Inventors And Their Strange Stories

Strange Stories of the Inventors
Introduction:
Inventors everywhere attempt to profit by their discovery and patent.  
This has never been my main interest in inventing.  
I remain more interested in the !AHA! moment of first discovery.  It may take a millisecond, but later become the work of a lifetime.  Unknown Canadians invented the light bulb much before Thomas Edison made it workable by thousands of hours of experimentation.  They did the right thing to sell their patent to him.
Even for a great idea, the promises of financial rewards are slim at best, as you will see as you read on.  More frequently the !AHA! moment turns out to be really useful in a completely unexpected way. This too you will see as you read on.  
Nobody will remember the sacrifices made by the inventor of the square drive screwdriver due to stubbornness, or the despair of men financially ruined who nevertheless carried on.
Inventors often live in their own world and are far ahead of their times. This was certainly true of the Canadian radio pioneer Fessenden. It was certainly true of the man who did more for the perfection of the AM radio, and later the FM radio. I bet you don't know who I am talking about.  Read on!
Sometimes a great invention is not recognized during the life of the inventor , especially if they commit suicide too early.
If your eyes glaze over at the view of chemical formulas I apologize and recommend that you just forge ahead and try to get over it.
These notes have been compiled from my much larger project "Recent History" which covers the history of the last 100 years [and more]. 


The Canadian "Real McCoy":
Elijah McCoy The inventor was born in 1843, in Colchester, Ontario, Canada. His parents were former slaves, George and Mildred McCoy had fled Kentucky for Canada on the underground railroad.  In 1872 trains needed to periodically stop and be lubricated, to prevent overheating. Elijah McCoy developed a lubricator for steam engines that did not require the train to stop. His lubricator used steam pressure to pump oil wherever it was needed. He subsequent made 24 more patents relating to the lubricator.
Unfortunately the origin of the term "Real McCoy" is unknown.

Canadian Heated Streetcar Leads to Other Things.

1892  "Electric Oven," Thomas Ahearn  (June 24, 1855 – June 28, 1938) was a Canadian inventor and businessman. Ahearn, a native of Ottawa, was instrumental in the success a vast streetcar system that was once in Ottawa, the Ottawa Electric Railway, and was the first chairman of Canada's Federal District Commission in 1927. He held several patents related to electrical items and headed companies which competed for decades with Ottawa Hydro as providers for electricity in Ottawa. Ahearn co-founded the Ottawa Car Company, manufacturer of streetcars for Canadian markets.

Having already impressed the people of Ottawa by inventing the heated streetcar in 1892, Thomas Ahearn took his electrical inventiveness one step further that same year by preparing Canada's first electrically cooked meal.

By 1887 Ahearn had already secured a monopoly on electrical power generation in the Ottawa region, and early in 1892, he patented an electric water heater. This local entrepreneur clearly saw the vast potential for electrically produced heat, as several related patents soon followed: an electric flat iron (patent no. 39917), the above-noted system for heating streetcars electrically (patent no. 39507), a method of heating an automatic water supply electrically (patent no. 39508), and the electric oven.

To celebrate this last innovation, Ahearn organized a meal to be remembered, at the Ottawa Windsor Hotel on August 29, 1892. The "Electric Dinner" featured consommé royal soup, Saginaw trout, sugar-cured ham, stuffed loin of veal, lamb cutlets, apple pie, chocolate cake and various other dishes, all prepared with what Ahearn called his "cooking heaters." As he proclaimed on the evening's menu, "Every item on this menu has been cooked by the electric heating appliance invented and patented by Mr. T. Ahearn of Ahearn and Soper of this City and is the first instance in the history of the world of an entire meal being cooked by electricity. The bread and meats were cooked in an electric oven and the liquids in other electric heaters."

Whether this electric meal was the world's first is hard to confirm, as this was the heyday of electrical inventions. Regardless, Ahearn's attempts to capitalize on his electric oven went sadly awry. He traded his patent rights to the American Heating Corporation in exchange for stock, and the company went bankrupt before he saw any return on his investment.

That was the one snag in an otherwise glorious career. Over the years, Ahearn was the president of nine companies and utilities and held six directorships. He also built the country's first coast-to-coast telegraph communications network in 1897. Thirty years later, he conceived and organized Canada's first coast-to-coast radio broadcast. His other inventions include a version of the telephone, sound-reproducing mechanisms, a talking machine and sound machinery.

The electric oven, for its part, was ahead of its time. Although models were available for sale in the 1890s, the technology was unstable and, regardless, the necessary electrical infrastructure was not yet widely established. As a result, gas stoves dominated the market well into the 20th century; it was only by 1930 that advances in technology made electric stoves an attractive option, particularly for domestic kitchens.  The electric stove was showcased at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where an electrified model kitchen was shown. Unlike the gas stove, the electrical stove was slow to catch on, partly due to the unfamiliar technology, and the need for cities and towns to be electrified.

His wife served as the President of the Victorian Order of Nurses. She was identified with the Local Council of Women, and the Woman's Canadian Historical Society. The couple lived at Buena Vista, 584 Maria Street, Ottawa.
Thomas Ahearn's son Frank would become the owner of the Ottawa Auditorium and the Ottawa Senators professional ice hockey team.
Ahearn's other child, Lilias Ahearn Southam(1888-1962) married Harry Southam in 1909. Harry Southam, publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, was part of the Southam newspaper empire.

In 1882 Ahearn installed 65 arc street lamps, thus introducing electric light to Ottawa.  His Ottawa Electric Light Company built a small waterwheel at Chaudière Falls on the Ottawa River to supply power for the street lighting. This is possibly the first hydraulic generator in Canada.

In 1887, for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Ahearn and Soper were contracted to illuminate the Parliament Buildings with thousands of electric lights.  This practice continues to this date around Christmas.

In 1891, he introduced the first electric streetcar into Canada at Ottawa.  He built the first electric powered hot-water heating for the cars in the winter.  He also invented a rotating brush sweeper to clear the track of snow and argued to get Sunday service for the streetcars. 

In 1899, Ahearn was the first person to drive a small electric automobile in Ottawa. 

In 1927, Ahearn, with Prime Minister Mackenzie King and Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe, made the first transatlantic telephone call to Britain.

In 1932, he was appointed as chairman of the Broadcasting Committee for the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation.  One of his tasks was to produce a coast-to-coast radio broadcast of the festivities on Parliament Hill. For this, Ahearn built the 32,000 kilometres of wire needed to connect the country from east to west. Governor-General Lord Willingdon said that this "had done more to create a national spirit in Canada than any other movement."

A simple Gimmick sell tea.
The tea bag was invented by Thomas Sullivan of New York City in 1903. He first used them to send samples to his customers instead of sending it in more expensive tins.  The rest is history.

Invented as a sales Gimmick
Aluminum was a very expensive metal in 1917, and  Ed Cox , an aluminum pot salesman, invented a pre-soaped pad with which to clean pots. As a way of introducing himself to potential new customers, Cox made the soap encrusted steel-wool pads as a calling card. His wife named the soap pads S.O.S. or "Save Our Saucepans." 

