Archives October 2013

Robots, in one guise or another, had been suggested as far back as 1495, when Leonardo da Vinci created his mechanical knight robot. However, the first significant robot prototypes, built in 1948, were a pair of tortoiselike robots named Elmer and Elsie. Created by United States-born neurophysiologist and inventor Dr. William Grey Walter (1910-1977), the tortoise robots were remarkable in their ability to mimic lifelike behavior. These experimental robots incorporated sensors for light and touch, as well as motors for propulsion and steering, and a two- vacuum tube (valve) analog "computer." With the aid of simple circuitry, these electro-mechanical, three-wheeled robots were capable of phototaxis (an automatic movement toward or away from light), and could thus find their own way to a recharging station when they ran low on "food"—a precursor of the technique used in the popular Sony Aibo" robot dog some sixty years later. Using a combination of more...

"Oh, wellies, they are wonderful,  wellies they are swell... they keep out the water, and keep in the smell." Billy Connolly, British comedian The name for the ubiquitous rubber boot derives from the British Duke of Wellington, who had his boot maker design a calfskin version of the hitherto popular Hessian boot. The "Wellington," as it became known, was both comfortable and hard-wearing. However, the earliest recognizable "welly boots" were actually produced in France by a company set up by the American entrepreneur, Hiram Hutchinson (1808-1869). He had bought a patent from Charles Goodyear, who had invented the process of vulcanization in 1843; this enabled rubber to retain its elastic and waterproofing qualities even in extreme temperatures. Hutchinson had identified a huge market in France where most of the population worked on the land with only wooden clogs for protection from the wet and the mud. Henry Lee Norris, another more...

Quick and efficient written communication became essential in the mid-nineteenth century as the pace of business activity increased. Many attempts to mechanize writing are recorded in the patents of that period, although few went into production. Pinpointing one single inventor is, therefore, difficult but the "chirographer" or printing machine, patented in 1843 by Charles Thurber (1803-1886), was the first to be produced and sold commercially. A wide variety of writing machines were designed in the early- to mid-nineteenth century, including Pellegrino Turri's 1808 machine to enable blind people to write, William Austin Burt's "typographer" of 1829, and the Hansen writing ball of 1864, which was probably the first typewriter that made it possible to write faster than by hand. The first commercially successful typewriter was developed by newspaper editor Christopher Scholes and others in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1867. The patent was later taken up by Remingtons, a well-established sewing-machine company, more...

Maharana Pratap and Shivaji are two important names in the history of Mughal period in India. Both loved their country.  Rana Pratap was born in the family of Shishodia Rajputs His father Udai singh was a man of character. Other Rajputs had given their daughters to Akbar. But Udai Singh did not do so. To avoid fight with Akbar he left Chittor. Maharana Pratap took a vow to get back Chittor. A great battle was fought at Haldighati. The great Mughal army under the command of famous general Man Singh and Prince Salim fought with Rana Pratap and his brave soldiers. The Rana and his soldiers fought bravely to the last man. But at last they lost the field. Rana took a vow to make Chittor free from Mughals. He had now to run from the palace with his queen and children. He passed his bad days in the forests more...

"One of the most hard-hearted, malevolent old scoundrels now living in Britain." Lord Dundonald on John Wilkinson The boring machine, designed by John Wilkinson (1728-1808), was one of the foundations of the Industrial Revolution. The idea of mechanical boring was not new, but Wilkinson used it to bore better cannon with a greater degree of accuracy. More importantly, however, boring machines could be used to make precisely engineered cylinders for steam engines. Thanks to his collaboration with James Watt, inventor of the commercial steam engine, Wilkinson enjoyed a monopoly on the engine for several years, and they both became very wealthy men. As Wilkinson's wealth grew, so did his eccentricities. He was a volatile character and was often criticized by his fellow industrialists, thanks to some shady business dealings and the implication that some of his ideas may have already been suggested by others. Some of his family relationships were more...

"[The Arsenal of Venice's work force] continually produced new innovations for the Venetian fleet." Gregory Sheridan, The Imperial Age of Venice (1970) The division of labor into many discrete tasks in a production line increased efficiency and output and enabled the mass production of high quality goods. Nowhere was this better exemplified than in the Venice Arsenal factory, where standardized parts and specialized tasks gave the Venetians a speed advantage in building warships, firearms, and, as a result, their empire. In 1574, King Henry III of England had the privilege of seeing this formidable first factory construct complete galley ships in less than a day. With their efficient and organized approach, the Arsenal's thousands of workers manufactured complicated war tools 600 years before the start of the Industrial Revolution. The arsenal was expanded on several occasions throughout its lifetime but was originally built as a shipyard in 1104. By 1320, more...

"We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun." George Orwell, novelist Canning is the process by which food is preserved by sealing it into a robust and airtight container, and then sterilizing the sealed can. Cans are heated (sometimes under pressure, to achieve a higher temperature than boiling) to destroy bacteria. Englishman Peter Durand patented a process using a tin-lined, wrought-iron "canister" in London in 1810. (Nicolas Appert had recently developed his food preservation process in France, whereby hot food was sealed with wax into glass jars.) At first, the strong metal cans were made and sealed by hand and cooked for six hours, making it an expensive process. At this stage canned food was used only by the armed forces and explorers. The can opener had not yet been invented and hungry diners had to cut or break open the more...

In 1925 Bengali physicist Satyendra Nath Bose proposed that a new state of matter could exist, based on his work in quantum mechanics. It took seventy years before Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman, at the University of Colorado, managed to make it. Known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the new matter was essentially a collection of atoms so cold that they behaved like one large "superatom," demonstrating quantum mechanical effects on a macro scale. The science of the super cold has been hard to switch from theory to practice because the art of getting matter to fractions of a degree above absolute zero is far from simple. Indeed, many of the methods involved have been as groundbreaking as the scientific results they have yielded. A critical step was the invention of the magnetic atom trap, proposed in 1983 in a research paper by David Pritchard (b. 1941). It relies on the more...

Dutch ophthalmologist Hermann Snellen (1834-1908) first came up with the idea of a standardized test to measure how well a person can see and also allow comparisons of different people's visual capabilities. The Snellen Chart, developed in 1862, consists of eleven rows of block letters. The first row consists of very large letters; subsequent rows decrease in size. A person taking the test covers one eye and reads aloud the letters of each row, beginning at the top. The smallest row that can be read accurately indicates the patient's visual acuity in that eye. The patient then reads the letters with the other eye, and then again with both eyes. A traditional Snellen Chart features only the letters C, D, E, F, L, N, 0, P, T, and Z. The relationship between the size of letters and the distance at which they are seen has become the standard method of more...

American entrepreneur and inventor George Eastman (1854-1932) became fascinated by photography in 1874. He pioneered a process making dry plates for photography and formed the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company to produce them. In 1889 he patented a system where photographic emulsion was coated onto a roll of flexible paper. The basis of this process was devised by a chemistry student, Henry Reichenbach, at Eastman's company. This convenient foil film on a transparent base replaced the fragile, unwieldy glass plate. Paper film created an unsatisfactory grainy image and was later replaced by a cellulose nitrate film that was unbreakable. Eastman came up with the trademark "Kodak." His early Kodak camera was a wooden, handheld box with a simple lens, and a fraction-of-a-second shutter. This box camera was preloaded with enough film for 100 exposures. After all the negatives had been exposed, the whole camera was returned to the factory more...