Category: Inventions

A fearsome sight for many, the hypodermic syringe was nevertheless an improvement on the animal bladder and hollow goose quill used experimentally […]

As one of history’s greatest seafaring nations, Britain has made many contributions to oceanography, with the marine chronometer being one of the […]

Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802-75) from Gloucestershire is best known for the ‘Wheatstone bridge’, a device for measuring electrical resistance, though he can […]

For Yorkshireman Richard Clyburn (1796/7-1852) to become a consulting engineer in his early 30s, he must have shown impressive manual, technical and […]

After the Great Fire of London in 1666 there was a gradual move towards organised firefighting (initially by insurance companies, who instructed […]

Yorkshire-born Dr. John Venn (1834-1923) had two obsessions ~ logic and Cambridge University. His deep interest and skill in mathematics, probability and […]

The flash rate of Belisha beacons (0.75 seconds on, 0.75 seconds off) might have been chosen by a psychologist, as it is […]

Dr. Edmund Halley (1656-1742), of comet fame, lived in the era of seafaring buccaneers who sometimes sank to a watery grave with […]

Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was once the UK’s largest manufacturing company and from the 1930s to the 1960s its Plastics Division was […]

Dr. Brian Mercer (1927-98) was born in Blackburn towards the end of the British textile industry’s golden age. Fortunately, he was inspired […]