~ ‘Invention’ ~

[MysteRy]

Email




Computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson invented internet based email in late 1971. Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971).

Ray Tomlinson worked as a computer engineer for Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the company hired by the United States Defense Department to build the first Internet in 1968.

Ray Tomlinson was experimenting with a popular program he wrote called SNDMSG that the ARPANET programmers and researchers were using on the network computers (Digital PDP-10s) to leave messages for each other.

SNDMSG was a “local” electronic message program. You could only leave messages on the computer that you were using for other persons using that computer to read.

Tomlinson used a file transfer protocol that he was working on called CYPNET to adapt the SNDMSG program so it could send electronic messages to any computer on the ARPANET network.

The @ Symbol
Ray Tomlinson chose the @ symbol to tell which user was “at” what computer. The @ goes in between the user’s login name and the name of his/her host computer.

First Email
The first email was sent between two computers that were actually sitting besides each other. However, the ARPANET network was used as the connection between the two. The first email message was “QWERTYUIOP”.

Ray Tomlinson is quoted as saying he invented email,”Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea.” No one was asking for email.

[MysteRy]

Toilets




King Minos of Crete had the first flushing water closet recorded in history and that was over 2800 years ago.

A toilet was discovered in the tomb of a Chinese king of the Western Han Dynasty that dates back to 206 BC to 24 AD.

The ancient Romans had a system of sewers. They built simple outhouses or latrines directly over the running waters of the sewers that poured into the TiberRiver.

Chamber pots were used during the middle ages. A chamber pot is a special metal or ceramic bowl that you used and then tossed the contents out (often out the window).

In 1596, a flush toilet was invented and built for Queen Elizabeth I by her Godson, Sir John Harrington.

The first patent for the flushing toilet was issued to Alexander Cummings in 1775.

During the 1800s, people realized that poor sanitary conditions caused diseases. Having toilets and sewer systems that could control human waste became a priority to lawmakers, medical experts, inventors, and the general public.

In 1829, the Tremont Hotel of Boston became the first hotel to have indoor plumbing, and had eight water closets built by Isaiah Rogers. Until 1840, indoor plumbing could be found only in the homes of the rich and the better hotels.

Beginning in 1910, toilet designs started changing away from the elevated water tank into the modern toilet with a close tank and bowl.

[MysteRy]

Watch




The oldest means of determining time is by observing the location of the sun in the sky. When the sun is directly overhead, the time is roughly 12:00 noon.

A slightly later development, and one less subject to an individual’s judgment, is the use of a sundial. During the daylight hours, sunlight falls on a vertical pole placed at the center of a calibrated dial, thus casting a shadow on the dial and providing the reader with a relatively accurate time reading.

The invention of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century was a major advancement—it provided a more concise and consistent method of measuring time.

The mechanical clock includes a complicated series of wheels, gears, and levers powered by a falling weights and with a pendulum (or later a wound-up spring). These pieces together moved the hand or hands on a dial to show the time.

The addition of chimes or gongs on the hour, half hour, and quarter hour followed soon afterward. By the eighteenth century, smaller clocks for the home were available, and, unlike their predecessors, were closed and sealed in a case.

Developments in metal technology and in miniaturization, the lubrication of small parts, and the use of first, natural sapphires (and then artificial sapphires) at the spots that received the most stress (the jeweled movement) all became integral components of horological science.

Small pocket watches, perhaps two to three inches (five to seven centimeters) in diameter, were available by the end of the nineteenth century. Mechanical wristwatches were an everyday item in the United States by the 1960s. And yet, the central problem faced by watch and clockmakers remained the same: mechanical parts wear down, become inaccurate, and break.

In the years immediately following World War II, interest in atomic physics led to the development of the atomic clock. Radioactive materials emit particles (decayed) at a known, steady rate.

The parts of a mechanical clock that ratcheted to keep the time could be replaced by a device that stimulated the watch movement each time a particle was emitted by the radioactive element. Atomic clocks, incidentally, are still made and sold, and they are found to be consistently accurate.

With the development of the microchip in the 1970s and 1980s, a new type of watch was invented. Wristwatches that mixed microchip technology with quartz crystals became the standard; there are few non-quartz wristwatches made today.

The microchip is utilized to send signals to the dial of the watch on a continual basis. Because it is not a mechanical device with moving parts, it does not wear out.