An All Canadian Screwdriver
In 1908, square-drive screws were invented by Canadian P. L. Robertson. Twenty-eight years before Henry Phillips patented his Phillips head screws, which are also square-drive screws.The Robertson screw is considered the "first recess-drive type fastener practical for production usage." The design became a North American standard, as published in the sixth edition of Industrial Fasteners Institute Metric and Inch Standards. A square-drive head on a screw can be better than a slot head because the screwdriver will not slip out of the screw's head during installation. The Model T car made by the Ford Motor Company (one of Robertson's first customers) used over seven hundred Robertson screws. From early years of the Milton plant Ford Windsor accounted for a substantial part of Robertson’s production. By using socket head screws Ford made a considerable savings of $2.60 per car.  Ford found that they could save upwards of 2 hours of assembly time per vehicle.   You are 3% through this article.
Soon after P.L was in Detroit talking about expanding socket head screw production to supply all U.S. made Ford cars. Henry Ford refused to commit to a new product line without having a say in how and where the screws would be made. P.L was not happy with this idea and headed home. This meant P.L was letting go of vast potential in the U.S. market, this also included Ford Windsor which accounted for one third of his output of screws. 
During the mid 1930’s, times were tough during the second world war, as P.L Robertson felt the weight of the many hard years, until PL caught a break, the armed services needed tremendous quantities of brass screws and Robertson was there to supply them. In addition, a traveling salesman for Robertson landed a contract where carloads of cadmium plated Robertson combination square/slot drive screws were needed for the plywood mosquito bomber aircraft. This was the largest order ever received by the company. 
Around the end of the war PL received a phone call from a change to his financial advisor – PL was officially a millionaire.
The Robertson is the real lifesaver, rescuing us from both flatheads and Henry M. Phillips’s vastly inferior product. The patent ran out in 1964.


Before his time Lee DeForest:
Discovery in 1906 Of the Audion Tube.  He invented the amplifying tube which is basic to the amplification of sound by wireless means. Radio broadcasting was born, no longer were people restricted to the cat's whisker unamplified radio signal.  In 1910 Enrico Caruso sang in the first experimental Radio Broadcast by vacuum tube inventor Lee De Forest. But the public was not interested.  Discouraged, De Forest sold the rights to the tube to a telephone company. In the following years he took out more than 300 patents on radio and other electronic devices.  One invention was phonofilm, a forerunner of sound-track motion-picture film. He failed also to make his fortune with it.  In 1923 he showed the first public talking movie.  The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer, released 4 years later which used a phonographic method which could go out of syncronization with the film. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded on to the side of the strip of motion picture film to create a composite, or "married", print. If proper synchronization of sound and picture was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in playback. Any modern non digital motion picture theater can play a Movietone film without modification to the projector.  Over the next four years, he improved his system. Theodore Case later sold an improved version of DeForest's invention to Movietone and the Fox Studios.  DeForest, a failed inventor but a master promoter, spent his life convincing people he'd invented sound film, reaching his greatest glory with an Academy Award for his lifetime achievement and contributions to the creation of sound film.  Wider recognition came to him in his later years, but he was bitter about the financial gains made by others on his inventions. He died on June 30, 1961

Chemical Inventor commits suicide:
1935 W. H. Carothers polymerised adipic acid (C6) and hexamethylene diamine (C6) to give specimen 66 which had good physical properties when it was drawn into a fibre. The material was christened Tiber 66 and, in September 1938 re-christened Nylon66. 
In three years of research Carothers’ team had created the first commercial synthetic rubber with the discovery of neoprene and now they had done it in the plastics field with nylon.
1937 Suicide by  cyanide and died believing that he was ‘morally bankrupt’ and that his work had been useless.  He should have waited a bit longer.
1940 nylon stockings hit the hosiery stores nationwide. At just over one dollar a pair, five million pairs were sold on the first day. 
It is thought that Corothers is not the only inventor to commit suicide.
1848 Horace Wells the inventor of Chloroform anaesthetic
Horace Wells (January 21, 1815 – January 24, 1848) was an American dentist who pioneered the use of anaesthesia in dentistry, specifically nitrous oxide.  Dr. Wells, the discoverer of the anaesthetic properties of ether, having been placed in confinement on a charge of Vitriol-throwing, committed suicide by cutting the femoral artery of the left thigh with a razor. Previously to the fatal act, he inhaled some chloroform to produce insensibility to pain.  "what still more distresses me is the fact that my name is familiar to the whole scientific world as being connected with an important discovery."

Text of a letter sent to Horace Wells , days after he committed suicide.
Twelve days earlier a letter addressed to Wells had been posted in Paris. Transportation was slow in that day and Horace Wells was never to read: 

"The use of ether took the place of nitrous oxide gas, but chloroform has supplanted both, yet the first person, who first discovered and performed surgical operations without pain, was Horace Wells "
Edwin Howard Armstrong , the electrical genius of the radio age , mentioned lower on this page too was an unfortunate suicide.

Cleanliness and Germs
1846  Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis worked at the Vienna General Hospital's maternity clinic on a 3-year contract from 1846-1849. 

There, as elsewhere in European and North American hospitals, puerperal fever, or childbed fever, was rampant, sometimes climbing to 40 percent of admitted patients. 

He was disturbed by these mortality rates, and eventually developed a theory of infection, in which he theorized that decaying matter on the hands of doctors, who had recently conducted autopsies, was brought into contact with the genitals of birthgiving women during the medical examinations at the maternity clinic. He proposed a radical hand washing theory using chlorinated lime, now a known disinfectant.

At the time however, the germ theory of infection had not been developed and Semmelweis' ideas ran contrary to key medical beliefs and practices. His ideas were rejected and ridiculed. Quite unusually, his contract was not renewed, effectively expelling him from the medical community in Vienna. He died as an outcast in a mental institution.

Sanitation
In the 1870s, Joseph Lister was instrumental in developing practical applications of the germ theory of disease with respect to sanitation in medical settings and aseptic surgical techniques—partly through the use of carbolic acid (phenol) as an antiseptic. 

Simultaneous innovations in medical sanitation were developed independently by Ignaz Semmelweis.

Nicolai lvanovich Pirogoff introduced various procedures which foreshadowed the concept of antisepsis many years before Lister's great discovery. For example, he isolated patients suffering from infectious diseases, shaved the operative area before the patient was placed on the operating table, used dry sutures, excised infected parts, advised against the common practice of exploring wounds with fingers, and employed antiseptic agents such as alcohol, iodine, and nitrate of silver.  He is considered to be the founder of field surgery, and was one of the first surgeons in Europe to use ether as an anaesthetic. He was the first surgeon to use anaesthesia in a field operation (1847), invented various kinds of surgical operations, and developed his own technique of using plaster casts to treat fractured bones. He is one of the most widely recognised Russian physicians. His name lives in the Pirogoff amputation, a method of osteoplastic amputation of the foot, which he devised in 1854; the Pirogoff opera-
tion for hernia; and the Pirogoff (venous) angle. 

