The Universe

Nowadays, we take for granted that our oven doors and measuring cups will be see-through. But it was not always so. Normal glass will expand and shatter under the temperatures of the kitchen, so ceramics and metals were the only solution. The magic material that changed all this was Pyrex, a borosilicate glass produced by Corning Incorporated. The heat-resistant glass was an immediate success and soon found its way into every cook's armamentarium. Oddly, its origins lie in the railway industry. Lanterns on trains would often crack because of large temperature differences between the hot lamp inside the glass and the cold weather outside. William C. Taylor and Eugene Sullivan at Coming's New York facility discovered that adding boron to the traditional glass mix improved its resilience to temperature extremes. The material was dubbed "nonex" and used with success on the railways for lanterns and telegraph battery jars. Corning went more...

"The high-voltage magneto and spark plug... became available just as serial car production [took off]." Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century Gottlob Monoid's (1876-1923) career as an engineer and inventor started with a lucky break. His father was friends with the father of Robert Bosch, founder of the great German technology company. At the age of fourteen, Honold was given his first job in Bosch's workshop in Stuttgart, where he began to hone his technical prowess. He later left to study engineering at Stuttgart University, but returned to Bosch in 1901 as their technical manager. It was then that he made important changes to the concept of the spark plug. Ignition systems for cars had been around for some time, but none of them were reliable. Some systems rapidly drained the car's battery, whereas the Daimler glow tube ignition system sometimes even set fire to engines. The issue of inventing more...

"No invention of such far-reaching importance ...so quickly exerted influences [on] the national culture." U.S. government commission, 1931 It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a world without the motorcar. When German engineer Karl Benz (1844-1929) drove a motorcar tricycle in 1885 and fellow Germans Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) and Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929) converted a horse-drawn carriage into a four-wheeled motorcar in August 1886, none of them could have foreseen the effects of their new invention. Benz recognized the great potential of petrol as a fuel. His three-wheeled car had a top speed of just ten miles (16 km) per hour with its four-stroke, one- cylinder engine. After receiving his patent in January 1886, he began selling the Benz Velo, but the public doubted its reliability. Benz's wife Bertha had a brilliant idea to advertise the new car. In 1888 she took it on a 60-mile (100 km) trip from more...

The development of the firearm magazine was one of many improvements to weapons in the nineteenth century, and its creator's name is still recognized today by gun enthusiasts all over the world. Benjamin Hotchkiss (1826-1885) worked as a gunmaker in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1850s and 1860s. After the American Civil War the U.S. government had little interest in firearms, and like other famous firearm designers such as John Browning and Hiram Maxim, Hotchkiss moved to Europe to market his designs. He ended up in France in 1867 and set up a factory in St. Denis in 1875—the same year that he designed the bolt-action magazine rifle. The story goes that Hotchkiss was on a train from Vienna to Bucharest when he became engaged in a conversation with a Romanian army officer who suggested the idea that bolt-action rifles needed to be developed further for military use. Hotchkiss took this more...

The Haber process (sometimes called the Haber- Bosch process)—invented by the German chemist Fritz Haber (1868-1934) in 1908—may be the most important technological advance of the twentieth century. At that time, the main way of obtaining large quantities of ammonia was from naturally occurring saltpeter. Ammonia was an incredibly useful substance, with uses ranging from cleaning to fertilizer and explosives. But saltpeter could be difficult to harvest, with deposits occurring on the walls of caves, and making it required the large-scale decomposition of piles of animal dung. In the first decade of the twentieth century, increasing global agriculture was putting a large strain on the supplies of ammonia, and there were fears that the supply would not be able to keep up with the demand. What Haber created was a means of making ammonia that would make it a plentiful resource. He extracted hydrogen gas from methane and made it more...

Transformers convert alternating current (AC) from one voltage to another without changing the frequency. When American William Stanley, Jr. (1858-1916) invented this master of conversion (based on an idea of Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs) in 1885, he paved the way for televisions, computers, battery chargers, and lamps. As a result, Stanley was invited to go and work for the entrepreneur George Westinghouse. Transformers take advantage of Michael Faraday's principle of mutual inductance, which enables one coil to induce a current in another coil. The ratio between the input and output currents is determined by the number of loops in the two respective coils. Thus a current can be raised from low voltage to high voltage with relative ease, the significance of which is driven by the fact that a low voltage transmitted over a large distance will dissipate much of its energy, whereas high voltages retain most of more...

“[It will] make it easier and quicker for these Europeans to cut each others' throats." Anonymous acquaintance of Hiram Maxim American inventor Hiram Maxim (1840-1916) would have been much more famous had he won the battle with Thomas Edison over the credit for the invention of the electric light. But his other inventions proved to be just as important, at least in the development of firearms in the late nineteenth century. . Maxim first introduced the principle of his portable, automatic machine gun in an 1883 patent. Several features of Maxim's gun made it innovative. The action was completely automatic and the user needed only to keep his finger pressed on the trigger to fire the gun. The recoil energy of the shot was used to extract the old shell, reload a new one, and automatically fire. The gun had a single barrel that was surrounded by a jacket filled more...

"What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan." Oliver Herford, writer, artist, and illustrator Being too hot must have been a major problem for people before the late 1800s. As soon as electrical power was introduced, inventors started to work on ideas for the electric fan. Dr. Schuyler Skaats Wheeler (1860-1923) was the American engineer responsible for creating the personal two-blade desk fan—an invention beloved of anyone who has ever held down an indoor job in the summer months. Invented by Wheeler at the tender age of twenty-two, the fan was made of brass, with no protective caging surrounding the rotating blades, resulting in a product that was both stylish and dangerous in equal measure. However, like most inventions of that time that used electricity, when they were first introduced these fans were the reserve of the rich and the powerful, It more...

It sounds rather like an exercise bicycle from the 1950s but the cyclotron is actually the grandfather of today's most powerful particle accelerators. Having originally studied chemistry, Ernest Lawrence (1901-1958) switched to physics and received his PhD from Yale University in 1925. At this time, scientific insights into the nature of matter were starting to yield interesting results. In Cambridge, England, Ernest Rutherford had been using atomic particles as projectiles with which to bombard atoms. By 1919 he had succeeded in bombarding the nucleus of a nitrogen atom and getting it to absorb a helium nucleus, creating oxygen. This kind of work, however, was reaching a technical limit. The atomic particles from naturally radioactive materials were too few and did not have the energy required to pursue the experiments that Rutherford wanted to perform. In 1927 he issued a plea to physicists to find methods to produce a "copious supply" more...

"... embryonic stem cells were a researcher's dream. Now they're a political hot potato." Frederic Golden, commentator Stem cells are cells that have the ability to differentiate into a diverse range of cell types, creating the potential for the cells to be used to grow replacement tissues. American developmental biologist James Thomson (b. 1958), from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, won the race to isolate and culture human embryonic stem cells. On November 6, 1998, the journal Science published the results of Thomson's research, describing how he used embryos from fertility clinics (donated by couples who no-longer needed them), and developed ways to extract stem cells and keep them reproducing indefinitely.  With the ability to develop into any one of the 220 cell types in the body, stem cells hold great promise for treating a host of debilitating illnesses, including diabetes, leukemia, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, and spinal more...