The use of quartz in watches makes use of a long-known type of electricity known as piezoelectricity. Piezoelectricity is the current which flows from or through a piece of quartz when the quartz is put under electrical and/or mechanical pressure (piezo is from the Greek verb meaning “to press”).

A quartz watch uses the electricity from a piece of quartz subjected to the electricity from a battery to send a regular, countable series of signals (oscillations) to one or more microchips. (Electrical wall clocks, in contrast, use the regularity of wall current to keep track of time.)

The most accurate quartz watches are those in which the time appears in an electronically controlled digital display, produced via a light-emitting diode (LED) or a liquid crystal display (LCD).

It is possible, of course, to have the microprocessor send its signals to mechanical devices that make hands move on the watch face, creating an analog display.

But because the hands are mechanically operated through a portion of the watch known as a gear train, analogue watches usually are not as accurate as digitals and are subject to wear.

Both types of watches achieve tremendous accuracy, with digital watches commonly being accurate to within three seconds per month.

[MysteRy]

Clothes Iron




A clothes iron, also referred to as simply an iron, is a small appliance used in ironing to remove wrinkles from fabric. Ironing works by loosening the ties between the long chains of molecules that exist in polymer fiber materials.

With the heat and the weight of the ironing plate, the fibers are stretched and the fabric maintains its new shape when cool.

Some materials such as cotton require the use of water to loosen the intermolecular bonds. Many materials developed in the twentieth century are advertised as needing little or no ironing.

The electric iron was invented in 1882 by Henry W. Seeley, a New York inventor. Seeley patented his “electric flatiron” on June 6, 1882 (patent no. 259,054).

History
Metal pans filled with hot water were used for smoothing fabrics in China in the 1st century BC. From the 17th century, sadirons or sad irons began to be used. They were thick slabs of cast iron, delta-shaped and with a handle, heated in a fire. These were also called flat irons.

A later design consisted of an iron box which could be filled with hot coals, which had to be periodically aerated by attaching a bellows. In Kerala in India, burning coconut shells were used instead of charcoal, as they have a similar heating capacity.

This method is still in use as a backup device since power outages are frequent. Other box irons had heated metal inserts instead of hot coals.

Another solution was to employ a cluster of solid irons that were heated from the single source: as the iron currently in use cools down, it could be quickly replaced by another one that is hot.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were many irons in use which were heated by a fuel such as kerosene, ethanol, whale oil, natural gas, carbide gas as with carbide lamps, or even gasoline.

Some houses were equipped with a system of pipes for distributing natural gas or carbide gas to different rooms in order to operate appliances such as irons, in addition to lights. Despite the risk of fire, liquid-fuel irons were sold in U.S. rural areas up through World War II.

In the industrialized world, these designs have been superseded by the electric iron, which uses resistive heating from an electric current. The hot plate, called the sole plate, is made of aluminium or stainless steel.

The heating element is controlled by a thermostat which switches the current on and off to maintain the selected temperature. The invention of the resistively heated electric iron is credited to Henry W. Seeley of New York in 1882.

In the same year an iron heated by a carbon arc was introduced in France, but was too dangerous to be successful. The early electric irons had no easy way to control their temperature, and the first thermostatically controlled electric iron appeared in the 1920s. Later, steam was used to iron clothing. Credit for the invention of the steam iron goes to Thomas Sears.

[MysteRy]

History of the Remote Control




General History
The first machines to be operated by remote control were used mainly for military purposes. Radio-controlled motorboats, developed by the German navy, were used to ram enemy ships in WWI. Radio controlled bombs and other remote control weapons were used in WWII.

Once the wars were over, United States scientists experimented to find nonmilitary uses for the remote control. In the late 1940′s automatic garage door openers were invented, and in the 1950′s the first TV remote controls were used.

History of the TV remote control
Zenith began playing around with the idea of a TV remote control in the early 1950′s. They developed one in 1952 called “Lazy Bones,” which was a long cable that was attached to the TV set. Pushing buttons on the remote activated a motor that would rotate the tuner in the set. This type of remote wasn’t popular for long considering that, at the time, there were very few channels to choose from.

