Category: Inventions

Christmas table settings customarily include a pretty Christmas cracker next to each plate, to be pulled apart with a SNAP! with a fellow diner before the meal begins. From each torn cracker tube falls a colourful paper hat, a motto, joke or riddle, and a miniature knick-knack, usually inexpensive. This ritual is all thanks to Londoner Thomas Smith (1823-69), who had a talent for making wedding cake decorations, plus a certain business acumen.

Remarkably, Smith was employed in a bakery from age 7. He set up his own wedding cake shop as a teenager and on a visit to Paris was intrigued to see bonbons wrapped individually in a twist of tissue paper. He began selling these in his shop and soon added a tiny love verse inside each wrapper. Looking for a way to add a surprise element, Smith then invented the cracker, removing the sweets and adding little gifts instead.

Faced with competition from a foreign manufacturer who stole his idea, Smith quickly produced a variety of designs and crowded out the market. After he died, his sons took over and Walter (1854-1923), the youngest, was particularly proactive and creative in boosting sales for Tom Smith & Co., which still exists today.

(Images LtoR: Smith by Jack 1956 at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, crackers by freshfoodvillage at Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0)

When a football commentator uses the term “a slide rule pass”, what is meant is that the ball was kicked with great accuracy, sometimes through a narrow gap, to a running team-mate’s feet. Even though electronic calculators superseded the slide rule in the 1970s, its great importance in mathematics over the previous 350 years has thereby left at least one cultural imprint.

In fact, the engineering feats behind the Industrial Revolution, including James Watt’s steam engine, would have been impossible without this tool to achieve solutions to complex equations quickly. A succession of at least ten Britons devised and developed it, so that by the mid-1800s there were 40 different versions of the slide rule, including a spiral one. Thereafter, other countries, and plastic, took it on.

Notable among the Britons are John Napier (1550-1617), who invented logarithms and Napier’s Bones in 1617, followed by Edmund Gunter (1581-1626) who invented logarithmic scales for use with calipers in 1620. The big name is William Oughtred (1574-1660) with his invention of a circular slide rule with two scales c.1622 and one for calculating excise duty on ale, wine and spirits in 1633. Other scales were gradually added and other uses applied, including Henry Coggeshall’s (1623-90) slide rule specifically for carpenters in 1677.

(Image of slide rule in use in 1966: U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service at picryl.com / Public domain)

Professor Sir Charles William Oatley (1904-96) from Somerset worked on developing the scanning electron microscope (SEM) for two decades. During WW2 he was involved in radio and radar technology and then furthered his inventive talent with his PhD students in his laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where he himself had been educated. He felt they would learn more by dealing with a real breakthrough challenge.

Eleven fledgling engineers ~ Messrs. Sander, McMullan, Smith, Wells, Everhart, Thornley, Spreadbury, Stewart, Broers, Ahmed and Pease ~ successively assisted Oatley in making gradual, significant improvements to his SEM prototype, until it was finally presented to the scientific market in 1965. Oatley had picked up the initial idea from groundwork in Germany and the USA that had been abandoned.

Whole objects can be placed under the microscope’s electron beam, as opposed to the ultra-thin slices required for its predecessor, the transmission electron microscope. Another benefit is the three-dimensional magnification that it produces on the computer screen, thanks to the configuration of lenses, coils, etc., and the addition of a raster scanner that zigzags over the specimen. There are numerous applications for the SEM, wherever materials analysis or investigation are needed and over 50,000 SEM instruments have been sold worldwide.

(Image of one of the early Cambridge SEMs: Zeiss Microscopy at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Professor Dr Eric Laithwaite (1921-97) from Lancashire was a naturally gifted lecturer and was attached firstly to Manchester University, then Imperial College, London. He was well-known for his radio and television appearances and has been called the UK’s first ‘media engineer’. Another accolade assigned to Laithwaite is ‘the father of Maglev‘, even though he insisted that he did not invent it, but re-discovered it.

