Invention Help

Category: Inventions

  • Chinese Inventions

    Chinese inventions span thousands of years, and the Chinese have introduced many important inventions and innovations in the world.

    To fully appreciate the significance of Chinese inventions, it is helpful to consider how ancient some of them are, and how they laid the basis for future innovations and improvements in science.

    Ancient Chinese Inventions

    There is something knows as the four great innovations of Ancient China:

    Papermaking

    Papermaking in Ancient China was invented around 100 CE, where the first sheet of paper was constructed with a combination of fibres, mulberries, and hemp. That paved the way for the future of papermaking.

    Gunpowder

    In roughly the 9th century CE, the Chinese began using mixtures of substances like petrochemicals for warefare. This is the earliest known use of gunpowder, even though they were using some of the substances to make gunpowder for medicinal and other purposes.

    The Compass

    The compass is one of the oldest Chinese inventions, having been invented roughly around 250 BCE. Interestingly enough, it was not invented for navigational purposes, but in order to harmonize the built enivronment for Fung Shei purposes. The earliest compasses were made with a mineral known as lodestone, which has magnetic properties.

    Printing

    Of course, the invention of papermaking aided that of printing. The Chinese started off with woodblock printing, where letters are carved out of wood, and then ink is applied and printed onto paper. Later, the Chinese also invented movable type printing, which is more suited to Western alphabets, and can be used to easily change letters and words around.

    Fun Chinese Inventions

    There are many other ‘smaller’ inventions, but incredibly useful to mankind, that the Chinese have invented or discovered. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

    The Noodle

    What would some people do without eating noodles?

    Rowing Oars

    Which have helped navigation over the oceans, and still today play an important role in water-based sports and events

    Salt

    The Chinese didn’t ‘invent’ salt, but they discovered ways of harnessing and using it for commercial purposes, which laid the basis as salt as a currency in other parts of the world

    The Banknote

    Still used today, the banknotes dates back to Ancient Chinese printmaking, and banknotes were used by merchants and tradesmen as trading receipts hundreds of years ago

    Chopsticks

    But that one’s obvious

    Domonies

    Still played today by tens of thousands of people around the world, first invented in China.

    Fireworks

    Spectacles in the sky, developed by the Chinese around 900 CE.

    Kites

    Traditionally used by inhabitants of a besieged Chinese town as a rescue signal

    Toothbrush

    Developed out of a need for cleanliness, the toothbrush has certainly taken the world by storm!

    There are many more Chinese inventions, but these should give you a taste and insight into the enormous contribution the Chinese have made to the world and world culture.

     

     

  • Who Invented The Toilet

    Some people often mistakenly think that it was certain Thomas Crapper who invented the toilet about 300 years ago. That is an urban myth.

    There was a Thomas Crapper, a plumber who apparently had several patents, but he did not ‘invent’ what we know today as the toilet.

    In fact the toilet was invented over two thousand years ago, and remnants of ancient toilets have been found in India, China and even Egypt. These toilets did use water, and were built on clay bricks linked to a drainage system, but did not have the famous ‘flush’ mechanism that we know and use today.

    Interestingly enough, what we know as toilet paper, was a Chinese invention and came quite a while before the toilet!

    When people want to find out who invented the toilet, they are normally thinking about the modern ‘flush’ toilet. The flush toilet was a dramatic step forward in modern sanitation (sanitation is only a fairly modern concept) and was invented in 1596 by a certain John Harrington. But that was only a step towards the modern toilet that we know today.

    Several other inventors and designers paved the way for the system that we use today. I won’t bore you with names and dates, but to know who invented the toilet means appreciating that several people stood on each other’s shoulders (thankfully not literally) to take us where we are today in terms of efficiency, hygiene, sanitation, and civil engineering.

    These days we find all different types of toilet inventions, from those that produce nice smells after flushing, to those that produce white noise or light music so that people don’t need to worry about that kind of thing!

    In the last century there has been an absolute explosion of patents and inventions that have improved our bathroom activities, and in the new century we can look forward to many more.

  • Invention Of The Barcode

    The bar code is a really a brilliant invention. It has simplified the entire shopping experience, making it quick and easy to add shopping items to a bill. But it didn’t fall out of the sky, someone had to invent it first.

    The invention of the bar code came out of a very real and pressing need to speed up the shopping check out process. As is often the case with innovations, the invention of the bar code happened serendipitously.

    It started in 1948, Bernard Silver was a graduate student at the Drexel Institute of Technology was listening to the president of Food Fair, a Pennsylvanian food chain, talk to the dean of the Institute about the need for a system to quickly add up product information at the check out counter. He quickly saw the opportunity to develop the technology, spoke to a friend of his, Norman Joseph Woodland, about the idea, and they soon started working on a system.

