Inventor

INVENTOR 

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Just a few hundred years ago, life was far different than it is today. When people wanted to travel or communicate, they had to go on foot or horseback. A journey of just a few miles by this method could be a long, arduous process. Whatever people owned—from clothing to tools—had to be made by hand. Work was manual, laborious, and often tedious. Illness was a constant threat; diseases rapidly spread through unsanitary conditions and were difficult to treat with the rudimentary medicines available.

Today, life in the United States and other developed countries is about ease and convenience. Communication is global and instantaneous. Transportation can carry people across states, countries, and even entire continents in a matter of hours. Industry has been automated, providing people with plenty of time outside of work to enjoy leisure pursuits. Modern medical treatments have enabled people to stay healthy well into their eighth, ninth, or even tenth decade.

Life has been transformed over the years through the efforts of the men and women who had the brilliance, diligence, and creativity to come up with new and better ways of doing things. As detailed throughout these pages, their inventions spawned many more inventions, speeding up the pace of progress even further. Alexander Graham Bell’s fascination with the idea of sending sound down a wire from the speaker to the listener gave birth to the telephone, which ultimately led to the cell phone, fax machine, modem, and a communication system that now links the entire globe.

These inventions, like many others, have clearly improved life by keeping people healthier, helping them to communicate and work more efficiently, and allowing them to travel farther. X-rays allowed doctors to look inside the human body to treat disease and injury. The electric light illuminated the darkness so people could work (and play) at night. Braille made it possible for blind people to read.

However, some inventions, while having their obvious benefits, have also had their pitfalls. Before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793, separating cotton lint from its seeds was a 10-hour, labour-intensive ordeal. Whitney’s invention transformed cotton production into a rapid process that for the first time made cotton farming a highly profitable business. Yet the cotton gin also prolonged slavery, as cotton plantations needed a larger labour force to keep up with increased production demands.

Other inventions were controversial because of their potential for destruction. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, was described by one scientist as being one of the “most thoughtful statesmen of science.” However, another contemporary referred to Teller as “a danger to all that’s important,” and claimed that the world would have been better off without him. In 1948, Paul Hermann Müller received a Nobel Prize for discovering the toxic effects on insects of the chemical compound known as DDT, a pesticide that efficiently wiped out the insects that carry deadly diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and typhus. DDT was initially hailed as a “miracle” pesticide. Yet by the early 1970s it had been banned from public use in the United States. Health officials had discovered that while DDT was killing insects, it was also accumulating in other wildlife, notably falcons and eagles, and dangerously lowering their reproduction rate.

Even the most groundbreaking and world-changing inventions were not always recognized as such when they were introduced to the public. When Rutherford B. Hayes saw a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone in 1876, the president’s response was less than enthusiastic. “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” he scoffed. In 1968, the audience attending a computer conference at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium likely didn’t know what to make of Douglas Engelbart’s invention—a small wooden box with a button that moved a cursor on an attached machine. His “mouse,” so named for its tail-like cable, now enables virtually every home and business computer user to navigate around their computer screens.

Inventors themselves have sometimes been skeptical about the ability of their own creations to endure. Despite the public excitement that greeted their Cinèmatographe motion picture machine when it was released in 1895, the Lumière brothers felt that their invention was just a fad. In fact, Louis Lumière referred to the cinema as “an invention without a future.” In spite of the Lumière brothers’ initial cynicism, film endures as one of the most popular art forms today.

What InspIres InventIon?

The old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” couldn’t be more true. Inventors have had a knack for recognizing a need or problem in society and then discovering a way to fill that need or solve that problem.

In the 15th century, as the number of universities in Europe grew and public literacy spread, a more efficient method was needed for reproducing books—a demand that was met by Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press.

Sometimes it was the inventor’s own necessity that gave birth to invention. Frustrated at having to change pairs of glasses whenever he switched from reading to viewing objects at a distance, Benjamin Franklin invented a new type of glasses—bifocals—that could easily accommodate both views.

Intelligence and curiosity are unquestionably important assets for inventors, but having an advanced degree—or even a formal education—has never been a prerequisite. Thomas Edison studied at home with his mother. Orville and Wilbur Wright never finished high school. George Washington Carver, who began life as a slave, taught himself to read from the only book he possessed—Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book.

What ultimately fueled the spark of discovery and led inventors to their “eureka” moment was unique to each person. Dr. Robert H. Goddard, who pioneered the first rocket-powered spacecraft, became fascinated with the idea of space flight after reading H.G. Wells’s science fiction novel The War of the Worlds. Decades before Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile and designed the moving assembly line, he became fascinated with the inner workings of clocks and watches. When Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple II computer, was 11 years old, he built a computer so that he could play tic-tac-toe.

