Marcel Grauls – Page 18

Lego

In the company album of the Lego company there is a strange snapshot showing the desolate bogs of the Danish Jutland. In the foreground, five men are busy cutting peat. The youngest, at the back, cuts the sods, three others pry them loose, and the fifth, at the front, leaning on one knee, makes the piles. It's war, the Germans have occupied Denmark. There is no fuel available for private individuals and the population is forced to meet its energy needs with peat. The man kneeling is Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of the Lego toy factory, one of the largest in the world. In 1942, Ole Kirk is fifty years old. His life has been one of poverty and disaster, and new calamity is yet to come.

Led light

How the son of a power plant maintenance man in a remote Japanese fishing village became a researcher in a small company that had a laboratory with two employees, and how he outran all major electronics companies with the invention of the bright blue LED light, after which he quickly credited 200 related inventions, including the Blu-ray laser, got into a fight with his old boss's son-in-law, and left for California because his wife and three daughters found that place the most attractive, and where he is now , after receiving 25 international awards, if only a modern Edison can be surprised by the Nobel Prize - for Chemistry or Physics, that is not clear.

"The lava lamp," its inventor once said, "has a cycle like that of life itself: it grows, wears out, decays, disappears, and then starts all over again." Edward Craven Walker himself lived to be 82 years old, so he was allowed to experience it all: he introduced the strange lamp in 1963, by the end of the 1970s it faded away, in the 1980s it had completely disappeared at one point. She was there again at the end of the nineties.

The first time a wide audience was introduced to a laser beam was in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964). In a famous scene, Bond, played by Sean Connery, is tied to a table of gold. A laser beam that cuts the table in half lengthwise crackles its way between Bond's spread legs.

Bond first uses his phlegm as a weapon and says to Goldfinger, "Thank you for the demonstration." As the beam approaches his crotch, the secret agent gets short of breath and asks, "You expect me to talk?" To which Goldfinger replies, "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.'
In reality, the table had first been sawn in half and then painted over. Then someone from under the table melted the glue with a torch. The beam looks like the flame of a welding machine; it also crackles, while a real laser in this case would have produced hardly any heat and no sound.

'A crown cap', says the Dikke Van Dale, 'is a metal bottle cap with indentations all around, making it reminiscent of a crown.' The lid is dirt cheap, can easily be mechanically applied to a bottle and removed again, it seals a bottle perfectly so that the sting, the carbon dioxide, cannot escape and the used cap can be reprocessed without any problems. But the thing didn't come into the world that completely perfect. There were 150 crazy and less crazy closures in the United States alone, when one William Painter came up with a 151st version more than a hundred years ago. An incorrigible copy, as it turned out later.

Melitta Liebscher was born in 1873 in Dresden. She was married to Hugo Bentz, manager of a local department store, and had two sons, one aged nine and one aged four. On a Sunday afternoon in early 1908, together with some friends during the 'Kaffeeklatsch', she came up with the idea of banning the coffee grounds from her favorite drink.

snapshot

Few Dutch people have been immortalized so beautifully in one word as the Leiden photographer Kiek, after whom 'het kiekje' was named, an occasional photo by an amateur photographer. But because 'kiekje' looks like a dialect word for 'look', the surname has become almost invisible. Leiden honors him with a simple Kiekpad and since 2001 also with a small-scale Kiekmonument. Kiek deserves better; as the (forced) founder of occasional photography, he is entitled to national recognition.

Kevlar

Stephanie Kwolek was born in 1923 in Pennsylvania, on the east coast of the United States. Her father was a nature lover, who traveled with her through the fields and the woods; together they collected leaves and flowers and seeds, which they stuck in large books. From her mother she got the love for sewing and fabrics. She drew all kinds of clothes and sewed them together with her mother. She thought of becoming a fashion designer. Her father died when she was ten, in the depths of the Great Depression that ravaged America. Her mother had to work in the factory and little Stephanie's future did not look so bright.

Father Giovanni Jacuzzi (1855-1929) came from the village of Casarsa della Delizia, Friuli, north of Venice. There was a great famine in that region towards the end of the nineteenth century. From 1890, the population fled en masse to America, Canada, Australia or Argentina. 1913 was a record year: 600,000 Italians left their country to look for happiness elsewhere. Between 1907 and 1921, Giovanni's entire family of seven boys and six girls moved to California.

"It's like a dream," Momofuku Ando, 95, said at a press conference in late July 2005 at his noodle museum in Ikeda, near Osaka. The space shuttle Discovery was in space at that time, not only with the Japanese cosmonaut Soichi Noguchi on board, but for the first time also with space windows, space noodles. The very old gentleman briefly demonstrated to the cameras how you should eat them, slurping, in other words, and said: 'Exactly what it should be. I would also like to go into space myself.' It was a celebration for the inventor of instant noodles and cup noodles. In the margins of the Discovery mission, the typical Japanese fast food captivated the whole country in those days.

Lego

Led light

Lava lamp

Laser

Crown cap

Coffee filter

snapshot

Kevlar

Jacuzzi

Instant noodles