The word ‘quidnunc’ first appeared around the year 1710, in Irish writer and politician Sir Richard Steele’s journal The Tatler: ‘The infignificancy of my manners to the reft of the world, makes the laughers call me a quid-nunc, a phrafe which I neither underftand, nor fhall ever enquire what they mean by it.’ Since then, several writers…
The discovery of Teflon, a polymer chemically known as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), was sheer coincidence, and yet a revolutionary one. The man behind the discovery was an American chemist named Dr Roy J. Plunkett (1910–1994), who was then working for DuPont, an American chemical company. In the year 1938, Dr Plunkett was conducting a coolant gas…
A water-powered car is one of the most attempted inventions in the world.Even though hydrogen is regarded as one of the most efficient alternative fuels, the expense that goes behind producing it is excessively high. As a result, there has always been a need for economic alternative fuels – a need that helped in discovering…
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,…
