INVENTION
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INVENTOR
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NATION
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BACKGROUND
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NOTES
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Jet Engine
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Frank Whittle
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U.K.
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His father was a mechanic. Came from a working-class
background. Became an RAF Officer through merit.
|
The Establishment would not take notice of his
revolutionary thinking. It took him 10-years to convince them. Created a new
global industry.
|
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First Adhesive Glue
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Not known
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U.K.
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A Patent was issued around 1750
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Although it is known that it existed, no record is
available
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Air Brake
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George Westinghouse
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U.S.A.
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His father had small shops manufacturing
agricultural machinery. Working-class entrepreneurial background.
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Self-educated inventor who created one of the USA’s
greatest electric manufacturing companies.
.
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Electric Transformer
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George Westinghouse
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U.S.A.
|
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He was very inquisitive as a boy in anything
electrical.
|
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First large system supplying electricity from one
circuit for multiple end-uses
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George Westinghouse
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U.S.A.
|
|
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Milking Machine
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Anna Baldwin
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U.S.A.
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She was a small working farmer
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Created a new global product.
|
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Automotive air bags
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Allen K. Breed
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U.S.A.
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He had a working-class entrepreneurial background.
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Built from the grass-roots level an international
company. Created a new global product
|
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Electro-mechanical crash Sensor (EMS).
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Allen K. Breed
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|
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Modern Air Conditioning
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Willis Haviland Carrier
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U.S.A.
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He had a working-class entrepreneurial background.
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Started his working life on a salary of only
US$10.00 per week.
Created a new global industry.
|
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Aeroplane/Aviation
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Orville & Wilbur Wright
|
U.S.A.
|
They were owners of small bicycle business
|
They were both self-trained mechanics. Created a
whole new global industry.
|
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Alternating electric current motor
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Charles Proteus Steinmetz
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Poland
|
He came from a middle-class family who immigrated to
the USA
with little money to start a new life.
|
Greatly Instrumental in building the financial and
industrial base/development of General Electric – The world’s largest industrial
concern. Created a whole new global industry.
|
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Fuel Cell
|
William Grove
|
U.K.
|
He was a Welsh circuit judge and amateur scientist
|
Father of the fuel-cell who experimented as a hobby.
Created the basis of a 21st century global industry.
|
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Water based fuels
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Rudolf W. Gunnerman
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Germany
|
He was a US Immigrant who arrived in the US
with US$20 dollars in his pocket.
|
This technology has the potential to substantially
reduce the energy used in vehicles in the medium term over the next 30 years.
Created the basis of a 21st century global industry.
|
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silicon solar cell
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Russell Ohl
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a
working-class employee of Bell Labs
|
The management at Bell Labs tried several times to
dissuade him from this research direction. If they had the company would not
have created such a revolutionary invention/product. Created the basis of a
new global industry.
|
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sun energy battery
|
Gerald Pearson, Calvin Fuller and Daryl Chapin
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a working-class employees of Bell Labs and he
accidentally came across the basis of a new global industry where the
conversion from light to electricity powered appliances.
|
The New York Times praised it as "the beginning
of a new era, leading eventually to the realization of harnessing the almost
limitless energy of the sun for the uses of civilization. Created the basis
of a new global industry.
|
|
Introducing the impurities necessary to transform
silicon
from a poor electric conductor to a superior
conductor of electricity.
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Calvin Fuller
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a working-class employee of Bell Labs
|
This discovery absolutely revolutionised the
electronics age. Created the basis of a new global industry.
|
|
MS-DOS (Q-DOS)
|
Tim Paterson
|
U.S.A.
|
He was just a worker/programmer for a small computer
products company who created it for his own use. He sold the rights of
Q-DOS to Bill Gates for US$50,000 The
world’s best investment move ever in modern history. He ended up simply as a
worker for Microsoft.
|
The software that made Microsoft what it is today.
Without MS-DOS Bill Gates would never have developed Microsoft into the
world-leader, as the foundation catalyst would never have existed for him.
Created the basis of a new global industry.
|
|
CP/M Operating System
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Gary Kildall
|
U.S.A.
|
He was an indifferent student who liked to spend his
time rebuilding old cars, but he attended the University
of Washington in his hometown of Seattle, planning to
become a maths teacher.
|
The first operating system for microcomputers and
what MS-DOS was derived from. Basis of a new global industry.
|
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Altimeter
|
Louis Paul Cailletet
|
FRANCE
|
He was an ironworker in his father’s iron foundry.
|
Created the basis of a new global product.
|
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high-pressure manometer
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Louis Paul Cailletet
|
|
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Created the basis of a new global product.
|
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Liquefication of oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and
air.
|
Louis Paul Cailletet
|
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He was an ironworker in his father’s iron foundry.
First person to liquefy these natural gases.
|
This process created a new global industry servicing
a diverse array of industries from health to energy.
|
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Tin Can
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Peter Durand
|
U.K.
|
He was a middle-class merchant selling commodities.
|
Revolutionised food preservation and its
transportation over an indefinite time. It was the
birth of the modern packaging industry
|
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Portland Cement
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Joseph Aspdin
|
U.K.
|
He was the eldest son of a bricklayer and a bricklayer himself.
|
He called the cement Portland cement because it
resembled Portland stone. Created the basis of a new global industry.
|
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Reinforced concrete
|
Joseph Monier
|
FRANCE
|
He was a gardener who made garden pots and tubs of
concrete reinforced with an iron mesh. Besides his pots and tubs, he promoted
reinforced concrete for use in railway ties, pipes, floors, arches, and
bridges.
|
Created the basis of a new global industry.
|
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Cates Eyes
|
Percy Shaw
|
U.K.
|
He was a young road repairer from a working class
family.
|
Greatly advanced road safety at night throughout the
world. Created a new global product that has saved thousands of lives over
the years.
|
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Thermos Flask
|
James Dewar
|
U.K.
|
He was the son of an innkeeper
|
The majority of households in the developed world
have bought one of these several times over. Created a new global product.
|
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Solidification of liquid Hydrogen
|
James Dewar
|
Scotland
|
He was the
youngest of six boys and was born and raised in Scotland. By the time he was
fifteen he had lost both parents, and went to live with his brother. He went
to Edinburgh University and after graduation
stayed on to work as a tutorial assistant.
|
Allows bulk storage of a needed commodity and where
its importance will significantly increase in the 21st century and
beyond. Basis of a new global industry.
|
|
Electric Motor
|
Michael Faraday
|
U.K.
|
He came from a poor family and was the son of a
blacksmith. He started in life as an
errand boy for a London
bookbinder.
|
The modern world could not function in many ways
without the device. Faraday through his work created a whole new
technological industry.
|
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Electromagnetic Induction
|
Michael Faraday
|
U.K.
|
|
His discoveries are the basis of all modern
electromagnetic technology. Therefore Faraday is the ‘father’ of the
electricity industry.
|
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Generator
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Michael Faraday
|
U.K.
|
|
Allows continuous source of electricity. Created the
basis of a new global industry.
|
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Transformer
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Michael Faraday
|
U.K.
|
|
Allows the electric power to be increased and
decreased at will. Created the basis of a new global industry.
|
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Dynamo
|
Michael Faraday
|
U.K.
|
|
Producing electricity at will. The modern world
could not do without it. Created the basis of a new global industry and
possibly the greatest invention of all time as all other inventions such as the WWW, could not exist without Faraday's invention .
|
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Electromagnet
|
William Sturgeon
|
U.K.
|
He was the son of a shoemaker, apprenticed into shoemaking
and thereafter an electrician by trade.
|
The beginning of using electrical energy for making
useful and controllable machines and which laid the foundations for
large-scale electronic communications. I.e. telephone etc. Created the basis
of a new global industry.
|
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Gas Mask/Breathing Mask
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John and Charles Deane
|
U.K.
|
They were blacksmiths by trade.
|
Basis of a new industry and underwater diving and
Scuba diving.
|
|
Holography
|
Dennis Gabor
|
Hungary
|
His father was a mining engineer.
With the rise of Hitler in 1933 he left Germany and after a short period in Hungary went to depression stricken England
and where finding a job as a foreigner was very difficult. Through
perseverance and over many years of hardship he eventually invented
holography and thereby a 21st century industry.
|
Basis of a new global industry.
|
|
Internal Combustion Engine
|
Samuel Brown
|
U.K.
|
He was an engineer from a working class background.
|
He adapted an old Newcomen steam engine to create
the first engine to drive a road vehicle. Pre-runner to the modern
automobile.
|
|
Laws of conservation and dissipation of energy
|
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin
|
U.K.
|
His father was the son of a farmer and he was
more-or-less self-taught.
|
Father of modern thermodynamics and created the
basis of a multi-global industries.
|
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Locomotive
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Richard Trevithick
|
U.K.
|
His father was a mining manager with only a
reasonable income. Therefore he had to work for everything that he made in
life and had no financial help other than his own personal earnings.
|
He is regarded as the ‘Father of railway engines’.
Created the basis of a new global industry.
|
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Light Bulb
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Humphry Davy
|
U.K.
|
His father was a woodcarver by trade with little
financial income.
|
Invented the first electric light. Davy connected
two wires to a battery and attached a charcoal strip between the other ends
of the wires. The charged carbon glowed making the first arc lamp. Created
the basis of a new global industry.
|
|
Penicillin
|
Alexander Fleming
|
Scotland
|
His father was a farmer living in a desolate area of
Scotland
and where Fleming had no contact initially with science.
|
His work created an industrial base for possibly the
greatest selling medical cure in history. Created the basis of a new global
industry.
|
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Polyester
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John Rex Whinfield and James Tennant Dickson
|
U.K.
|
They were employees of a small regional company.
|
Basis of a new global product.
|
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Periodic Table
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John Newlands
|
U.K.
|
His father was a minister of the church and educated
him at home. He did not have any formal state school education. He worked
initially for a time at an agricultural college.
|
Had the idea of arranging chemical elements in order
of their relative atomic masses and he arranged his elements in columns. The
Basic building blocks of the Universe and possibly the most important
listings of all time.
|
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Radar
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Robert Alexander Watson-Watt
|
U.K.
|
His father was a carpenter by trade and where he
learnt Watson-Watt to use his hands and make things.
|
Invention that revolutionised the aviation industry.
Created the basis of multi-global industries.
|
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Rubber Bands
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Stephen Perry
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U.K.
|
He was a working-class Entrepreneur.
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A product used worldwide in business and home.
Created the basis of a new global product.
|
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Radio Waves
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James Clerk Maxwell
|
U.K.
|
His father was a lawyer with no scientific
background but where James Clerk Maxwell developed an early interest in
scientific investigation.
|
Predicted the existence and from this connection sprang the idea that light was an electric
phenomenon. Established the clue for the invention of the Radio.
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Seismometer
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James Forbes
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U.K.
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He was a self-taught instrument maker.
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Instrument determining the magnitude of earthquakes.
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Sewing Machine
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Thomas Saint
|
U.K.
|
He was a joiner & cabinet maker
|
Created a new industrial machine that became the
basis of a global industry.
|
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Steel Production – The Bessemer Process
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Henry Bessemer
|
U.K.
|
His father was a typefounder. Bessemer was an inventor working under his
own initiative and intuition.
He said of the reasons why he had made the
breakthrough,
“I had an immense advantage over many others dealing
with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long-
established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the
general belief that whatever is, is right.”
|
Created the means by which mass-production of steel
could be done inexpensively. This was the basis of a whole new global
industry, created the material which built the 20th century and
what made Andrew Carnegie the world’s richest person. Created the basis of a
new global industry.
|
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Submarine
|
William Borne
|
U.K.
|
He was a former Royal Navy Gunner with no
qualifications or background in ship design whatsoever.
|
It never got off the drawing board because no one
would finance it.
|
|
The three machines that Revolutionised the Textile
Industry
1. Spinning Jenny
2. Spinning Frame
3. Spinning Mule
|
James Hargreaves
Richard Arkwright
Samuel Crompton
|
U.K.
U.K.
U.K.
|
He was a carpenter and weaver by trade.
He was the son of a tailor and trained as a barber.
Had no education whatsoever and was taught to read and write by his cousin.
He was a musician by trade through which he raised
enough money to invent things.
|
He had no formal education and could not read or
write.
The world’s first industrialist and became one of
the richest people in England
in his day.
The machine allowed him to earn 4>5 times more
money than just conventional weaving.
|
|
TELEVISION
|
John Logie Baird
|
Scotland
|
When he was twelve he built his own telephone.
He was an amateur radio-ham (he tinkered with radio
equipment). Baird was 34 years old when he started building his
"Televisor" system. Working on a shoestring budget, he built his
first device using objects found in the attic where he was experimenting. An
old tea chest was used to support the electric motor that turned the discs.
