Category: Inventions

Jethro Tull (1674-1741) was born into a wealthy farming family in Berkshire. He began a career in law but must have always had farming in mind because even while recuperating from illness in France and Italy he was noticing different agricultural practices and thinking of ways to improve them. In 1701 he invented the first mechanical farming tool, the seed drill, which paved the way for a revolution in agriculture.

Previously, seed had been scattered by hand from a shoulder bag. This was easy for the farm labourers, who simply had to walk up and down the fields, and they were not keen on Tull’s initial plan to have them place seeds only into furrows. When he presented them with a wheeled contraption which dug the furrow, placed the seed and covered it up, there were still some objections but it proved its worth in increased crop yield.

By 1714 Tull had developed his horse-drawn 3-row seed drill. He also invented a hoeing plough to aerate the soil and combat weeds. The benefits of his methods were plain to see, though the take-up came slowly from his fellow gentlemen farmers. However, his determination and persistence have served us exceedingly well.

(Image from ‘The New Horse-Hoeing Husbandry’ (1731) by Jethro Tull / Public domain)

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59) certainly had a penchant for ‘big’ and ‘first’ achievements, epitomised in the iconic 1857 photo of him dwarfed by the giant launching chains of his SS Great Eastern steamship, the world’s largest and longest luxury liner of its time. Born in Portsmouth, he grew up in London and followed in the footsteps of his father, mechanical engineer Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849), becoming his works assistant on the world’s first underwater tunnel, the Thames Tunnel.

Young Brunel then started work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, where he also upgraded the docks. Any thought of specialising in one type of project obviously never crossed the workaholic Brunel’s mind, as railways, trains, steamships and multi-purpose stations line the pages of his portfolio along with more bridges and docks.

The grand size of these ambitious engineering feats inevitably led to some failures but he is remembered rather for pushing the boundaries of the fledgling field of civil engineering. His three massive steamships. SS Great Western, SS Great Britain and the aforementioned SS Great Eastern travelled the oceans like no other ships had done before. Only the SS Great Britain survives, thanks to a rescue mission in 1970.

(Top image of Brunel’s Bristol Temple Meads station: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Plate glass was initially manufactured in the UK in the thirteenth century by a method which produced ‘broad sheet glass’. Molten glass was blown into a long tube, the ends were severed and the cylindrical glass form was split and flattened. This glass was nothing like the perfectly clear float glass of today, but was used in leaded lights.

Over the centuries, other techniques were developed but it took until 1952 for a revolutionary, cost-effective process to be invented and thereby provide us with the high quality plate glass we have today. Pilkington Brothers Ltd. was founded in 1826 in St. Helen’s on Merseyside and by 1860 it was producing 75% of the UK’s plate glass. It became Japanese-owned in 2006 but is still our largest glass manufacturer.

Sir Alastair Pilkington (1920-95) and Kenneth Bickerstaff devised ‘the Pilkington process’ which is an automated method of heating the ingredients in a huge furnace and floating the resulting liquid on top of molten tin. It does not mix with the tin, which is denser and does not boil at the specified temperature, so this provides a flat bottom with gravity providing the flat top. The glass sheet is gradually cooled and rolled off, to be machine-cut and processed.

(Image: Alan Wright at pixabay.com)

One of the biggest leaps in mathematics was the invention of logarithms by Edinburgh-born John Napier (1550-1617). As a mathematician and astronomer, he was motivated by the time-consuming and error-prone calculation of large multiplications, divisions and the extraction of roots by hand. One of the aids he created was called ‘Napier’s Bones’, a framed set of rods on which multiplication tables were engraved.

The beauty of logarithms is that, being powers, the calculations are transformed into additions and subtractions ~ much easier ~ and the system can be extended to many decimal places with consistent accuracy. Napier also pioneered the use of the decimal point.

