INVENTOR
(DESCRIPTION )
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.
Thank you so much for your spending your special time to read these.
Best Regarding!
