|
|
Click HERE or Refresh to see more random facts.
- The power lawn mower was invented by Ransom E. Olds (of Oldsmobile fame) in 1915.
- The rickshaw was invented by the Reverend Jonathan Scobie, an American Baptist minister living in Yokohama, Japan, built the first model in 1869 in order to transport his invalid wife. Today it remains a common mode of transportation in the Orient.
- The shoestring was invented in England in 1790, Prior to this time all shoes were fastened with buckles.
- The single blade window cleaning squeegee was invented in 1936 by Ettore Sceccone and is still the most common form of commercial window cleaning today.
- The Super Ball® was born in 1965, and it became America's most popular plaything that year. By Christmas time, only six months after it was introduced by Wham-O, 7 million balls had been sold at 98 cents apiece. Norman Stingley, a California chemist, invented the bouncing gray ball. In his spare time, he had compressed a synthetic rubber material under 3,500 pounds of pressure per square inch, and eventually created the remarkable ball. It had a resiliency of 92 percent, about three times that of a tennis ball, and could bounce for long periods. It was reported that presidential aide McGeorge Bundy had five dozen Super Balls® shipped to the White House for the amusement of staffers.
- Roulette was invented by the great French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It was a by product of his experiments with perpetual motion.
- The 'spot' on 7UP comes from its inventor who had red eyes. He was albino.
- Edison improved the incandescent lamp in 1879, but he didn't actually invent it. Sir Humphrey Davy is reputed to be the true inventor of the electric light. He passed electricity through a platinum wire and caused an arc lamp to glow as early as 1802. However, Davy did not pursue the discovery. By the time Edison entered the scene, arc lamps had been burning for several decades, but were limited by short life spans. Edison developed a long-lasting filament light in 1877, and in 1879 produced the first long-lasting light bulb.
- The man who invented shorthand, John Gregg, was deaf.
- The state of Maine was once known as the "Earmuff Capital of The World". Earmuffs were invented there by Chester Greenwood in 1873.
- Because he felt such an important tool should be public property, English chemist John Walker never patented his invention — matches.
- California police in the 1920s thought they had gotten the drop on a moonshiner. They raided what they thought was a still and found, instead, inventor Philo T. Farnsworth, working on something that was later to become television.
- The hypodermic needle was invented in 1853. It was initially used for giving injections of morphine as a painkiller. Physicians mistakenly believed that morphine would not be addictive if it by-passed the digestive tract.
- Thomas Edison’s first major invention was the quadruplex telegraph. Unlike other telegraphs at the time, it could send four messages at the same time over one wire.
- Inventor Gail Borden, Jr. invented condensed milk in the 1850's.
- After his death in 1937, Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless telegraph was honored by broadcasters worldwide as they let the airwaves fall silent for two minutes in his memory.
- Bryan J. Patrie, a Stanford graduate student invented the Watercolor Intelligent Nightlight, which informs bleary-eyed midnight bathroom-goers whether the toilet seat is up or down... without turning on a blinding light. Patrie introduced the device in the early 1990's. He explained, "When you get within five feet of the dark commode, it will sense your motion. It looks to see if the room is dark. Then it looks upward by sending out an infrared beam. If it gets a reflection, it knows the seat is up. If it is, the red light comes on."
- Pez was invented in 1927 by Eduard Haas, an Austrian anti-smoking fanatic, who marketed peppermint-flavored PEZ as a cigarette substitute. The candy gets its name from the German word for peppermint, Pfefferminze. Haas brought the candy to the U.S. in 1952. It bombed, so he reintroduced it as a children's toy, complete with cartoon heads and fruity flavors. One of the most secretive companies in the U.S., PEZ won't even disclose who currently owns the company.
- In the year 1886, Herman Hollerith had the idea of using punched cards to keep and transport information, a technology used up to the late 1970's. This device was constructed to allow the 1890 census to be tabulated. In 1896 the Tabulating Machine Company was founded by Hollerith. Twenty-eight years later, in 1924, after several take-overs the company became known as International Business Machines (IBM).
- The Nobel Prize resulted from a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered after his death as a propagator of violence - he invented dynamite.
- The shoe string was invented in England in 1790. Until then shoes were fastened with buckles.
- Germany holds the title for most independent inventors to apply for patents.
- Noxema, the skin cream invented in 1914 by Baltimore pharmacist George Bunting, was originally sold as "Dr. Bunting's Sunburn Remedy." Mr. Bunting changed the name to Noxema after a customer enthusiastically told him the cream had "knocked out his eczema." Thus, the cream that "knocks eczema" became "Noxema".
- George Eastman, inventor of the Kodak camera, hated having his picture taken.
- Root Beer was invented in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1898 by Edward Adolf Barq, Sr.
- Because Napoleon believed that armies marched on their stomachs, he offered a prize in 1795 for a practical way of preserving food. The prize was won by a French inventor, Nicholas Appert. What he devised was canning. It was the beginning of the canned food industry of today.
- Bavarian immigrant Charles August Fey invented the first three-reel automatic payout slot machine, the Liberty Bell, in San Francisco in 1899.
- Venetian blinds were invented in Japan.
- Benjamin Franklin was also the first person to try to electrocute a turkey. This experiment didn't work. The bird lived and it was America's Renaissance man who ended up absorbing the jolt. "I meant to kill a turkey," said the shocked inventor, "and instead, I nearly killed a goose."
- The horse race starting gate is a Canadian invention, designed in the early 1900s by Philip McGinnis, a racetrack reporter from Huntingdon, Quebec. The device proved popular because it prevented arguments caused when horses started prematurely.
|
