Historic Inventions

German inventor creates robot… When a German inventor found the task of dialling telephone numbers too burdensome, he did not bewail the mechanization of the service in the interests of efficiency.

Instead, he went one better than the telephone engineers and invented an automatic dialler.

Stops, on this device, are preset for the fifty numbers most frequently called.

A knob on top of the attachment is moved to the desired number. Pressing a thumb lever at the front of the device does the rest.

The fifty numbers may be changed at any time, to correspond with a new list.

December 1963…

You wouldn’t have to inch your way to a pump at a busy gas station that had track-mounted pumps like these. The recently patented system would let you park in any vacant bay at the service island and wait (in or out of the car) for the pump to come to you. Reel-up hoses would feed the movable pumps from a central supply.

October 1963…

Sunken ships might be raised quickly and economically, according to this recent patent, by pumping in foam. A diver would locate or prepare a closed compartment, insert a hose and nozzle. Pumps on a salvage ship would force in resin and catalyst. Combined at the nozzle, they’d set up to form a buoyant, closed-cell foam.

December 1963…

Tiny hydrofoil wings attached to these skis enable the skier to bank, dip, climb, and glide at speeds up to 35 miles per hour. The foils start lifting at eight miles per hour, ride two feet above the water.

CosmoDynamics Inc., Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, developed Dynaflite hydrofoils. Under the skis are a stabilizer and two “flying” wings, one of them removable for extra speed. A skier, it’s claimed, can learn to use the foils in a half-hour.

There are several speculations as to the inventor of the hearing aid. Hearing aids have been around since time immemorial and perhaps it is easier to find out who the inventor of the modern hearing aid is.

Hearing aids have a long history, ever since the prehistoric times. It is believed and rightly so that the first hearing aids were the trumpets, funnel-shaped structures made of wool, metal or sometimes trunks of animals which used to amplify the incoming sound and redirecting all of the sound energy to one’s ears. These types of hearing aids have been in use for a long time until the recorded history of mankind.

The inventor of the hearing aid which comes closest to the likes we get to see today was Harvey Fletcher. An American physicist, born on 11th July in the year 1884, who is also the inventor of the audiometer, Fletcher patented the first electrical hearing aid while working for Bell Laboratories.

The documented history of the modern era gives several names who have had invented various types of hearing aids across the world through the nineteenth and twentieth century. Alphonsus William Webster was the first patent holder of a hearing aid in the year 1836 in Great Britain.

Later, in the year 1880, another type of hearing aid was invented using cardboard and rubber by R. G. Rhodes.

1898 witnessed Alfonso Miltmore come up with an electric hearing aid that used a headphone (or earphone), carbon dust microphone and a pack of battery. He would have been credited as the inventor of the modern hearing aid but his design was unreliable hence it never made it to the public at large.

In 1898, two major developments happened. The Dictagraph Company developed the first hearing aid that was commercially available, it worked on batteries. Around the same time, Miller Reese Hutchinson came with a hearing aid, named the Acousticon. The Acousticon was available in the markets from 1901. Miller Reese Hutchinson is also at times considered as the inventor of the hearing aid.

Later in the twentieth century, Maynard Engebretson, Robert E Morley, Jr. and Gerald R Popelka designed and came up with the first fully digital hearing aid. As per the US patent records, this hearing aid was officially patented in 1984. Ever since there have been several developments and transformations to the designs and functions of contemporary hearing aids.

Not many people understand much about the invention of video games or the history of video games even though many people across the globe love playing them on a regular basis.

Those who grew up in the late 1970s and 1980s will have had the opportunity to play many, varied video games and also will have experienced the tremendous improvements in graphics and speed as the gaming technology has improved.

According to history, the first video game was designed back in 1952 by A.S Douglas, a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University in the UK. His thesis was on Human-Computer interactions.

In fact, Douglas created the first computer game back then. His game was programmed on an EDSAC computer which was a vacuum computer with a CRT display.