Koch's postulates are four criteria designed to establish a causal relationship between a causative microbe and a disease. The postulates were published by Koch in 1890. Koch applied the postulates to establish the etiology of anthrax and tuberculosis, but they have been generalized to other diseases.
Koch's postulates are the following:
=The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.
=The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture.
=The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism.
=The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent.

Pasteur:
The more formal experiments on the relationship between germ and disease were conducted by Louis Pasteur between 1860 and 1864. He discovered the pathology of the puerperal fever and the pyogenic vibrio in the blood, and suggest using boric acid to kill these micro organisms before and after confinement.

Louis Pasteur further demonstrated between 1860 and 1864 that fermentation and the growth of microorganisms in nutrient broths did not proceed by spontaneous generation. He exposed freshly boiled broth to air in vessels that contained a filter to stop all particles passing through to the growth medium: and even with no filter at all, with air being admitted via a long tortuous tube that would not pass dust particles. Nothing grew in the broths, therefore the living organisms that grew in such broths came from outside, as spores on dust, rather than being generated within the broth. Abraham Groves developed aseptic surgery techniques in the 1870s because he considered surgical infections to be transmitted by fluids as he knew typhoid was spread.

The first child vaccinated in Russia was named Vaccinoff, it was appropriate that the first child born under the influence of chloroform should be named Anesthesia. A photograph of Anesthesia at the age of "sweet seventeen" used to hang over James Young Simpson's desk inventor of chloroform.

Anaesthesia introduced by a Royal Birth

to John Snow was accorded the honor of administering chloroform to Queen Victoria at the birth of Prince Leopold, April 7, 1853. Snow gave the anesthetic in fifteen minim doses; the inhalation lasted fifty-three minutes. Most doctors at the time were horrified that such a new and untested technology should be applied to the Royal Body.  Snow was called again to administer chloroform to Her Majesty, at the birth of Princess Beatrice on April 14, 1857. On each occasion, Her Majesty expressed her satisfaction.  Snow's early monograph on the inhalation of the vapor 
of ether in surgical operations, published in 1847, was followed by papers on chloroform and the entire field of anesthesia. There are references to him in Simpson's defense of anesthesia, and when Lister wrote the section on Anesthetics for Timothy Holmes's System of Surgery (1860-64), he referred frequently to John Snow. 

with the exceptions of nitrous oxide and chloroform, all anesthetics given by inhalation are inflammable and explosive.



Cloth Dye
1856 Mauve dye invented from coal tar. William Perkin was trying to make Quinine.

Invention by accident?
1844 Charles Goodyear vulcanize rubber patent.  The inventor himself 
admitted that the discovery of the vulcanizing process was not the direct result of the scientific method, but claims that it was not accidental. Rather it was the result of application and observation.
Thomas Hancock took out a patent for the vulcanisation of rubber using sulphur, 8 weeks before Charles Goodyear in England. He used sulphur and got the idea from Goodyear.


1843 ‘vulcanization’  Thomas Hancock first patent for the process in 1843
1844 Charles Goodyear vulcanize rubber patent.  The inventor himself admitted that the discovery of the vulcanizing process was not the direct result of the scientific method, but claims that it was not accidental. Rather it was the result of application and observation.
Thomas Hancock took out a patent for the vulcanisation of rubber using sulphur, 8 weeks before Charles Goodyear in England. He used sulphur and got the idea from Goodyear.
1887 The first practical pneumatic tire John Boyd Dunlop
1889 First use of rubber gloves in the operating theatre  made by Dunlop
1895 Michelin makes first pneumatic motorcar tyre fitted to a specially designed Daimler. The car took part in the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race 1895 & finished ninth out of forty two entrants.
Firestone
After working in the rubber industry creating bicycle tires, Firestone founded the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company in 1900 to develop tires for automobiles. He saw the advantages of the pneumatic tire, as compared to the solid tire, and made several improvements. In 1905, Henry Ford discovered these advanced tires and immediately installed them on Ford Motor Company cars. Because of this relationship, many breakthroughs in the tire industry came from Firestone over the next thirty years, including a dismountable rim, the balloon tire, the first low-pressure truck tire, and the first rayon-cord tire. 

Aluminum Smelting Invented in Canada

Wilson, Thomas Leopold  Born in 1860, in  Woodstock, Ontario, Thomas at the age of 20 [1880] created his first invention, an electro dynamo, with a local blacksmith.  Their electro dynamo produced enough electricity to light the streets of Hamilton with electric arc lamps.  

1882 He developed the electric arc furnace, which he hoped to use to process aluminium ore.  In this pursuit, Thomas found a financial backer , James Turner Morehead, in North Carolina who had operated a factory powered by hydroelectricity.  Because his previous operation went out of business, Morehead gladly accepted Thomas Wilson and his patented process to produce aluminium in an electric arc furnace in his unused hydroelectric-powered factory.

In 1892, in an attempt to improve the aluminium smelting process, Thomas Wilson accidentally discovered how to make calcium carbide economically.  He mixed lime and coal tar, and heated it in his electric arc furnace.  When his waste product (calcium carbide) was cleaned out of the furnace and thrown in to the river, the resulting gas produced a very bright, hot flame when ignited.  Although both calcium carbide and acetylene were previously produced in limited quantities in the laboratory, Thomas realized that he had discovered a commercially viable process for mass producing both, and filed a patent on his process.  Although at that time there were no commercial uses for calcium carbide and acetylene, Thomas Wilson and his partner, concentrated their efforts on practical applications for both.  Their first application was in the area of lighting for street lamps, homes, bicycles, mine and factory lighting, etc.  Acetylene was also used to light the way at night for early automobiles.  Thomas eventually invented acetylene-lighted buoys for marine use, and founded his International Marine Signal Company in Ottawa to manufacture and distribute his Wilson Buoys and Beacons worldwide.

Invention by accident twice, and a war secret , the story of Polyethylene.
Polyethylene was first synthesized by the German chemist Hans von Pechmann who prepared it by accident in 1898 while heating diazomethane. When his colleagues Eugen Bamberger and Friedrich Tschirner characterized the white, waxy, substance that he had created they recognized that it contained long -CH2- chains and termed it polymethylene. First invention over
The first industrially practical polyethylene synthesis was discovered (again by accident) in 1933 by Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson at the ICI works in Northwich, England. Upon applying extremely high pressure (several hundred atmospheres) to a mixture of ethylene and benzaldehyde they again produced a white, waxy, material. Because the reaction had been initiated by trace oxygen contamination in their apparatus, the experiment was, at first, difficult to reproduce. Second invention almost over, wait 2 more years, it becomes a war secret.
It was not until 1935 that another ICI chemist, Michael Perrin, developed this accident into a reproducible high-pressure synthesis for polyethylene that became the basis for industrial LDPE production beginning in 1939. Because polyethylene was found to have very low-loss properties at very high frequency radio waves, commercial distribution in Britain was suspended on the outbreak of World War II, secrecy imposed, and the new process was used to produce insulation for UHF and SHF coaxial cables of radar sets. 
During World War II, further research was done on the ICI process and in 1944 Bakelite Corporation at Sabine, Texas and Du Pont at Charleston, West Virginia, began large scale commercial production under license from ICI.
The breakthrough landmark in the commercial production of polyethylene began with the development of catalyst that promote the polymerization at mild temperatures and pressures. The first of these was a chromium trioxide-based catalyst discovered in 1951 by Robert Banks and J. Paul Hogan at Phillips Petroleum.  In 1953 the German chemist Karl Ziegler developed a catalytic system based on titanium halides and organoaluminium compounds that worked at even milder conditions than the Phillips catalyst. The Phillips catalyst is less expensive and easier to work with, however, and both methods are heavily used industrially. 