No-one knows how Napier formed his ‘logos arithmos’ idea, but after twenty years of development his first ninety pages of logarithmic tables were published in his ‘Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio’ of 1614, translated into English in 1616. They were an instant success and hailed as a godsend by professors and scientists alike. One such professor was Yorkshireman Henry Briggs (1561-1630), Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. He immediately visited Napier and they became firm friends. Briggs suggested converting the tables to base 10, Napier agreed and this is the version that went on to be so pivotal for future scientific advancement.

(Image: pxhere.com / Public domain)

The world’s first free emergency telephone service went into operation in 1937 in London. Other numbers such as 333 and 707 were proposed, but if the caller could not see the dial but only feel for the right fingerhole, it had to be easy to locate, hence the selection of 999.

Prior to this, people either rang their local fire brigade, coastguard, police or ambulance station direct or rang for operator assistance at the telephone exchange on number 0, the last fingerhole on the dial. However, after five women died in a fire in 1935 at a doctor’s surgery while a panicked neighbour was kept waiting on the telephone, the government decided to see what could be done to alert operators to the urgency of such calls. The new system sounded an alarm and switched on a flashing light and operators were told to drop everything to answer the 999 calls.

Today, there are dedicated 999 operators and calls are answered within five seconds. There are well over 500,000 calls a week, a huge increase from the initial 1,073 genuine calls and 263 inappropriate calls in 999’s very first week. There is also now an additional ‘silent solution’ (on pressing 55) for the caller who cannot respond to the operator.

(Top image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

The Royal Radar Establishment in Worcestershire, set up in 1953, was responsible for many innovations in computer science, one of which was the touchscreen. In the early 1960s, one of their engineers, Eric Arthur Johnson, was investigating ways to assist Air Traffic Control to respond more quickly to the flight information displayed on their recently introduced computer screens. Bypassing the keyboard and interacting directly with the monitor was a solution which was adopted and is still in use in control towers today.

In 1965 Johnson registered a patent through Aviat UK and published an article on his idea, entitled ‘Touch display – a novel input/output device for computers’ in the journal Electronics Letters. By 1967 he had constructed a prototype and was able to include diagrams and photographs in his second article, ‘Touch displays: A Programmed Man-Machine Interface’ in the journal Ergonomics.

His design was for ‘capacitive touch’, which is the concept employed in smartphones, although Johnson’s screen could only cope with one touch at a time. A toughened glass panel is coated and layered with a grid of touch points and very thin copper wires. Pressure from the finger produces a local change in the electric charge which is communicated to the processor.

(Top image: NATS – UK Air Traffic Control at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This father-and-son partnership were the pioneers of the railways. George Stephenson (1781-1848) never went to school but his great talent was in mechanical engineering. His son, Robert Stephenson (1803-59), also a Northumbrian lad, worked with his father and became a brilliant civil engineer and administrator. Their 4’8¾” gauge became the standard for all railways.

Prior to 1814, when George Stephenson invented the first steam locomotive, transportation of coal was by horse-drawn wagons, road, canal or by sea along the coastline, but these were reaching the limit of their capacity. The steam locomotive, running on purpose-built cast-iron rails, was a great advance even though it only ran at 5 or 6mph. The 27-mile Stockton & Darlington railway was opened in 1825 and was the world’s first freight and passenger service.

Robert Stephenson developed the Rocket locomotive for the Liverpool & Manchester railway which opened in 1830. This ran at 35mph, amazing for the time. Orders poured in and the age of travel was born. He oversaw the construction of a third of the country’s railway network, including the London to Birmingham engineering masterpiece. His expertise also turned to bridge-building and he was an MP from 1847 until his death. He declined a knighthood but it would have been richly deserved.

