The year was 1938. World War II was about to begin. A wonderful invention, which only became ubiquitous with time, happened: The ballpoint pen. The biro, or the first ballpoint pen, was named after its inventor Ladislao José Biro (1899–1985). Biro was a Hungarian journalist and painter. On his visit to a newspaper printing press, he could not help…
Peter Henlein, a 16th-century locksmith and clockmaker from Nuremberg, Germany, is considered to be the architect of the first ‘watch’. Devices for reading time, like sundials, obelisks, and hourglasses were used to measure the passage of time since ancient ages. The credit for the first mechanical water clock goes to the Chinese genius Su Song, for…
The construction workers’ hats were invented by E.W. Bullard, who was inspired by the steel helmets he wore during World War I. He devised what is now known as ‘hard hats’. They were called so because they were made by steaming canvas and glue to make a hard material, which were then fashioned into hats….
John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) was an American physician who worked to develop a healthy diet. Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg invented several food items from grains. These eatables were rolled and made into sheets of dough, which were cooked. One day they accidentally left the cereals exposed for a longer period of time,…
In about 1607, Galileo invented an instrument that could measure the rise of water in a glass tube with the rise in temperature. This instrument is called a thermoscope. Later, scientists modified it to add a scale to mark the rise of water. Subsequently, water was replaced with alcohol and mercury.
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish industrialist, engineer and inventor. He was into construction and that led him to perform an experiment to find out ways of blasting rocks. His research led him to nitroglycerine. He found out that mixing silica with nitroglycerine would make it easy to handle. This mixture is known today as dynamite.
