Category Inventions & Discoveries

In 1918, the United States Navy began using zip fasteners in the clothing and other gear of its men during World War I. By the 1920s, zips could be found in all kinds of clothing, footwear, bags and suitcases. The zip finally arrived on the world scene when fashion designers began using it for haute couture.

The zip was the creation of American inventor Whitcomb Judson. He liked wearing high boots that were all the vogue in 1893, both among men and women. The boots had long shoelaces which took ages to do up. Judson designed a fastener which he called a ‘clasp locker’. It had a slider to link hooks and rings but was clumsy and frequently jammed. The invention was not a success.

It was only 20 years later, in 1913, when Judson employed Swedish engineer Gideon Sundback that the zip took on its present form-two fabric strips with metal or plastic teeth that locked when the zip was pulled closed and unlocked when it was opened.

Judson did not live to see the success of his invention. He died in 1909.

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Behind all of these inventions are incredible stories. Let's take a look at some of these inventions that eventually became an integral part of our lives. Here we trace the story of products from lab to lifestyle!

Plastic

Nothing is as ubiquitous as plastic. In fact, this man-made material has become so ingrained into our lives that we interact with one or the other form of plastic every day. But how did its journey begin? It all started with polyethylene, which is more familiar to us as polythene. It is one of the first plastics that was ever used. It was discovered by chance not once, but twice! The first one was sometime before 1900 when German scientist Hans von Pechmann came across a residue in his test tube. He thought that the waxy resin couldn't have any practical applications and failed to check further. The second time was when scientists Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson came across this by accident in 1933. When experimenting with ethylene, one of the vessels leaked. The presence of oxygen led to it acting as an initiator, leading to the formation of a white, waxy residue. Thus polythene came to be. The company the duo worked with saw the immense potential of the product and patented it. However, it took a few years until they were able to produce it with perfection. The first product they created out of polythene was a cream-colored walking stick. It was later used widely during World War II as an insulating material for radar cables. The low cost and highly versatile nature of the material were tapped into and the innovation turned into something that permeated into every walk of our lives. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Sticky notes

These canary yellow notes have been around for the past several years. They are universal products and indispensable in offices. Available in a multitude of shapes and colours, these notes are used by not just office-goers but students as well. So how did these sticky notes come to be? This office organising tool was discovered by chance. Spencer Silver was a scientist at the company 3M. He researched adhesives in the laboratory. Over the process, he discovered an adhesive that would stick lightly to surfaces but it wouldn't bond tightly. Silver was trying to develop new adhesives that were stronger and tougher. But this new adhesive was anything but strong or tough. What Silver had discovered was microspheres that would retain their stickiness but had the characteristic of removability. Meanwhile, there was another scientist going through a dilemma. During his practice at the church choir, Art Fry, another 3M scientist, would use little bits of paper to mark the music notes because they would always fall out of the hymn book. He was in search of a bookmark that would stay but not damage the pages. And once he attended the seminar on Silver's microspheres, he had his "Aha" moment. The two scientists partnered and began developing a product. The new adhesive notes proved to be helpful in communication and they could see its immense potential. The notes were supplied to the staff at the company and were later launched to the masses. Thus was born the sticky notes. With it, the duo had forever changed the way people communicate!

Corn flakes

What's for breakfast? Is it corn flakes? It is quite likely that you would have had cornflakes at some point in your life. The Kellogs corn flakes is a known breakfast brand. Did you know that the cereal was developed accidentally? It was in the 1890s that the com flakes were designed. The story starts at the Battle Creek Sanitarium health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan. It was run by brothers John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor, and Will Keith Kellogg who wanted to provide healthy food to the inmates. One night John Kellogg accidentally left a batch of wheat-berry dough midway. This was normally used to produce a type of granola. Rather than throwing it out the next morning, the dough was sent through the rollers. Instead of normal long sheets of dough, they obtained delicate flakes. These were then baked and they discovered a new type of cereal. Will Keith saw the potential of this new cereal and started his own company although John Harvey, who was a proponent of biologic" living, was not interested in making it a business. The Kellogg Company started producing corn flakes for the wider public. It was the start of a whole new cereal breakfast industry.

