Inventors

Anyone familiar with the climate of Scotland should not be surprised that the modern raincoat is a Scottish invention. The inventor Charles Macintosh was born in Glasgow; even today a raincoat is still called in English 'a mackintosh' (with k) or also called 'a mac' for short. Charles grew up in his father's dyestuff factory, who made a fortune towards the end of the eighteenth century with the purple-red dye orseille. This was obtained from certain lichens from the Scottish highlands, supplemented with ammonia. The Macintoshes purified that ammonia from human urine.

read more

Guglielmo Marconi was born in 1874, the son of a large Italian landowner and of Annie Jameson, a daughter of the wealthy Jameson whiskey dynasty of Dublin. In the years 1886-1888, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz was the first to succeed in generating radio waves and determining their length and speed. He also showed that lights are radio waves of the same nature and have the same speed, namely 300,000 kilometers per hour.

read more

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. '

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more

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.

read more