Another accidental Discovery  Trying to find a Refrigerant.
Teflon   Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) is a synthetic fluoropolymer of tetrafluoroethylene that finds numerous applications. The best known brand name of PTFE is Teflon by DuPont Co.
It is commonly believed that Teflon is a spin-off product from the NASA space projects. However, that is not so, although it has been used by NASA.
Teflon was accidentally discovered while looking for a refrigerant.
In 1938, a Dupont scientist was researching refrigerants, when he unknowingly created a bizarre new material. It took an adventurous young chemist named Roy Plunkett to make the bold decision that gave us Teflon.  Water-repellent fabrics such as Gortex® are made using Teflon.
Teflon is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the slipperiest material in the world.
In the early 1930s GM was looking for a safer refrigerant to use for their Frigidaire line of refrigerators. They needed to find a replacement for ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and propane, the refrigerants used at the time, because they were too dangerous for use in homes.
Ultimately they discovered two chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs; GM called their new refrigerants Freon 112 and Freon 113.  GM had made the discovery, but their expertise was in making machinery - cars and refrigerators - not chemicals. To refine and mass-produce Freon, GM looked to DuPont.  The two companies formed a joint venture called Kinetic Chemicals. While testing the new refrigerants, they actually developed a more efficient version, Freon 114.
Unfortunately, Kinetic's entire output of Freon 114 was earmarked for GM, so DuPont started looking for its own refrigerant. One of the scientists assigned to this task was a 27-year-old Ohio State chemistry Ph.D. named Roy J. Plunkett.
Plunkett hypothesized that a new refrigerant could be made by combining tetrafluoroethylene, or TFE, with hydrochloric acid. During experiments, Plunkett and his assistant Jack Rebok used tanks filled with compressed TFE.
They stored these tanks in dry ice to keep the gas inside from expanding too much, and exploding.  On the morning of April 6, 1938, Plunkett and Rebok set up for an experiment. Rebok connected a TFE tank and opened the valve, but to both of their surprise, nothing came out.   Plunkett and Rebok weighed the tank to see if the gas had leaked out. Another surprise - the tanks were still full. They unsuccessfully tried to unclog the valve wire. Out of frustration, Plunkett took the valve off of the tank and shook it. White flakes fell out.
Discovery!
Plunkett immediately sawed the tank in half. Inside they found a white, waxy coating. Plunkett wrote in his lab book that, "a white solid material was obtained, which was supposed to be a polymerized product."
It was commonly believed that TFE could not be polymerized, but that didn't deter Plunkett. He experimented with the new compound, discovering in two days that it is thermoplastic, melts at a temperature approaching red heat, and boils away.  It is insoluble in just about everything: cold water, hot water, acetone, ethers, acids, and alcohols. It doesn't char or melt under a soldering iron, it doesn't rot, swell, mildew, mold, or degrade in sunlight.
Plunkett needed to make sure this new substance was viable, so he conducted an experiment to recreate it. When the experiment succeeded, Plunkett knew he had something groundbreaking on his hands.  Plunkett applied for a patent on July 1, 1939 in the name of Kinetic Chemicals. In 1941, patent 2230654 was granted.
First Uses
Teflon's first use was in gasket seals for the Manhattan project. Teflon also found a home as the nosecone material on proximity bombs - it was resistant to electricity and transparent to radar, making it interference-free to the proximity fuse.
After the war, DuPont released Teflon for commercial and industrial uses. By 1953 Teflon had found its way into industrial kitchens, but was still being tested for release to the general public.
While DuPont tested, a french engineer named Marc Gregoire obtained a small amount of Teflon, intending to coat his fishing gear with it. Recognizing a more useful way to employ non-stick, Gregoire's wife asked him to coat her frying pans. The result was so successful that Gregoire patented non-stick cookware in 1954 and set up a factory in 1956 to produce Tefal frying pans.
By 1961 Teflon had appeared on cookware in American departments stores. Today "non-stick" cookware can be found in nearly every kitchen in the world, commerical or home.  

Just Stick With it.
1873 Who invented the light bulb? If you said Thomas Edison, you're wrong. Canadian Henry Woodward invented it. Between 1873 and 1874, Woodward with the help of Toronto innkeeper Matthew Evans, invented a glass bulb with an enclosed carbon filament and nitrogen gas. It was patented in 1874. But that's where it ended because they didn't have enough money to produce and sell their own invention. One year later they sold the patent to  Thomas Edison.
If they had just stuck with it, they could probably have developed the tungsten filament.
Edison did *not* invent the modern light bulb which we know today, In 1906, General Electric introduced incandescent bulbs with tungsten filaments.   Most incandescent bulbs convert less than 4% of the energy they use into visible light. By 1964, improvements in efficiency and production of incandescent lamps had reduced the cost of providing a given quantity of light by a factor of thirty, compared with the cost at introduction of Edison's lighting system.  By 1945, each person bought more than 5 lamps every year.  In 2010 GE closed the last plant making incandescent light bulbs. Today they are largely replaced by CFL [compact fluorescent] and LED [light emitting diode] bulbs which are about four times more efficient.  An 100W incandescent bulb is about 50% more efficient than a 40W one.  Light produced by luminescence, instead of heating a filament is inherently more efficient. A candle is about 1/10 as efficient as an incandescent bulb.  The USA in 2007 passed a law barring stores from selling incandescent light bulbs after 2014.  Incandescent bulbs continue to be produced in China.

Accidental Healthy and Prosperous.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, invented Cornflakes , He actually was one of the many to develop healthy food for the health-spa craze of the era, and he sold his patent to his brother in law to commercialize.  He was fed up with the addition of sugar to the product.  The story goes that Kellogg was trying to improve the vegetarian diet of his hospital patients. While he was boiling wheat to try to make an easily digestible substitute for bread, Kellogg accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat to stand and become tempered. When it was put through a rolling process, the grains of wheat emerged as large, thin flakes. When the flakes were baked, they became crisp and light, creating the corn flake. He patented his product on 31 May 1884.   The cornflake still had a way to go before being perfected. John Kellogg, with his brother Will Keith Kellogg, started the Sanitas Food Company to produce their whole grain cereals around 1897. The brothers argued over the addition of sugar to the cereals, so in 1906, Will started his own company called the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which eventually became the Kellogg Company.