In 1955, the Flash-o-Matic was invented. A flashlight was shined toward light sensitive cells in each of the four corners of the TV. Each corner had a different function. They turned the TV on and off, changed the channel, and controlled the volume. However, people often forgot which corner of the TV operated which control. Also, if the set was in sunlight, the sun’s rays would affect the operations of the TV.

In 1957 a group of engineers developed the Zenith “Space Command,” a wireless remote control using ultrasonic waves. The problem with the ultrasonic control was that clinking metal, such as dog tags, could affect the TV set.

High frequencies sometimes also made dogs bark. The ultrasonic remote was used for two decades until engineers discovered a better way to operate TV’s, the infrared remote control.

On the infrared control, each button has it’s own command, and is sent to the TV set in a series of signals. There is a digital code for each button, and in the TV there is a tiny sensor called a photodetector that identifies the infrared beam, and translates the code into a command.

Manufacturers used to only make remote controls that operated one TV set. However, they’ve recently begun making universal remote controls that can operate any TV set.

Experts predict that someday remote controls will control almost every device in the home.

[MysteRy]

Pen




Lewis Waterman patented the first practical fountain pen in 1884. Writing instruments designed to carry their own supply of ink had existed in principle for over one hundred years before Waterman’s patent.

For example, the oldest known fountain pen that has survived today was designed by a Frenchmen named M. Bion and dated 1702. Peregrin Williamson, a Baltimore shoemaker, received the first American patent for a pen in 1809.

John Scheffer received a British patent in 1819 for his half quill, half metal pen that he attempted to mass manufacture. John Jacob Parker patented the first self-filling fountain pen in 1831. However, early fountain pen models were plagued by ink spills and other failures that left them impractical and hard to sell.

The fountain pen’s design came after a thousand years of using quill-pens. Early inventors observed the apparent natural ink reserve found in the hollow channel of a bird’s feather and tried to produce a similar effect, with a man-made pen that would hold more ink and not require constant dipping into the ink well.

Filling a long thin reservoir made of hard rubber with ink and sticking a metal ‘nib’ at the bottom was not enough to produce a smooth writing instrument.

Lewis Waterman, an insurance salesman, was inspired to improve the early fountain pen designs after destroying a valuable sales contract with leaky-pen ink. Lewis Waterman’s idea was to add an air hole in the nib and three grooves inside the feed mechanism.

A mechanism is composed of three main parts. The nib, which has the contact with the paper. The feed or black part under the nib controls the ink flow from the reservoir to the nib. The round barrel that holds the nib and feed on the writing end protects the ink reservoir internally.

All pens contain an internal reservoir for ink. The different ways that reservoirs filled proved to be one of the most competitive areas in the pen industry. The earliest 19th century pens used an eyedropper; by 1915, most pens had switched to having a self-filling soft and flexible rubber sac as an ink reservoir.

To refill these pens, the reservoirs were squeezed flat by an internal plate, then the pen’s nib was inserted into a bottle of ink and the pressure on the internal plate was released so that the ink sac would fill up drawing in a fresh supply of ink.

[MysteRy]

Crescograph




A crescograph is a device for measuring growth in plants. It was invented in the early 20th century by Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose, an Indian scientist.

The Bose crescograph uses a series of clockwork gears and a smoked glass plate to record the movement of the tip of a plant (or its roots) at magnifications of up to 10,000.

Marks are made on the plate at intervals of a few seconds, demonstrating how the rate of growth varies under varying stimuli. Bose experimented with temperature, chemicals, gasses and electricity.

A Bose inspired modern electronic Crescograph was designed and built by Randall Fontes to measure plant movement at Stanford Research Institute for which culminated in a report “Organic Biofield Sensor” by H. E. Puthoff and R. Fontes.

The Electronic Crescograph plant movement detector is capable of measurements as small as 1/1,000,000 of an inch. However, its normal operating range is from 1/1000 to 1/10,000 of an inch.

The component which actually measures the movement is a differential transformer. Its movable core is hinged between two points. A micrometer is used to adjust and calibrate the system. It could record plant growth magnifying a small movements such as 10,000,000 times.

[MysteRy]

Umbrella




The basic umbrella was invented over four thousand years ago. We have seen evidence of umbrellas in the ancient art and artifacts of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and China.

These ancient umbrellas or parasols, were first designed to provide shade from the sun. The Chinese were the first to waterproof their umbrellas for use as rain protection. They waxed and lacquered their paper parasols in order to use them for rain.

