During your visit to a shopping mall or a big Retail chain, you must have observed that the person at the counter uses a simple machine to recognize your purchases. When he runs the machine over the sticker on the product, the computer automatically recognizes the product, and bills you for it. If you have […]
You must have had cuts, scrapes, blisters and bruises numerous times. And you may have used Band aids as many times. Have you ever paused to think, who invented this tiny bandage, and why he ever thought of inventing something like a Band Aid? The story goes like this. The year was 1920. Josephine married
A Hungarian journalist named Laxzlo Biro invented the first ballpoint pen in 1938. Biro had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. The thicker ink would not flow from a regular pen
The first invention of an automobile was by Nicolas Joseph Cugnot, a French military officer, who built a carriage that ran on a bulky steam engine. The next year, the US inventor Nathan Read, received a patent for his own steam carriage. During the 18th century, these were the few experiments with mechanizing the carriage.
The leaves and bark of some trees like the willow contain a substance called salicin. Salicin relieves pain to some extent. People in olden days used to chew the leaves or bark of such trees in order to get relief from pain. In 1853 a French chemist, Charles Frederick von Gerhardt trying to produce salicin
Artificial hearts date back to the mid 1950s when Dr. Paul Winchell first patented it. In 1982, a Seattle dentist, Dr. Barney Clark was the first person implanted with the Jarvik-7, an artificial heart intended to last a lifetime. William DeVries, an US surgeon performed the surgery. Robert Jarvik designed the Jarvik-7 artificial heart. The
In 1787, Levi Hutchins was a 26-year-old clock-maker in Concord, USA with a Yankee conscience. He believed in being at his job on time. It was his ‘firm rule’ to awaken at 4 a.m., whatever the season. But sometimes he slept past that hour, and was distraught the rest of the day. What he wished
Orville Wright (1871-1948) and Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) requested a patent application for a ‘flying machine’ nine months before their successful flight in December 1903, which Orville Wright recorded in his diary. As part of the Wright Brother’s systematic practice of photographing every prototype and test of their various flying machines, they had persuaded an attendant
People knew they wanted air conditioning much before they were able to create a machine that could do it. The first serious attempt to build the air conditioner took place in the 1830s in Florida, USA. Dr. John Gorrie created a system that forced air over buckets of ice suspended from the ceiling to lower
William Thomson was born in Belfast, Ireland June 26, 1824 at Baron Kelvin of Largs. William attended Glasgow University at the age of 10. This early age is not quite so unusual as one would think, for at that time the universities in Scotland to some extent competed with the schools for the most able
Sir William Ramsay was an eminent British physical chemist who is credited with the discovery of argon, krypton, neon and xenon. He also demonstrated that these gases, along with helium and radon, make the noble gases, a family of new elements. Ramsay won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his extraordinary efforts. Born in
Sir William Herschel was a German-born British astronomer and composer, who is widely credited as the founder of sidereal astronomy for observing the heavenly bodies. He found planet Uranus and its two moons, and formulated a theory of stellar evolution. Knighted in 1816, Herschel was also the first astronomer to suggest that nebulae are composed
The man who first correctly explained the process of blood circulation in our bodies and the role of heart in the process is none other than William Harvey, an English physician. He is also known as the father of modern physiology. William Harvey was born on 1 April 1578 in Folkestone, Kent, England, the eldest
Willard Frank Libby (1908-1980), a Nobel Prize laureate and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, was a pioneer in the use of differential decay of the Carbon 14 Isotope for dating organic materials; what we now call radiocarbon dating. He addressed this scientific puzzle after developing a gaseous diffusion enrichment process for uranium-235. His work also involved the
Wilhelm Wundt was a German physiologist and psychologist, who is widely credited as the founder of experimental psychology. Wundt is also acknowledged as one of the greatest and most influential psychologists of all times. Born at Neckarau, Baden in 1832, Wilhelm Wundt was the son of a Lutheran minister. Wundt received a medical degree at