Best Inventions

8/4/2019 Best Inventions

1/18

Best Inventions


2/18

The Popsicle

In 1905, 11-year old Frank Epperson tried makingsoda pop, then a popular drink, by mixing soda waterpowder and water. Accidentally, he left the soda out

on his porch all night. Temperatures dropped so lowthat the next day, young Epperson found his soda pophad frozen with the stirring stick in it! He didn't knowit then, but he had accidentally concocted the veryfirst popsicle! It wasn't until 18 years later, in 1923,that Epperson remembered his invention, applied for

a patent and started selling "Eppsicle" ice pops iindifferent fruit flavors. Later on, his kids startedreferring to it as the "Popsicle" and ever since, it'sbeen hard to resist the refreshing allure of this tangysummer treat!


3/18

The Microwave

In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer andinventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons,the devices used to produce the microwave radio signalsthat were integral to early radar use. Radar was anincredibly important innovation during the time of war, butmicrowave cooking was a purely accidental discovery.

While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencernoticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Hiskeen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves thathad caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels

and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have toldhim from mischievous childhood experiments), exploded. The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was

about the size of a fridge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetronhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetronhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radarhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetron


4/18

The microwave oven, aka the "Popcorn and Hot Pockets Warmer," was a happy accidentthat came from, of all things, a weapons program.

Percy LeBaron Spencer was a self-educatedengineer working on radar technology in theyears following WWII. The technology in question was the sci-fi sounding magnetron, apiece of machinery capable of firing high intensity beams of radiation.

Apparently, P.L.S., as some have called him, had a bit of a sweet tooth. Or a strange fetish.Either way, he had a candy bar in his pants while he was in the lab one day. The self-proclaimed engineer noticed that the chocolate bar had melted when he was working withthe magnetron.

Spencer disregarded the simple idea that his body heat had melted the chocolate in favorof the less logical and therefore more scientific conclusion that invisible rays of radiationhad "cooked it" somehow.

A sane man would stop at this point and realize these magical heat rays were landing justinches from his tender scrotum. Indeed, most of the military experts on hand probably

dreamed of the battlefield applications of their new Dick-Melting Ray. But like all men ofscience, Spencer was fascinated and treated his discovery like a novelty. He used it tomake eggs explode and pop kernels of corn ("Imagine, a future where a building full ofworkers in cubicles eat this all day!")Spencer continued to experiment with the magnetron until he boxed it in and marketed itas a new way to cook food. The initial version of the microwave was roughly six feet tall,weighed in around 750 pounds and had to be cooled with water. But they got it down tosize, and today we use it mostly to destroy random objects on YouTube.
http://www.cracked.com/%20http:/www.gallawa.com/microtech/history.htmlhttp://www.cracked.com/%20http:/www.gallawa.com/microtech/history.htmlhttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=microwaving&aq=fhttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=microwaving&aq=fhttp://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=microwaving&aq=fhttp://www.cracked.com/%20http:/www.gallawa.com/microtech/history.html


5/18

Ice Cream Cone

Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. Itwasnt until the Worlds Fair of that year, held in StLouis, Missouri,

that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs becameinexorably linked together. At this particularly 1904 World's Fair, a stall selling ice

cream was doing such good business that they werequickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stallwasn't doing so well, selling Zalabia a kind of wafer

thin waffle from Persia and the stall owner came upwith the idea of rolling them into cone shapes andpopping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice creamcone was born.


6/18

Champagne

While many know that Dom Pierre Prignon is credited for theinvention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictinemonks intention to make a wine with bubbles in it in fact, hehad spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was

considered a sure sign of poor winemaking. Prignonsoriginal wish was to cater for the French courts

preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to growin the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white

juice from them. But since Champagnes climate was relativelycold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spendingthe second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with

bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Prignon tried but failed toeradicate. Happily, the new winewas a big hitwith the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_P%C3%A9rignon_(person)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_P%C3%A9rignon_(person)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_P%C3%A9rignon_(person)


7/18

Brandy

Medieval wine merchants used to boil theH20 out of wine so their delicate cargo

would keep better and take up less spaceat sea. Before long, some intrepid soul -probably a sailor decided to bypass thereconstitution stage, and brandy wasborn.


8/18

Post-It Notes

The invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidentalcollaboration between second-rate science and a frustratedchurch-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the largeAmerican corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong

adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak gluethat could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted hisinvention within 3M, but nobody took any notice.