Origins of the Term Umbrella
The word “umbrella” comes from the Latin root word “umbra”, meaning shade or shadow. Starting in the 16th century the umbrella became popular to the western world, especially in the rainy weather of northern Europe. At first it was considered only an accessory suitable for women. Then the Persian traveler and writer, Jonas Hanway (1712-86), carried and used an umbrella publicly in England for thirty years, he popularized umbrella use among men. English gentleman often referred to their umbrellas as a “Hanway.”

James Smith and Sons
The first all umbrella shop was called “James Smith and Sons“. The shop opened in 1830, and is still located at 53 New Oxford Street in London, England.

The early European umbrellas were made of wood or whalebone and covered with alpaca or oiled canvas. The artisans made the curved handles for the umbrellas out of hard woods like ebony, and were well paid for their efforts.

English Steels Company
In 1852, Samuel Fox invented the steel ribbed umbrella design. Fox also founded the “English Steels Company”, and claimed to have invented the steel ribbed umbrella as a way of using up stocks of farthingale stays, steel stays used in women’s corsets. After that, compact collapsible umbrellas were the next major technical innovation in umbrella manufacture, over a century later.

[MysteRy]

Odometer




An odometer or odograph is an instrument that indicates distance traveled by a vehicle, such as a bicycle or automobile. The device may be electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two. The word derives from the Greek words hodós (“path”) or gateway and métron (“measure”). In countries where Imperial units or US customary units are used, it is sometimes called a mileometer or milometer, or, colloquially, a tripometer.

History
Odometers were first developed in the 1600s for wagons and other horse-drawn vehicles in order to measure distances traveled. In 1645 Blaise Pascal invented the pascaline. Though not an odometer, the pascaline utilized gears to compute measurements. Each gear contained 10 teeth. The first gear advanced the next gear one position when moved one complete revolution, the same principle employed on modern mechanical odometers.

Odometers were developed for ships in 1698 with the odometer invented by the Englishman Thomas Savery. Benjamin Franklin, U.S. statesman and the first Postmaster General, built a prototype odometer in 1775 that he attached to his carriage to help measure the mileage of postal routes. In 1847, William Clayton, a Mormon pioneer, invented the Roadometer, which he attached to a wagon used by American settlers heading west. The Roadometer recorded the distance traveled each day by the wagon trains. The Roadometer used two gears and was an early example of an odometer with pascaline-style gears in actual use.

In 1895 Curtis Hussey Veeder invented the Cyclometer. The Cyclometer was a mechanical device that counted the number of rotations of a bicycle wheel. A flexible cable transmitted the number of rotations of the wheel to an analog odometer visible to the rider, which converted the wheel rotations into the number of miles traveled according to a predetermined formula.

In 1903 Arthur P. and Charles H. Warner, two brothers from Beloit, Wisconsin, introduced their patented Auto-meter. The Auto-Meter used a magnet attached to a rotating shaft to induce a magnetic pull upon a thin metal disk. Measuring this pull provided accurate measurements of both distance and speed information to automobile drivers in a single instrument. The Warners sold their company in 1912 to the Stewart & Clark Company of Chicago. The new firm was renamed the Stewart-Warner Corporation. By 1925, Stewart-Warner odometers and trip meters were standard equipment on the vast majority of automobiles and motorcycles manufactured in the United States.

Trip meters
Most modern cars include a trip meter (trip odometer). Unlike the odometer, a trip meter is reset at any point in a journey, making it possible to record the distance traveled in any particular journey or part of a journey. It was traditionally a purely mechanical device but, in most modern vehicles, it is now electronic. Luxury vehicles often have multiple trip meters. Most trip meters will show a maximum value of 999.9. The trip meter may be used to record the distance traveled on each tank of fuel, making it very easy to accurately track the energy efficiency of the vehicle; another common use is resetting it to zero at each instruction in a sequence of driving directions, to be sure when one has arrived at the next turn.

GPS used as odometer
Recently, exercise enthusiasts have observed that an advanced Global Positioning System receiver (GPSr) with an odometer mode serves as a very accurate pedometer for outdoor activities. While not truly counting steps (no pendulum is involved) an advanced GPS odometer can accurately reveal the distance traveled to within 1/100 of a mile (depending on the model, perhaps 1/1000 of a mile). 1/1000 of a mile is approximately the distance of a single pace or 2 steps (1.609 m). Precise metric odometers have a precision of 1/100 or 1/1000 km, 10 or 1 metre(s) respectively.