Another invention that stayed in the family
1907 janitor James Murray Spangler invents the "suction sweeper" using an old fan motor, a soap box, broom handle, and pillow case, obtaining a patent next June and founding the Electric Suction Sweeper Co; an early buyer is his cousin, whose hubby William Hoover goes on to purchase the rights from him and found the Hoover Co., which offers a 10-day free home trial and sweeps the U.S. market, adding a "beater bar" in 1919, along with the slogan "It beats as it sweeps as it cleans".

Cellophane invented by mistake for gas masks:
One day in 1900, Dr. Jacques E. Brandenberger was sitting in a cafe in his native Switzerland, when a hapless customer spilled a glass of wine. That fateful accident would change the landscape of food service forever.
While watching the waiter change the tablecloth, Brandenberger had an idea - a stain-resistant tablecloth. He wasn't sure how he'd accomplish it, but it seemed logical to apply a waterproof, flexible coating that would make the tablecloth stainproof. He never got it to stick to cloth, but he did invent cellophane.  It had a great impact on meat packaging.
The resulting fabric was too stiff to use as a table cloth and not durable: the plastic coating peeled off easily. Brandenberger was upset, but strangely curious.  Brandenberger had failed to find a waterproof tablecloth, but had instead invented a clear, flexible, plastic coating.
The first use of this new plastic film was in gas masks. In 1917 Brandenberger gave his patents to La Cellophane Societe Anonyme and joined that organization.
In 1923 La Cellophane reached an agreement with DuPont to allow that company to market Cellophane in the United States as a flexible covering for food.
Sinclair's "Jungle" spurred on the passing of the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906) and the Meat Inspection Act (1906).
By 1938, cellophane sales accounted for 25 percent of DuPont's annual profit.
DuPont ceased production of cellophane in 1986 in favor of Mylar.
Like so many other inventions, cellophane has become so pervasive that people use it to refer to all clear, plastic, flexible coverings for food, rather than the specific product that it is named for.

The First Plastic Bakelite
Bakelitei, a plastic made out of phenol and formaldehyde, and first sold as a synthetic substitute for shellac is invented and manufactured by Leo Hendrik Baekeland (1863-1944), who came to the U.S. in 1889, and invented Velox photographic paper in 1893, and sold his patent to Kodak for $1M.  Bakelite is so versatile and superior in its chemical, mechanical, and physical qualities that it can be molded into any unbreakable shape, and is a perfect insulator, making possible the first automobile self-starters.  His original goal was much more modest: to find a replacement for shellac.  "the material of 1,000 uses." He underestimated its potential by several orders of magnitude. In the following decades, Bakelite was used to make electronics components, auto parts, cameras, telephones, buttons, letter openers, clocks, radios, toys, telephone casings, billiard balls, kitchenware, rosary beads, chess pieces, and tens of thousands of other items. 

“Well, it was kind of an accident, because plastic is not what I meant to invent…”
LEO BAEKELAND, BELGIAN CHEMIST, ON INVENTING BAKELITE

By 1909 Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland had accidentally discovered that mixing phenol and formaldehyde with powdered wood produced a resinlike material he called Bakelite, which was the first thermosetting plastic (polymer that is soft until set solid by heat).
Bakelite became the design material of the Art Deco era.
Polymers that are liquid when heated and solid when cooled, thermoplastics are often used for pipes since they can be blow-molded to make hollow tubes with no joints, and can withstand high gas and liquid pressure.

A Great Invention, Now What can we use it for?
It was at the end of the 19th century when a German scientist, Hans von Pechmann, discovered a waxy residue at the bottom of his test tube. He had little idea of the material's significance; he was not to know that the substance was an early form of what we now use to bottle our shampoo, cocoon our sandwiches and wrap our wires. He had, completely by accident, made polythene, one of the world's most widely used and controversial materials.
The product Von Pechmann made that day in 1899 was virtually identical to the modern chemical and a pair of his colleagues – Eugen Bamberger and Friedrich Tschirner – called it polymethylene. But unlike polythene, which is versatile enough to make hardy and filmic plastics, this waxy resin was not useful in practical terms; and so little was made of it.
Like future volumes of plastic, the Von Pechmann experiment was duly buried. It was not for another 34 years that the people who are officially credited with inventing polythene chanced upon it. 
Waldo Semon and the B.F. Goodrich Company developed a method in 1926 to plasticize PVC by blending it with various additives. The result was a more flexible and more easily processed material that soon achieved widespread commercial use.  Unfortunately he could not bond it to metal – which had been the purpose of the research – but Goodrich got some early return for its investment by way of PVC shoe heels and coated chemical racks. This was not sufficient to provide the company with the return it needed to keep on developing the material and it was on the point of backing out when Semon came up with the idea of coating fabrics to give waterproof materials and of producing soft flexible PVC sheets for applications such as shower curtains. The company vice-president whom he had to convince was a keen camper who was used to being soaked inside his ‘waterproof’ tent so Semon got his ‘green light’ and in 1931 a range of products hit the unsuspecting market. The name “Koroseal” was proposed for PVC by Goodrich’s Director of Research and soon became the registered trademark. Waldo Semon was granted the US Patent for PVC in 1933.


Stealing Patents the Radio Wars:
Guglielmo Marconi  was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of a radio telegraph system.Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy"
1896 Marconi transports his wireless invention to England. Upon entry to the country, nervous customs officials smash his apparatus under suspicion that it may be part of an Italian anarchist plot.
1897 Marconi received a British patent for "improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and an apparatus therefor. Marconi was the first to get a patent for a "black box" . He enclosed his transmitter in a box and demonstrated that it actually worked, however he had stolen the concept from Oliver Lodge  in England which Lodge failed to patent.  Lodge knew practically what the box must contain, and immediately afterwards (the same day) showed to a few friends, a Morse tape instrument, very roughly working on that plan.  Lodge performed transmission on August 14, 1894. This was a year before Marconi's initial experiments.  Thomas Edison also took out a U.S. Patent on a system of electrical wireless communication between ships in 1885 which later he sold to the Marconi Company. Also in 1897 Nicola Tesla also applied for two key United States radio patents, first a radio system patent, and, second for protection of his interests of the radio arts.  The Russians too have an invention preceding the radio, but not a patent.  Popov presented his radio receiver to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society on May 7, 1895 — the day has been celebrated in the Russian Federation as "Radio Day". On this day, Popov performed a public demonstration of transmission and reception of radio waves used for communication at the Russian Physical and Chemical Society, using his coherer. The paper on his findings was published the same year 1895. Popov was hoping for distant signaling with radio waves. He did not apply for a patent for this invention. Popov's early experiments were transmissions of only 600 yards. Popov was the first to develop a practical communication system based on the coherer, and is usually considered by the Russians to have been the inventor of radio.
Critics and disbelievers notwithstanding, Marconi continued with his experimentations and transmissions, and by the end of 1902 the first official messages , not test transmissions, were being sent across the Alantic Ocean.  By the early part of 1903 , newspaper stories from New York City were being sent for publication in TheTimes of London by means of Marconi’s telegraphy, which was undeniably built on the work of Henry, Lodge, Morse, Maxwell, Hertz, Fessenden, Edison, Popov, and other individuals. Because of Marconi's patent.