4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of hischurch choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper heplaced in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall outwhen the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of

Spencer Silver, and later applied some of Silvers weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the littlesticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trialmarketing began in 1977, and today youd find it hard to imaginelife without them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Silverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Silverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Fryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Fryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Silver


9/18

Potato chips/crisps

In 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, aparticularly fussy diner (railway magnate CorneliusVanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had beenserved with his meal, complaining that they were too thickand too soggy. After he had sent back several plates ofincreasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decidedto get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato ingrease and sending them out.

Vanderbilt initially protested that the chefs latest effortswere too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a

few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody inthe restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipeappearing on the menu as Saratoga Chips before laterbeing sold all over the world.


10/18

Penicillin

Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteriacalled staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one timein 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes hehad accidentally left out had become contaminated with afungus, and so threw it away. It wasnt until later that henoticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemedunable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould.

Fleming didnt even hold out much hope for his discovery:it wasnt given much attention when he published hisfindings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and

it was slow-acting it wasnt until 1945 after furtherresearch by several other scientists that penicillin was ableto be produced on an industrial scale,changing the way doctors treated bacterial infectionsforever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleminghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleminghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming


11/18

As researchers go, Sir Alexander Fleming is one of the greats. But the man was a slob.Years before he became famous for discovering Penicillin, he accidentally conducted astudy based around some snot of his that fell into a Petri dish.

Six years later, the good Mr. Phlegm-ing, as he was affectionately known, was once againworking in the lab with a plastic dish filled with disease. The Doc (another nickname) left

the lab for a weekend without cleaning the filthy dishes that were scattered around. If thescientific community is represented by the cast from Revenge of the Nerds (we know, hugestretch), then Fleming is "Booger"?

Fleming returned to his abandoned experiment after his holiday to find that the dishes hadsprouted mold. Fleming tossed the dish into a nearby trashcan. As per his custom, hecontinued to inspect his experiment after throwing it into a container filled with lab waste.Maybe he had decided to eat that sausage he had thrown away earlier.

While there he noticed that the mold had killed off the bacteria around it. This mold turnedout to be the basic form of Penicillin, arguably the most important discovery in the field ofmedicine ever. All science needed was for a man to come along who was so filthy that heactually would discover a form of filth that could kill other filth. Millions of lives were saved.
http://www.trivia-library.com/b/accidental-scientific-discovery-and-invention-penicillin.htmhttp://www.trivia-library.com/b/accidental-scientific-discovery-and-invention-penicillin.htmhttp://www.trivia-library.com/b/accidental-scientific-discovery-and-invention-penicillin.htmhttp://www.trivia-library.com/b/accidental-scientific-discovery-and-invention-penicillin.htmhttp://www.trivia-library.com/b/accidental-scientific-discovery-and-invention-penicillin.htmhttp://www.trivia-library.com/b/accidental-scientific-discovery-and-invention-penicillin.htm


12/18

The Pacemaker

Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention thatcontinues to save lives to this day. Americanengineer Wilson Greatbatchwas working on a gadget thatrecorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrongtype of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, thenwas quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch tocompare this reaction with the human heart and work onthe worlds first implantable cardiac pacemaker.

Before the implantable version was used on humans from1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the

external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These wereabout the size of a television and dealt out considerablejolts of electricity into the patients body, which oftencaused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devisea lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Greatbatchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Greatbatchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Greatbatchhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Greatbatch


13/18

Superglue

More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value,unlike Silvers Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr HarryCoover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights forhandheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals knownas cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with

moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious thatthese wouldnt work, so research moved on. 6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized

the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance ofcyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat norpressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercialrefinement, Superglue (or Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate AdhesiveComposition, to give it its full name) was born.

It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam the adhesive couldbe sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easiertransportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in thata discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of gunsended up saving countless lives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Cooverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Cooverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Cooverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Cooverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylateshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerizehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylateshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerizehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerizehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanoacrylateshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Cooverhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Coover


14/18

The story goes that in 1942, Dr. Harry Coover was working for Eastman Kodak, a companyrenowned for cameras and camera-related things. His job was to find a plastic that couldbe used as a clear gunsight, since this was smack in the middle of WWII and everybodyknew where the money was.

Coover got frustrated because the material, called cyanoacrylate, was just too damnedsticky. Rather than noticing he accidentally made one of the most versatile adhesives of alltime, he threw it away in a huff and continued sweating over gunsights for a war thatwould be ended, ironically, by two bombs with blast radiuses so big that they didn't evenrequire sights at all.