Lab-grown meat

What's on your plate? Soon it can be lab-grown meat! The farmed meat is getting replaced by meat from the laboratory as meat products are grown from animal cells for human consumption. Recently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared lab-grown meat for human consumption as safe. Here, instead of meat reared from livestock, meat is grown in a sterile environment in a laboratory. The living cells from chicken are first taken and then grown in a laboratory. Thus the required meat product is created. Cultivated meat is dubbed green meat as it does not lead to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming. The absence of the use of antibiotics in animals and a humane way of growing meat are some of the pros of lab-grown meat over traditional livestock production. Seen here is a cooked piece of cultivated chicken breast.

Battery

It powers almost everything. But do you know how it all began? The story behind creating the leakproof battery is quite an interesting one. Back in the day, the battery that was popular was the zinc-carbon battery. But they came with a problem. The zinc would swell and burst. It would cause leakage and short circuits and render the device inoperable. The problem was solved by Herman Anthony, an engineer with the company Ray-O-Vac, which was in the battery business. He used a better grade of manganese in the battery. This reduced the swelling. He then used steel to encase the battery. The battery was the first to solve the problem of leakage. In 1939, it was showcased to the public but the patent was received only in 1940. When World War II happened, batteries were rationed out to civilians. Like most companies at the time, Ray-O-Vac started supplying batteries to the military. The battery sealed in steel was widely used in flashlights, radios, walkie-talkies, mine detectors, and so on. After the war, it was used by the masses to power a plethora of devices.

Strikeable matches

Fire has been humankind's greatest discovery. And so have been the discovery of strikeable matches that we use now. It gave us the ability to light fires quickly and made life easier. But did you know that the strikeable match was invented by chance? The story takes us back to 1826. It was an English chemist John Walker who invented it. He was working on an experimental paste that can be used in guns. He noticed that the stick he was using burst into flames when he scraped it. He observed that it was the coating of chemicals on the stick that led to the wooden stick catching fire. That was how the first friction match was invented. He started selling his "friction lights", which became a huge success. While the first friction matches were made of cardboard, he soon started replacing it with wooden splints. However, he never patented his work and Londoner Samuel Jones copied the idea and launched his own matches as "Lucifers" in 1829.

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Who set up the world's first website? When was it? Any idea how large the first commercial microwave oven was? Did you know two inventors, working independently, came up with near-identical integrated circuits at about the same time? Who were they? Read on to find out the answers and the backstories of a few other inventions

Connecting the world

In 1969, the Internet took its first baby steps as Arpanet, a network created by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It connected universities and research centres, but its use was restricted to a few million people.

Then in the 1990s, the technology made a quantum jump. Tim Berners-Lee, an English software consultant wrote a program called 'Enquire’, named after 'Enquire Within Upon Everything', a Victorian-age encyclopaedia he had used as a child. He was working for CERN in Switzerland at the time and wanted to organise all his work so that others could access it easily through their computers. He developed a language coding system called HTML or HyperText Markup Language, a location unique to every web page called URL (Universal Resource Locator) and a set of protocols or rules (HTTP or Hyper Text Transfer Protocols) that allowed these pages to be linked together on the Internet. Berners-Lee is credited with setting up the world's first website in 1991.

Berners-Lee did not earn any money from his inventions. However, others such as Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape in 1994, became one of the Web's first millionaires.

It began with a bar of chocolate!

The discovery that microwaves could cook food super quickly was purely accidental. In 1945, American physicist Percy Spencer was testing a magnetron tube engineered to produce very short radio waves for radar systems, when the chocolate bar in his pocket melted. Puzzled that he hadn't felt the heat, Spencer placed popcorn kernel near the tube, and in no time, the popcorn began crackling. His company Raytheon developed this idea further and in 1947, the first commercial microwave oven was introduced – all of 1.5 metres high and weighing 340 kg!

Since it was too expensive to mass-produce, Raytheon went back to the drawing board and in the 1950s, came out with a microwave the size of a small refrigerator. A few years later came the first regular-sized oven-far cheaper and smaller than the previous models.

Chip-sized marvel

A microchip, often called a "chip" or an integrated circuit (IC), is what makes modern computers more compact and faster. Rarely larger than 5 cm in size and manufactured from a semi-conducting material, a chip contains intricate electronic circuits.

