Category: Inventions

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)

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (1955-) is responsible for helping to usher in the digital age with his revolutionary invention of the World Wide Web. Born in London to parents who themselves were computer scientists, Berners-Lee graduated in physics at the University of Oxford in 1976. Whilst there, he constructed his first computer using an old television set.

He then went into the computing industry, including a stint at CERN in Switzerland. By the time he returned there in 1984 with a Fellowship, it was clear to him that a program was needed to facilitate easier communication and sharing of documents among the thousands of CERN employees, associates and partner organisations. He proposed a global hypertext system in 1989 and devised the ‘WorldWideWeb’ program the following year.

The TCP/IP protocol had already been developed in the USA, but Berners-Lee came up with the first server (with a handwritten warning note adjacent to the switch!) the first browser and editor, http, html and much of the web jargon. He made the world’s first website, at info.cern.ch. Knighted in 2004, he has received many distinguished awards. He is now involved in institutes which “advance the open web as a public good and a basic right“.

(Image: Athanasios Kasampalis at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The first car designed and made by Sir Henry Royce (1863-1933) was a 2-cylinder 10HP model in 1904, closely followed by the 3-cylinder 15HP, the 4-cylinder 20HP,  the 6-cylinder 30HP and the powerful V-8. The sports version successfully raced in the Isle of Man in 1905-6. Royce’s mechanical expertise, his very high standards and his keenness to learn from each new distance and time trial, meant that innovative additions were made quickly and effectively to successive models.

On teaming up with Charles Rolls (1877-1910), the company of Rolls-Royce was born and proceeded to give us the most prestigious, reliable and elegant cars in the world. For example, from 1950 to 1956, just eighteen Rolls-Royce Phantoms were produced and almost all were sold to heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II. Their smoothness and quiet ride made them ideal for parading.

Rolls-Royce represents the pinnacle of motor manufacturing, with models such as the Silver Ghost (dubbed ‘the best car in the world’ in the 1910s/20s), the Phantom, the Silver Shadow and the Corniche still revered and treasured by enthusiasts. In 1998 Rolls-Royce came under German ownership, but it is still being produced in the UK at Goodwood in the south of England.

(Image: Jack Snell at Flickr.com / CC BY-ND 2.0)

Robert Recorde (1510-58) was born in Tenby and, astonishingly, died in debtors’ prison, but he had had a glittering academic career at Oxford and Cambridge universities, studying both mathematics and medicine. In his notes he would write two parallel lines as his own shorthand for ‘is equals to’, reasoning that this is a graphic representation of two things that are exactly the same.

He decided to introduce this into his 1557 book, ‘The Whetstone of Witte’, which was the first book in English to use a range of algebraic symbols. His equals sign did not become universally accepted immediately, as there were several alternatives, but by the 1700s these had been completely discarded for the more elegant =. Recorde’s original version was quite wide, a style he applied to + and – as well, as can be seen in the image above.

Recorde’s simple innovation is perfect for its purpose. However, many students today are not taught its correct meaning and they automatically place it in front of each line in a stepped calculation. This inevitably leads to errors and omissions. Fortunately, there are those who do have a grasp…

(Top image: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Born in Hillsborough, near Lisburn, Professor J. Frank Pantridge, CBE, MC (1916-2004) is regarded as a pioneer of emergency medical treatment. He was a prisoner-of-war in WW2 and narrowly survived but with a heart condition for the rest of his life. On returning to Northern Ireland he began studying cardiology, including an invaluable year on electrocardiography in the USA.

He became a cardiac consultant at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and a professor at the nearby affiliated Queen’s University. He set up a specialist cardiology unit but saw that having patients transported into the Hospital in order to treat them with a defibrillator wasted too much time and many died in the ambulance. One day in 1964, he and his colleagues were called to treat a man having a heart attack on the pavement outside the Hospital. Professor Pantridge used a trolley to wheel out the 11-stone defibrillator, plugged in inside. This undoubtedly sparked the idea for the portable defibrillator.

The first one was powered by two car batteries and saw its first successes in 1966. In the years that followed, it reduced to less than 7lbs. in weight and is now computerised, user-friendly and available in many public locations.

(Top image of Professor Pantridge statue: Albert Bridge at geograph.ie / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Catseye, trademark of Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd, was invented by Percy Shaw, OBE (1890-1976) who was born in Yorkshire. He was prompted by the difficulty of driving home on foggy nights down an unlit, winding road. Shiny tram lines and gleaming cats’ eyes stood out in the darkness, leading to his ‘light-bulb moment’.

Developing the idea of reflective lenses invented by Richard Hollins Murray in 1927, Shaw designed a round cast iron casing with a vulcanised rubber insert to hold two pairs of lenses with mirrored backs. He also included a rainwater collection chamber which cleans the lenses whenever the domed top is depressed by a car’s tyres. The casing is held in place by bitumen grout. He patented his idea in 1934 and set up Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd the following year.

As fate would have it, the blackouts of WW2 proved the immense life-saving value of the ‘Catseye’ and by 1947 they were officially adopted throughout the UK and were exported all across the world. The most common are the white ones, used for the centre of the road and lane marking. Red is for hard shoulders, green for slip roads and lay-bys, amber for central reservations and blue for emergency services areas.

(Image: Chris Downer at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)