Archives March 2013

It has been estimated that the average house is built using around 20,000 nails. For this we have American inventor and engineer Jacob Perkins (1766-1849) to thank—not for inventing the nail, which appeared thousands of years before he was born, but for inventing a machine that could produce upward of 200,000 nails per day, introducing mass-produced nails for the first time. Perkins was born in Massachusetts, and worked for a goldsmith during his teenage years. He became known for creating a multitude of different inventions, of which his nail-making machine was one of his first and most famous. Nails were traditionally handmade by beating out sheets of iron into the required shape, but this was made easier with the invention of mechanical cutting processes by the mid 1700s. In 1790 Perkins devised his nail-cutting invention, followed five years later by a patent for "a machine to cut and head nails more...

Archeological findings suggest that glass was first created during the Bronze Age in the Middle East. To the southwest, in Egypt, glass beads have been found dating back to about 2500 B.C.E. Glass is made from a mixture of silica sand, calcium oxide, soda, and magnesium, which is melted in a furnace at 2,730°F (1,500°C). Most early furnaces produced insufficient heat to melt the glass properly, so glass was a luxury item that few people could afford. This situation changed in the first century B.C.E. when the blowpipe was discovered. Glass manufacturing spread throughout the Roman Empire in such quantities that glass was no longer a luxury. It flourished in Venice in the fifteenth century, where soda lime glass, known as cristallo, was developed. Venetian glass objects were said-to be the most delicate and graceful in the world. Glass is normally a clear or translucent brittle material, but it may more...

"A pair of needle nose pliers used on the Apollo 16 lunar module sold for more than $33,000." Heritage Auction Galleries, Dallas, March 2008 Pliers are hand tools used for gripping objects by using the principle of the lever. They utilize the hand's powerful closing grip of the fingers into the palm to apply force precisely to a small area. There have been many designs with different jaw configurations to grip, turn, pull, adjust, or cut a variety of items. Pliers are an ancient invention and probably developed from tools used for handling hot coals when fires were used for cooking. Sticks and wooden tongs were used at first. These were replaced by metal tongs, which were effectively early pliers, around 3000 B.C.E. when iron was being forged. A Greek Macedonian gold wreath from the fourth century B.C.E., also shows evidence of the use of pliers. Modern pliers consist of more...

"Doctor Snow gave that blessed chloroform and the effect was soothing, quieting, and delightful" Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom James Simpson (1811-1870), Professor of Obstetrics at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, was the first doctor to use chloroform in childbirth. He had become dissatisfied with the use of ether and set about finding an alternative, using himself and friends as guinea pigs. On November 4, 1847, the group tried chloroform— tradition has it that Simpson's wife, on bringing in dinner, found them all asleep under the table. Simpson immediately recognized the advantages of chloroform over ether; it was inflammable, lighter, and easier to administer. Within a week he had administered the chemical to over thirty women in labor. Simpson's innovation brought down the wrath of the Church and the medical establishment. The Bible taught that women should bring forth in pain, and doctors claimed pain was a biological necessity. more...

Electric motors are used in a vast number of household items, and are essential for industry. Michael Faraday (1791-1867) introduced this revolutionary technology in 1821 when he successfully demonstrated the first electricity-driven motor, a discovery that led to a golden age in the application of electrical technology. Faraday, son of a blacksmith, started his career as a chemist but soon became involved in many aspects of science, most notably electromagnetism. In 1813 he worked under chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution, where he focused on the principle of electromagnetic rotation that would later be developed into the first electric motor. Following the recent discovery of the property of electromagnetism by the Dane Hans Oersted, Faraday showed that mechanical  action  could  be  derived  from electromagnetic energy in 1821. He passed an alternating current (AC) through a wire suspended in a small cup of mercury with a magnet at the bottom. more...

Precisely where or when the very first Venetian blinds appeared has long been a point of some conjecture. Slatted blinds made from various timbers were popular throughout northern Italy in the mid to late- 1700s; these consisted of slats held together by strips of fabric rather than corded cloth, and the angle of the slats could be adjusted with the use of a tilting device, not unlike what is in use today. When freed Venetian slaves took Venetian blinds to France in the 1790s, the window coverings soon became known to the French as les Persiennes (the Persians). In fact, by the 1700s Italy had already enjoyed a long association with the Venetian blind. Archeologists have uncovered slatted window coverings amid the ruins of Pompeii, with the individual slats being fashioned from marble. Farther to the east, the earliest window coverings unearthed in modern Iran (previously known as Persia) have more...

"One might wonder how we would be controlling our television sets today if it wasn't for... Zenith." James Fohl, writer By the 1950s the television set was beginning to establish itself as a firm feature of the family living room and viewers soon grew tired of constantly having to leave the comfort of their favorite armchair to change the channel. One of the first incarnations of the remote control was the 1948 Garod "Telezoom." This small, round, single-button remote was connected to the television by a wire, but its only function was to enlarge the picture on the screen. Thus it was Zenith Radio Corporation (now Zenith Electronics Corporation) that pioneered the modern remote control. The founder president, Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., was worried that advertisements would kill television, and so challenged his engineers to invent something that would "tune out annoying commercials." In 1950 the rather aptly-named "Lazy Bones" more...

From 1932 until the early 1990s, the vinyl gramophone record was the single most popular medium for the reproduction of recorded music. Like many significant inventions, the line of evolution began with Thomas Alva Edison, who developed the cylinder recording system. It was Emile Berliner—already known as the man who invented the microphone used in the mouthpiece of Alexander Graham Bell's first commercial telephones—who, in 1887, developed the idea of using discs with a lateral groove cut in spiral. The first discs were manufactured from rubber, but shellac was introduced in 1896, and the 10-inch, 78 rpm "single" became the norm. This system, however, had three notable problems: Shellac was extremely brittle, and records broke easily; it generated high levels of background noise; and it was simply not possible to get much music on a record—around four minutes on each side. Large-scale classical compositions had to be chopped up into more...

This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel." Walter Dornberger The history of rocketry dates back to around 900 C.E., but the use of rockets as highly destructive missiles able to carry large payloads of explosives was not feasible until the late 1930s. War has been the catalyst for many inventions, both benevolent and destructive. The ballistic missile is intriguing because it can be both of these things; it has made possible some of the greatest deeds mankind has ever achieved, and also some of the worst.  German Waiter Dbrnberger (1895-1980) and his team began developing rockets in 1938, but it was not until 1944 that the first ballistic missile, the Aggregat-4 or V-2 rocket, was ready for use. V-2s were used extensively by the Nazis at the end of World War II, primarily as a terror weapon against more...

"Man lives by images. They lean at us from the world's wall, and Time's." Robert Penn Warren, poet Computer scanners (or "optical scanners") take images and turn them into signals that a computer can understand. Although image scanners did exist prior to the invention of the charge-coupled device (CCD), most modern scanners now capture images in this way. A scanner houses an array of CCDs for capturing light. When a photograph or book is scanned, a lamp illuminates the image, which is then reflected by a series of mirrors and focused through a lens to reach the CCD array. The CCDs create an analog signal, which is then converted to a digital signal that can be read by a computer and stored. More recently, manufacturers have started to use a different technology—the contact image sensor (CIS) method, which reflects light from LEDs (light-emitting diodes), instead of from a normal lamp, more...