(Top image: from Smiles (1868) / Public domain)

Devon-born Thomas Newcomen (1664-1729) was among the early inventors of small steam engines and his beam engine, used solely to pump water out of coalmines, was manufactured for over fifty years from 1720. James Watt (1736-1819) from Renfrewshire then took a good look at a Newcomen engine in his workshop at Glasgow University and proceeded to make a series of improvements that would drive the mass production of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1769 he patented the addition of a condenser to separate the cooling process from the steam cylinder, thereby making it more effective and reliable. He teamed up with financier Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) and they set up a manufacturing company in Birmingham, Boulton’s home town. Further inventions patented over the years included the sun-and-planet gear enabling rotary motion, a dual-input cylinder, a centrifugal governor and a pressure indicator. He also invented the horsepower measurement and gave his name to the watt.

The fuel efficiency of Watt’s machines was enhanced by the precision boring technique invented by iron-master John Wilkinson (1728-1808). Nevertheless, Watt was reportedly reluctant to keep on increasing the size and pressure of his steam engines, but after his death, other engineers would go on to do just that and cater for heavier workloads.

(Top image [cropped]: hape662 at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

James Starley (1830-81) from West Sussex was the pioneer of the modern pedal bicycle, along with his London-born nephew, John Kemp Starley (1854-1901). The very first bicycle, nicknamed the ‘bone-shaker’, was made entirely of wood, with no pedals at all, resulting in the rider’s footwear being quickly ruined! The Starleys made the design modifications that led to the much more practical and safe version we have today.

James Starley was very mechanically-minded and began his working career repairing sewing machines and he patented several improvements to their mechanisms. It was while he was manufacturing his own models that he started to look at ways to improve a ‘bone-shaker’ brought to him from Paris. He first of all made a four-wheeled version with suspension, in 1865. In 1870 he patented the spoked wheel and made an all-metal bicycle. In 1871 he invented the Penny-Farthing, with a large wheel at the front and small wheel at the back.

He continued upgrading his design, adding pneumatic tyres, a chain, levers, and inventing the differential gear. In 1876 he patented a tricycle used by Queen Victoria (1819-1901). He even made tandem tricycles. His nephew developed the safety features and experimented with adding motors. His ‘Rover’ line eventually morphed into Rover cars.

(Image: Karen Roe at Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0)

Boolean algebra, or logic, is named after George Boole (1815-64), a gifted mathematician and philosopher. Born in Lincoln, the city honoured him with a memorial stained glass window in Lincoln Cathedral. His thirst for knowledge was such that he taught himself advanced mathematics, Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian at a young age. He opened his own school in 1834, then became head of a boarding school in 1840.

This extraordinary man received the Royal Society of London’s first gold medal for mathematics in 1844. From 1849 until his death from pneumonia he was the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Cork. He devised a symbolic system for sorting information with binary values, enabling the efficiency of computer programs, databases and electronics. He is therefore regarded as one of the forefathers of the digital age.

The Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT are the most well-known, as they can be used in most search engines to narrow down results. However, Boole also greatly contributed to new areas of mathematics such as set theory, binary numbers, probability and differential equations, and he was the founder of invariant theory. He showed that mathematics, far from being set in stone, still has further creative possibilities.

(Top image: Chris Bertram at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The first patent for a typewriter was granted in 1714 to Henry Mill (1683-1771) from southern England. It does not include a technical specification or drawing, but it states that he had perfected a machine for neatly setting down letters on paper just as if they had been printed. It goes on to suggest that this would be a great boon for keeping records, as any attempt at alteration would be quite obvious.

There were many attempts to manufacture a commercially viable typewriter, but it took until the 1870s for this to be achieved (in the USA). Among these attempts was that of Wolverhampton-born engineer Frederick Nesfield Cookson, whose 1860 index-type model is in the Science Museum. In 1885 he also designed a typewriter which could print right-to-left for languages such as Hebrew.

British typewriter manufacturers included George Salter & Co., who began production of the ‘Empire’ machine in 1892. Imperial and Brother were two others, with Brother claiming to have made the very last typewriter in the UK in 2012. Although demand dropped dramatically in the digital age, the typewriter remains an excellent network-free writing tool with many fans worldwide.

(Image of a Salter Standard typewriter: Birmingham Museums Trust at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0)