A GPS with odometer mode is also an excellent and inexpensive means to verify proper operation of both the speedometer and odometer mounted in a vehicle.

[MysteRy]

Stethoscope




The stethoscope is an acoustic medical device for auscultation, or listening to the internal sounds of a body. It is often used to listen to lung and heart sounds. It is also used to listen to intestines and blood flow in arteries and veins. In combination with a sphygmomanometer, it is commonly used for measurements of blood pressure. Less commonly, “mechanic’s stethoscopes” are used to listen to internal sounds made by machines, such as diagnosing a malfunctioning automobile engine by listening to the sounds of its internal parts. Stethoscopes can also be used to check scientific vacuum chambers for leaks, and for various other small-scale acoustic monitoring tasks. A stethoscope that intensifies auscultatory sounds is called phonendoscope.

History
The stethoscope was invented in France in 1816 by René Laennec at the Necker-Enfants Malades Hospital in Paris. It consisted of a wooden tube and was monaural. The first flexible stethoscope of any sort may have been a binaural instrument with articulated joints not very clearly described in 1829. In 1840, Golding Bird described a stethoscope he had been using with a flexible tube. Bird was the first to publish a description of such a stethoscope but he noted in his paper the prior existence of an earlier design (which he thought was of little utility) which he described as the snake ear trumpet. In 1851, Irish physician Arthur Leared invented a binaural stethoscope, and in 1852 George Cammann perfected the design of the instrument for commercial production, which has become the standard ever since. By 1873, there were descriptions of a differential stethoscope that could connect to slightly different locations to create a slight stereo effect, though this did not become a standard tool in clinical practice.

Several other minor refinements were made to stethoscopes, until in the early 1960s Dr. David Littmann, a Harvard Medical School professor, created a new stethoscope that was lighter than previous models and had improved acoustics. In the late 1970s, 3M-Littmann introduced the tunable diaphragm: a very hard (G-10) glass-epoxy resin diaphragm member with an overmolded silicone flexible acoustic surround which permitted increased excursion of the diaphragm member in a “z”-axis with respect to the plane of the sound collecting area. The left shift to a lower resonant frequency increases the volume of some low frequency sounds due to the longer waves propagated by the increased excursion of the hard diaphragm member suspended in the concentric accountic surround. Conversely, restricting excursion of the diaphragm by pressing the stethoscope diaphragm surface firmly against the anatomical area overlying the physiological sounds of interest, the acoustic surround could also be used to dampen excursion of the diaphragm in response to “z”-axis pressure against a concentric fret. This raises the frequency bias by shortening the wavelength to auscultate a higher range of physiological sounds. 3-M Littmann is also credited with a collapsible mold frame for sludge molding a single column bifurcating stethoscope tube with an internal septum dividing the single column stethoscope tube into discrete left and right binaural channels.

In 1999, Richard Deslauriers patented the first external noise reducing stethoscope, the DRG Puretone. It featured two parallel lumens containing two steel coils which dissipated infiltrating noise as inaudible heat energy. The steel coil “insulation” added .30 lb to each stethoscope. In 2005, DRG’s diagnostics division was acquired by TRIMLINE Medical Products.

Types of stethoscopes
- Acoustic
- Electronic
- Recording stethoscopes
- Fetal stethoscope

[MysteRy]

Floppy Disk




A floppy disk is a disk storage medium composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic carrier lined with fabric that removes dust particles. They are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).

Invented by IBM, floppy disks in 3.5-inch, 5.25-inch and 8-inch forms were a ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s to the 2000s.

While floppy disk drives still have some limited uses, especially with legacy industrial computer equipment, they have been superseded by data storage methods with much greater capacity, such as USB flash drives, portable external hard disk drives, optical discs, memory cards, and computer networks.

The earliest floppy disks, invented in the late 1960s, were 8 inches in diameter; they became commercially available in 1971. These disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term “floppy disk” appeared in print as early as 1970, and although in 1973 IBM announced its first media as “Type 1 Diskette” the industry continued to use the terms “floppy disk” or “floppy”.