Two separate inventors, working independently, invented near-identical integrated circuits at about the same time! In the late 1950s, both American engineer Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and research engineer Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation) were working on the same problem- how to pack in the maximum electrical components in minimal space. It occurred to them that all parts of a circuit, not just the transistor, could be made on a single chip of silicon, making it smaller and much easier to produce.

In 1959, both the engineers applied for patents, and instead of battling it out, decided to cooperate to improve chip technology. In 1961, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation launched the first commercially available integrated circuit. This IC had barely five components and was the size of a small finger. All computers began using chips, and chips also helped create the first electronic portable calculators. Today an IC, smaller than a coin, can hold millions of transistors!

Keeping pace with the heart

Pacemakers send out electrical signals to the heart to regulate erratic heartbeats. Powered by electricity, early pacemakers were as big as televisions, with a single wire or 'lead' being implanted in the patient's heart. A patient could move only as far as the wire would let them and electricity breakdowns were a major cause of worry!

In 1958, a Swedish surgeon and an engineer came together to invent the first battery-powered external pacemaker. Around the same time, American electrical engineer Wilson Greatbatch was creating a machine to record heartbeats. Quite by accident, he realised that by making some changes, he was getting a steady electric pulse from the small device. After two years of research, Greatbatch unveiled the world's first successful implantable pacemaker that could surgically be inserted under the skin of the patient's chest.

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Mary Anning was responsible for unearthing a stunning array of prehistoric fossils in the 19th Century. Her discoveries radically changed the way scientists thought about the history of Earth.

Mary Anning was a fossil collector who made some of the most significant geological discoveries at a time when not much was known about the evolution of Earth and life on it.

Mary was bom in England in 1799 in the sea-side town of Lyme Regis. Mary could hardly attend school as her family was very poor. However, she not only taught herself to read and write but also learned about rocks, soil, anatomy of animals, etc. As a child, she would often go to the seashore with her father to collect shells. Mary learnt fossil hunting and cleaning from her father. After her father’s death, she began exploring the rocky hill-ridges along the shore. She had a good eye for the fossils and braved the merciless rocky terrain to unearth a stunning array of prehistoric fossils. The family made a living by selling the ‘curiosities’ found along the seashore.

Along with her brother, Mary discovered the first complete fossil of ichthyosaurus or fish lizard when she was just 11. Some of her important discoveries include fossils of two giant sea reptiles or plesiosaurs, a flying reptile (pterosaur) and some prehistoric fishes. Mary also discovered that ink from belemnites (squid-like prehistoric creature) can be ground up and used for painting.

Mary Anning soon became famous and was considered an authority on prehistory and geology. Eminent scientists often corresponded with her or came to see her collection of fossils. This is especially noteworthy at a time when women did not enjoy equal status with men. Her discoveries at Lyme Regis, radically changed the way scientists thought about prehistoric life and the history of the earth.

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It was the Biro brothers who invented the ball-point pen in the late 1930s which changed writing forever

The ball-point pen or ball pen, as we know it today, was invented by Hungarian journalist and painter Laszlo Biro.

Biro hated the way fountain pens blotted and smudged on the paper. Once, when he was visiting a newspaper printing press, he saw them using quick-drying ink and rollers. The first thing he did was use the newspaper ink inside a fountain pen but found that the ink was too thick and slow to make it to the nib of the pen.

So he approached his brother, Gyorgy Biro, who was a chemist. Together, they created a rolling ball mechanism for the tip of the pen. This ball picked up ink from a cartridge as it turned in its socket and then rolled again to deposit it on paper. They also created just the right consistency of ink for this kind of nib. They patented their invention in 1938 and called the pen Biro. In some countries, the pens are still known by this name.

Unfortunately, the advent of World War II forced the Biro brothers to flee Hungary because they were Jews. They shifted to Argentina where they began selling their pen commercially under the brand name ‘Eterpen’. That’s how the ball-point pen was born.

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It was the Biro brothers who invented the ball-point pen in the late 1930s which changed writing forever

The ball-point pen or ball pen, as we know it today, was invented by Hungarian journalist and painter Laszlo Biro.