Unheard of Patents:
Edwin Howard Armstrong invented the (Super)regenerative Radio Circuit 1914 , which feeds part of the output of a tube back to the input for amplification at the expense of stability; it eventually replaces weak crystal radios and makes loud squealy home family radios possible; too bad, there is one dial for each stage of amplification, which must be tuned simultaneously. 
In 1918 he invents the quantum leap Superheterodyne (Superhet) Radio Receiver, which blows his own super-regenerative feedback circuit of 1912 away. 
In 1923 he invents the suitcase receiver, the world's first portable radio as a present for his wife's birthday. 
In 1922 RCA buys his superheterodyne patent, creating a monopoly for the rest of the decade as it only requires one dial and everybody ditches the multi-dial regenerative models for it, causing RCA in 1930 to be forced by Congress to share its patents.
During the early 1930’s, he invented frequency-modulated radio broadcasting, although he would neither receive credit for it nor see its widespread use in his lifetime.  In 1937, Armstrong financed construction of the first FM radio station, W2XMN, a 40 kilowatt broadcaster in Alpine, New Jersey. The signal (at 42.8 MHz) could be heard clearly 100 miles (160 km) away, despite the use of less power than an AM radio station.
Financially broken and mentally beaten after years of legal tussles with RCA and others, Armstrong lashed out at his wife one day with a fireplace poker, striking her on the arm. MacInnis left their apartment to stay with her sister, Marjorie Tuttle, in Granby, Connecticut.
On January 31, 1954 Armstrong removed the air conditioner from the window and jumped to his death from the thirteenth floor of his New York City apartment. His body was found fully clothed, with a hat, overcoat and gloves, the next morning by a River House employee on a third-floor balcony. The New York Times described the contents of his two-page suicide note to his wife: "he was heartbroken at being unable to see her once again, and expressing deep regret at having hurt her, the dearest thing in his life." The note concluded, "God keep you and Lord have mercy on my Soul." After his death, a friend of Armstrong estimated that 90 percent of his time was spent on litigation against RCA. Upon hearing the news, David Sarnoff supposedly remarked, "I did not kill Armstrong."
MacInnis was able to formally establish Armstrong as the inventor of FM following protracted court proceedings over five of his basic FM patents. Until her death in 1979 she participated in the Armstrong Memorial Research Foundation that she founded.

Emile Berliner sells his patents to Thomas Edison:
Berliner invented the carbon microphone in 1876 and fought over it with Edison.  In 1877, Thomas A. Watson, representing Alexander Graham Bell, began the aquisition of the Berliner microphone by the Bell Telephone Company.  Then (1887), Emile invented the disk record and a method of mass producing it and the disk player, the Gramophone.  No one here wanted it; they used Edison's cylinder Phonograph.  So, he took it to Germany and founded Berliner Grammophon Gesellschaft, now the world-famous Deutsche Grammophon1 Gesellschaft*, DGG (just 100 years old this year - 1998).  Later, he came back to the U.S. and founded Berliner Gramophone Company; he also did the same in Canada, the Berliner Gram-o-phone Co., Ltd., and in England, The Gramophone Co., Ltd. (now EMI). His Master's Voice Trademark , the dog known as Little Nipper , painted by Francis Barraud is all that is left to remember Berliner by.   Nipper was originally painted in front of an Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph and The Gramophone Co. paid the artist to REPAINT it!  Later the U. S. company became the Victor Talking Machine Company to celebrate its "victory" over Edison in a patent fight.  HMV in England recorded in 1903 the first complete opera, Verdi's "Ernani" on 40 single-sided discs. Odeon pioneered something called the "album" in 1909 when it released the "Nutcracker Suite" by Tchaikovsky on 4 double-sided discs in a specially-designed package.

Who Would Want to Listen to Music?

1876  When Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, he pitched the device to businesses as a way to speed correspondence. That soon created another need: 
Companies wanted a permanent record of their phone conversations. Thomas Edison stumbled onto a solution. In July 1877, while experimenting with telephone speakers in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Edison noticed that the speaker diaphragm moved in tandem with the sound. He and his lab assistants hooked up a stylus to a telephone speaker. While Edison yelled into it, his assistants ran a strip of wax paper under the needle. When the strip was pulled back under the stylus, the faint sound of Edison's voice could be heard. What Edison had discovered was the acoustic recording of sound. 


Throughout the 1880s, Edison's competitors pushed ahead with the commercial development of phonographs aimed at the American office. Spoken letters and contracts recorded on wax cylinders - the dominant medium - would soon be sent through the mail, they believed, making paper correspondence obsolete. But the sound quality was poor, the batteries unreliable, and the cylinders fragile. It was by chance that recorded sound found a lasting commercial use. 
With the business market for the phonograph faltering, manufacturers scrambled to come up with other applications. In 1889, the first coin-operated phonograph was placed inside an arcade. For a nickel, listeners could hear a two-minute recording. That year, a single machine at the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco took in more than $1,000 in five months. 
Edison jumped into the record business, developing techniques to mass-produce recordings and marketing them to an eager public. It took another decade before the phonograph reached critical mass. By 1899, 2.8 million records had been sold in the US, and recorded music had become the nation's most popular entertainment medium.


An unknown Canadian Invention to avoid Surgery
Pneumothorax treatment, or "collapse therapy", meant compressing a lung to put it to rest, with air pumped into the chest cavity. This allowed the TB lesion to heal more readily. Although it became standard Canadian practice in 1919 (where the patient was getting progressively worse), its first recorded use was in Ingersoll, Ontario, in 1898.
A similar treatment using air pressure was described by Hippocrates more than 2400 years ago, though no anaesthetic or antibacterials would have been used then. After the invention of a water "manometer" to measure the air pressure, in 1911, patients could look forward to receiving "pneumo" once or twice a week during their stay at the sanatorium.
As experience accumulated, this treatment was used more frequently and in 1929, 153 patients were given regular pneumothorax refills in Canadian sanatoria; the treatment was attempted in eighteen more cases. But for all the enthusiasm, particularly among many surgeons, how effective was collapse therapy? By the early 1950s some argued that roughly fifty percent of apparently successful cases rendered negative by surgery in days prior to antibiotics were again positive after five years. In fact it has been said that at the time there were probably more scientific papers against than for surgical intervention.

Invented by a kid:
Popsicle invented by 11 year old. Frank W. Epperson. after leaving a frozen drink out over night with a stirring stick in it; he waits until the 1920s to go into business with it, originally calling it Epsicle until his kids start calling it "pop's sicle"; it is eventually patented in 1924.