In fact, it was Laithwaite who took the neglected theory of magnetic levitation (Maglev) and, from 1947, devised many practical applications of it, most notably in low-speed trains. One such was in commercial use in 1984-95 as a 26mph shuttle from Birmingham’s airport to its international railway station, a distance of 2,000ft.. However, government funds were withdrawn and this futuristic technology went to Japan and Germany.

Maglev is the principle used in the linear motor designed by Laithwaite, which needs no gearbox or wheels and is therefore friction-free. Instead of torque providing propulsion, an electro-magnetic set-up forms a ‘travelling magnetic field’ or ‘magnetic river’ along which an object literally floats. It can be low- or high-acceleration, the latter being intended for space vehicles potentially. Laithwaite also believed he had found amazing gyroscopic properties but struggled to convince his peers.

(Top image: Dan Meerbeek at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Currently one of the most common surgical operations, the hip replacement is the legacy of Professor Sir John Charnley (1911-82) from Lancashire, and it was the British inventions of the high-density plastic polyethylene and PMMA cement that Charnley used to join a stainless steel femoral head to the thigh bone. This inspired combination was first successfully used by Charnley at Wrightington Hospital in his home county in 1962.

Wrightington still offers this treatment today and has become a place of ‘pilgrimage’ for young surgeons. Charnley himself was motivated by his experience as an Army doctor in WW2. Early prosthetics were made of glass, ivory and even Teflon, but these had failed and patients had caught infections during the procedure. Charnley, who recorded everything meticulously, said that “failure is a relentless teacher” as he persevered in his quest to find the optimal materials and technique.

Charnley tracked all of his orthopaedic patients and when any died, he sent his staff to retrieve the hip to check on its status. He set a new high standard for cleanliness and reporting and his influence spread worldwide, giving millions of sufferers renewed quality of life. He also pioneered fusion of joints by compression, and trauma surgery.

(Images LtoR: Public domain and Laboratoires Servier at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 1770 King William III (1738-1820) purchased a gold watch from the country’s greatest watchmaker, Devon-born Thomas Mudge (1715-94). Mudge had placed his pioneering detached-lever escapement in the mechanism and it made the pocket watch so much more reliable that the field of horology was transformed. It was a present for William’s wife, Queen Charlotte (1744-1818) and it became known as ‘the Queen’s Watch‘. It still sits in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle today [pictured above].

The problem had been that spring-driven watch mechanisms included two wheels that were in constant contact, causing friction and wear, leading to gradual loss of accuracy. Mudge’s solution was an escapement which kept these components apart.

Mudge had refined his exceptional skills  during his apprenticeship in London under Yorkshireman George Graham (1673-1751), himself an inventor of several improvements to clocks and watches. After Graham died, Mudge established his own business and customers including royalty flocked to his door.

Mudge published ‘Thoughts on the Means of Improving Watches, Particularly Those for Use at Sea’ in 1765 and after moving back to Devon in 1771 to be near his doctor brother, he worked on a new type of marine chronometer. It is said that some of Mudge’s mechanisms are the most complex ever made.

(Image of Thomas Mudge: Public domain)

Yorkshireman Sir George Cayley (1773-1857) was a man ahead of his time. For the want of a suitable engine, he would have invented the powered aircraft; instead it was the glider which successfully made it from his drawing board to the skies in 1849. The pilot, or intrepid passenger, was a 10-year-old boy and, scaling up his experiments, Cayley persuaded a grown man to be carried aloft in his 1853 version.

The story goes that the gentleman was Cayley’s coachman and after the 900ft-long. flight, he promptly resigned! His survival of the glider’s crash-landing was doubtless partly due to the seatbelt which Cayley had thoughtfully designed and added to the wheeled carriage beneath the wings. A galloping horse drew the contraption (which Cayley called a “governable parachute”) to lift-off and one can only imagine the astonishment of any onlookers.