The discs themselves were cut out of cardboard. Other parts were mounted upon
pieces of scrap lumber. His lens came from an old bicycle lamp. Glue, sealing
wax and wire held the device together.
|
One of the greatest and most important inventions
ever and the basis of one of the world’s largest industries.
|
|
Nipkow disk
(the pre-runner invention to the Television)
|
Paul Nipkow
|
Germany
|
He came from a middle-class family but had no great
wealth.
|
He was an engineering student when he proposed and
patented the world's first electromechanical television system.
|
|
Modern televisions (Basis of electronic system)
|
Philo Farnsworth
|
USA
|
He came from a working-class agricultural family
living on a small farm.
|
For those inclined to think of our fading century as
an era of the common man, let it be noted that the inventor of one of the
century's greatest machines was a man called Philo Taylor Farnsworth. Even
more, he was actually born in a log cabin, rode to high school on horseback
and, without benefit of a university degree (indeed, at age 14), conceived
the idea of electronic television — the moment of inspiration coming,
according to legend, while he was tilling a potato field back and forth with
a horse-drawn harrow and realized that an electron beam could scan images the
same way, line by line, just as you read a book. He came up with his ideas
whilst still a schoolboy and by the age of 20 years demonstrated his
invention.
|
|
Modern Television (Person who launched the industry)
– the 'kinescope,' a cathode-ray tube.
|
Vladimir Zworykin
|
Russia
|
He was an apprentice boat ferry operator on his father’s
boats across the river Oka. He
eagerly helped repair electrical equipment, and it soon became apparent that
he was more interested in electricity than anything nautical.
|
He was a Russian immigrant who went to the USA to create
his dream – mass television.
Zworykin's 'storage principle' is the basis of
modern TV.
|
|
Cruise Control in Cars
|
Ralph Teetor
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a blind mechanical engineer who was in the
top three in his class at university.
|
A totally blind person from the age of five.
|
|
Alternating Electric Current
|
Charles Proteus Steinmetz
|
Polish
|
He edited a student newspaper at university. After
his groundbreaking invention. He was in essence a genius as he devoured books
on every subject from mathematics and economics to literature and medicine
Thomas Edison installed Steinmetz as consultant and research chief at his new
General Electric Company in upstate New
York.
|
Only 4’0” tall and deformed from birth but created
the first commercially successful
alternating current motor for General Electric which gave GE a world
advantage which significantly built their industrial empire.
One of his famous sayings was, "No man really
becomes a fool until he stops asking questions."
|
|
Telephone Answering Machines
|
Valdemar Poulsen
|
Denmark
|
He was a simply a basic telephone engineer but with
an inventive flare to create things all on his own.
|
He worked for a telephone company and invented the
first answerphone in his spare time.
|
|
Anticeptics
|
Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis
|
Hungary
|
He was a basic doctor working in a hospital but saw
more than all others and individually conceived the reasons to why so many
people died in hospital.
|
When he first suggested anticeptics he was ridiculed
by his fellow hospital doctors.
|
|
Apple Computer – first single circuit board computer
|
Steve Wozniak
|
U.S.A.
|
He worked on calculators for Hewlett Packard who at
the time were not producing computers
in any way.
|
His hobby in his spare time created the famous Apple
computer and started a revolution in personal computers.
|
|
Manufacturing assembly line
|
Eli Olds
|
U.S.A.
|
He started in a small way making steam and gasoline
engines with his father.
|
Eventually the company grew and he invented an
assembly line for greater productivity.
|
|
Aspirin
|
Felix Hoffmann
|
Germany
|
He was a line-worker chemist employed by a chemical
firm.
|
He rediscovered an old formula through serendipity
and told his employer about it.
By chance this single employee created possibly the
biggest selling medicinal pill in the world.
|
|
Automated electrified monorail systems
|
Ronald J. Riley
|
U.S.A.
|
In his early days he tinkered with toys and
electronic devices on the workbench in his basement, and earned money by
selling vegetables door to door.
|
Disillusioned with the limited roles and rewards
gained by inventors within large companies (that he worked for) he became
a self-employed inventor.
|
|
First commercial automatic sliding door.
|
Lew Hewitt and Dee Horton
|
U.S.A.
|
He worked for a small glass repair company that was
constantly re-fitting broken glass to doors that had shattered due to high
winds and the weather.
|
Literally established a brand-new industry.
|
|
The Pram (baby carriage)
|
William Kent
|
U.K.
|
He was an architect by profession and not a
manufacturer or mechanical engineer.
|
He designed the pram on his drawing board for one of
his clients.
|
|
Bakelite - the first plastic
|
Leo Hendrik Baekeland
|
Belgium
|
He was the son of a shoemaker and a maid. He became
an assistant teaching professor after receiving his PhD. He went to the USA on a
scholarship decided to stay there.
|
His first invention ‘Velox’ netted him £1 million
and allowed him to create Bakelite, which in itself created a whole new
industry.
|
|
Ball point Pen
|
Laszlo & Georg Biro
|
Hungary
|
They were from a working-class family where Laszlo
was a journalist and Georg was a chemist.
|
The brothers worked out and created a pen that would
work in many situations unlike the fountain pen. Created a new global
product.
|
|
Rubber Balloon
|
Michael Faraday
|
UK
|
Initially he was an apprentice bookbinder.
|
Only rudimentary education up to the age of 14 to
read and write and do simple arithmetic.
|
|
Band Aid for skin cuts
|
Earle Dickson
|
USA
|
He was a cotton buyer and not a chemist or medical
practitioner.
|
He was inspired to invent the band-aid by his
wife, Josephine Dickson, who was always cutting her fingers in the kitchen
while preparing food.
|
|
Bar Codes
|
Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver
|
USA
|
They were both graduate students at a technology
college.
|
Whilst young and at college a local food store had
asked about a method of reading merchandise at the checkout. Silver picked
this up and decided to do something about it.
|
|
Internal Combustion Engine - first effective gas motor engine - the first
practical four-stroke internal combustion engine
|
Nicolaus Otto
|
Germany
|
He was a travelling salesman selling tea, coffee,
and sugar. He had no training in mechanical engineering whatsoever.
|
He developed an interest in the new technologies of
the day and began experimenting with building four-stroke engines. (As a
travelling salesman he chanced upon a newspaper account of the Lenoir
internal combustion engine. Before year's end, he had built an internal
combustion engine, utilizing a four-stroke piston cycle.)
|
|
Basketball
|
James Naismith
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a Canadian physical education instructor at
the Y.M.C.A. training
school [Springfield
College
|
He invented and started one of America’s most popular sports
that has become a multi-billion dollar industry.
|
|
Lightning Conductor
|
Benjamin Franklin
|
U.S.A.
|
He had little formal education. He was a printer by
profession and not a scientist.
|
A prolific inventor.
|
|
Bifocals
|
Benjamin Franklin
|
|
|
He made them for himself as he grew older so that he
had not to keep changing his glasses for near and far sight.
|
|
Gulf Stream
|
Benjamin Franklin
|
|
He had little education but had a natural ability
for great intuition.
|
He single-handedly determined that a conveyor system
must be in operation in the Ocean.
|
|
Blue Jeans
|
Levi Strauss
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a Bavarian immigrant with little education.
Sold rough canvas to use for tents and wagon covers and developed denim
through an idea from a miner.
|
He started the world’s foremost jean company and a
multi-billion company.
|
|
Calculating Machine
Calculator - the first practical adding and listing machine.
|
William Seward Burroughs
|
U.S.A.
|
He was a bank clerk and not an engineer.
|
Working in a bank inspired him with a vision of a
mechanical device that would relieve accountants and bookkeepers of the
monotony of their tasks and ensure that a smaller percentage of their time
was spent correcting errors.
|
|
First practical process of photography
|
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
|
France
|
He was a scene painter for the opera, Daguerre and
not a scientist.
|
He developed a system to take the first permanent
photograph.
|
|
Pacemaker
|
Wilson Greatbatch
|
U.S.A.
|
He was from a working-class
family and in his early teens he built his own short wave radio receiver. He became
an electrical engineer after serving in WW2..
|
He accidentally installed a resistor into an
oscillator to record heart sounds with the wrong resistance, it began to give
off a steady electrical pulse. He realized that the small device could be
used to regulate the human heart.
|
|
The Modern computer
the Z3 - the world's first electronic, fully
programmable digital computer (1941)
|
Konrad Zuse
|
Germany
|
He was a construction engineer for an aircraft
company and not a scientist of computer programmer.
|
He invented the computer to help him with his
lengthy engineering calculations. It was the first freely programmable computer.
|
|
Modern Beauty Cosmetics/make up
|
Max Faktor (Max Factor)
|
Poland
|
He came from a poor Polish family where his father
could not afford any education for their ten children (Max being just one of
them). Therefore he had no formal education whatsoever but self-taught
himself over time.
|
He was apprenticed to a dentist and mixed basic
dentistry potions for years. Started selling hand-made
rouges, creams, fragrances, and wigs in Moscow.
A chance happening (serendipity)
occurred when a travelling theatrical troupe wore Factor’s make-up
while performing for Russian nobility, and the door to fame and fortune
opened wide.
|
|
Ivory Soap
|
An unknown soap maker who
made a mistake at work at Procter and Gamble – He or she would not own up to
it as it was thought that they would be fired. Presumably whoever it was left
the company before realising what had been invented.
|
USA
|
Whoever he or she was they invented the world’s
first floating soap.
|
It became one of Procter & Gamble’s most
successful products ever.
|
|
Pine-Sol cleaner
(the biggest selling household cleaner in the world)
|
Harry A. Cole
|
USA
|
He started a small business in the depression years.
He slowly but surely supplied janitorial services that
cleaned local banks.
|
He was living in the midst of
miles of pine forest, and used pine oil, a natural disinfectant and
deodorizer, to create a fresh smelling and highly effective cleaning product.
This product was developed for self use – like a great number of inventions.
|
|
S.O.S Soap Pads
For cleaning pots & pans etc – Brillo Pads is a
modern derivative
|
Ed Cox
|
USA
|
He was an aluminium pot salesman and not a products
engineer.
|
He invented a pre-soaped pad with which to clean
pots. Cox soon found out that the S.O.S pads were a hotter product than
selling his pots and pans.
|
|
Disposable NAPPIES
|
Marion Donovan
|
USA
|
She was a young mother and housewife and not a
product design engineer.
|
She first invented the 'Boater', a plastic covering
for cloth diapers. She made her first Boater using a shower curtain. A year
later she carried her ideas further. Using disposable absorbent material and
combining it with her Boater design. She then created the first convenient
disposable diaper. Manufacturers thought her product would be too expensive
to produce. She left unable to sell or license her diaper patent, went into
business for herself.
|
|
Diesel Engine
|
Rudolf Diesel
|
He was born in France into a poor Bavarian
family who had immigrated.
|
Employed as a refrigerator engineer. In 1893 he was
on an average wage. 5-years later in 1898 he was a millionaire (a huge sum
106 years ago) and got richer by the year thereafter.
|
He was motivated by the concept of sociological
needs. Rudolf Diesel originally conceived the diesel engine to enable
independent craftsmen and artisans to compete with large industry
|
|
Garbage Disposer
|
John W. Hammes
|
USA
|
He was an architect by profession and not a design
products engineer.
|
He built his wife the world's first kitchen garbage
disposer. After ten years of design improvement he went into business selling
his appliance to the public and ceased working as an active architect.
|
|
Paper Towels
|
Irvin and
Clarence Scott
|
USA
|
He had operated a failed paper commission business.
|
Initially his invention was developed for use in
school classrooms to help prevent the spread of the common cold from child to
child.
|
|
Disposable
cellphone (1999)
|
Randice-Lisa Altschul
|
USA
|
She was a female toy designer with no prior
experience in electronics said she developed the phone by surrounding herself
with experts who shared her ''conceive-it, believe-it, achieve-it'' attitude.
|
She and colleagues have also created a paper laptop
computer, which will sell for twenty dollars and serve as an internet access
device. The STTTM technology has opened up the potential for creating
countless new electronic products and countless cheaper versions of
pre-existing products. If STTTM is all that it seems to be, this technology
should be considered a milestone in electronic innovation.
|
|
Soft drink "Dr Pepper
|
Charles Alderton
|
USA
|
He was a young pharmacist at the time of his
invention and not a soft drinks manufacturer.
|
He invented his own recipes for soft drinks and
found one of his drinks was becoming very popular. This was the basis of the
Dr Pepper Company which is the oldest major manufacturer of soft drink concentrates
and syrups in the United
States.
|
|
Dynamite
|
Alfred Nobel
|
Sweden
|
He was born in the year his father was made
bankrupt. Unfortunately his father was made bankrupt a further time and his
mother kept the family going by opening a small grocer’s shop. He
collaborated with others to create dynamite and built the basis of dynamite
by putting several pieces of knowledge together. Basically just like how the
structure of DNA was determined. Nobel therefore had to go through bad
periods in his life and where only through intuition and hard work was able
to overcome these major handicaps in later life.
|
He was forcibly made to move his experimentation to
a barge anchored on Lake
Mälaren. He was not
discouraged and in 1864 he was able to start mass production of
nitro-glycerine. Major companies founded by Nobel include Imperial Chemical
Industries (ICI), Great Britain;
Société Centrale de Dynamite,
France; and
Dyno Industries
|
|
Earmuffs
|
Chester Greenwood
|
USA
|
He was a school dropout who made his invention at
the age of 15 years.
|
He made a fortune supplying Ear Protectors to U.S. soldiers
during World War I. He went on to patent more many other inventions. In 1977,
Maine’s legislature declared December 21
"Chester Greenwood Day" to honour a native son
and his contribution to cold weather protection. He accumulated over 100
patents in his lifetime and the Smithsonian Institution has named him one of America's 15
outstanding inventors.
|
|
Ear plugs
|
Ray Benner
|
USA
|
He was a classical musician by profession and not a
product design engineer.
|
The Benner’s designed a new ear plug made from
silicone, a waterproof material, to help prevent swimmer's ear, an infection
of the ear caused by exposure to water. Also their Pillow Soft Earplugs were great noise stoppers.
