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
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,