Types of Floppy Disks

5.25 Inch Floppy Disk are not commonly found anymore. They are used by older computers

3.5 Inch Floppy Disk are the most commonly used disk. It is encased in a hard plastic square case that cannot be opened. Information is magnetically recorded onto this thin flexible round disk.

Floppy Capacity
Floppies can be found in two storage capacities. They are high density disks and double-density disks.

Double-Density Disks (720K capacity) store the least amount of information. They are still used, but not as common as the high density disks. It is referred to with the letters DD on the label. With only one hole at the top of the disk, it can store 720K of information.

High-Density Disks (1.44K capacity) store the most information. Having two holes at the top of the disk, it can store 1.44 MB of information. It usually has the letters HD written on it. This is the most commonly used floppy disk.

[MysteRy]

Compass




A compass is an instrument containing a freely suspended magnetic element which displays the direction of the horizontal component of the Earth’s magnetic field at the point of observation.

Magnetic Compass
The magnetic compass is an old Chinese invention, probably first made in China during the Qin dynasty (221-206 B.C.). Chinese fortune tellers used lodestones (a mineral composed of an iron oxide which aligns itself in a north-south direction) to construct their fortune telling boards.
Eventually someone noticed that the lodestones were better at pointing out real directions, leading to the first compasses. They designed the compass on a square slab which had markings for the cardinal points and the constellations. The pointing needle was a lodestone spoon-shaped device, with a handle that would always point south.

Magnetized Needles
Magnetized needles used as direction pointers instead of the spoon-shaped lodestones appeared in the 8th century AD, again in China, and between 850 and 1050 they seem to have become common as navigational devices on ships.

Compass as a Navigational Aid
The first person recorded to have used the compass as a navigational aid was Zheng He (1371-1435), from the Yunnan province in China, who made seven ocean voyages between 1405 and 1433.

Ferrites or magnetic oxides are stones that attract iron and other metals. These are natural magnets and are not inventions. However, the machines that we make with magnets are inventions.
Ferrites were first discovered thousands of year ago. Large deposits were found in the district of Magnesia in Asia Minor, giving the mineral’s name of magnetite (Fe3O4).

Magnetite was nicknamed lodestone and used by early navigators to locate the magnetic North Pole. William Gilbert published De Magnete, a paper on magnetism in 1600, about the use and properties of Magnetite. In 1819, Hans Christian Oersted reported that when an electric current in a wire was applied to a magnetic compass needle, the magnet was affected – this is called electromagnetism.

In 1825, British inventor William Sturgeon (1783-1850) exhibited a device that laid the foundations for large-scale electronic communications: the electromagnet. Sturgeon displayed its power by lifting nine pounds with a seven-ounce piece of iron wrapped with wires through which the current of a single cell battery was sent.

Cow Magnets
U.S. patent # 3,005,458 is the first patent issued for a cow magnet issued to Louis Paul Longo, the inventor of the Magnetrol Magnet, for prevention of hardware disease in cows.

[MysteRy]

Thermometer




Thermometers measure temperature, by using materials that change in some way when they are heated or cooled. In a mercury or alcohol thermometer the liquid expands as it is heated and contracts when it is cooled, so the length of the liquid column is longer or shorter depending on the temperature. Modern thermometers are calibrated in standard temperature units such as Fahrenheit or Celsius and Kelvin.

Early History
In 1593, Galileo Galilei invented a rudimentary water thermoscope, which for the first time, allowed temperature variations to be measured. In 1612, the Italian inventor Santorio became the first inventor to put a numerical scale on his thermoscope. It was perhaps the first crude clinical thermometer, as it was designed to be place in a patient’s mouth for temperature taking. In 1654, the first enclosed liquid-in-a-glass thermometer was invented by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II. The Duke used alcohol as his liquid.

Fahrenheit Scale – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was the German physicist who invented a alcohol thermometer in 1709, and the mercury thermometer in 1714. In 1724, he introduced the standard temperature scale that bears his name – Fahrenheit Scale.

Centigrade Scale – Anders Celsius
The Celsius temperature scale is also referred to as the “centigrade” scale. Centigrade means “consisting of or divided into 100 degrees”. In 1742, the Celsius scale was invented by Swedish Astronomer Anders Celsius.