Created a new industry.
|
|
Lear Jet executive airplane
|
William Lear
|
USA
|
He was only educated to 14 years of age. He learned
his trade/knowledge when he joined the US Navy.
|
He had many critics who should realize that the
vision that earned him sneers is the same vision that helped him transform
the automotive, aviation and audio industries. If global technology has not
advanced as quickly as Lear thought it would, it was through no fault of his
own someone once said.
|
|
8-track stereo
|
William Lear
|
USA
|
|
|
|
First Heart Pacemaker
(Externally fitted)
|
John Hopps
|
Canada
|
He was trained as an electrical engineer but later
joined the National Research Council of Canada.
|
He conducted research on hypothermia. While
experimenting with radio frequency heating to restore body temperature, Hopps
made an unexpected discovery: if a heart stopped beating due to cooling, it
could be started again by artificial stimulation using mechanical or electric
means.
|
|
Heart Pacemaker
(Internally fitted)
|
Wilson Greatbatch
|
USA
|
He was an electrical engineer who began working in
medical research.
|
One afternoon in the late 1950s, he was inspired by
a mistake to invent one of the most significant medical devices of all time:
the implantable cardiac pacemaker. He was building an oscillator to record
heart sounds. When he accidentally installed a resistor with the wrong
resistance into the unit, it began to give off a steady electrical pulse. He
realized that the small device could be used to regulate the human heart.
After two years of refinements, he had hand-crafted the world's first
successful implantable pacemaker (patent #3,057,356). Until that time, the
apparatus used to regulate heartbeat was the size of a television set, and
painful to use.
|
|
corrosion-free lithium battery
|
Wilson Greatbatch
|
|
|
His pacemakers and batteries have improved and saved
the lives of millions of persons worldwide. In 1985 the US National Society
of Professional Engineers named his invention one of the ten greatest
engineering contributions to society of the last 50 years.
|
|
Rubber Industry
|
Thomas Hancock
|
Scotland
|
He was a coach builder by profession. Turned his
attentions on rubber and what new products could be created from rubber. He
later trained as an industrial chemist.
|
The need for waterproof clothing for stage coach
passengers may have been at the back of his mind, but whatever it was by 1819
he was working on rubber solutions to apply to fabrics for making gloves,
stockings and other garments.
Known now as the ‘Father of the Rubber Industry’.
|
|
Masticator
|
Thomas Hancock
|
Scotland
|
|
He revolutionised the rubber industry and moved it
forward.
|
|
Lift (first safe lift that enabled skyscrapers to be
built – without them skyscrapers were commercially of low value and low
interest foe developers and occupants)
|
Elisha Otis
|
USA
|
He was born on a farm near Halifax, Vermont,
the youngest of six children, he made several attempts at establishing
businesses in his early years. However, chronically poor health led to
continual financial woes.
|
He worked as a master mechanic in the bedstead factory
of O. Tingley & Company. He remained about three years and during that
time invented and put into use a railway safety brake, which could be
controlled by the engineer, and ingenious devices to run rails for
four-poster beds and to improve the operation of turbine wheels.
By 1852 he had moved to Yonkers,
New York, to organize and
install machinery for the bedstead firm of Maize & Burns, which was
expanding. Josiah Maize needed a hoist to lift heavy equipment to the upper
floor. Although hoists were not new, Otis' inventive nature had been piqued
because of the equipment's safety problem.
If one could just devise a machine that wouldn't fall.... He hit upon the
answer, a tough, steel wagon spring meshing with a ratchet. If the rope gave
way, the spring would catch and hold.
In 1854 Otis dramatized his safety device on the floor of the Crystal Palace
Exposition in New York.
With a large audience on hand, the inventor ascended in an elevator cradled
in an open-sided shaft. Halfway up, he had the hoisting cable cut with an
axe. The platform held fast and the elevator industry was on its way. His
brakes made skyscrapers a practical reality.
|
|
Electrogasdynamics - EGD (turning gas into energy)
|
Meredith Gourdine
|
USA
|
Has was brought up in Brooklyn & Harlem in a
poor family.
|
Applications of EGD include refrigeration,
desalination of sea water, and reducing the pollutants in smoke. He built a
multi-million dollar corporation based on his ideas in the field of
electrogasdynamics. He was responsible for the engineering technique termed
Incineraid for aiding in the removal of smoke from buildings. His work on gas
dispersion developed techniques for dispersing fog from airport runways.
Meredith Gourdine also created a generator that allowed for the cheaper
transmission of electricity. Created the basis of a whole new technological
industry.
|
|
Xerography (photocopying)
|
Chester Carlson
|
USA
|
He was a young law student when he devised the basis
of modern photocopying.
|
He had
been frustrated with the slow mimeograph machine and the cost of photography
and that lead him to inventing a new way of copying. He invented an
electrostatic process that reproduced words on a page in just minutes.
He had a hard time finding investors in his new
invention and was turned down by IBM and the U.S. Army Signal Corps. It took
him eight years to find an investor, the Haloid Company which later became
the Xerox Corporation.
|
|
Electroscope
|
Jean Antoine Nollet
|
France
|
He was initially a clergyman and later a physicist.
|
The Electroscope was the first instrument to
detected the presence of electric charge by using electrostatic attraction
and repulsion.
|
|
E-Mail
|
Ray Tomlinson
|
USA
|
He was a computer engineer for Bolt Beranek and
Newman (BBN), the company hired by the United States Defence Department to
build the first Internet in 1968.
|
He used a file transfer protocol that he was working
on called CYPNET to adapt the SNDMSG program so it could send electronic
messages to any computer on the ARPANET network.
He chose the @ symbol to tell which user was
"at" what computer. The @ goes in between the user's login name and
the name of his/her host computer. He created one of the biggest
Communications phenomena almost by accident - e-mail.
In 1971 he was tinkering with a programme that allowed staff at ARPANET to
leave messages for each other. He'd been working on an experimental computer
program called CYPNET that transferred files between linked computers, and
thought it would be a neat idea if you could transfer messages as well as
files.
He chose the '@' symbol to mark the difference between a message that needed
to go to a mailbox on the local computer and one that was headed out onto the
network.
Typically, he told his colleagues about it via the mail system and it caught
on like wildfire - although it took about five years before his
employer realised what a hot property they had.
He continues to work in software to this day. He said later that at the time
he even didn't know he was creating something important.
|
|
First applied ‘Steam Engine’ of note
|
Thomas Savery
|
UK
|
He was a military engineer working on mine problems.
|
He designed it on Denis Papin's Digester or pressure
cooker.
|
|
First Atmospheric steam engine (an improvement on
Thomas Savery’s invention)
|
Thomas Newcomen
|
UK
|
He was a blacksmith who eventually worked together
with Thomas Savery.
|
The Newcomen engine was the predecessor to the Watt
engine and it was one of the most interesting pieces of technology developed
during the 1700's. Although his pioneering work was highly important to the
Industrial Revolution his position in life was humble, and he was not looked
upon as an individual of even possible importance in the community.
|
|
Watt's engine
|
James Watt
|
UK
|
He was a university helper/researcher/ instrument
maker working on improvements to Newcomen’s engine. He came from a
working-class family background
|
Watt's
engine became the dominant design for all modern steam engines and helped
bring about the Industrial Revolution. A unit of power called the
Watt was named after James Watt. Without Watt’s input the full
industrialisation of Britain
could not have happened as the efficient engines to do this would not have
been there.
|
|
Escalator
|
Jesse Reno
|
USA
|
His father was an officer in the US army and
where his upbringing was predominantly of a military situation. This did not
bring him into contact with many things outside the military but he had an
intense interest in mechanical moving things.
|
He formulated his idea for an inclined moving
stairway at age 16. It first began as an amusement. He created a new novelty
ride at Coney Island, a moving stairway that
elevated passengers on a conveyor belt at a 25 degree angle.
|
|
Ethernet (connecting computers within a building
using hardware running from machine to machine)
|
Robert Metcalfe
|
USA
|
He came from a working-class family and was
fascinated by technology and gadgets as a child. He became a member of the
research staff at Xerox and was given the project to solve the
interconnecting problem between computers as the company was introducing
laser printers.
|
He later developed a computer industry standard -
LAN protocol.
|
|
First modern filters to polarize light
|
Edwin Herbert Land
|
USA
|
He came from a working-class family. As a youth he
chose not to be stifled. Entering Harvard
University in 1926 he left after only a few months to
pursue his first great invention, plastic sheet polarizers. He was a college
dropout twice but saw full well the power of science and gave an anonymous
multi-million dollar sum for the Harvard
Science Center--to
give undergraduate science more weight in a research-oriented university.
|
When asked why he dropped out of college he said in
a speech at MIT, that he had protested
against a process that stifled students' drive to "greatness," that
is, originality. He said that students had to wait too long to meet the
first-rate minds, when they needed to begin direct research at once.
|
|
Polaroid photography & the creation of the
Polaroid Corporation
|
Edwin Herbert Land
|
USA
|
He was inspired by his three year old daughter, who
had asked him why she couldn't see a photo he had taken of her right away. He
thereafter created a system of one-step photography.
Throughout his lifetime he held over 500 patents and
ranks second only to the world’s most prolific inventor Thomas Edison in
patent awarded prowess.
|
He founded a company that plunged himself into years
of technical agony, mostly in grimy buildings. He learned to make reliable,
cheap polarizers and sell them for camera filters and sunglasses, and
persuaded investors of the huge potential market for polarizers to control
headlight glare and view 3-D movies. With financing from James P. Warburg
and other Wall Street leaders, the
enterprise Polaroid Corporation was created.
|
|
Kevlar
|
Stephanie Kwolek
|
USA
|
Her father died when she was 10-years old. She was
therefore brought up by her mother who was first a homemaker and then by
necessity a career woman. She inherited a love of fabrics and sewing through
her mother. At one time she thought she might become a fashion designer, but
her mother warned her that she would probably starve in that business because
she was such a perfectionist. Later she became interested in teaching and
then in chemistry and medicine.
|
Kevlar is five times stronger than the same weight
of steel. She patented Kwolek that does not rust nor corrode and is extremely
lightweight. Many police officers owe their lives to her, for Kevlar is the
material used in bullet proof vests. Other applications of the compound
include underwater cables (fibre optics), brake linings, space vehicles,
boats, parachutes, skis, and building materials. She obtained 28 patents for
new products and where she is truly a modern day alchemist.
|
|
Rayon
|
Georges Audemars
|
Switzerland
|
He was an amateur inventor and chemist working
alone.
|
He invented the first crude artificial silk by dipping
a needle into liquid mulberry bark pulp and gummy rubber to make threads.
Rayon became a new industry that spanned the world.
|
|
Velcro
|
George de Mestral
|
Switzerland
|
He was an amateur-mountaineer and inventor.
His idea met with resistance and even laughter, but
the inventor 'stuck' by his invention. Together with a weaver from a textile
plant in France,
he perfected his hook and loop fastener. By trial and error, he realized that
nylon when sewn under infrared light, formed tough hooks for the burr side of
the fastener. This finished the design, patented in 1955. The inventor formed
Velcro Industries to manufacture his invention. He was selling over sixty
million yards of Velcro per year. Today it is a multi-million dollar industry
spaning the globe.
|
On one lovely summer day he decided to take his dog
for a nature hike. The man and his faithful companion both returned home
covered with burrs, the plant seed-sacs that cling to animal fur in order to
travel to fertile new planting grounds. With burning curiosity he ran to his
microscope and inspected one of the many burrs stuck to his pants. He saw all
the small hooks that enabled the seed-bearing burr to cling so viciously to
the tiny loops in the fabric of his pants. He raised his head from the
microscope and smiled thinking, "I will design a unique, two-sided
fastener, one side with stiff hooks like the burrs and the other side with
soft loops like the fabric of my pants. I will call my invention 'velcro' a
combination of the word velour and crochet. It will rival the zipper in its
ability to fasten", he later told people.
|
|
Sewing machine
|
Elias Howe
|
USA
|
After he lost his factory job he found work in a
machinist's shop. It was at that point that he began tinkering with the idea
of inventing a mechanical sewing machine. Eventually his hobby made him one
of the USA’s
richest people.
|
Eight
years after starting his invention he demonstrated his machine to the public.
At 250 stitches a minute, his lockstitch mechanism outstitched the output of
five hand sewers with a reputation for speed.