Pong

However, the first real computer game was created in 1958 by William Higinbotham. This game was known as Tennis For Two and was designed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Oscilloscope.

Later in the 1970s, the arcade type of video game was designed. These video games were on coin-operated consoles, enabling entrepreneurs to provide gaming opportunities to players.

The entrepreneurs were able to make an income from these video game consoles and one of the biggest successes was PONG back in 1972. Pong was designed by a company known as Atari which was a force to reckon with back in that period of time.

Prior to that, back in 1966, Ralph Baer had designed a video game that was fun, enjoyable and could be played from a regular TV set.

pong

Space Invaders

However, the golden age of arcade games came in 1978 with the release of a game known as Space Invaders. The success of Space Invaders was really huge and many manufacturers started to produce arcade games.

Tetris

It was in this era that manufacturers and programmers started to seriously produce video games and consoles. However, an economic slowdown halted this advancement for a while until the early 1980s when Nintendo made its appearance.

Nintendo came up with handheld consoles that could be played from anywhere. The first portable console was designed and released in 1989. One of the more popular games was Tetris which was a popular puzzle game.

Games continued to develop and in the 1990s 3D games were beginning to appear. More games and more games seemed closer to reality than ever before. However, social factors such as concerns regarding links to violence especially among kids have had an effect on the industry.

Video games continue to thrive, with the gaming industry generating sales in excess of US$11.2 billion in 2003.

Now For Some Fun

On a lighter note, to end with a bit of fun. Check out this funny short film about the invention of video games…

The invention of coca-cola can be attributed to a struggling pharmacist from Atlanta, Georgia named John S. Pemberton; he concocted the first batch coca-cola syrup back in May 1886 in a three-legged iron pot in his back yard.

Two of the ingredients for coca-cola at the time were dried coca leaves of a South American shrub, and cola, an extract of the kola nut.

Pemberton’s friend a bookkeeper named Frank M. Robinson named the drink by using a combination of these two ingredients, i.e. coca-cola. He also created the flowing design that is still in use today.

Coke is simply a nickname for coca-cola and this nickname was created by the beverages customers who insisted on using this shortened version. The coca-cola company created advertisements to try and get people to use the full name for coca-cola as the nickname coke was encouraging substitute products.

Eventually via a Supreme Court decision in 1920 the coca-cola company were able to get the nickname ‘coke’ also registered as a trademark.

The curved, fluted bottle originated around the 1920s and is almost as famous as the trademarked names.

Coca-cola was first sold to the public from a soda fountain in Jacon’s Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8th, 1886. The syrup that Pemberton created was mixed with carbonated water and sold for five cents a glass.

In 1888 Asa Candler acquired the formula and patents from Pemberton and his partners in order to gain full control of the beverage.

The Spencerian coca-cola script wasn’t registered with the U.S. patent office until 1893.

Back in 1886, approximately 9 drinks a day were being sold in more recent time the coca-cola company sells close to 2 billion drinks across two hundred countries around the world.

The invention of cable television in the late 1940s has radically changed the way that the world communicated. Not only did it provide a source for entertainment and news, it disseminated an ideal of a middle-class world that to many people, was just a dream; a depiction of normal life portrayed on the screen.

Being pioneers in scientific discovery is something that Americans have had down since the formation of the country, but nothing like the invention of cable television had made such an impact on the world since the development of the telephone.

Getting television into the homes of everyday people was another feat that had to be accomplished through careful business maneuvering. An electronics salesman by the name of John Walson was the first to connect a cable television network to televisions in mid-1948, due to a few of his customers complaining of bad antenna reception, and afterward, it spread like wildfire.

John Walson has been credited with being the founder of the cable television industry, simply by trying to get better reception for his customers. This laid the foundation for cable television as we know it today.

Early cable television was usually reserved for people with enough money to enjoy it, as a television set was considered very expensive then and there were also fees and monthly charges incurred also. This is what made cable television, in its early days, a product that usually only middle to upper-class Americans had access to.