Years later, Coover would re-discover his invention, we prefer to think due to him noticingthat old container of cyanoacrylate was still stuck to the bottom of his trash can andcouldn't be removed by any means.

In 1958, after finally convincing his bosses that at the very least, there was enormouscomedic potential in the prospect of a man getting his hand permanently stuck to his junk;Kodak released the glue with the catchy name "Eastman 910."

Somebody then decided to actually pay the marketing guys to do something, and theydecided the best way to convince people to buy this new product was to suspend a carover a public street with a crane, supposedly held up only with the ol' 910.

Reactions resulted in the product being coined "Krazy Glue"; a product so crazy that itrequires intentional misspelling. The early slogan, "Remember, you can only use it oncebefore it completely solidifies in the tube!" was quickly dropped and it remains a top-selling product to this day.
http://www.cracked.com/%20http:/inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/glue.htmhttp://www.cracked.com/%20http:/inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/glue.htm


15/18

Safety Glass

Safety glass is the glass that's used in cars and buildingsand almost everywhere you look. The idea is that when itshatters, like when a bad guy goes through it back-firstbecause you blasted him with a shotgun, it doesn't breakinto shards that can cut his skin on the way through.Frenchman, Edward Benedictus, was a jack-of-all-trades,er, Jaques-of-all-trades. Before stumbling across anincredible invention, Benedictus was already a classicalquadruple threat. That is to say he was a painter,composer, writer and chemist.

One day, in a potentially Clouseau-like manner, Edwardknocked a scientific flask off of a shelf and heard it crash tothe ground (we like to imagine that he shouted "sacrebleu!" upon hearing the impact). When Benedictus climbeddown from his ladder, he noticed that the flask was broken,but had not actually shattered.
http://www.cracked.com/%20http:/www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/safglass.htmhttp://www.cracked.com/%20http:/www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/safglass.htm


16/18

After asking one of his aides about the incident, he foundthat the flask had recently contained cellulose nitrate,which acted as an adhesive and held the shattered piecesof glass together.Though he knew he had something, Benedictus didn'treally know what he had. Then inspiration struck in theform of a rash of horrifyingly gruesome car accidents.Benedictus noticed that the more horrific injuries fromthese crashes were due to flying shards of windshield.

Then he set to work until he eventually developed Triplex

(not pronounced triple x). When we say eventually, wemean 24 hours later. After taking notice of the durability ofhis new invention in the gas masks of WWI, the automotiveindustry began making the Triplex windshield the standard,as angry, sledgehammer-wielding ex-girlfriends the worldover can attest to.


17/18

Vulcanized Rubber

You probably won't be shocked to find out that the inventor of tire rubber is CharlesGoodyear, as he's the first guy on the list to actually get his name attached to the endproduct (since "Coover Glue" sounds like a gruesome form of birth control).

It wasn't easy coming up with a form of rubber tough enough to withstand the drag racingand car chases everyone envisioned the day the automobile was invented. In fact, if therewas one man who should have given up his life dream, it was Goodyear. The man spenttime in and out of prison, lost every friend he had and starved his children in his tirelesspursuit of a stronger form of rubber.

It was the 1830s, a period of time known for sucking. After his first two years of tinkeringand failing with primitive rubber, Goodyear and his family were camping out in anabandoned factory and fishing for sustenance. This is when he made a huge breakthrough:He'd use acid to smooth out and toughen rubber! The government bought 150 mailbagsmade of the stuff and the rest is...

Oh, wait. They were all defective. The process didn't work and Goodyear was ruined.

Again. Finally in 1839, probably after being struck by lightning and/or being pissed on by a pack

of stray dogs, Goodyear wandered into a general store with another failure of a formula.The crowd watched. Then they laughed at him. In a rage, he began to shake his fist,flinging a piece of his rubber onto the hot stove top.

After inspecting the charred remains, he realized that he had just found a way to makedurable, weatherproof rubber. Despite what we're sure were numerous failed "now let's trysetting this on fire to see if it improves it!" experiments, an empire was born
http://www.conntact.com/archive_index/archive_pages/3451_Business_New_Haven.htmlhttp://www.conntact.com/archive_index/archive_pages/3451_Business_New_Haven.htmlhttp://www.conntact.com/archive_index/archive_pages/3451_Business_New_Haven.htmlhttp://www.conntact.com/archive_index/archive_pages/3451_Business_New_Haven.htmlhttp://www.conntact.com/archive_index/archive_pages/3451_Business_New_Haven.html


18/18

Thanks.

Best Inventions

Documents

Transcript of Best Inventions