For the next nine years he struggled, first to
enlist interest in his machine, then to protect his patent from imitators.
|
|
Modern ‘Zipper’ for textile clothing
|
Gideon Sundback
|
Sweden
|
He was a working-class electrical engineer who was
hired to work for a Fastener Company. He was not therefore a maker of zips
but someone who kept electrical equipment working. He was an amateur inventor
in his spare time.
|
When his wife died the grieving husband busied
himself at the design table and designed the modern zipper. Another global
industry was born by an independent inventor.
|
|
Fax Machine
|
Alexander Bain
|
Scotland
|
He was an amateur clock maker.
|
He received a British patent for “improvements in
producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and
in electric printing and signal telegraphs.” (Seven years earlier, the
telegraph had been invented and the fax machine evolved from the telegraph
technology.)
He had created a fax machine transmitter that was
designed to scan a flat surface (made of metal) using a stylus mounted on a
pendulum and the stylus picked up the images on the surface. He adapted parts
from clock mechanisms combined with telegraph technology to invent the fax
machine.
|
|
Fibre Optics
|
Sam DiVita
|
USA
|
He was the Manager of Materials Research at one of
the US Army Signal Corps Labs. It was his personal thinking that glass fibre
and light signals might work.
|
With the help of an outside glass works to produce
high purity SiO2 for a glass fibre to transmit light he announced to the
world that fibre optics had been successfully created. Thereby seeding the
industry and making what is today’s multi-billion dollar industry and made
copper wire in communications a reality.
|
|
Photography
(first ever practical process of)
|
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
|
France
|
He was a professional scene painter for the opera
house in Paris.
|
He formed a partnership with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce
to improve the process Niépce had developed to take the first permanent
photograph.
After several years of experimentation, Daguerre
developed a more convenient and effective method of photography, naming it
after himself -- the daguerreotype. He sold the rights for the daguerreotype
to the French government and published a booklet describing the process. (The
daguerreotype gained popularity quickly; there were over seventy
daguerreotype studios in New York
City, USA
alone.)
|
|
Modern Lie Detector/Polygraph
|
John Larson
|
USA
|
He was a University
of California medical
student when he invented the modern lie detector (polygraph) used in police
interrogation and investigations.
|
The device measures heartbeats and breathing to
learn if a person is lying or not. It later included a skin monitoring system
to tell if a person is sweating. If a person was sweating and their breathing
and pulse became higher, an alarm would sound concluding that the person was
lying. (i.e. The theory is that when a person lies, the lying causes a
certain amount of stress that produces changes in several involuntary
physiological reactions.
|
|
Liquid-Fueled Rocket
(modern space travel)
|
Robert Hutchings Goddard
|
USA
|
He was intrigued with pyrotechnics from childhood.
|
He was totally ridiculed by newspapers and his own
science fraternity when he first espoused his thinking on rockets and space
travel.
But through perseverance and knowing that he was
right, he eventually showed the world that rocket travel was possible – he is
given the title of the ‘father of modern rocket propulsion’ and where now it
is a multi-billion global industry.
|
|
World Wide Web
|
Time Berners-Lee
|
United Kingdom
|
He worked in
a sawmill for extra cash during his studies at university. He was a software engineer
doing a six-month stint at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics,
in Geneva.
CERN did not ask Berners-Lee to invent the www nor did they invent it as some
people have comprehended.. He was in his spare time doodling around with a
way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in
programs that dealt with information in a "brain-like way" but that
could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised
a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep "track of all the
random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to
be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't." He called it
Enquire, short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian-era
encyclopedia he remembered from childhood. He continued and in his own time
eventually created the WWW.
Therefore Berners-Lee could have been working for
anyone at the time when he invented the www and it was only by sheer chance
that he was temporarily employed by the CERN at the time but where CERN
played no physical part in the invention.
|
Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the
world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for
the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. William
Shockley may have fathered the transistor, but two of his research scientists
actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee,
the Internet — with its protocols and packet switching — is it. But the World
Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He personally let it loose
on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open,
non-proprietary and free. If he had kept it for himself he would have been
the richest person ever.
|
|
Automobile (mass production)
|
Henry Ford
|
USA
|
He was born into a working class family on a country
farm and educated in district schools. After leaving school with a basic
education only he became a machinist's apprentice.
|
Most
people credit him with inventing the automobile. The fact is he didn't. He
did, however, introduce standardized interchangeable parts and assembly-line
techniques in his plant. Which allowed for mass production of automobiles.
|
|
Traffic Light (Modern control lights that first used
yellow, the third light)
|
William Potts
|
USA
|
He was simply a Police officer and not a design
engineer.
|
He used red, amber and green lights and thirty-seven
dollars worth of wire to form this light, which was put on the corner of
Woodward and Michigan Avenues in Detroit.
Around the same time, African- American Garrett Morgan invented the automated
traffic light which worked basically the same way the railroad lights work
today. This was the concept on which four way traffic lights are built.
|
|
Bread Slicer
|
Frederick Rowedder
|
USA
|
He was a mechanic by trade.
|
He worked on his idea of a bread slicer and finally
completed a machine that could successfully cut and wrap a loaf of bread.
This machine was later improved by baker Gustav Papendick.
|
|
Fire Extinguisher
|
Alanson Crane
|
USA
|
He was an amateur inventor.
|
He created an instant success and the basis of a
global industry.
|
|
Electric light
|
Thomas Edison
|
USA
|
He was a bell boy on the emerging US railway
system with little education.
|
One of his many inventions that changed the world
and created the basis of the largest company in the world, General Electric.
|
|
Flying Shuttle (textiles)
|
John Kay
|
UK
|
He was the twelfth child of a farmer with little
education but had a inquisitive and enquiring mind.
|
It enabled weavers to weave faster and it paved the
way for mechanical power looms that revolutionised mass textile manufacture.
|
|
First practical fountain pen
|
Lewis Waterman
|
USA
|
He was an insurance broker with no
previous knowledge of pen making.
|
He was getting ready to sign one of his biggest hottest
contracts ever. In honour of the occasion he bought a new fountain pen that
he considered far more stylish than a cumbersome dip pen and ink well. With
the contract on the table and the pen in the client’s hand, the pen refused
to write, and actually leaked onto the precious document. Horrified he raced
back to his office for another contract, but a competing broker had closed
the deal when he got back.
Determined to never again suffer such
humiliation he began to make fountain pens in his brother’s workshop. He used
the capillarity principle which allowed air to induce a steady and even flow
of ink. From thereon he started the Waterman empire.
|
|
Ballpoint pen
|
Laszlo Biro
|
Hungary
|
He was a journalist by profession
|
He 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 nib and he had to devise a new type of point. He did
so by fitting his pen with a tiny ball bearing in its tip. As the pen moved
along the paper, the ball rotated picking up ink from the ink cartridge and
leaving it on the paper. Now there are billions sold every year.
|
|
Machine for cutting and heading nails in one
operation
|
Jacob Perkins
|
USA
|
Started out in life as an apprentice goldsmith with
no training in mechanical matters.
|
Started the mass production of nails and a new
global industry.
|
|
Bathometer (measures the depth of water)
|
Jacob Perkins
|
|
|
Created a new niche industry.
|
|
Pleometer (measures the speed at which a vessel
moves through the water).
|
Jacob Perkins
|
|
|
Created a new niche industry.
|
|
Radiator (for use with hot water central heating)
|
Jacob Perkins
|
|
|
Created the basis of central heating and a new
global industry.
|
|
Process for transferring engravings from one steel
plate to another
|
Jacob Perkins
|
|
|
Invented the process due to increased workload.
|
|
First practical refrigerating machine - Fridge
|
Jacob Perkins
|
|
|
Started the modern refrigeration industry with his
basic fridge. Now millions of fridges are sold every year.
|
|
Flash-freeze foods (and deliver them to the public)
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Clarence Birdseye
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USA
|
He was a taxidermist by
trade.
Later after he had sold his invention
and patent he turned his attention to other interests and invented an
infrared heat lamp, a spotlight for store window displays, a harpoon for
marking whales. He then established companies to market these products.
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He wished his family could have fresh
food all year. After observing the people of the Arctic preserving fresh fish
and meat in barrels of sea water quickly frozen by the arctic temperatures,
he concluded that it was the rapid freezing in the extremely low temperatures
that made food retain freshness when thawed and cooked months later. With an
investment of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice he
invented and later perfected a system of packing fresh food into waxed
cardboard boxes and flash-freezing under high pressure. Goldman-Sachs and the
General Foods Corporation bought his patents and trademarks in 1929 for $22
million.
|
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Fuel Cells
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William Robert Grove
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UK
|
He was a Welsh judge amateur inventor
|
He mixed hydrogen and oxygen in the presence of an
electrolyte, and produced electricity and water. The invention, which later
became known as a fuel cell, didn't produce enough electricity to be useful
at the time.
|
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Green plastic garbage bag
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Harry Wasylyk
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Canada
|
Was an inventor by profession.
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|
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Electric light bulb (first to patent the idea)
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Henry Woodward & Mathew Evans
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Canada
|
Woodward was a medical student at the time &
Evans was a hotel owner.
|
Patented the first incandescent lamp with an
electric light bulb. They understood that carbon was a conductor and made
light inside a bulb by sending electricity through a filament made of carbon.
They did not have enough money to develop their invention for people to use
and sold a share of their patent to Thomas Edison who was also struggling
with his own light bulb experiment.
|
|
Process to convert oil to gasoline.
|
William Meriam Burton
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USA
|
He was a chemist working for Standard Oil.
|
His process was the breakthrough that the automobile
industry required and a major factor in making John Davison Rockefeller the
richest person in the world ever and the head of the world’s largest company
at the time.(in comparative terms Rockefeller at his height was over four
times richer that Bill Gates of Microsoft – who remarkably through his mother
has his ancestry also from Scotland).
|
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United States Steel Corporation
|
Andrew Carnegie
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Scotland
|
He started out in life in a textile mill as a bobbin
boy at the age of 14 years and after that as a telegraphic messenger (very
similar background to that of Thomas Edison who was a railway bell-boy and
who eventually formed the basis of General Electric , the world’s largest
company)
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By anticipating that oil and steel would be in great
demand he decided to set up his first steel plant with his savings and a bank
loan. After building up the United States Steel Corporation and selling to
the US
government he became the richest person in the world at the time.
|
|
Standard Oil Company
|
John Davison Rockefeller
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USA (but his mother’s family came from Scotland)
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He came from a
normal working family where his father was a roaming healer who charged US$25
for a so-called cure for Cancer. At the age of 16 he began looking for work
in Cleveland
as a bookkeeper or clerk. Business was bad in Cleveland at the time and he had problems
finding a job. He was always neatly dressed in a dark suit and black tie. Cleveland was not a
large city at the time and he could easily visit every business in under a
week’s time. He returned to many businesses three times. Finally he got a job
as an assistant bookkeeper with Hewitt & Tuttle, commission merchants and
produce shippers.
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Her founded the Standard Oil company with just US$900.
|
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Geobond (a fire resistant building material)
|
Patricia Billings
|
USA
|
She was a sculpture artist who developed a durable
additive to prevent her painstaking plaster works from accidentally falling
and shattering.
Currently Geobond is being sold in more than 20
markets worldwide, and Patricia Billings, great grandmother, artist, inventor
remains at the helm of her carefully constructed business empire.
|
After nearly two decades of basement experiments,
the result of her efforts was a solution which when added to a mixture of
gypsum and concrete, creates an amazingly fire resistant, indestructible
plaster trademarked Geobond. Not only can Geobond add longevity to artistic
works of plastic, but also it is steadily being embraced by the construction
industry as an almost universal building material. Geobond is made with
non-toxic ingredients which makes it the ideal replacement for asbestos. She
had indirectly invented one of the most revolutionary---and potentially
profitable---substances in the history of the modern construction industry: a
building material that is both indestructible and fireproof. A new global
industry by sheer chance and unintentional.
|
|
Geodesic dome
|
Richard Buckminster Fuller
|
|
Started out in life as an apprentice machine fitter.
He was prior to his great work jobless and broke
with a wife and newborn daughter to support. His first daughter had died four
years previous and Buckminster Fuller was still living in mourning. He had
attempted suicide and was drinking heavily. In the darkness of that year,
Buckminster Fuller went through a spiritual rebirth that changed the course
of his life. He decided to dedicate his life to finding out how much
difference one man could make in the world.
|
He coined the word 'Dymaxion',
a contraction of the words 'dynamic', 'maximum' and 'ion' that represented
resource-efficient and self-sustaining technologies. Under the Dymaxion
ideal, he developed a series of inventions from lightweight homes,
streamlined cars to the geodesic dome.
The geodesic dome combines the sphere,
the most efficient container of volume per square foot, with the tetrahedron,
which provides the greatest strength for the least volume of weight.
The geodesic dome can withstand winds of
210 mph, while at the same time it is light and easily transportable.
Quick to build, a geodesic dome can be
put up in hours. A geodesic dome can withstand hurricanes and earthquakes
far better than conventional buildings.
