Category: Inventions

The London Underground, or ‘the Tube’, was the world’s first subterranean railway network and without it and its 270 stations, London would be engulfed by cars and extra roads. Of its 253 miles, 45% are below ground, as much as 221ft. down. During WW2, Tube stations doubled up as air raid shelters and even housed makeshift factories for the manufacture of aircraft components.

It opened in 1863 with the Metropolitan line. The trains were steam-powered and had three classes of carriage. In 1890 the first electric railway was introduced as more lines were added. In 1900 the Central line was the first to lie entirely underground. The whole system was unified in the early 1900s and the flat rate fare was launched. The Art Deco design of stations and signs became the corporate style and journey time was cut by installing a driver’s cab at each end of the train.

Inevitably, tunnel construction disturbed cemeteries and goodness-knows-what-else from centuries past. This, along with disused stations and the many suicides committed on Tube tracks, has led to numerous accounts of ghostly sightings and strange noises! These generally occur when the almost 4 million passengers per day have left and the Tube is shut, 12am-5am, for maintenance and cleaning.

(Top image: Rossographer at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

William Addis (1734-1808) from London is the protagonist of a story about the invention of the toothbrush which seems to merge two different events. Addis was a rag trader for the paper-making industry and rags dipped in grit were also used in those days to clean teeth. However, the increasing inclusion of sugar in people’s diets had a disastrous effect on dental health.

At some point Addis found himself in jail for starting a riot, cause unknown. It is said that whilst there, he put together his toothbrush prototype with the assistance of a guard. The fact that this involved drilling small holes in a bone, inserting boar bristles and gluing the back infers that the guard must have been a friendly, co-operative and resourceful sort of chap. Alternatively, Addis’s jail-time may have merely provided the inspiration for his new product.

Nonetheless, this saw the introduction of the toothbrush as we know it today and Addis went on to establish a hugely successful manufacturing business in 1780 which remained in the family until 1996, having incorporated Wisdom Toothbrushes Ltd in 1993. Around 70 million toothbrushes are produced per year by Wisdom and Addis Housewares Ltd now focuses on other types of brush and household accessories.

(Top image: Karolina Grabowska at pexels.com / Public domain)

Londoner Sir Peter Mansfield (1933-2017) was among several developers of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique and one of two physicists who were awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for bringing it to fruition. In 1973 his assistant’s finger was the first body part to be scanned and in 1977 Mansfield himself had the first whole-body MRI scan.

He began working on an imaging system in 1972 and, unlike his co-awardee Paul Lauterbur who was looking at a slow ‘projection-reconstruction’ method, Mansfield’s innovation was ‘slice selection’ in which linear magnetic field gradients are measured. Still researching in his later years, he was always concerned with reducing the time required to take a scan, which can be up to 90 minutes depending on what is under investigation. Since the patient must lie still throughout, children and people with claustrophia sometimes have to be given a general anaesthetic, unfortunately.

MRI is selected over another technique such as ultrasound when more detail is needed or the issue is over a large area or it is behind bone, e.g. in the brain. MRI is more expensive; a scanner is large and has its own room where no metal is allowed, as there are super-magnets in the machine.

(Image of mobile MRI scanner unit parked outside hospital: Robin Webster at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The ten Colossus machines built at Bletchley Park during WW2 were the first electronic programming computers, albeit for one specific purpose ~ the decoding of secret German communications. It is thought that their success in 1944, particularly around the time of D-Day, shortened the war by two years. Eight of the machines were dismantled immediately after the war and two continued to be used by British Intelligence until the 1960s. The one on display at the National Museum of Computing is a working replica.

Bill Tutte (1917-2002) was a man inspired when he broke the code being generated by Dr. G. Grimsen’s Lorenz cipher in Germany and deduced the design of the machine producing it. Max Newman (1897-1984) commissioned Tommy H. Flowers (1905-98) to assemble a corresponding machine by which to reverse the process and read the messages.

Flowers chose to use 2,500 valves and keep the machine running 24/7 to protect them from breaking. This was unheard of but it worked. Colossus was able to read 5,000 characters per second, generating so much heat that the WREN operators often stripped to their underwear! Tutte, Newman, Flowers and their team are unsung heroes, as the post-WW2 Cold War meant that their work remained classified for decades.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

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)