Frozen food invented in Canada:
Clarence Birdseye started his inventing career by discovering the cause of Rocky Mountain spotted fever in 1911. He visited Canada from 1912 to 1915, was in Labrador in the Dominion of Newfoundland, where he became interested in food preservation by freezing, especially fast freezing. He was taught by the Inuit how to ice fish under very thick ice. In -40°C weather, he discovered that the fish he caught froze almost instantly, and, when thawed, tasted fresh. He recognized immediately, that the frozen seafood sold in New York was of lower quality than the frozen fish of Labrador, and saw that applying this knowledge would be lucrative. In 1924 his first company went bankrupt for lack of consumer interest in the product.  In 1927 he began to extend the process beyond fish to quick-freezing of meat, poultry, fruit, and vegetables.
In 1929, Birdseye sold his company and patents for $22 million to Goldman Sachs and the Postum Company, which eventually became General Foods Corporation, and which founded the Birds Eye Frozen Food Company. Birdseye continued to work with the company, further developing frozen food technology. In 1930 the company began sales experiments in 18 retail stores around Springfield, Massachusetts, to test consumer acceptance of quick-frozen foods. The initial product line featured 26 items, including 18 cuts of frozen meat, spinach and peas, a variety of fruits and berries, blue point oysters, and fish fillets. Consumers liked the new products and today this is considered the birth of retail frozen foods. The "Birds Eye" name remains a leading frozen-food brand.

Two Dreams - One Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize in Medicine
In 1936, Otto Loewi won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. He discovered the secret of nerve impulses from not one, but two dreams.

Otto Loewi was born on June 3, 1873, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. He was torn between medicine and philosophy but by 1894 he became dedicated to the idea of being a doctor. By 1896 he got his doctorate and after seeing the high toll TB was causing, he decided to go into research to work on a cure. 
He discovered many essential ideas in biochemistry, including carbohydrate metabolism. 

In the early 20s, he was working on how nerves transmit impulses. He worked on it night and day with little result. Then one night he fell asleep and had a vivid dream. He scrawled down some notes but was unable to read them the next morning. Frustrated, he waited until the next night. Again, he had a vivid dream, showing him the style of experiment that would help him in his nerve transmission work. 

Sure enough, he went immediately to his lab to try the experiment. It worked, and as a result, Otto Loewi was awarded the 1936 Nobel Prize for Medicine.

As an interesting footnote, in 1938 the Germans invaded Austria. Otto was able to escape to freedom - but not before the Germans forced him to transfer all of his winnings to their own banks.

A Secret Invention by a Film Star:
The Czechoslovakian film "Exstase" was the first mainstream film to include a nude scene, in which actor Hedy Lamarr played a young bride having an extramarital affair. The scandalous film, denounced around the world, was tagged in its American release as “the most whispered about picture in the world.” Lamarr was known ever after as the Ecstasy Girl. She was also a great inventor.
Although better known for her Silver Screen exploits, Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr also became a pioneer in the field of wireless communications following her emigration to the United States. The international beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, developed a "Secret Communications System" to help combat the Nazis in World War II. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted by enemy personnel.
Military Communications System
Lamarr and Anthiel received a patent in 1941, but the enormous significance of their invention was not realized until decades later. It was first implemented on naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequently emerged in numerous military applications. But most importantly, the "spread spectrum" technology that Lamarr helped to invent would galvanize the digital communications boom, forming the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations possible.

Accidental Discovery of the Microwave Oven

The heating effect of a beam of high-power microwaves was discovered accidentally in 1945, shortly after high-powered microwave radar transmitters were developed and widely disseminated by the Allies of World War II, using the British magnetron technology that was shared with the United States company Raytheon in order to secure production facilities to produce the magnetron. Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine, worked at the time with Raytheon. He was working on an active radar set when he noticed that a Mr. Goodbar he had in his pocket started to melt - the radar had melted his chocolate bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters. To verify his finding, Spencer created a high density electromagnetic field by feeding microwave power from a magnetron into a metal box from which it had no way to escape. When food was placed in the box with the microwave energy, the temperature of the food rose rapidly.
On October 8, 1945, Raytheon filed a US patent for Spencer's microwave cooking-process, and an oven that heated food using microwave energy from a magnetron was soon placed in a Boston restaurant for testing. The first time the public was able to use a microwave oven was in January 1947, when the Speedy Weeny vending machine was placed in Grand Central Terminal to dispense "sizzling delicious" hot dogs. 

In 1947, Raytheon built the "Radarange", the first commercially available microwave oven. It was almost 1.8 metres (5 ft 11 in) tall, weighed 340 kilograms (750 lb) and cost about US$5,000 ($52,042 in today's dollars) each. It consumed 3 kilowatts, about three times as much as today's microwave ovens, and was water-cooled. An early Radarange was installed (and remains) in the galley of the nuclear-powered passenger/cargo ship NS Savannah. An early commercial model introduced in 1954 consumed 1.6 kilowatts and sold for US$2,000 to US$3,000 ($17,000 to $26,000 in today's dollars).
The rapidly falling price of microprocessors also helped by adding electronic controls to make the ovens easier to use. By 1986, roughly 25% of households in the U.S. owned a microwave oven, up from only about 1% in 1971. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that over 90% of American households owned a microwave oven in 1997.
For cooking or reheating small meals, the high heating power delivered directly to the meal makes the microwave oven the most efficient appliance

A Canadian Invents the Walkie Talkie in Wartime, 
But Nobody Knows

Donald Lewes Hings, CM MBE (November 6, 1907 – February 25, 2004) was a Canadian inventor. In 1937 he created a portable radio signaling system for his employer CM&S, which he called a "packset", but which later became known as the "Walkie-Talkie".
While Hings was filing a U.S. patent for the packset in Spokane, Washington in 1939, Canada declared war on Germany. CM&S sent Hings to Ottawa to redevelop his new invention for military use, and he worked there from 1940 to 1945. During these years, he developed a number of models, including the successful C-58 Walkie-Talkie which eventually sold eighteen thousand units produced for infantry use, and for which he received the MBE in 1946 and the Order Of Canada in 2001.

Hings had to sue the Canadian Govt over his invention, but his legal fees were equal to his reward. Supposedly he was employed by the Govt. while developing the device.

Following the war, he moved to Burnaby, British Columbia, where he established an electronics R&D company, Electronic Labs of Canada. He held more than 55 patents in Canada and the United States, and was the inventor of the klystron magnetometer survey system. In 2006, Hings was inducted into the Telecommunications Hall of Fame.  

