Why are inventors suddenly seeing the light? Is there such a thing as a eureka moment? Is it true what Edison said: an invention consists of 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration? Everything is always invented by someone. Our daily life is full of curious finds and inventions. Even though the objects come from modern laboratories, on closer inspection there is always a human story behind every decisive inspiration. In Simply Genial, Marcel Grauls traces the origins of a hundred everyday objects. From post-it to pamper, from mp3 to sms, from gore-tex to tampax, from www to usb, from tefal to lego…
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. '
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.
How the son of a French teacher, who opposed official education, liquefied air, invented the neon light and made a powerful bomb with which he single-handedly almost took the life of the German emperor over Belgium. How he spent a fortune to realize an idea of Jules Verne and then fell under Hitler's spell. So that a judge afterwards sentenced him to life imprisonment, after which he simply continued his profession - inventing - in the cell, giving the impression that he was out of his mind and released after three and a half years, at the age of eighty. came. And continued inventing for another ten years.
No one expects modern inventions to be the work of one person anymore. Nevertheless, the German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg is regarded as the inventor of the digital music format MP3. Brandenburg always refers to his entire team at the Fraunhofer Institute in Erlangen; he often speaks of 'us' and in 2000 he distributed a prize of 250,000 euros among his 40 employees.
When Martin Cooper, the inventor of the portable telephone, the predecessor of the cell phone, was three years old, he saw older boys set fire to paper with magnifying glasses and sunbeams. He was completely upset about that. He secretly smashed a bottle and tried to make his own magnifying glass with the bottom of it. As a child he took clocks apart and sometimes got them repaired too. Martin Cooper grew up in a rough neighborhood of Chicago, where he attended technical school. His friends in the metalworking department had the highest ideal of forging a beautiful brass knuckles. Cooper went on to study electricity at technical college and when he finished this, the Korean War was just breaking out. From 1950 to 1953 he spent as an engineer on warships.
Jack Kilby, the man who invented the computer chip more than fifty years ago, was six feet tall, tall, and squinted a little behind his thick glasses. He was from the agricultural state of Kansas, but spent half his life working in Texas. Maybe that's why he spoke a little slowly and all his answers started with 'well…' and then said nothing at all for a long time. "The Humble Giant," his colleagues called him, the Humble Giant.
Every year in late March or early April, the Times of London publishes a list of the 1,000 richest Britons. For the Rausings - Swedes who moved to Great Britain in the 1980s for tax reasons - it must have always been a dull moment. As owners of the packaging giant Tetra Pak, they managed wonderfully to remain unknown. Except for that one dire moment every year. Gad and Hans Rausing were continuously in the British top three in the 1990s. It was they who first pushed the Queen from the top spot in 1994.
Before William Perkin came on the scene, colors came only from nature, from stones, plants, or animals. The dyes were scarce, expensive and not washable; only rich people could afford colors. William Perkin was only eighteen years old on that memorable day in 1856, but he had been a student at London's Royal College for three years, the youngest student the university had ever known.
September 1940. London is bombed by German planes for weeks in broad daylight. The British have rapidly installed radar installations - a state-of-the-art invention of their own - on board hundreds of RAF aircraft and built the first chain of radar stations on the east coast, from Aberdeen to Southampton. It soon becomes clear that the long radio waves cannot trace low flying aircraft. Microwave radars are being developed head over heels. The heart of it is a complicated vacuum tube, a microwave. The British need more than they can produce themselves and are knocking on the door of the American allies, who are not yet involved in the war at that time.
The word 'nadarhek' or 'nadar closure' has come to Flanders from the French adventurer, caricaturist, writer, photographer and balloonist Nadar, the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The man lived and worked in Paris in the nineteenth century. The Flemish know the word, the Dutch do not; French-speaking Belgians know it as 'barrier Nadar', the French don't. A purely Belgian word.
English 
Nederlands