Marcel Grauls

Paris, March 1794, the French Revolution has degenerated into terror. Before the Comité du Salut Public, in which authority is centralized, the following must appear: Nicolas-Jacques Conté, portrait painter, chemist and balloonist. The man is ordered to invent an invention on the spot: 'The toll we have to pay to England for providing us with natural graphite is too high. The pencils have become too expensive. You have a week to present us with a new pencil process, the basic raw material of which is drawn from French soil. '

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Art Fry was a Presbyterian, which meant that he sang a number of psalms every Sunday in his church. For nearly 20 years he attended the service at the NorthPresbyterian Church in Saint-Paul, a town east of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and for nearly 20 years he had been annoyed by the bookmarks disappearing from his hymnal. If you stood up to sing, they would fall out, leaving Fry desperate to find the right psalm.

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As a child, Johann Friedrich Böttger was already interested in everything to do with chemistry. At the age of fourteen, his mother apprenticed him to a pharmacist in Berlin, in the Duchy of Prussia. He was also in alchemical circles, and in 1700, when he was 18, the story sprang up around him that he could make gold, that he had found the philosopher's stone. Apparently he had demonstrated this in a limited circle - not without some dexterity. Duke Frederik - king from 1701 - heard about this and he needed gold, a lot of gold, and he hired Böttger. When it turned out that the young man could not keep his promise, he fled to Dresden, the capital of Saxony, chased by an army of a hundred men.

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Edwin Land, the son of a scrap dealer, had his first inspiration when he was seventeen. He attended Harvard University and had taken a weekend off to visit New York. Walking along Broadway with his friends, he was overwhelmed by the sea of light from the neon signs, the cinemas and the dazzling headlights of the cars. In a flash he realized that you should be able to undo that blindness.

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It has been established since October 2008: when scotch tape is unrolled in a vacuum, short pulses of X-rays are released that are powerful enough to take a finger shot in a second. Researcher Seth J. Putterman of the University of California in Los Angeles called the phenomenon "a kind of microscopic lightning." He conducted the experiments with 3M Scotch tape because other brands show the effect to a lesser extent or not at all. Some of the secret is in the adhesive, but its composition is a 3M trade secret. Masking tape has not been tested.

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The idea of transporting freight and passengers by train over a long distance comes from the Englishman George Stephenson, who was born next to a railway line, so to speak. This happened in 1781 in the English mining village of Wylam, which has barely 2000 inhabitants today. On that local railroad, it was the horses that pulled the loads of coal. In the mine just down the road, James Watt's boilers were working to pump the water out of the mine.

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Once in his life, the humble and withdrawn Elisha Otis pulled off a real American stunt. That was in 1854, now more than 150 years ago. A large platform had been built in the main exhibition hall of Crystal Palace in New York. On it were a few boxes and barrels and above all a tall gentleman with a beard the size of a snow shovel. He was dressed in a jacket and top hat.

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For seventeen years, Carl Magee had had a thriving law practice in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when he settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife and three children in 1919. His wife Grace had weak lungs and urgently needed a drier climate. Magee was 47 and thought that Albuquerque, with its 15,000 residents, had plenty of lawyers. He had always dreamed of publishing a newspaper: 'A newspaper that would tell the complete truth about everything. And then I would see what happened. '

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Wallace Hume Carothers, the most handsome American chemist of his day, wrote a series of spectacular inventions in nine years of lab work, including Polymer 66, the first fully synthetic fiber. Even before the new fabric was named 'nylon', he took his own life. He never saw the nylon stocking either. A year and a half after his death, on October 27, 1938, the Du Pont de Nemours company officially announced that it had a special fabric in house. On May 15, 1940, five million pairs of 'nylons' were put up for sale in American department stores in an unprecedented sales stunt. Thousands of American women fought a real battle to get a pair of new stockings, with just no deaths. They sold out in two hours.

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