Biro hated the way fountain pens blotted and smudged on the paper. Once, when he was visiting a newspaper printing press, he saw them using quick-drying ink and rollers. The first thing he did was use the newspaper ink inside a fountain pen but found that the ink was too thick and slow to make it to the nib of the pen.

So he approached his brother, Gyorgy Biro, who was a chemist. Together, they created a rolling ball mechanism for the tip of the pen. This ball picked up ink from a cartridge as it turned in its socket and then rolled again to deposit it on paper. They also created just the right consistency of ink for this kind of nib. They patented their invention in 1938 and called the pen Biro. In some countries, the pens are still known by this name.

Unfortunately, the advent of World War II forced the Biro brothers to flee Hungary because they were Jews. They shifted to Argentina where they began selling their pen commercially under the brand name ‘Eterpen’. That’s how the ball-point pen was born.

Picture Credit : Google

Did you know Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg accidentally invented the first artificial sweetener saccharin while working on coal tar derivatives?

The first artificial sweetener to be invented was saccharin. Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg is credited with this invention, which was actually pretty accidental. In the late 1870s,

 Fahlberg was working with another chemist, Ira Remsen. Together, they were studying substances derived from coal tar. One evening, Fahlberg returned home and sat down for dinner. As he bit into a roll, he found it sweet. He asked his wife about this, but she claimed that her rolls were perfectly normal. Fahlberg then tasted his fingers. They were sweet. He rushed back to his lab and began checking up all that he had done that day. He found that he had accidentally invented a substance that was as sweet as sugar, but had no fattening effects like sugar. He named this substance ‘saccharin’

Fahlberg shared the news of the invention with Remsen, but he filed a patent claiming that he was the sole inventor of saccharin. Saccharin caught on commercially and Fahlberg grew rich. This upset Remsen who was a part of the discovery.

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The lightning rod was invented by America’s founding father Benjamin Franklin.

It protects buildings from lightning. It was invented by American scientist Benjamin Franklin who first proved that lightning and electricity were related, by conducting his fabled kite and key experiment.

The lightning rod is a pointed metal rod mounted on the roof of a building. It is electrically connected to the ground through a thick wire. When lightning strikes the building, the rod attracts the electric current and conducts it harmlessly to the ground through the wire. Thus, the lightning charge does not pass through the building where it could potentially start a fire or cause electrocution.

THE KITE EXPERIMENT

In the mid-18th Century, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a storm to see if a key attached to the string would draw an electrical charge. It did and this led to his invention of the lightning rod which protects tall buildings from lightning strikes.

DID YOU KNOW?

Some monuments in the ancient Sri Lankan capital of Anuradhapura bear some of the earliest examples of metal lightning conductors.

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On September 4, 1888, American inventor George Eastman received a patent for “new and useful improvements” in cameras. On that same day, Eastman also registered the trademark for the name Kodak, a word now synonymous with photography.

What do you, or anyone for that matter, do when you need to capture a moment? You pick up a smartphone, open the camera app, try to best fit the moment you are capturing inside the frame, and tap on the button on the screen to click a photograph. It is as simple as that. With more and more people carrying smartphones these days and with even the basic models boasting a decent camera, amateur photography has been revolutionised like never before.

The first such massive change that promoted amateur photography on a large scale came about in 1888 with the advent of the first Kodak camera. A simple box camera pre-loaded with a 100-exposure roll of film, it made photography less cumbersome than ever before. The man who made it possible was American inventor George Eastman.

Born in 1854 in upstate New York, Eastman had humble beginnings. His father’s death meant that he had to drop out of high school while still a teenager in order to support his family. Starting out as a messenger boy earning $3 a week, he went on to be hired as a junior clerk earning $15 a week at the Rochester Savings Bank in 1874.

The trip that didn’t happen

It was in that same year that he was drawn towards photography. When he made travel plans, a colleague suggested that Eastman record his trip using a “photographic  outfit”. Even though he eventually didn’t make the trip, Eastman had purchased the “outfit and described it as “a pack-horse load”.

Apart from the fact that the camera was heavy and needed a tripod, Eastman would have also had to carry a tent and loads of equipment to develop the photographs if he had gone on the trip. Soon, Eastman was obsessed with the idea of making photography easier.