Often inventors were inspired by one another. Orville and Wilbur Wright became interested in aviation after reading about German aviation engineer Otto Lilienthal’s experiments with gliders. In turn, the Wright Brothers’ famous 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., inspired a teenaged Russian boy named Igor Sikorsky to later invent the world’s first single-rotor helicopter.

Some inventions throughout history have occurred purely by accident. In 1796, in an effort to find an inexpensive way to print his own plays, Austrian actor and playwright Alois Senefelder stumbled across the promising potential of using fine-grained stone instead of copper plate, thereby inventing the process of lithography. In 1839, businessman Charles Goodyear was looking for a way to make natural rubber more pliable, when he accidentally spilled some rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove. He discovered that instead of melting, the rubber became more elastic. Thus was the vulcanization process born, and with it a whole range of uses for rubber.

For other inventions, however, the process was painstakingly slow and required many hours of trial and error. Thomas Edison experimented with 6,000 different materials before finally discovering a filament (carbonized thread) that would stay lit for many hours inside a bulb without burning up. It’s no wonder that the famous quote “Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration” is attributed to him.

Despite the hard work that was often required to produce an invention, money was not always the impetus for the inventors in this book. In fact, before the 18th century, inventors had no guarantee that their ideas would not be stolen. The design of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was so basic that manufacturers throughout the South began to copy it, and Whitney was never able to profit from his own invention.

However, the introduction of the U.S. Patent system in 1790 meant that inventors could for the first time prevent others from copying their work. (Thomas Edison was issued some 1,093 U.S. patents during his prolific career.) With the protection that patents afforded often came huge profits. When Henry Ford died in 1947, his estimated net worth was around $600 million.

Money was just one of the benefits awarded to those who came up with a successful invention. Inventors also earned fame, recognition, and a place in history. Some received what is thought to be the highest honour—the Nobel Prize. (The man responsible for establishing this prize, Alfred Nobel, is himself included in the pages of this book for his invention of dynamite.) In 1909, Guglielmo Marconi received the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing the first practical radio. English biochemist Frederick Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice: once in 1958 and again in 1980 (shared with Paul Berg and Walter Gilbert) for his pioneering work unraveling the mysteries of DNA. the Inventors

This book recognizes not only the inventors whose work changed the course of human life, but also those whose ideas paved the way for future generations of inventors. In the mid 1800s, mathematician Charles Babbage developed a model for an automatic computing engine, but he never built his device. A century later, Babbage’s idea that a machine could perform scientific computations reemerged, and today the computer is recognized as one of the most revolutionary inventions in history.

The vast majority of the inventors who have been included in these pages lived during the 19th and 20th centuries, which should come as no surprise considering that this was the time period in which the modern scientific age began. However, that is not to say that the many inventors who came before that period were any less important. Cro-Magnons’ stone tools were a technological feat. The Archimedes screw water pump, invented in the 3rd century BCE, is still in use today. Recorded history would not have been possible without Cai Lun’s invention of paper in 105 CE.

There was no lack of invention before the 19th century; it was just the pace of invention that sped up significantly after that time. When Charles Duell, head of the U.S. Patent Office, famously declared, “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” in 1899, how wrong he was. In 2008 alone, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted more than 185,000 patents for new inventions.

Some of these inventions may never make headlines or revolutionize the world, but they will all have an effect (however subtle) on people’s lives.

The speed of invention today is so rapid that the world can literally change during the course of one individual’s lifetime. Someone who was born in the early part of the 20th century will have witnessed the invention of the television, computer, Internet, microwave oven, helicopter, penicillin, and dozens of other innovations that have transformed the way in which people live.

One of the fields where invention has made the greatest strides is in medical science. At the turn of the 20th century, doctors were able to look inside the human body without cutting it open (thanks to Wilhelm Röntgen’s X-rays). By the end of the century, they had unraveled the entire genetic code and discovered the minute changes that lead to disease. Looking ahead into the next century, new therapies might be developed that could reprogram human DNA, changing the course of an individual’s medical history before he or she is even born.

So many inventors have made important contributions that to mention them all here would far exceed the space limitations of this book. The 100 men and women who have been included are among the greatest and most prolific inventors of all time. They were selected because their inventions have altered the course of people’s lives and have left an indelible stamp on human history.

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