The geodesic dome is the only structure
that actually gets stronger, lighter in density and cheaper per square foot
with size.
Over 200,000 of such geodesic domes have
been built.
People use geodesic domes as homes and
shelter from pole to pole.
|
|
Carbon microphone transmitter (basis of modern
telephone)
|
Emile Berliner
|
Germany/USA
|
Initially he worked as an assistant in a chemistry
lab, and sold dry goods to support himself. Within six years, he had
re-invented the telephone and invented the gramophone, making both suitable
for mass production.
|
He sold the rights to Bell Telephone Company, which
only then was able to mass market the device. Created a whole new global
industry.
|
|
Record (for mapping sound)
|
Emile Berliner
|
|
|
He developed a method for mapping out sounds in a
spiralling, wavering groove etched into a flat disk (first of glass, then of
zinc, then of plastic); the sounds were "read" by a needle, which
transmitted the pattern of vibrations to a diaphragm, which then reproduced
the original sounds. Her sold the rights to the Record Company of America (
RCA), thereby providing them their first major product.
|
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Grocery Bag
|
Margaret Knight
|
USA
|
When she was just 12 years old, she had an idea for
a stop-motion device that could be used in textile mills to shut down
machinery, preventing workers from being injured. Was an employee in a paper
bag factory but was a born inventor who obtained throughout her life 26
patents for her varied inventions from internal combustion engines to window
frame and sash and machinery for cutting shoe soles.
|
She invented a new machine part that would
automatically fold and glue paper bags to create square bottoms for paper
bags. Paper bags had been more like envelopes before. Workmen reportedly
refused her advice when first installing the equipment because they
mistakenly thought, "what does a woman know about machines?" She
can be considered the mother of the grocery bag and where she founded the
Eastern Paper Bag Company.
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Rotary Engine
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Margaret Knight
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|
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Dress and skirt shield
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Margaret Knight
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Clasp for robes
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Margaret Knight
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|
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Numbering machine
|
Margaret Knight
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|
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Window frame and sash
|
Margaret Knight
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|
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bubble gum
|
Walter E. Diemer
|
USA
|
He was an accountant at a chewing gum company.
|
In his spare time at work he was playing around with
new gum recipes. By accident one of his brew was unexpectedly, crucially
different. It was less sticky than regular chewing gum and also stretched
more easily. At 23 years of age he saw the bubbles first hand as well as the
possibilities. The company that he worked for developed the new product and
formed a new global market.
|
|
Hallmark Card Company
|
Joyce C. Hall
|
USA
|
He was a high school dropout. He started out in life
as a picture-postcard peddler.
|
He overcame both poverty and a lack of a formal education
to become the architect of an industry. He once said, "If a man goes
into business with only the idea of making a lot of money, chances are he
won't. But if he puts service and quality first, the money will take
care of itself. Producing a first-class product that meets a real need
is a much stronger motivation for success than getting rich."
|
|
Fluorescent tube (forerunner)
|
Heinrich Geissler
|
Germany
|
He was a glassblower who privately experimented.
|
He placed gas in a tube under a low pressure and applied
an electrical voltage. The result was that the gas glowed.
|
|
Hydraulic Jack
|
Richard Dudgeon
|
USA
|
He was a machinist and constant tinkerer who created
through his thinking the world’s largest manufacturers of hydraulic
jacks.
|
He started in a machine shop and invented a
‘portable hydraulic jack – and his company has not looked back since. It now
designs, manufactures, rents and sells high-pressure hydraulic jacking
equipment used to lift bridges, roofs and a range of other heavy structures.
His Company now manufactures single-acting jacks of up to 1,250 tons
capacity, as well as other types, pumps, controls and synchronous systems,
load test systems (for piles and so on) as well as hydrostatic test pumps.
Its innovations have now produced multi-piston hydraulic jacks for limited
spaces such as in bridges up to 50 ton capacity each within a height of 1.5in
and a stroke of 0.75in. For the NASA the company has manufactured 1 inch,
1,200 ton load cells. With the continuing trend to assemble large prefab elements,
it’s always a good thing to have an idea of how you’re going to move and lift
them.
|
|
Modern Helicopter
|
Igor Sikorsky
|
Russia
|
While still a schoolboy in Russia he
built several model aircraft and helicopters. This provided the basis of his
lifetime work in aeronautics and eventually the title of the father of
helicopters.
|
After arriving in the USA as an immigrant with little
to his name, he soon found out that his money was running out and he resorted
to teaching Russian immigrants mathematics, later astronomy and aviation
lessons were included. He also started to lecture to various groups which
brought him in contact with people who shared his enthusiasm for aviation
which convinced him to start his own aeronautical enterprise – the Sikorsky
Corporation.
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|
Rotary clothes line
|
Lance Hill
|
Australia
|
He started his inventive career after he
returned from the Second World War. He was unemployed and actively looking
for work when he decided to do something about it other than strike lucky.
From his garden shed he made a prototype that eventually started a major
Australian company with sales worldwide.
|
He invented the rotary clothes line
because his wife asked him if he could think of something better than the old
clothes line and prop that she had.
|
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Email
|
Ray Tomlinson
|
USA
|
He was and still is today a software engineer
working for BBN Technologies, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications.
(The content of the first email message – from him
on one computer to himself on another -- is forgotten. He didn't make a big
deal of his breakthrough. "When he showed to his colleague Jerry
Burchfiel, he said, “Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be
working on.'").
|
He created one of the biggest
communications phenomena almost by accident. At the time he didn't know
he was creating something important. When asked how he did it he mused,
"I think I may have just dragged my fingers across the keyboard.
In 1971 he was tinkering with a programme that
allowed staff at ARPANET to leave messages for each other. He'd been working
on an experimental computer program called CYPNET that transferred files
between linked computers, and thought it would be a neat idea if you could
transfer messages as well as files.
He chose the '@' symbol to mark the difference between a message that needed
to go to a mailbox on the local computer and one that was headed out onto the
network.
Typically, he told his colleagues about it via the mail system and it caught
on like wildfire - although it took about five years before ARPANET realised
what a hot property they had.
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Jacuzzi
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Roy Jacuzzi
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Italy
|
As a teenager he worked in the family business in a
variety of odd jobs, learning how things worked from the ground up. In 1968,
his passion for design and engineering emerged when he invented and marketed
the world’s first fully integrated whirlpool bath, known as the Roman. He had
sensed that American consumers were moving toward an emphasis on health,
fitness and leisure activities.
|
He invented the world’s first whirlpool bath in
1968. He was determined and peddled his invention one at a time at county
fairs and trade shows. While his family members looked on with both surprise
and delight, he slowly and surely – and nearly single-handedly – created a
brand new industry. The Roman whirlpool tub became an icon of free-spirited
relaxation in the 1970’s … and the brand Jacuzz i® became forever imprinted
in American minds.
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Jacquard Loom
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Joseph Marie Jacquard
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France
|
Was a working weaver and where he could not support
his wife who had to undertake a very menial job to exist.
|
In his spare time he in constructed improved loom.
His final design weaved complex designs and where
eventually France
had 11,000 Jacquard Looms alone.
Eventually the French government declared that the
loom was public property because its commercial success was so important for France.
|
|
Janney coupler
(Semiautomatic railway coupling)
|
Eli Janney
|
USA
|
He was a dry goods clerk with an interest in
railways.
|
He used his lunch hours to whittle from wood an
alternative to the link and pin coupler that was so slow and dangerous to
couple up railway carriages. His invention eventually became a world leader
as it saved time and was safe.
|
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Kitty Litter
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Edward Lowe
|
USA
|
He worked for his father selling industrial
absorbents, including products such as sawdust and an absorbent clay called
Fuller's Earth. (Vital to his phenomenal and sustained success was a fiery
desire to pursue a continuing cycle of listening, learning and innovating).
|
Because his neighbour’s cat was trailing ashy paw
prints all over her home she mentioned to him that she wished that there was
a cleaner alternative. He suggested that she use absorbent clay, she did and
loved it. Thereafter he started to distribute his kitty litter from the back
of his car while travelling around the USA with his father’s products.
Because of the remarkable success of his intuition and thinking he founded
Edward Lowe Industries, Inc. to mass manufacture and distribute the
successful kitty litter products. An example of many where one simple product
created a vast new industry.
|
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Laptop Computer
|
William Moggridge
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UK
|
He started a small design firm on his own.
|
One of his commissions was to design a small compact
computer that could move with you when you moved. His work enabled the first
laptop to be created.
|
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Laser
|
Gordon Gould
|
USA
|
He dropped out of university to concentrate on his
personal thinking and to exploit its commercial potential.
|
His mechanically-minded mother encouraged him to be
innovative and make things with his hands. Later, through such encouragement
he conceived and designed one of the most significant inventions of the 20th
century: the laser.
Now countless practical applications of lasers have
been established, including welding, scanning and surge.ry. Created a new
multi-global industry
|
|
Liquid Crystals
|
George H. Heilmeier
|
USA
|
He was a research engineer.
|
His private thinking sparked him into producing a
paper on the possibility of using liquid crystals for displays. Kick-starting
a new multi-billion dollar industry
from scratch.
|
|
Adhesive postage stamp
|
Roland Hill
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UK
|
He was a schoolmaster.
|
He was knighted for his invention.
|
|
First postage stamp in the world
|
Roland Hill
|
UK
|
|
|
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Liquid paper
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Bette Nesmith Graham
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USA
|
She was a secretary, single parent and artist by
profession.
|
She never intended to be
an inventor; she wanted to be an artist. However, shortly after World War II
ended, she found herself divorced with a small child to support. She learned
shorthand and typing and got a job as an executive secretary. An efficient
employee who took pride in her work, she sought a better way to correct
typing errors. She remembered that artists painted over their mistakes on
canvas, so why couldn’t typists paint over their mistakes?
She then put some tempera
water based paint, coloured to match the stationery she used, in a bottle and
took her watercolour brush to the office. She used this to correct her typing
mistakes… her boss never noticed. Soon another secretary saw the new
invention and asked for some of the correcting fluid. She found a green
bottle at home, wrote "Mistake Out" on a label, and gave it to her
friend. Soon all the secretaries in the building were asking for some, too.
So started a product that has gone all over the world.
|
|
Personal Computer
|
Steve Jobs
|
USA
|
He was an orphan who was adopted by Paul and Clara
Jobs. He started out designing computer games for software companies.
|
After comprehending were the world was going he
started work in his father’s family garage making the new computers that
would change his life for ever and managed to make his first
"killing" when the Byte Shop in Mountain View bought his first
fifty fully assembled computers. On that basis the Apple Corporation was
founded, the name based on his favourite fruit. Apple changed people's idea
of a computer from a gigantic and inscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used
by big business and the government to a small box used by ordinary people.
His thinking literally revolutionized the computer hardware and software
industry.
|
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Magnetic Core Memory
|
Kenneth H. Olsen
|
USA
|
He began his career working summers in a machine
shop. Fixing radios in his basement gave him the reputation of a
neighbourhood 'Edison.'
|
He formed the
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Digital began producing printed circuit
logic modules used by engineers to test electronic equipment. The company
also started developing the world's first small interactive computer.
Digital
produced the PDP-11, which became the most popular minicomputer line in
history.
He received patents for a saturable switch, a diode
transformer gate circuit, magnetic core memory, and the line printer buffer.
From humble beginnings DEC grew on the back of its innovations to be a major
computer force.
|
|
Multicoordinate Digital Information Storage Device
Random Access Memory (RAM)
|
Jay W. Forrester
|
USA
|
He was brought up on a cattle ranch but where his
personal interest was the field of computers.
|
He was a pioneer in early digital computer
development and invented random-access, coincident-current magnetic storage,
which became the standard memory device for digital computers and which made
billions for the manufacturers.
|
|
Mail Order Catalogue
|
Aaron Montgomery Ward
|
USA
|
When he was fourteen, he was apprenticed to a trade
to help support the family.
He first worked on a cutting machine in a barrel
stave factory, and then stacking brick in a kiln. He then got employment at a
department store as both a store clerk and a travelling salesman.
|
As a travelling salesman, he realized that his rural
customers could be better served by mail-order, a revolutionary idea. He
started his business with only $2,400 in capital. His company Montgomery Ward
was a mail-order only business until 1926, when the first Montgomery Ward
retail store opened. Mail order is now a global industry worth multi-billions
in sales every year.
|
|
Matches (first strikable anywhere)
|
John Walker
|
UK
|
He worked in a chemist’s shop and was an apothecary.
|
|
|
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Aspirin
|
Felix Hoffman
|
Germany
|
He was a chemist by profession but created Aspirin
in his own time to help his family ease the pain of a disease that was
crippling his father.
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Coca Cola (world’s most successful soft drink)
|
Pemberton
|
USA
|
He went to a pharmacy school and started a small
drug store.
|
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The Protractor
|
Joseph Huddart
|
USA
|
He was a ship’s captain.
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|
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Sextant
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John Campbell
|
UK
|
He was a ship’s captain.