    Silver and Woodland’s original plan for the bar code invention was to use ultraviolet ink, but this proved too costly. So like all successful inventors, they continued to work at the idea. Woodland then moved to Florida, and decided to try out something that involved morse codes, by simply extending the lines of the morse code downward to create lines. The invention of the bar code started taking shape.

    But it was one thing to generate what would later be known as the bar code, and another thing to read them. Woodland started working on technology to read bar codes, modifying technology from optical soundtracks. Eventually the two friends had developed enough proprietary technology to file a patent application, which they entitled “Classifying Apparatus and Method”.

    It was many more years, and several developments later, until a useable technology was implemented in stores in the US. A trial system was implemented in 1972 in a store chain in Cincinnati. But it took another two years for the bar code technology to get more widespread exposure, and the cumbersome process and minimal cost savings had some predicting the death of the bar code technology.

    Yet here we are in the 21st century, and the invention of the bar code has stood the test of time. Even though the original inventors probably didn’t make much money out of their invention, they certainly helped contribute towards a minor revolution in the entire shopping process.

     

  • Who Invented Velcro

    Some things are so commonplace, so part of our everyday lives, that we don’t think twice about them. Velcro is such a thing. We use it every day on our clothes, shoes, surfboards and around the house in carpets, notebooks, suitcases and other products. Velcro has become quite normal and everyday.

    And it is even used by NASA on space shuttles, and also by the US army who use it on military and combat uniforms. Velcro’s even been used to create a whole new sport, known as velcro jumping, where you where a special suit, and run and jump as high as possible onto a Velcro wall. What an amazing invention velcro is!

    But the big question you’re wondering is who invented velcro? Well before we answer that, consider that Velcro is made up of two parts: a hook part and a loop part. The hook part gets attached to the loop part through the ‘hook’ fabrics getting intertwined with the ‘loop’ fabrics. So the person who invented velcro actually invented this system of hooks and loops using different kinds of fabrics and materials.

    The inventor of velcro was a Swiss Engineer named George de Mestra who was born in 1907 and died just over 20 years ago in 1990. George de Mestra was a remarkable person, who was an inventor from a very young age. At the age of 12 he even patented his design for a toy airplane. After school, he attended a polytechnic university in Lausanne, Switzerland and qualified as an engineer.

    Interestingly, the Swiss engineer who invented velcro actually started dreaming and conceiving about it many years before he started working on it. In 1941, he went hunting in the Alps with his dog, and noticed how Burdock seeds were sticking to his clothes and dog’s coat. This made him fascinated with the concept of a material attaching itself to another, and he looked at it through a microscope and ‘discovered’ this concept of ‘hooks’ which attach themselves to the ‘loops’ of other materials. This gave him the notion of trying to replicate nature’s genius for other purposes.

    In 1948 he started working seriously at the Velcro invention, and in 1955 he patented it, and turned it into a multimillion dollar company, which made him an absolute fortune!

    So the man who invented velcro story has a happy ending and a few morals:

    1. Observe and learn from nature

    2. Be incredibly persistent

    3. Patent your ideas and inventions so that you can profit from them

  • Who Invented The Microscope

    The question of who invented the microscope is a matter of historical debate. There isn’t 100% certainty on the microscope invention, because it was not that well documented during its time, but we know for certainty that it occured around the turn of the 17th century.

    Furhermore, we are certain that that the first type of microscope invented was the most common one: the optical microscope (which contains a lens that greatly magnifies objects).

    A few names regularly crop up of potential inventors who invented the microscope. There is a Dutch spectacle maker named Hans Janssen who, together with his son, was said to have originated the concept of the microscope back in 1590. Another name is Hans Lippershey who is credited with inventing the telescope (which is designed to make objects in the far distance much easier to see), and some people suggest he had a role to play in microscopics as well. But the link is not that strong.

    Perhaps the most famous person who invented the microscope, or should we say holds the claim to the invention, is none other than the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei. Galileo is said to be a major force behind the scientific revolution, and is sometimes referred to as the father of observational science and astronomy. In 1609 Galileo invented what he termed the ‘little eye’, which was an apparatus that made use of convex and concave lenses to view objects unseeable by the human eye. A friend of Galileo’s, a German named Giovanni Faber, termed this the ‘compound microscope’ and the name ‘microscope’ has stuck since then.

    But it did not simply end then, as it took a while for the microscope to become part of scientific enquiry, research and culture. There were many more people who invented improvements to the microscope, amongst them Cornelius Drebbel, who used double lenses that were concave, Anton van Leeuwenhoek attunes the apparatus for use on biological organisms, and Ernst Abbe in the mid 1860s drastically improved the design of the microscope. Even today there are still improvements and modifications of the observational apparatus.