NEET

"Left all alone in some punkensh place, like a rusty tin coat hanger hanging in space..." Dr. Seuss, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? (1973) Patented more than 200 times in the United States alone, the humble coat hanger has undergone many transformations to reach its modern incarnation. Various methods of hanging clothes had probably existed before Britain's Queen Victoria was gifted a set of wooden coat hangers for her wedding in 1840, however, the mass-market wire hanger was not invented until 1903. The story goes that Albert Parkhouse, an employee of the Timberlake Wire and Novelty company, a Michigan-based firm that specialized in wire lampshade frames, was irritated by arriving at work one day to find that all the coat hooks were in use. Seizing a piece of wire, he bent it into two large oblong hoops and then twisted both ends at the center into more...

"No other device since the shields and lances of the ancient knights fulfills a man's ego like [a car]." Sir William Rootes, automobile manufacturer Superchargers, also called blowers, are used in cars to increase the power of internal combustion engines. German automobile-maker Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) first came up with the idea of pumping extra air into the engine to increase the horsepower. This effectively makes an engine larger for less weight, which is ideal for racing cars and aircraft. Initially engines relied on atmospheric pressure to keep air inside the engine. By pumping extra air into the engine, the amount of oxygen was increased, and this burned more fuel, giving the vehicle a power boost. Daimler's design was based on twin-rotor air pumps that forced extra air into the system. His design went into production in Mercedes and Bentley cars in the 1920s and was essential to World War II more...

Welding is one of the processes whereby two metals are joined together. The two metals to be joined are melted (sometimes in the presence of a molten filler metal) and made to intermingle by applying intense heat. The bond formed between the two metals, being made of a mix of both the metals, is incredibly strong. This process is different from soldering and brazing where the joining metal is a different metal with different properties. Electric arc welding utilizes the incredible heat generated by an electric arc as the means of melting the metals. A power source is linked to the metal to be worked on and, at the other end of the circuit, to an electrode of some kind. It is between this electrode and the surface of the work metal that the electric arc forms. Like so many inventions, its creation cannot strictly be allotted to one person more...

"Sprinklers typically reduce the chances of dying in a home fire by one haIf to two thirds." National Fire Protection Association The automatic fire sprinkler can trace its earliest origins back to 1806 and an Englishman called John Carey. However, it was almost seventy years later that the first commercially viable fire sprinkler was invented. In 1874 Henry S. Parmelee invented a sprinkler head for use in his piano factory. It had a single valve, plugged with a solder that would melt in a fire. Once melted, the valve was opened, releasing water through a perforated chamber. The design was such that only areas affected by fire would be doused. A few modifications later and the Parmelee Sprinkler Company began to market the invention. After installation in a number of factories, where they were tested by real fires, the sprinklers soon spoke for themselves. Once insurance companies were on board, more...

Sodium thiopental was discovered in 1932 by Ernest H. Volwiler (1893-1992) and DonaleeL. Tabern (1900-1974) , two scientists on a quest to discover an anesthetic that could be injected directly into the bloodstream. Working for Abbott Laboratories, the pair spent three years screening hundreds of compounds to find one that could produce unconsciousness prior to surgery, with limited side effects. Sodium thiopental was first tried in humans on March 8, 1934, by Dr. Ralph M. Waters in an investigation of its properties. It was found to induce anesthesia for ten to thirty minutes by depression of the central nervous system within sixty seconds of injection. It was also found to show surprisingly little analgesia. For this reason, it was commonly used to make it easier for doctors to administer longer lasting, inhalable anesthetics after patients had comfortably "gone under." Sodium thiopental was the first general anesthetic to be widely used more...

People become quite excited about artificial hearts. But, when you think about it, the heart is basically a pump, the same kind of pump that people have been using for thousands of years. Described in these terms, it does not sound quite so advanced. By contrast, an artificial liver is a complex achievement. Far from the one trick pony that the heart is, the human liver has to undertake many tasks simultaneously. Among other functions, it helps to break down food into usable substances, detoxifies harmful chemicals,, stores energy in the form of glycogen, and manufactures any number of substances from bile to the proteins that make cuts stop bleeding. But how do you combine all those different functions into an artificial liver? Numerous ways have been tried to treat liver failure, from replacing the entire blood volume in a person's body with new blood to hemodialysis. All have met more...

The tampon with applicator was invented in 1929 by Dr. Earle Haas (1888-1981). The design, submitted for patent in 1931, consisted of a narrow tube nestling inside a bigger tube containing a cotton plug. When the narrow tube was pushed into the bigger tube, the tampon was guided into place in the vagina. Dangling from the end of the tampon was a piece of string that could be used for easy withdrawal. The use of disposable plugs for menstrual flow dated back to the ancient Egyptians who invented tampons made from softened papyrus. Over the years women improvised with the materials at hand: in Rome it was wool, in Japan paper, in Indonesia vegetable fibers, and in Africa rolls of grass. Haas registered the name Tampax as a trademark. In 1934, Haas's patents were purchased by a group of investors, leading to the birth of the Tampax Sales Corporation. The more...

French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was one of the truly brilliant minds of the nineteenth century, whose groundbreaking work in the field of microbiology and chemistry led to a long list of scientific discoveries. He is perhaps best remembered today for his development of "pasteurization" in milk, and the invention of a number of vaccines, including rabies, and anthrax. His discovery of a vaccination for cholera, however, was something of an accident, although he was aware of the work of Edward Jenner (1749-1823), who pioneered the smallpox vaccine. In the summer of 1880, Pasteur was conducting experiments on chickens with cholera, and had instructed his assistant Charles Chamberland to inoculate the birds with a culture of cholera-bacteria. Chamberland failed to do so, and a month later the culture, which had now spoiled, was used of the birds. They became ill but did not die, so Pasteur introduced a new group more...

In 1886, Ferdinand Frederic Henri Moissan (1852-1907) became the first person to isolate fluorine gas, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Six years later, he designed an electric arc furnace with the intention of turning iron and sugar into diamonds by heating them to temperatures of 3500°C. It is doubtful that he ever succeeded in this endeavor; however, he did discover other high-temperature chemical reactions, including a practical method of producing acetylene. Moissan constructed his furnace using two blocks of limestone with a hollow cavity between them, into which he inserted two carbon rods. The sample to be heated was placed in the cavity and then an electric current of hundreds of amperes was put on the rods, creating an energetic stream—or arc—of vaporized carbon between them that produced temperatures of thousands of degrees. To make acetylene, Moissan mixed limestone and coal at high temperature to create more...

The Kodak Brownie was the first handheld camera suitable for use by everyone, including children. It cost just one dollar and it was designed by camera-maker Frank Brownell who had been asked to invent the cheapest camera possible, without compromising its reliability and quality by George Eastman, the founder of Kodak. However, it was not Brownell after whom the camera was named. During the 1890s, children's author and illustrator Palmer Cox was the Walt Disney of his day. His Brownie characters were so popular that they were used to advertise everything from sweets and dolls, to trading cards and cigars. Eastman thought that branding the new camera with the Brownie name would ensure its success. And he was right because the Brownie name became synonymous with popular photography for the next eighty years. It was a simple device consisting of a cardboard box and a meniscus lens, which was curved more...