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Chronometer
|
John Harrison
|
UK
|
He was a carpenter and amateur watchmaker with
little formal education.
|
|
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|
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First Practical MRI Scanner (basis of all modern
medical full-body scanners)
|
John Mallard
|
UK
|
He was a university researcher who spent 17 years of
his life developing a practical MRI machine to see his great thinking and
work disappear to other nations when British industry and the ‘City’ would
not back his work. Indeed, he developed two of the most important diagnostic
technologies of the 20th century, namely Nuclear Medicine and Nuclear
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI).
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|
|
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Transistor
(a single invention that is the basis of an industry
now turning over US$1.7 TRILLION – source Texas Instruments website). It is
probably the most important invention of the 20th century.
|
William Bradford Shockley
(co-inventor)
|
USA (but born in the UK)
|
He was a physics researcher working at Bell Labs. His father, William Snr was an MIT-trained mining
engineer and adventurer, quite capable of staring down bandits at gunpoint on
Mongolian railroads, but largely incapable of making a living. His mother
became the first woman surveyor in Nevada's
silver mining territory.
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Transistor
|
John Bardeen
(co-inventor)
|
USA
|
He was one of five children with an interest in
science.
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Transistor
|
Walter H. Brattain
(co-inventor)
|
USA
|
He was brought up on a cattle ranch and later
claimed that he put his cattle-herding skills to good use when he went to
work in research laboratories.
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Integrated Circuit
|
Jack Kilby
(Joint-inventor)
|
USA
|
He began his career as a rather undistinguished
scientist. He couldn't get into Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
and he got consistently average grades as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois. But barely ten years after
he graduated from college he independently invented an integrated chip, the kind of chip that today lies in the heart
of every computer. By incorporating all the necessary electronic components
onto a single crystal of silicon,
He never obtained a PhD but became one of the
greatest electrical engineers of all time.
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|
|
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Integrated Circuit
|
Robert Norton Noyce
(Joint-inventor)
|
USA
|
His father was a preacher. He was the third of four
boys. As a child he showed an early interest in tinkering and figuring out
how things work for himself.
|
He had no interest in pure research and was an
inventor by heart. He started the INTEL Corporation, the 9th
largest company in the world with a shareholder value of US$185 Billion at 26th
July 2004.
He learned from his former employer’s mistakes and
he gave his young, bright employees phenomenal room to accomplish what they
wished, in many ways defining the Silicon Valley
working style.
|
|
Microscope (modern practical)
|
Anton Van Leeuwenhoek
|
Netherlands
|
He started as an apprentice in a dry
goods store where magnifying glasses were used to count the threads in cloth.
He once wrote, "My work, which I've done for a
long time, was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy, but
chiefly from a craving after knowledge, which I notice resides in me more
than in most other men. And therewithal, whenever I found out anything
remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so
that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.".
|
He is given the title of ‘Father of the Microscope’.
He was inspired by the glasses used by
drapers to inspect the quality of cloth. He taught himself new methods for
grinding and polishing tiny lenses of great curvature which gave
magnifications up to 270x diameters, the finest known at that
time. These lenses led to the building of his Leeuwenhoek's microscopes
considered the first practical microscopes, and the biological discoveries
for which he is famous. He was the first to see and describe bacteria, yeast
plants, the teeming life in a drop of water, and the circulation of blood
corpuscles in capillaries. During a long life he used his lenses to make
pioneer studies on an extraordinary variety of things, both living and non-living
organisms.
From these humble beginnings magnifying optics
became eventually a global industry.
|
|
Microbiological sciences
|
Louis Pasteur
|
France
|
He was a chemist by profession and not a medical
doctor as many think.
He was the only son of a poorly educated tanner. He
was not an outstanding student during his years of elementary education,
preferring fishing and drawing to other subjects. In fact, when he was young
his drawings suggested that he could
easily have become a superior portrait Artist. His later drawings of friends
done at college were so professional that he was listed in at least two
compendia of XIX C. artists.
(His main contributions to microbiology and medicine
were; instituting changes in hospital/medical practices to minimize the spread
of disease by microbes or germs, discovering that weak forms of disease could
be used as an immunization against stronger forms and that rabies was
transmitted by viruses too small to be seen under the microscopes of the
time, introducing the medical world to the concept of viruses. Because he
believed in serendipity and that many discoveries were made by sheer chance,
he was once asked, "Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen?”
He replied, “Chance favours only the prepared mind", now a well known
fact in all walks of life.
|
Three of his children died of typhoid
fever, possibly leading to Pasteur's drive to save people from disease. He
graduated in with honours in physics, mathematics, Latin, and drawing.
In his early research he worked with the wine
growers of France,
helping with the fermentation process to develop a way to pasteurise and kill
germs. He then worked within the textile industry finding a cure for a
disease affecting silk worms. He also found cures for chicken cholera,
anthrax and rabies.
During his lifetime it was not easy for
him to convince others of his ideas, controversial in their time but
considered absolutely correct today. He fought to convince surgeons that
germs existed and carried diseases, and dirty instruments and hands spread
germs and therefore disease. His pasteurisation process, kills germs and
prevents the spread of disease.
He coined the word ‘Germ’ and introduced the world
to the concept of Viruses.
He is given the title of ‘Father of Microbiology and
Immunology’.
These great works derived by a single person from a
poor family make clear that people
from ordinary backgrounds can literally change the world for the better.
Indeed, this single person provided the basis of many global industries that
are essential to modern life.
If one were to choose among the greatest benefactors
of humanity, Louis Pasteur would certainly rank at the top.
|
|
Polymerase chain Reaction (PCR)
- (The patents were sold by his employer Cetus to
Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. for
$300,000,000 in 1991)
|
Kary Banks Mullis
|
USA
|
He was brought up on a small country farm where none
of the family had ever been interested in science. Other than a scientist he
is a surfer and considered an "intellectual maverick" by many. He
conceived and developed the idea of PCR and where that idea was not the
product of a painstaking laboratory discipline, but was conceived while
cruising in a Honda Civic on Highway 128 from San Francisco to Mendocino.
"I do my best thinking while driving," the
scientist with the tanned face and bleached hair once explained. For this
brilliant idea born at the speed of 50 m.p.h., he received a $10,000 bonus
from his employer Cetus, with whom he eventually parted ways. He now lives in
a small apartment across from Windansea
Beach, a surfing spot
made famous by Tom Wolfe's novel, "The Pump House Gang."
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Once in a while in the world of
science, there comes an idea or a tool so ingenious that it revolutionizes
the way people ask questions, .PCR, is one of these technologies. It has not
only made a tremendous impact on the scientific community, but it has also
affected many aspects of our everyday lives.
The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which he
devised has quite literally revolutionized DNA technology. PCR amplifies
specific DNA sequences from very small amounts of complex genetic material.
The amplification produces an almost unlimited number of highly purified DNA
molecules suitable for analysis or manipulation. PCR has allowed screening
for genetic and infectious diseases. Analysis of DNAs from different
populations, including DNA from extinct species, has allowed the
reconstruction of phylogenetic trees including primates and humans. PCR is
essential to forensics and paternity testing.
Invention Impact
It has had a major impact on molecular biology, medicine, forensics,
molecular palaeontology, and many related fields.
PCR immediately spread to laboratories around the world where DNA chemistry
was performed. PCR technology has grown into a mult-Billion dollar a year
industry.
His employer Cetus later sold the technology to La
Roche for $300,000,000.
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Microwave oven
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Percy LaBaron Spencer
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USA
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He was twice orphaned, had no formal education,
lived on a small country farm and was a totally self-taught engineer. In this
respect he applied to be an electrician first having no knowledge of the
discipline whatsoever. After learning on the job entirely by trial and error,
he emerged as a competent electrician. Thereafter he educated himself further
by joining the US Navy in the war effort and then companies within the
electrical industry.
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During a radar-related research project
testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron he noticed that a candy bar in
his pocket had melted. He placed some popcorn kernels near the tube and
observed the popcorn popping. Later he made a metal box into which he fed
microwave power. The microwaves would cook food placed in the box. In fact,
he boiled an egg and due to the yoke cooking faster than the white, it blew
up in his face.
Microwave ovens are now a part of every modern
household and where this single invention from a self-educated engineer has
produced a global industry turning over US$ billions every year.
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General Electric (GE) – world’s largest company
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Thomas Edison
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USA
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He had only rudimentary education as a child and was
according to his school teacher a poor student. Thereafter with only 3-months
of formal education his mother took him from his school and taught him at
home. With no formal learning qualifications he started out in his working
life as a railroad’s bell-boy (selling newspapers and candy) and of course
with no technical knowledge whatsoever.
At an early age he showed a fascination for
mechanical things and for chemical experiments. He set up in the baggage car
what could be called his first laboratory for his chemistry experiments and a
printing press, where he started the "Grand Trunk Herald", the
first newspaper published on a train.
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GE can trace back through its history and beginning
to the companies formed by Thomas Edison. His famous quotation was that,
"Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”.
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Light bulb
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Thomas Edison
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He was the youngest of seven children with little
going for him as a child and in poor health. At the age of 12-years he lost
nearly all his hearing. This major disablement that persisted throughout his
life made him more solitary and shy in dealings with others. Therefore
organizations should take note that disabled people can be the very people
who they should hire at times. Edison’s
example proves that all people have immeasurable skills. Indeed, skills that
can eventually spawn the largest company in the world.
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Electric bulbs are used throughout the world and
where this product has created just one of many multi-billion industries from
the thinking of a totally self-educated scientist and engineer of the
first-order. By the time of his death he had obtained 1,093 United States
patents, the most issued to any individual ever.
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Phonograph
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Thomas Edison
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Kinetoscope
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Thomas Edison
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He believed that inventing useful products offered
everyone the opportunity for fame and fortune while benefiting society.
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Improvements upon the original design of the stock
ticker, the telegraph, and Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone.
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Thomas Edison
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Electricity Industry in the USA
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Thomas Edison
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He created the first electricity generating
companies in the USA
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Telephone
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Alexander Graham Bell
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UK
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He was the son and grandson of people who taught
elocution and the correction of speech. He was educated to pursue a career in
the same specialty and with this knowledge of the nature of sound it led him
not only to teach the deaf, but also to invent the telephone.
Bell shows that the diversity of thought in other areas
can create the world’s primary industries and those that are worth billions.
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When he began experimenting with electrical signals,
the telegraph had been an established means of communication for some 30
years. Although a highly successful system, the telegraph, with its
dot-and-dash Morse Code, was basically limited to receiving and sending one
message at a time. His extensive knowledge of the nature of sound and his
understanding of music enabled him to conjecture the possibility of
transmitting multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. Although
the idea of a multiple telegraph had been in existence for some time, he
offered his own musical or harmonic approach as a possible practical
solution. This "harmonic telegraph" was based on the principle that
several notes could be sent simultaneously along the same wire if the notes
or signals differed in pitch.
He once said, "Leave the beaten track
occasionally and dive into the woods. Every time you do so you will be
certain to find something that you have never seen before. Follow it up,
explore all around it, and before you know it, you will have something worth
thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the
results of thought."
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Cell Phones/Mobile Phones – First hand-held
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Martin Cooper
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USA
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Trained as an electrical engineer and served in the
US Navy on combat ships and submarines prior to starting with Motorola
Corporation.
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His application of cell phone technology was years
ahead of all others although Bell Labs. had first created the technology ten
years before. Bell
had not the foresight to see what they had in their hands. He is given the
title of ‘Father of the Cellular Phone’.
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Penicillin
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Alexander Fleming
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UK
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He was brought up on a remote sheep farm in Scotland with
little early access to education. He started out in life working as a
shipping clerk.
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One of the great accidents and
serendipitous events in the history of science and medicine.
In this case it was when he left a
culture plate smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria on his lab bench while he
went on a two-week holiday.
When he returned, he noticed a clear
halo surrounding the yellow-green growth of a mould that had accidentally
contaminated the plate. Unknown to him, a spore of a rare variant called
Penicillium notatum had drifted in from a mycology lab one floor below. Luck
would have it that he had decided not to store his culture in a warm
incubator, and that London
was then hit by a cold spell, giving the mould a chance to grow. Later, as
the temperature rose, the Staphylococcus bacteria grew like a lawn, covering
the entire plate — except for the area surrounding the mouldy contaminant.
Seeing that halo was his "Eureka"
moment, an instant of great personal insight and deductive reasoning. He
correctly deduced that the mould must have released a substance that inhibited
the growth of the bacteria.
Penicillin has now saved millions of lives over the
years and thereby a new industry has been created around it. Indeed, the
indirect economic effect of sustaining the lives of those people who have
been saved through this treatment has probably allowed vast wealth to be
delivered and which would not have been there otherwise. In this respect the
health of a company’s workforce is of paramount concern.
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56K Modem (for telecommunications)
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Brent Townsend
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Canada
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He is an electrical engineer who worked for Bell
Labs before he started his own company.
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He came up with the idea while building an appliance
for downloading music from servers over direct-dial phone connections. His
Music Fax system looked to be a precursor of file-sharing systems - and
lawsuit magnets - such as Napster and Kazaa. Working on Music Fax, he
recognized that modem speeds were too slow for real-time playing of songs.