Kelvin Scale – Lord Kelvin
Lord Kelvin took the whole process one step further with his invention of the Kelvin Scale in 1848. The Kelvin Scale measures the ultimate extremes of hot and cold. Kelvin developed the idea of absolute temperature, what is called the “Second Law of Thermodynamics”, and developed the dynamical theory of heat.

Mouth Thermometers
In 1612, the Italian inventor Santorio invented a mouth thermometer and perhaps the first crude clinical thermometer. However, it was both bulky, inaccurate, and took too long to get a reading. The first doctors Hermann Boerhaave, Gerard L.B. Van Swieten founder of the Viennese School of Medicine, and Anton De Haen. These doctors found temperature correlated to  the progress of an illness, however, few of their contemporaries agreed, and the thermometer was not widely used.

First Practical Medical Thermometer
Sir Thomas Allbutt (1836–1925) invented the first practical medical thermometer used for taking the temperature of a person in 1867. It was portable, 6 inches in length and able to record a patient’s temperature in 5  min.

Ear Thermometer
During World War II, Theodore Hannes Benzinger invented the ear thermometer. David Phillips invented the infra-red ear thermometer in 1984. Dr. Jacob Fraden, CEO of Advanced Monitors Corporation, invented the world’s best-selling ear thermometer, the Thermoscan® Human Ear Thermometer.

[MysteRy]

Sputnik – The First Satellite in the Space




Name: Sputnik I

Launched On: October 4, 1957

Launched By: Soviet Union

Dimension: 58 cm. or 22.8 inches in diameter

Weight: 83.6 kg. or 183.9 pounds

Time Taken to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path: 98 minutes

Satellite Race Between US and Soviet Union:
In September 1955, the Naval Research Laboratory’s Vanguard proposal was chosen to represent the U.S. during the IGY.

The Sputnik launch changed everything. As a technical achievement, Sputnik caught the world’s attention and the American public off-guard. Its size was more impressive than Vanguard’s intended 3.5-pound payload. In addition, the public feared that the Soviets’ ability to launch ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S. Then the Soviets struck again; on November 3, Sputnik II was launched, carrying a much heavier payload, including a dog named Laika.

On January 31, 1958, the tide changed, when the United States successfully launched Explorer I. This satellite carried a small scientific payload that eventually discovered the magnetic radiation belts around the Earth, named after principal investigator James Van Allen.

The Sputnik launch also led directly to the creation of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In July 1958, Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act (commonly called the “Space Act“), which created NASA as of October 1, 1958 from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and other government agencies.

[MysteRy]

Bicycle Facts



In 1817, Karl von Drais, a German baron, invented a horseless carriage that would help him get around faster. The two-wheeled, pedal-less device was propelled by pushing your feet against the ground, The machine became known as the “draisine,” and led to the creation of the modern-day bicycle.

The term “bicycle” was not introduced until the 1860s, when it was coined in France to describe a new kind of two-wheeler with a mechanical drive.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, the brothers who built the first flying airplane, operated a small bike repair shop in Dayton, Ohio. They used their workshop to build the 1903 Wright Flyer.

Fred A. Birchmore, 25, circled the globe by bicycle in 1935. The entire trip, through Europe, Asia, and the United States, covered forty thousand miles. He pedaled about 25,000 miles. The rest was traveled by boat. He wore out seven sets of tires.

There are over a half billion bicycles in China. Bikes were first brought to China in the late 1800s.

About 100 million bicycles are manufactured worldwide each year.

Over the past 30 years, bicycle delivery services have developed into an important industry, especially in cities, where the couriers have earned a reputation for their high speed and traffic-weaving skills.

Americans use their bicycles for less than one percent of all urban trips. Europeans bike in cities a lot more often—in Italy 5 percent of all trips are on bicycle, 30 percent in the Netherlands, and seven out of eight Dutch people over age 15 have a bike.

The Tour de France is one of the most famous bicycle races in the world. Established in 1903, it is considered to be the biggest test of endurance out of all sports. Lance Armstrong, an American cyclist, is the only rider to have won seven titles (1999–2005) after surviving cancer.

Bicycle Moto Cross (BMX), an extreme style of bicycle track racing, became a sport in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, China. Maris Strombergs, of Latvia, received the gold medal for Men’s BMX, and Anne-Caroline Chausson, from France, took home the gold in the first Women’s BMX Olympic event.