Previously, would-be aviators had tried to imitate birds with flapping wings but Cayley’s extensive research showed that wings should be fixed and he identified, and produced calculations for, lift, weight, thrust and drag as being the key factors. He delved into all forms of aircraft including airships and helicopters, and he laid a foundation just waiting for the technology to catch up decades later.

(Images LtoR: Replica of Cayley’s glider in the Yorkshire Air Museum by Alan Wilson at Flickr.com / CC BY-SA 2.0 and Sir George Cayley portrait, Public Domain)

William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) from Dorset was a polymath but lacked one skill, namely draughtmanship, and he was even frustrated with his attempts at using tracing devices to make illustrations for his various research papers. Luckily, his knowledge of chemistry enabled him, in the mid-1830s, to invent a method whereby sunlight would imprint an image for him, albeit in negative, on paper coated in salt, then silver nitrate and salt again. He then devised another process to turn this negative into a positive as many times as desired.

He later discovered that exposure need only be a few seconds to create a latent image which could then be developed in a gallic acid mixture. He patented this in 1841 as a ‘calotype’. His friend and fellow polymath, Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) from Buckinghamshire, suggested using hyposulphite of soda as a fixer and this is still used today for black-and-white photography.

Fox Talbot published the first book of photographs, ‘The Pencil of Nature’ (1844) to demonstrate how his “photogenic drawings”, as he called them, could be used. A new type of artistic expression was born, as well as the means for producing authentic historical records. In Talbot’s words, “It is a little bit of magic realised”.

(Images LtoR: Fox Talbot & photograph taken by him in 1842, both at Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

The pneumatic tyre was invented twice, since the second claimant was unaware of a patent registered in 1846 in France and 1847 in the USA that had lain undeveloped by the horse-drawn carriage industry for which it was intended. The two inventors were both Scotsmen ~ Robert William Thomson (1822-73) from Aberdeenshire and Dr. John Boyd Dunlop (1840-1921) from Ayrshire. Dunlop’s patent of 1889 was invalidated in 1890 but a shrewd, enthusiastic business partner overcame any difficulties and it is Dunlop’s name that became world famous.

Wheels had previously been trimmed in wood, then leather-clad wood, then solid rubber. These progressions aimed to soften the bumpy, noisy ride experienced on the new-fangled bicycle. In 1887 Dunlop, then working as a vet in Belfast, witnessed the discomfort of his young son riding a tricycle on cobbled streets, so made a rubber tube pumped full with air and held round the front wheel with sailcloth and later, for manufacturing purposes, with rubber cement.

Dunlop resigned from the ensuing Dunlop Rubber Company in 1895 and did not make much money from his idea. He was not to know that he was on the cusp of the motor car revolution which would see ‘Fort Dunlop’ built in Coventry to service a mushrooming sector.

(Top images LtoR of Dunlop racing tyre: Peter Taylor at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 2.0 and of Dr. Dunlop: picryl.com / Public domain)

John Kay (1704-c.80) from Lancashire and one of his six sons, Robert (1728-1802), made vital contributions to the Industrial Revolution in the textile industry. John first invented, manufactured and installed wire reeds for looms. He later developed a card-making machine and a cording and twisting machine for yarn. In 1733 he invented the flying shuttle, the first step from hand looms to power looms.

His mechanism comprised a wheeled, aerodynamic bobbin tray ferrying the weft to and fro inside the warp ‘shed’ and operated by pulling on a cord attached to the hammers that whacked the tray along a ‘race’. A weaver could do this with one hand while simultaneously operating the reeds. This was far quicker than doing the job manually and enabled the production of much wider cloth.

Some newly laid-off weavers expressed their resentful and some rival businesses ignored Kay’s patent, which he could not afford to continue defending in court, and copied the idea anyway (patents were not fairly regulated then). However, Robert improved the loom further in 1760 by the addition of a ‘drop box’ to hold extra bobbins so that multi-coloured designs could be woven. In spite of any difficulties, the Kays’ innovations were a turning point.

(Top images LtoR: flying shuttle trays by Linda Spashett at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0, John Kay [cropped] by Wellcome Collection by Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0)