Early MPEG could transmit good sound at 50K to 60K bit/sec, but the fastest
modems only topped out at 33.6K bit/sec.
He noticed that downloads from servers connected to
the phone network via digital links, such as T-1s, could reach 56K bit/sec
because they didn't have to undergo speed-sapping analog-to-digital
conversions. Uploads required these conversions, limiting speeds to 33.6K
bit/sec. He patented technology essential to making fast-down, slow-up
modems.
He said, “This is an easy thing to do. I can just
license this to people that are in the modem business. I don't have to start
competing with them or set up my own distribution".
His patent claim came as a horrible surprise to
International Telecommunication Union members working on a 56K bit/sec modem
standard in 1996. At a meeting, word came out that he had not only filed for
a patent but had already licensed his ideas to modem maker U.S. Robotics.
He has since made and is making millions from this
sole invention that his global patents protect.
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Nuclear Isotopes for Cancer Treatment
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Glenn T. Seaborg
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USA
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He was with his father and mother an immigrant from Sweden.
His father was a working-class machinist. And once said that had they not
gone to the USA
he would probably have been a machinist as well as all his former generations
had been a machinist.
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Most nuclear isotopes used in the fight against
Cancer are those created by Seaborg.
Although Seaborg with others created the atomic bomb
he unceasingly worked for the limitation in the arms race. One of many
examples of his humanity was when he wrote to President Harry Truman at the backend
of World War II to deter him from dropping the atomic bomb on Japan,
suggesting that he first demonstrate the weapon to the world on a barren
island. Having amongst other great scientific achievements discovered with
his team nearly 10% of the Universe’s Elements, he became the only ‘living’ scientist to
have an element named in his honour – Element 106 Seaborgium.
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Nystatin (worlds first non-toxic and useful
antifungal antibiotic)
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Rachel Fuller Brown
(co inventor)
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USA
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Her father left the family when she was twelve. Her mother worked as a
secretary at various churches. She had therefore no one to instil a
scientific life but this is what happened through serindipidy.
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Through long distance collaboration she shared tests
and samples with Elizabeth Hazen via the U.S. mail. To Hazen's
single-minded pursuit of an antifungal antibiotic, Brown added the skills
needed to identify, characterize, and purify the various substances produced
by culturing bacteria found in hundreds of soil samples.
Not only did it cure many disfiguring and disabling
fungal infections of the skin, mouth, throat, and intestinal tract, but it
could be combined with antibacterial drugs to balance their effects.
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Nystatin (worlds first useful antifungal antibiotic)
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Elizabeth Lee Hazen
(co inventor)
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USA
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She was orphaned at the age of three and raised by
relatives.
She attending a one-room school.
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See above.
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X-Ray Tube
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William David Coolidge
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USA
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His father
was a shoemaker by occupation and supplemented his income by running a farm
of seven acres. His mother was a dressmaker in her spare time. He was brought
up where there was very limited family financial resources
As an only child of his parents, he had a regular routine of farm chores.
This, however, left room for fishing (summer and winter), baseball, hiking,
skating, and primitive skiing. Photography became a lifelong hobby, and
during this period he built a basement darkroom and constructed his own
camera, including the shutter.
After grade school he attended Hudson High School
where, in due time, he graduated valedictorian in his class of thirteen. En
route, he quit school for a while and took a job in a local factory
manufacturing rubber garments. After a few months he decided that this was
not a very good idea, and he went back to school, where he caught up with his
class without difficulty. He had assumed that, with very limited family
financial resources, he would not be going to college at the end of the
school year. His plans changed when a friend who had been impressed by his
scholastic record and his mechanical and electrical aptitudes suggested that
he might be able to obtain a state scholarship to MIT. He applied, the grant
was awarded, and in the fall of 1891 he went to Boston to continue his studies.
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It is impossible to estimate the number of lives
that have been saved thanks to Coolidge's greatest achievement---to say
nothing of its applications in scientific research (for example, in analyzing
the structure of crystals). The "Coolidge tube" stands as a classic
example of an inventive mind harnessing a phenomenon of nature and putting it
to use for the good of humanity.
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Crookes tube (precursor of the X-ray tube)
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William Crookes
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UK
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His father was a tailor from the North of England
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He received rudimentary education to the age of 14
years.
His father became very rich and upon his death
inherited his fortune. With this money he created his own private laboratory
where all his great discoveries took place.
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Nonreflecting glass (invisible glass)
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Katherine J. Blodgett
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France/USA
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She did not attend normal school for most of her
life and was raised solely by her mother.
With these handicaps she became the first woman to
receive a Ph.D. in Physics from Cambridge
University.
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She is responsible for the way we all view the
world. Without the research that she and Irving Langmuir pioneered in the
1920's and 30's, we would see things in an entirely different light.
During WWI
and WWII, her research was of great consequence. She pioneered methods of
de-icing aircraft wings, poison gas absorption, and improved smokescreens. As
well, of course, the Langmuir-Blodgett films had a wide range of wartime
uses, including periscopes, binoculars, range finders, and telescopes, all of
which are still in use.
Her pioneering spirit and thirst for knowledge have
provided us with much of the technology we use. The computer screen through
which you are viewing this article, the glasses you might be wearing, the
television you watch, or the movie, DLP, LCD or CRT projector through which
the next film you see is projected, are all possible because of her efforts.
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Her scant economy forced her to support herself on
extra work; one of her jobs was catching cats for the physiological
laboratory.
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New-born scoring system
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Virginia Apgar
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USA
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Her father was an insurance executive and the family
had no scientific relatives in the family.
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When a
baby is born, the new parents immediately memorize the child's weight, length
and time of birth. But there's an equally important vital statistic they
frequently note: the child's "Apgar score."
She
developed the now famous test that measures the infant's physical condition
minutes after birth. Her efforts led at least one health official to credit
her with doing more to improve the health of mothers, babies and the unborn
than perhaps anyone this century. Given at one minute and five minutes after
birth, the Apgar test quickly assesses the: A ppearance
(skin color), P ulse, G rimace
(reflexes), A ctivity (muscle
activity) and R espiration (breathing).
A low score can immediately signal the need for
emergency medical attention. She is said to have developed the lO-point
scoring system in 1952 to force physicians and nurses to pay more attention
to newborns in the first critical minutes of life. As a result, her work
formed the foundation of what was then a new medical specialty-perinatology,
which since has helped save countless infant lives. Her contributions to
medicine and health, however, extended far beyond the development of the
infant test that bears her name.
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Computer mouse
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Douglas Engelbart
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USA/Norway
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His family were immigrants that travelled from Norway to the US.
His father was a salesman for a while, but he became
interested in radio and started a
radio shop selling and repairing
radios. His father died when he was 9 years old.
He initially after graduating had a line-job putting
things together.
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He envisioned a computer that would work in the
modern office and made it a practical reality.
In the early days he tried building a radio with
crystals but they never worked.
He dedicated his career to designing systems that
could help humans collectively manage their increasing complex world.
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Aluminum manufacturing process
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Charles Martin Hall
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USA
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His father was a church minister.
He was a private experimenter working with basic
equipment.
He only had his BA in chemistry (basic knowledge)
and a driving interest in providing an inexpensive way to liberate aluminium.
His university teacher who once said in his class that anyone who could
achieve this would be very rich indeed fuelled this drive. He took his
teacher’s words literally and invented such a system. The equivalent in many
ways of the Bessamer Converter that made cheap steel production possible
years earlier.
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His was predominantly musically minded.
After graduating with a BA
he invented an inexpensive method for the production of aluminum. On February
23, 1886 in the woodshed behind his family's home, he produced globules of
aluminum metal by the electrolysis of aluminum oxide dissolved in a
cryolite-aluminum fluoride mixture and repeated this experiment the next day
for his sister Julia to witness. He was 22years of age at the time. This
achievement was the culmination of several years of intensive work on this
problem. He was granted patent #400,655 for his process.
Not only did he have to
devise a method for winning aluminum metal, but he also had to fabricate most
of his apparatus and prepare his chemicals.
He found a financial backer
in Alfred E. Hunt, and the two of them founded the Pittsburgh Reduction
Company (later ALCOA). The rest is history.
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Computerized Telephone Switching System
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Erna Schneider Hoover
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USA
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She was a medievalist, logistician, working mother,
and computer programmer.
She was the first woman elected to the US National
Inventors Hall of Fame.
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She earned a B.A. with honors from in medieval
history and a Ph.D. in philosophy and foundations of mathematics.
She was in the hospital after giving birth to one of
her three daughters when she drew up the first sketches of her system. Her solution was to use a computer to
monitor the frequency of incoming calls at different times, and to adjust the
call acceptance rate accordingly. By putting a simple theory into practice
through the complexities of computer programming, she eliminated the danger
of overload in processing calls.
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O-ring (a rubber doughnut nestled inside a grooved
metal housing)
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Niels Christensen
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Denmark
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He was a pensioner and an independent inventor who
patented the O-Ring at the age of 72 years.
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He invented it whilst developing automobile brakes.
The O-Ring is the most widely adapted seal in
history because of its simplicity, low cost, ease of installation, and small
space requirements without supporting structures.
It has created a whole new global industry that
industry is now dependant upon.
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Optical diagnostic equipment
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Tuan Vo-Dinh
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Vietnam
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During the Vietnam War he received a scholarship
from the government of Vietnam
and went to Switzerland
to be educated. Science was his great interest and where he built his own
toys as a boy.
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He has invented numerous lifesaving devices that
detect and diagnose diseases by optical scanning. One of his first patents
was for a disimeter, a device that workers (those employed in plants,
laboratories, etc.) can clip to their clothing, and at the end of the day, it
gives the reading of any material the employee has been exposed to. Another
devise that he has invented can recognize the mutation of genes in the human
body to see whether a person has the likelihood to develop a disease such as
cancer, Alzheimer, or it can detect a virus like HIV, tuberculosis or
microbes.
He has also invented a number of life-saving devices
which detect and diagnose diseases, defects and toxins by optical scanning
(using lasers and fiberoptics) rather than biopsy (the removal of bodily
tissue for analysis).
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Compact Disc
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James T. Russell
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USA
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At age six, he invented a remote-control battleship,
with a storage chamber for his lunch.
In 1965 he patented a system to read a sequence of
sampled music recorded on a disc via a laser. The system remained on the
drawing board until the 1980s.
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He was an avid music listener. Like many audiophiles
of the time, he was continually frustrated by the wear and tear suffered by
his vinyl phonograph records. He was also unsatisfied with their sound
quality: his experimental improvements included using a cactus needle as a
stylus.
Alone at home on a Saturday afternoon, He began to sketch out a better music
recording system --- and was inspired with a truly revolutionary idea.
Like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM
found few interested investors at first; but eventually, Sony and other audio
companies realized the implications and purchased licenses.
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RADAR
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Robert
Watson-Watt
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Scotland
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He was a direct descendant of James Watt, pioneer of
the steam engine. He was the youngest son and his father, like his
grandfather, was a carpenter by trade, an Elder of the Presbyterian Church
and a very able Sunday School teacher. His mother, was a temperance reformer,
a feminist and described her as miraculous.
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It was his thinking and his thinking alone. No one,
either government or industry, asked him to invent RADAR. He did it out of
personal thinking, interest and great intuition.
Radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging), was the single
biggest technological factor in the Allied victory of the Battle of Britain
and in achieving and maintaining mastery of the skies throughout World War
II.
His first line of research was in meteorology where
he used short-wave radio to detect the location of thunderstorms. By
combining this direction finding technique with the ranging capabilities of
ionosondes, he designed a system that was capable of detecting aeroplanes.
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Anti-pollution devices
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Mary Walton
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USA
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She was an independent inventor who was not one to
stand idly by choking on the smog that the factories produced during the
Industrial Revolution.
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After
cleaning up the air, she moved onto the noise pollution that seemed to fill
the air as well as the heads of New Yorkers.
Working
in her basement, Walton built a model train set and began working to cut down
on the clanging of the trolleys. She built a wooden box, painted it with tar,
lined it with cotton, and filled it with sand. The vibration from the rails
was absorbed. After putting her invention under the struts that supported the
city trains, she received a patent for her work. She sold the rights of her
patent to the New York City Metropolitan railroad.
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Elevated railway
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Mary Walton
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USA
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Improved locomotive chimney
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Mary Walton
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USA
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Car heater
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Margaret Wilcox
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USA
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Invented it for herself to keep warm.
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Computer program
(world’s first documented computer
programmer)
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Augusta Ada
Byron
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UK
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She
was the daughter of English poet Lord Byron but had no interest in poetry and
was fascinated with physical calculations that proved something. With the
help of friends and tutors, she taught herself geometry and later attended
classes in astronomy and mathematics.
