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…
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.
The British invented the train, the French have been setting the speed records for locomotives for fifty years, but the Japanese built the first super-fast train connection. Their first shinkansen (literally: new mainline), nicknamed 'the bullet train', ran at high speed between Tokyo and Osaka as early as 1964, before there was even a TGV or an HST in Europe. It was one man, Hideo Shima, who conceived and constructed this train in the 1950s. But when the government officially opened the line, he was not invited to the ceremony.
As the name suggests, the GPS is part of a global (global) system for positioning (positioning) anything. What the acronym does not indicate is that the system is military in origin and remains under US military control. This is done from Colorado Springs, on the Rocky Mountains, by the 50th Space Wing at Schriever Air Force Base. About 6,000 people work there, 150 of whom work for the GPS Operations Center (GPSOC), a division of the 2nd Space Operations Squadron (2nd SOPS). Named after General Bennie Schriever, "the father of the United States Air Force's space program," Schriever Base is a cozy base. You can e-mail, call and write to the GPS center, and follow the ins and outs of the small community with their Internet newspaper, the Satellite Flyer.
One of the advertisements shows a bear in a tie staring sadly at a TV against a mountainous background. The text says: 'Watch out! Gore-Tex can change your life. We were all free once. Our home was the forest, the mountain and the ocean. Then something happened. We only lived indoors. We became pen-eaters, TV junkies and party numbers. But our soul is still out there. GoreTex can change your life and bring you back to nature. It's more than a warning. It's a promise. '
The google search engine seems old, but it has only been operational since 1998. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who developed the search system, were 23 and 22 years old respectively when they bumped into each other at Stanford University in 1995. Page had studied computer science in Michigan and came to Stanford over the weekend to see if it was interesting to do a PhD. Brin had arrived earlier from Maryland and was assigned to give newcomers a tour of the campus.
Anyone who loves pottery and knows the south of France a bit has certainly heard of the town of Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie, just north of Nîmes. Today it still has twelve pottery kilns, but in the middle of the nineteenth century there were sixty. They also baked stone tobacco pipes for half of France. Joseph Monier was born in 1823 between all those ovens, the man who, curiously enough, would go down in history as the inventor of reinforced concrete.
Johann Jacob Schweppe was born in 1740 near Kassel, Germany. His parents thought he was too weak for farm work and gave the frail little man to a traveling tinker when he was eleven. He was amazed at how quickly the boy had mastered repairing kettles and pans. He brought him home after a few months and said that he thought it was a shame to let little Johann work below his level. He advised his parents to apprentice him to a silversmith. This is how little Schweppe ended up with a jeweler and before he was 25 he was established as an independent jeweler in Geneva, Switzerland. Precisely Geneva, the European center for the manufacture of watches, jewelery and precision instruments. In 1777 he was registered as a 'maître-jewellery'. His chef d'œuvre was a traveling box that the guild presidents praised for its exceptional quality.
How the son of the assistant resident of Surakarta, with a Greek name and Javanese, Chinese and Dutch blood in his veins, was not allowed to become an airplane pilot because of a missing phalanx of the right index finger and then chose the automobile, with which he flew more than 350 competitions drove and covered more than two million kilometres, after which he converted his comprehensive knowledge of cars and speed into developing speedometers, traffic cameras and finally the speed camera, of which he himself became a victim into old age.
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