During its developing years, cable television was heavily regulated by the US Government. Important messages only were usually relayed through the cable television system, and it wasn’t until between 1959 and 1961 when Congress determined the role of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), 10 years after its formation that television really started coming into the forefront of the American imagination.

Programming including original programs and different television networks started popping up, mostly for a cost. The first basic cable network showed up in 1976, WTCG, the Turner Communications Group.

Cable television has been an integral part of life for almost everyone today. From grandparents to parents, to even a more recent childhood of Nickelodeon and Disney Channel shows, life without cable television is very hard to imagine these days.

The culture was changed and then defined by what our television sets brought us. There are countless contributions that the invention of cable television has brought us over the last 60 years, and there are undoubtedly more to come.

The steam engine inventor was James Watt who issued a patent for his invention in 1769.

James Watt was born in Scotland in the little town of Greenock on the banks of the Clyde in 1736. At the age of sixteen, he had a short 2-year apprenticeship working for a mechanic/mathematical instrument specialist.

After his short apprenticeship, Watt moved to London where he gained employment as a mathematical instrument maker. However, after a severe cold, he returned home after an absence of little more than a year.

At this point, Watt was appointed to the college of Glasgow as a mathematical instrument maker to the university. It was here at the university that Watt began to experiment with how steam might escape when contained within a tight syringe. This action led to a basic piston that was able to raise quite a considerable weight of 15lbs.

Overtime further experiments were made to improve on this discovery. For example, the steam was cooling too quickly so materials were used that would conduct heat more slowly.

Ultimately Watts experiments led to an idea that struck him, that if a communication was opened between a cylinder containing steam, and another vessel which has been exhausted of air and other fluids, then the steam as an expandable fluid, would immediately rush into the empty vessel, and continue to do so until it had established an equilibrium; and if that vessel was to be kept very cool by an injection or otherwise then more steam would continue to enter until the whole was condensed.

Watt further perfected this idea by adding a pump that extracted any water, air and uncondensed steam. Next Watt surrounded the cylinder by a casing to assist the retention of the heat. A piston rod worked through an aperture used the elasticity of the steam from the boiler to impel the piston down the cylinder and all this ultimately led to Watts steam engine.

Without the invention of electricity, none of us would have the power to use computers, turn on a light, or keep the food in our refrigerator from spoiling. Electricity is a wonderful part of all of our lives that we use every single day.

When someone wonders about where electricity came from, the icon image of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in a storm comes to mind, but did you know that he did not discover certain aspects of electricity by himself?

The truth is that mankind has been experimenting with electricity for thousands of years and it was not a single man that began doing so. Here is some more information about electricity through history.

Static electricity: The invention of electricity began with a man named Thales who lived in Greece around the year 600 BC. He rubbed objects and found out that static electricity could be created this way.

Otto von Guericke was the one that first demonstrated static electricity in 1660. He had a machine that helped with the demonstration.

Demonstrations were one thing, but what about being able to store that electricity? George Von Kleist was the man who wondered this very thing, and he created the first capacitator for the storage of electricity.

Benjamin Franklin and his kite and key experiment in a storm happened in 1752, and with this, he proved that static electricity and lightning were the same things.

Battery: Alessandro Volta is the man that created the first electric battery in 1800. This is where the word volt and voltage comes from.

Ohm’s Law: Georg Ohm discovered that power, voltage, current, and resistance were all associated with each other; the year was 1826, and this was called Ohm’s Law.

The electric motor: Thomas Davenport created the electric motor in 1837, which is now used in electric appliances.

The light bulb: In 1878, Thomas Edison created a light bulb that lasted for around forty hours, he founded the Edison Electric Light Company, and in 1880 his light bulb was able to last over twelve hundred hours.

The first electric company: The California Electric Light Company was founded in 1879, and it was the first company to provide electricity to houses that San Francisco.

Electricity makes all of our lives better, and it was the hard work of a lot of men that helped make it the vital tool that it is today.

The next time you turn on your laptop and click on a lamp to see by, just remember that electricity is how this is possible and be thankful for it.