A company is born

Still holding on to his job at the bank, Eastman spent countless evenings and nights toiling away towards a solution. Realising that wet plates definitely weren’t the way forward, Eastman invented and patented a dry plate formula. He went into the photographic business on a full-time basis, and the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company was born.

More innovations followed as he began to look for new exposure methods. In order to replace the glass plates, he first came up with a light-sensitive, gelatin-coated paper that could be rolled onto a holder.

In 1888, Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera, which proved to be the first successful roll-film hand camera that came in a compact box with 100 exposures’ worth of film. As the paper proved problematic, Eastman, along with young research chemist Henry  Reichenbach, experimented further until they hit upon the possibility of flexible rolls of sensitised celluloid. At around the same time, another American Hannibal Goodwin independently arrived at celluloid-based camera films, resulting in lengthy patent wars between the parties that was belatedly settled in Goodwin’s favour.

On September 4, 1888, just months after the public release of the camera, Eastman received a patent for “new and useful improvements” in cameras. That very day. Eastman also registered the trademark for the Kodak name.

“We do the rest”

Bolstered by the introduction of the film rolls, the Kodak cameras became a runaway success. An advertising campaign was introduced with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.” This was exactly how things panned out as users sent the entire camera back to the manufacturer for developing, printing, and reloading once the film was entirely used up.

Quick to spot an opportunity, Eastman changed the name of his company from Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company to Eastman Kodak Company in 1892. By the time he died aged Eastman Kodak dominated the industry in the U.S. and across the world. It still remains one of the best recognised names in the field, with the word Kodak becoming synonymous to photography.

Apart from being an inventor and innovator, Eastman was also far ahead of his time in various other ways. As a philanthropist, Eastman gave away much of the fortune that he created while still alive to many beneficiaries, including universities. As a businessman, he was among the first to introduce profit sharing as an incentive to employees. But then, he will forever be remembered as the one who placed the power of photography within the grasp of anyone who could just press a button. That button is now more accessible than ever before.

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Did you know that the name algorithm comes from the name of Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi?

An algorithm is a set of rules or instructions used in calculations and problem-solving operations. Algorithms date back to 300 BC when their inscriptions were found on Babylonian clay tablets. Originally, they were marking schemes which the common people used to keep track of their cattle and stocks of grain.

The name algorithm comes from the name of Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi who wrote a book on Hindu-Arabic numerals. The Arabic work was translated into Latin as “Algoritmi de numero Indorum.” and later into English, “Concerning the Hindu art of Reckoning.”

Algorithms became a significant part of mathematics laying the foundation for the algebra of logic, variables in calculations, greatest common divisor, approximation of Pi, prime numbers, etc.

The modern algorithm is a sequence of steps laid down to fulfil a particular task. British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing worked out how a machine could follow algorithmic instructions and solve complex mathematical problems. Thus began the computer age. Now algorithms are used in all major applications in information technology including navigation (GPS), shopping and internet searches.

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Amar G. Bose, founder of the Bose Corporation. Founder Amar Bose didn’t set out to sell speaker systems and headphones. He began his career as an academic engineer at MIT in the late 1950s, licensing power conversion and amplification technology to the U.S. military and government agencies such as NASA

His company’s products can be found in Olympic stadiums, Broadway theatres, the Sistine Chapel and in the space shuttle where they protect astronauts hearing. Amar Bose, the founder of Bose Corporation, was renowned for his invention of high-end stereo speakers.

Bose was brought up in Philadelphia, USA, the son of an immigrant from Kolkata. He became interested in technology when he began repairing model trains and transistors to supplement his family’s income at the age of 13. Bose joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering in the early 1950s. His interest in acoustics was sparked off when some expensive speakers he bought failed to deliver its advertised sound quality.

Bose’s idea was to utilize the space around the loudspeakers to directly reflect the sound to the listeners’ ears rather than letting it bounce indiscriminately off the walls and ceiling. His Direct/Reflecting speaker system patented in 1968 remained the industry standard for 25 years. Bose speakers proved that rich sound need not come from bulky speakers- elegance and simplicity in design could do the job just as well.

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