Archives November 2013

"Lactomangulation, n. [Badly] manhandling the 'open here' spout on a milk carton…” Rich Hall, comedian Tetra Pak, a multinational company, revolutionized the food and drink industry with its unique cardboard carton production in the 1940s. It was founded in 1951 by Ruben Pausing (1895-1983) and Erik Wallenberg (1915-1999) in Sweden. Work began in 1943 with development of a new storage medium for milk, which had previously been sold only in glass bottles. The challenge was to provide a hygienic container using minimal materials. Tetra Paks are made from paper, polyethylene, and aluminum foil, arranged in seven layers to create a lightweight product. The original design, the "Tetra Classic," was launched in 1952. This was a four-sided pyramidal milk container sold in Sweden. Initial responses were very positive and the company continued to refine Its designs with the more familiar rectangular "Brik" carton produced in 1959. In 1961 the simple addition more...

It is thought that early man used a primitive drill—perhaps a modified spear—to pierce wood and animal skins. Much later, the woodworkers of ancient Egypt refined this technique by making any necessary holes with a bow drill. Adapted from the fire-stick, it had a cord wrapped round it and was held taut with a bow. Holding the drill vertically, the operator moved the bow backward and forward, pressing downward on alternate turns, with an idle return stroke. (There is also evidence of dental drilling from as long ago as 9000 B.C.E., accomplished by the same means.) The Romans replaced the bow drill with the auger, but the bit froze between turns. It was not until the Middle Ages that use of the carpenter's brace made continuous rotation of the drill possible. The term "drill" may either refer to the machine supplying the rotational energy needed for penetration, or to the more...

In October 1930, a young surgical resident sat vigil as a patient with a blood clot in her pulmonary artery labored to breathe. The surgery she needed had never been successfully performed in the United States. Developed in Germany, the "Trendelenburg operation" had a 6 percent survival rate. After seventeen hours, it was clear the patient was not going to survive without surgery, so, with nothing to lose, the procedure was successfully carried out, but the patient died. For the next twenty-three years, Dr. John Heysham Gibbon (1903-1973) and his wife Mary worked to produce a machine that could supply oxygenated blood while the heart was stopped. In 1935 he used a prototype heart-lung bypass machine to keep a cat alive for twenty-six minutes. Venous blood was fed into the machine where it was spun over a cylinder to provide oxygen/and then pumped back into an artery. Many improvements were more...

"[It] computes the given numbers automatically; adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides." Wilhelm Schickard Early inventions to speed up calculations focused on manual solutions such as Napier's bones, which consisted of multiplication tables inscribed onto bones for calculating sums. Seeing John Napier's work, the German polymath Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) created a mechanical calculator that automated the process of calculation and incorporated Napier's bones. In 1623, he designed and built the "calculating clock." At around the size of a typewriter, it could handle numbers of up to six digits in length. The calculator used a direct gear drive and rotating wheels to add and subtract. When a wheel made a complete turn, the wheel adjacent rotated one-tenth of a turn. Dials on the lower part of the machine were turned one way to perform addition, and the opposite way to perform subtraction. These dials were joined by teeth-bearing internal wheels that carried more...

Public Key Cryptography (PKC) is a technological tool that enables participants to confirm their identity with each other electronically. Traditional signatures have been around for thousands of years, originally being used to mark artwork such as pottery with the identity of the creator. However, as the concept of currency and contracts spread across the globe, so did the use of signatures. Although signatures were adequate for society's needs, and still are as a whole, they clearly did not satisfy the demands of electronic security. When governments began to learn of the potentials of PKC, they endeavored to keep the technology to themselves. In the early 1970s, while working for the British government, James Ellis (1924- 1997), Clifford Cocks (b. 1950), and Malcolm Williamson (b. 1950) contributed to its development. It was only in 1997, under a new government "openness" policy, that it was revealed to the world that Britain had more...

Norwegian Svend Foyn (1809-1894) is regarded as the father of modern whaling and is credited with the invention of the modern harpoon. Foyn's genius was to combine the use of fast steam-powered boats with deck-mounted cannons that could use both harpoons with strong lines attached to them and bomb lances to kill the target whale as quickly as possible. Foyn's purpose-built steam whale "catcher" Spes et Fides {Hope and Faith) first sailed in 1864 to northern Norway. By 1868 Foyn had perfected the technique and "modern" whaling methods began to reap financial rewards. This success soon transformed Norway into the dominant force in whaling, an industry previously dominated by British, American, French, and German ships. During the nineteenth century, whale oil was much in demand for lighting and soap; whale meat, which has been eaten by some cultures since early times, became popular in the twentieth century. Foyn's innovations were more...

"Fogarty's... procedure was the first successful example of 'less invasive'... vascular surgery." Inventor of the Week archive Thomas Fogarty [b. 1934) was working as a scrub technician at the Good Samaritan Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio, when he noticed the difficulty surgeons had in removing blood clots that formed in arteries and veins. The operation, which often took nine to twelve hours to perform, necessitated opening up the entire length of the vessel and often resulted in the patient dying or having their limb amputated. Fogarty devised a scheme that could be used to overcome the need for invasive surgery. It involved using a urethral catheter, which is flexible and strong enough to be pushed through a blood vessel and penetrate the blood clot. Working in his attic, Fogarty had the further inspiration to use the fly-tying skills he had learned as a fisherman to attach the "fingertip" of a latex glove more...

During the second half of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred patents for milking machines were applied for in the United States alone. The proliferation of people trying to develop this device, as with any that sees development across countries, makes it difficult to attribute the modern product to one person or organization. The problem with all kinds of automatic milking processes is that there is potential for damage to the cow's teats. A viable milking machine needs to strike a balance between producing a good yield of milk and safeguarding the cow, either from injury or infection caused by the equipment. Many inventors made contributions to the field. Foremost is the DeLaval Company of Gustaf de Laval, famous for inventing a device for separating milk and cream through centrifugal force, which researched almost every type of automatic milker in existence, including ones that simulated the action of the more...

Most inventions are remarkable because they appear to be ahead of their time, revelatory events that transform the world into which they appear. The horse collar seems to be somewhat the opposite, for it is difficult to see why it was not invented earlier. The problem to be solved is obvious: A horse wearing a simple harness can pull a load weighing about 135 pounds (60 kg), but any heavier load forces the harness on to the horse's windpipe, and restricts its ability to breathe. Therefore, while horses had been domesticated, mounted, saddled, and harnessed by around 100—and so could be ridden for pleasure, work, or warfare—their role as a beast of burden was necessarily limited, and was to remain so for another 400 years. It was not until circa 500 that a Chinese camel driver had the bright idea of devising a padded collar, which was quickly used also more...

Linnaean taxonomy is the system of classification of living organisms that is used throughout the biological sciences. Its inventor, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), spent most of his career in Uppsala, Sweden. Starting with the plant kingdom, Linnaeus created a hierarchy in which plants are grouped, according to similarities in their appearance, into twenty-five phyla, and then each phylum into classes, and these in turn into orders, families, genera, and species. The first description of this system was published by Linnaeus in 1753, in a two-volume work, Species Plantarum. He later applied the same principles toanimals and minerals. The most important feature of Linnaean taxonomy is a system known as binomial (or two-name). nomenclature. The first name identifies the genus-to which the organism belongs; the second name, its unique species: for example, the common daisy is Bellis perennis. If necessary, the family, order, and phylum to which a genus belongs can be more...