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In
1833 she met British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. He had invented
the Difference Engine, a mechanical device designed to handle complicated
mathematical problems. She showed her understanding of the concept of a
programmed computer in 1842, when she translated from French and annotated a
paper by the Italian engineer Luigi F. Menabrea on Babbage's Difference
Engine. She also collaborated with Babbage to invent the Analytical Engine,
an archetype of the modern digital computer. The technology of their time was
not capable of translating their ideas into practical use, but the Analytical
Engine had many features of the modern computer. It could read data from a
deck of punched cards, store data, and perform arithmetic operations.
Components of her work remain in the modern digital
electronic computer that receives a set of instructions, then carries out
those instructions.She set of instructions was a forerunner of modern
programming languages and historians have credited her as the first computer
programmer.
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Fire Escapes
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Anna Connelly
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USA
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She was the first person to patent the idea.
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She designed them in such a way that people could
not go up the fire escape, only down them despite what one sees in old
movies.
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Grain storage bin
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Lizzie Dickelman
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USA
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She was an independent farmer and inventor.
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She needed it for
enhanced farm production
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ventilated storehouse
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Lizzie Dickelman
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USA
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She needed it for
enhanced farm production
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heated brooder (where incubated chicks could be
nested without the hens)
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Lizzie Dickelman
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USA
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She needed it for
enhanced farm production
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Engine muffler
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El Dorado Jones
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USA
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She was an independent inventor.
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She simply hated the engine noise and decided to do
something about it.
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Circular Saw
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Tabitha Babbit
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USA
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She was a member of the Shaker society and invented
the circular saw as she sat there at her spinning wheel watching some of her
Brother Shakers toiling while they cut wood. She observed that one half
of the motion was lost, and so conceived the idea of the circular saw. She
made a thin disk, notched it around the edge, slipped it on the spindle of
her spinning wheel, tried it on a piece of shingle, found that it would cut
and gave the world the buzz saw. The first circular saw made under her
instructions is on exhibit in the Geological
Building at Albany, NY.
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The Shakers were modernists. Sister Tabitha invented
the circular saw and sought effective ways to produce the community's goods,
blending quality craft with new production techniques. The Shakers were among
the first to build and operate
circular sawmills in this country, and later applied this technology to other
areas as well.
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Rotary washing Machine
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Margaret Plunkett Colvin
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USA
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She was a housewife and inventor.
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She made it for herself to make life easier.
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Outboard boat motor
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Ole Evinrude
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Norway
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When his family emigration to America, when
he was five he spent almost the entire trip in the ship's engine room.
He much preferred working with farm tools and
machinery, first around his father's property, then as an apprentice and
labourer in factories all over the US Midwest. A tireless worker, he allowed
himself only one indulgence, a subscription to a mechanics magazine.
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Founded an industry and managed a thriving company
while remaining one of America's
most honest and generous businessmen.
He first read about the internal combustion engine, already
being used in Germany
experimentally to power the "horseless carriage."
Whilst going to buy an ice-cream for his young love
around a bay, he realised that not just automobiles needed an engine but a
small boat would make the trip far quicker. Thereafter he started his new
concept and never looked back.
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Propeller driven ships
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John Ericsson
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Sweden
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As a youth, he joined the Swedish Army, which
recognized his talents and put him to work on topographical duties.
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He moved to England, where he pursued a
variety of engineering projects, among them the use of screw propellers on
ships, the development of extraordinarily large guns and the creation of
engines driven by hot air instead of steam.
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Deep-sea sounding device
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John Ericsson
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Sweden
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First Traffic Lights (manually operated)
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J P Knight
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UK
|
He came from a working-class family who rose to
become superintendent on the South-Eastern
railway of Britain.
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He simply designed them from those on his railways
to control traffic and pedestrians.
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Molecular sieves
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Edith Flanigen
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USA
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Her mother was a homemaker and her dad was in the
lumber business. She came from a working-class background.
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Imagine looking into a tiny crystal and seeing in it
the ability to make gasoline cleaner, water purer and natural gas safer.
That's the first step toward understanding the simple power of a zeolite --
and the genius of chemist Edith Flanigen.
For a
couple of centuries, zeolite crystals had intrigued scientists because they
contain tiny channels and cavities inside that act like a sieve.
Where
a filter stops larger particles and allows smaller ones to pass through, a
sieve sends through larger particles while trapping smaller molecules in its
complex web.
She
was the woman who learnt how to make all kinds of zeolites in a lab and
harness their unique properties.
The most significant of these discoveries was
``zeolite Y'' -- a sieve that could take the crude oil found in earth and
break it down into its parts. It separated the part that is turned into
gasoline in a way that was cleaner and safer than any previous refining
method.
Today,
other sieves are used to purify water and remove moisture from refrigerator
lines and auto air conditioners so they don't freeze.
They
dry and purify natural gas for the home, are used to clean up nuclear waste
sites (including Three Mile Island and Chernobyl)
and are used to make household detergents more environmentally friendly.
They
are used in dual-pane windows to help save energy and prevent fogging, and
have found their way into personal hygiene products for their ability to
absorb odours.
Today ‘molecular sieves’ are a multi-billion dollar
global industry and created in the main by one single woman.
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The Screw Propeller for driving Ships (1st
Practical introducer of)
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Francis Petttit Smith
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UK
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He was a grazing farmer on
Romney Marsh in Kent, UK
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He had a fascination with boats and made many models
of boats. His experiments extending over many years. He arrived at the
conclusion that his method of
propelling steam vessels by means of a screw was much superior to
paddles; at that time exclusively employed.
As with all great technological breakthroughs almost
simultaneously a Swede had also invented the ship screw propeller. But
although Captain Ericsson invented a screw propeller also, Smith took out his
patent in May, 1836; and Ericsson in the
following July. Therefore Smith was the first to patent his great invention
and the precedence is seeded to the English farmer.
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Minicomputer
was born in a in Bridgeport, Connecticut,
USA.
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Ken Olsen
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USA
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He was the son of a
working-class Danish migrant.
He had an intense interest in the workings and
construction of computers.
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He founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and
made the world's first minicomputer. He always considered himself as a
working engineer and insisted on working on the shop floor and not in an
office. There is DEC folklore of him wearing chequered work shirts and being
mistaken for the janitor by a new employees.
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Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)
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Waldo L. Semon
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USA
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He was born into a working-class family and as a new
employee decided to pursue a dubious project. Instead of digging into his
assigned work (adhesives), he began trying to dissolve an undesirable
material called polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to create an adhesive for bonding
rubber to metal.
'People then thought of PVC as worthless back then,' he recalled. 'They'd
throw it in the trash bin.'
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He never succeeded in creating the adhesive he was
told to create by his employer, but by heating PVC in a solvent at a high
boiling point he discovered a substance that was both flexible and elastic.
At first no one literally knew what to make of Semon's newfangled substance,
but decades later PVC has become the world's second-best-selling plastic,
generating billions of dollars in sales each year.
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PVDC wrapping films – the basis of ‘cling-film’.
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Ralph Wiley
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USA
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He was
a chemical lab worker who accidentally discovered polyvinylidene chloride or
Saran. He was a college student who cleaned glassware in a Dow Chemical lab
and came across a vial he couldn't scrub clean. He called the substance
"eonite", after an indestructible material in the comic strip
"Little Orphan Annie." Dow researchers made his "eonite"
into a greasy, dark green film, which Dow called "Saran". The
military sprayed it on fighter planes to guard against salty sea spray and
carmakers used it for upholstery. Dow later got rid the of Saran's green
colour and unpleasant odour.
Saran
films are best known in the form of Saran Wrap ® film, the first cling wrap
designed for household (1953) and commercial use (1949), introduced by the
Dow Chemical Company. Saran Wrap ® brand plastic film is now marketed by S.
C. Johnson.
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Saran
polyvinylidene chloride or Saran resins and films (called PVDC) have been
wrapping products for more than 50 years. Saran works by polymerizing
vinylide chloride with monomers such as acrylic esters and unsaturated
carboxyl groups, forming long chains of vinylide chloride. The
copolymerization results in a film with molecules bound so tightly together
that very little gas or water can get through. The result is a barrier
against oxygen, moisture, chemicals and heat-qualities used to protect food,
consumer and industrial products. PVDC is resistant to oxygen, water, acids,
bases, and solvents.
After
World War 2, it was approved for food packaging, and it was Prior Sanctioned
in 1956 (Society of the Plastics Industry). PVDC is cleared for use as a food
contact surface as a base polymer, in food package gaskets, in direct contact
with dry foods, and for paperboard coating in contact with fatty and aqueous
foods.
Saran resins for food contact can be extruded,
coextruded or coated by a processor to meet specific packaging needs. About
85 percent of PVDC is used as a thin layer between cellophane, paper and
plastic packaging to improve barrier performance. For non-food contact, Saran
resins can be used for molding and melt adhesive bonding. In combination with
polyolefins, polystyrene and other polymers, Saran can be coextruded into
multilayer sheets, films and tubes.
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Cotton swabs or Q-tip
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Leo Gerstenzang
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Poland
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He was a Polish immigrant who travelled to the USA with little money or
financial support.
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One day he found himself watching his wife applying
cotton wads to toothpicks in an attempt to reach hard-to-clean areas. He noticed
that his wife had stuck a bit of cotton on a toothpick and was using it to
clean their baby's ears. Thinking that this jerry-rigged swab might cause
some damage to the child’s ear he designed a safer cotton swab.
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Modern Safety Pin
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Walter Hunt
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USA
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He was a mechanic by trade and an amateur inventor
in his spare time.
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It was twisting a piece of wire, trying to think of
something that would help him pay off a fifteen dollar debt that provided him
with the invention. But he thought little of his safety pin as an invention
and soon sold the patent for four hundred dollars.
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Slinky
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Richard James
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USA
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He was a naval engineer trying to
develop a meter designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. He was
working with tension springs when one of the springs fell to the ground. He
saw how the spring kept moving after it hit the ground and an idea for a toy
was born.
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He remarked to his wife Betty, "I
think I can make a toy out of this." Richard then spent the next two
years figuring out the best steel gauge and coil to use in making the toy and
Betty James found a name for the new toy after discovering in the dictionary
that the word "Slinky" is a Swedish word meaning traespiral - sleek
or sinuous.
He and his wife founded a Company with
$500 dollars to mass produce their creation. Over a quarter of a billion
Slinkys ® have been sold worldwide.
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Slot Machines
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Charles Fey
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USA
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He was a mechanic by trade and freelance inventor.
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This invention has travelled the world and created
instant gambling and fortunes for many businesses. Indeed, although a simple
technological product it is a product that makes vast amounts of money every
day of the year and provides a continuous flow of global income.
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vacuum cleaner (electric)
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James Murray Spangler
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USA
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He was a janitor in a department store.
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He deduced that the carpet sweeper he
used was the source of his cough. He tinkered with an old fan motor and
attached it to a soap box stapled to a broom handle. Using a pillow case as a
dust collector on the contraption, Spangler invented a portable electric
vacuum cleaner. He then improved his basic model the first to use both a
cloth filter bag and cleaning attachments, and received a patent and formed
the Electric Suction Sweeper Company. One of the first buyers was a cousin, whose
husband, William H. Hoover, later became the president of the Hoover Company,
with Spangler as superintendent. Hoover’s
improvements resembled a bagpipe attached to a cake box, but they worked.
Sluggish sales were given a kick by Hoover’s
10 day, free home trial, and eventually there was a Hoover® vacuum cleaner in
nearly every home.
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vacuum packed canning
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Amanda Jones
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USA
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She was a poet, editor and inventor but not an
engineer or scientist.
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She published her first poems in
the pages of the "Ladies' Repository," a Methodist
magazine located in Cincinnati,
Ohio. During the Civil War she
penned a number of war-songs that received a wide circulation.
After the war she became an
associate editor on the Chicago
journal, the "Universe," and was subsequently
a contributor to the "Western Rural." Later she was
named editor of "The Bright Side," a juvenile weekly.
Later she cut back on her literary work to pursue the commercial
interests that would add her name to the roster of American
inventors, well earned by her successful food canning process and
her device for the safe fuelling of oil furnaces.
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VisiCalc – (the first computer spreadsheet program)
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Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston
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USA
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They were from working-class backgrounds and where
their invention stemmed out of frustration. He knew computers could be of
immense benefit for business and through his knowledge he also knew that
there had to be a better way to do spreadsheets than was presently available
at that time. Bricklin began to create a software program that would do for
numbers what word processing did for words -- enable the user to insert and
delete elements and see an immediate change in the results.
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Whilst a masters student in business administration
at Harvard Business School, Dan Bricklin joined up with Bob Frankston to help
him write the programming for his new electronic spreadsheet. The two started
their own company, Software Arts Inc., to develop their product after
graduating.
Computer spreadsheet programs are now a
multi-billion dollar industry worldwide.
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Walkie talkie
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Al Gross
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USA
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By the time he was twelve, he had turned his
basement into an amateur radio headquarters, thanks to equipment gleaned from
junkyards. He obtained his amateur radio license at the age of 16. His early
interest in amateur radio helped set his career choice while he was still a
teenager.
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He developed it while he was still in high school.
He developed circuits and components for miniaturized portable communications
that were unheard of for that era.
He played a major role in establishing miniaturized
portable communication and the base for a new global industry.
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