Category Science

            Paper making is one of the inventions made by the Chinese. Paper, as we know it today, was first made in China by Cai Lun, a Chinese court official.

            From 3000 BC onwards, the Egyptians started using papyrus made from dried reeds as a writing material. Parchment and vellum were used in the 2nd century BC in Turkey.

            The kind of paper used in the Middle East during the 8th century was made from linen, rags, and flax cord. However, this paper reached Europe only in the 10th century AD.

            As paper became common mills were built. The very first paper mill in England was built in 1494. The rise of literature soon increased the demand for paper. The continued use of rags and cloth made large-scale production impossible.

            This demand was met in 1800, when a Dutchman, Mathias Koops patented a paper made from straw and wood.

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               During the 13th century AD, sharpened goose feathers were widely used as quill pens in Europe.

               Metal pens were considered fancy and ornamental, even during the 16th century. Bryan Donkin is credited with having invented the steel nib. In 1822, John Mitchell of Birmingham started to mass-produce steel pen nibs, and their popularity took off.

               In 1832, John Joseph Parker became the first to introduce a pen which had its own reservoir of ink. When he was trying to invent a pen that could write on leather, John J. Loud invented the first ballpoint pen. He patented it in 1888 in America. But this was not commercially successful.

               In 1943, Ladislao Jose Biro launched a new model, using quick drying ink.

               Ink had been there even before the invention of the pen. Primitive men used natural inks made from charcoal and iron oxide. In 2000 BC, Chinese scribes used a durable ink made from soot mixed with gum solution.

               The first evidence of prints was Chinese wood cuts from at least the 7th century AD. Cloth printing was popular even before paper printing in China, India, and Europe. Woodblock printing, popularly known today as xylography, was the first method of paper printing. It became widely used throughout East Asia.

               Typography-printing was developed in Europe first, which helped in the mass production of letters on paper. Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1450’s. His was a durable machine. The Gutenberg Bible was the first major book printed using a mass-produced, movable, metal type printing press in Europe.

               Gutenberg developed an oil-based ink which was more resilient than water based inks.

            Typewriter is a machine that was commonly used in the past, and which has keys that are pressed in order to print letters, numbers, or other characters onto paper.

            The English claim that it was Henry Mill who invented the typing machine in 1714.

            Henry received the first typewriter patent in Britain for a machine that appears to have been similar to a typewriter.

            Although many went before him, it is the name of Christopher Latham Sholes that is generally linked to the title of ‘inventor of the typewriter’, as he introduced the first typewriter to be commercially successful in 1868. He worked along with Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule.

            The working prototype was made by the machinist Matthias Schwalbach. The patent was sold to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons, then famous as a manufacturer of sewing machines, to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. This was the origin of the term typewriter.

            It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which because of the machine’s success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. Later, many types of typewriters came into the market.

               The bicycle is a vehicle consisting of two wheels held in a frame, one behind the other, propelled by pedals, and steered with handlebars attached to the front wheel. The credit for creating the first bicycle belongs to a German, Baron Karl von Drais. In 1818, von Drais patented his design and this two wheeled, human propelled machine became known as the ‘velocipede’. The following year, the design was copied to produce an iron model.

                Later, Pierre Michaux got the idea of attaching pedals to the simple devices that were in use during the 1850s. Thus, Michaux and his son Ernest produced a velocipede with pedals.

               This principle was taken further by James Starley. He created a bicycle model nicknamed penny-farthing. It got its name because of the size of its wheels. It created a cycling boom. In 1889, gears were introduced to the bicycle.

               James Moore won the first cycle track race ever in 1869.

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               The introduction of the safe bicycle led to the invention of the motorcycle. The very first steam powered motorcycle was made in the 1860s by Pierre Michaux, a blacksmith in Paris. Those motorcycles were called the Michaux-Perreaux Steam   Velocipede.

               A German, Gottlieb Daimler invented the first petrol engine motorcycle in 1885. The modern day motorcycle design is adopted from a model made by Eugene and Michel Werner. Their motocyclette was exhibited in 1897.

               However, the German-built Hildebrand & Wolfmuller motorcycle was the first motorized, two-wheeled vehicle sold to the public.

               Hildebrand & Wolfmuller was also the first company to refer to the vehicle as a ‘motorcycle’.

               In the early 1950s the NSU Company in Germany started producing the evergreen motorcycles called mopeds.

               Motor scooters first appeared in Italy in 1946 and the first one was Vespa.

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