Modems are often used to enable computers to

A parachute is simply a big umbrella that creates air re+sistance. It is possible only with a parachute that man may drift down through the air slowly to avoid injuries when striking the ground. The first man to use a parachute is believed to be a Frenchman called J.P. Balanchard. In 1785, he attached parachute

Remember ‘Pong’, literally the first arcade game that could be played at home? It was as basic as you could get, just a white ping-pong style ball that bounced around the screen, controlled by an elementary game console. It was the start of the video game era, and was followed shortly by more ‘sophisticated’ games

Well before 1880, Amanda Theodosia Jones, had already established herself as an author and an inventor. Her early work in attempting to devise a method of preserving food resulted in her being awarded two patents.Having failed to establish a successful canning company, Jones set her sights upon perfecting a method of heating furnaces. It was