An invention based on observing Nature closely:
An avid outdoorsman, DeMestral returned from one of his many hikes in 1948 to find his dog, as well as himself, covered in burrs.
Burrs are plant seeds covered in small hooks. These hooks attach to the fur of animals, spreading the plant as far as the carrier animal travels. DeMestral realized that these hooks could form the basis of a new type of fastener! By creating pieces of cloth with burr-like hooks woven into them, two pieces of DeMestral's fastener could be joined.
"Velour Crochet"
DeMestral experimented with various cloths and hook-making processes for three years, usually working with small batches of custom-woven cotton.
The velvet-like appearance of this original cloth, lent the product its name, which DeMestral derived from the French words for velvet "velour" and hook - "crochet." The result was Velcro. In 1951 he applied for a patent.
DeMestral's original invention utilized two pieces of similar cloth - both sides had hooks for grabbing. By 1988 the process of manufacturing, combined with advances in plastic, and especially nylon, led to what we today commonly think of as Velcro.

Rediscovered by Kodak

The original cyanoacrylates (the chemical name for the glue) were discovered in 1942 in a search for materials to make clear plastic gun sights for World War II when a team of scientists headed by Harry Wesley Coover Jr. stumbled upon a formulation that stuck to everything that it came in contact with. However, cyanoacrylates were quickly rejected by the American researchers precisely because they stuck to everything. 

In 1951, cyanoacrylates were rediscovered by Eastman Kodak researchers Harry Coover and Fred Joyner, who recognized their true commercial potential, and it was first sold as a commercial product "Eastman #910" (later "Eastman 910") in 1958.

During the 1960s, Eastman Kodak sold cyanoacrylate to Loctite, which in turn repackaged and distributed it under a different brand name "Loctite Quick Set 404". 

In 1971, Loctite developed its own manufacturing technology and introduced its own line of cyanoacrylate, called "Super Bonder". Loctite quickly gained market share, and by late 1970s it was believed to have exceeded Eastman Kodak's share in the North American industrial cyanoacrylate market. Other manufacturers of cyanoacrylate included Permabond Division of National Starch and Chemical, Inc., which was a subsidiary of Unilever. Together, Loctite, Eastman and Permabond accounted for approximately 75% of the industrial cyanoacrylate market.

2013 You can buy superglue in the dollar store packaged in 4 tiny amounts for 1$.
The term "superglue" is often used informally as a verb or noun, but is still a trademark 
Now for the Twist.. I bet you didn't know another use for Superglue..

A Remarkable Accident
While fingerprint usage spread rapidly, fingerprint categorization and detection evolved slowly over the next century, until a remarkable accident in 1977.

Fuseo Matsumur was a hair and fiber expert at the Saga Prefecture Crime Laboratory of the National Police Agency of Japan. He used a microscope to examine trace evidence to solve crimes.  The evidence would be mounted on glass slides with superglue. One day, while working on a taxi driver murder case, Matsumur noticed his fingerprint developing on the slide.

Intrigued, Matsumur took the slide to his colleague, Masato Soba, who experimented with his own fingerprints. Soba eventually developed a technique for developing fingerprints with superglue which is still used today.

A fingerprint leaves trace elements of amino acids, fatty acids, and proteins on smooth surfaces. These are not usually visible to the naked eye. However, superglue, or cyanoacrylate, is highly attracted to these substances. In superglue fuming, a small amount of  Cyanoacrylate is heated, which produces cyanoacrylate gas. The gas circulates and eventually adheres to the substances left behind by the fingerprint, allowing the print to be photographed or "lifted."

In 1979 the Japanese police demonstrated the fingerprint fuming method for Latent Print Examiners from the U.S. Army Crime Laboratory, who brought the procedure back to the United States in April, 1980.

Superglue fuming is still used in most crime labs around the world. Although not as glamorous or complex as other methods, the persistence of superglue fuming proves its effectiveness.


Bic Biro and the President of Argentina

By 1953 the Bic Cristal Pen: had finally become a practical writing instrument.  The public accepted it without complaint, and today it is as standard a writing implement as the pencil. In England, they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say "Biro" on the side of the pen, as a testament to their primary inventors. 

The dirt-cheap Cristal had a hard plastic body is faceted like a pencil, with a tiny hole on the side that allows air to displace ink expended during use. And the soft plastic reservoir inside each Cristal holds enough ink to draw a line more than 2 miles long. 

Mass Productionidnode://509

The first great success for the ballpoint pen came on an October morning in 1945 when a crowd of over 5,000 people jammed the entrance of New York’s Gimbels Department Store. The day before, Gimbels had taken out a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting the first sale of ballpoints in the United States. The ad described the new pen as a "fantastic... miraculous fountain pen ... guaranteed to write for two years without refilling!" On that first day of sales, Gimbels sold out its entire stock of 10,000 pens-at $12.50 each!

Actually, this "new" pen wasn't new at all and didn't work much better than ballpoint pens that had been produced ten years earlier. The story begins in 1888 when John Loud, an American leather tanner, patented a roller-ball-tip marking pen. Loud’s invention featured a reservoir of ink and a roller ball that applied the thick ink to leather hides. John Loud’s pen was never produced, nor were any of the other 350 patents for ball-type pens issued over the next thirty years. The major problem was the ink - if the ink was thin the pens leaked, and if it was too thick, they clogged. Depending on the temperature, the pen would sometimes do both.
The next stage of development came almost fifty years after Loud’s patent, with an improved version invented in Hungary in 1935 by Ladislas Biro and his brother, Georg.   Ladislas Biro was very talented and confident of his abilities, but he had never had a pursuit that kept his interest and earned him a good living.  He had studied medicine, art, and hypnotism, and in 1935 he was editing a small newspaper-where he was frustrated by the amount of time he wasted filling fountain pens and cleaning up ink smudges.  Besides that, the sharp tip of his fountain pen often scratched or tore through the newsprint (paper). Determined to develop a better pen, Ladislas and Georg (who was a chemist) set about making models of new designs and formulating better inks to use in them.

One summer day while vacationing at the seashore, the Biro brothers met an interesting elderly gentleman, Augustine Justo, who happened to be the president of Argentina.   After the brothers showed him their model of a ballpoint pen, President Justo urged them to set up a factory in Argentina.  When World War II broke out in Europe, a few years later, the Biros fled to Argentina, stopping in Paris along the way to patent their pen.

Once in Argentina, the Biros found several investors willing to finance their invention, and in 1943 they had set up a manufacturing plant.  Unfortunately, the pens were a spectacular failure. The Biro pen, like the designs that had preceded it, depended on gravity for the ink to flow to the roller ball. This meant that the pens worked only when they were held more or less straight up, and even then the ink flow was sometimes too heavy, leaving smudgy globs on the paper.  The Biro brothers returned to their laboratory and devised a new design, which relied on "capillsry action" rather than gravity to feed the ink.  The rough "ball" at the end of the pen acted like a metal sponge, and with this improvement ink could flow more smoothly to the ball, and the pen could be held at a slant rather than straight up.  One year later, the Biros were selling their new, improved ballpoint pen throughout Argentina. But it still was not a smashing success, and the men ran out of money.

The greatest interest in the ballpoint pen came from American flyers who had been to Argentina during World War II. Apparently it was ideal for pilots because it would work well at high altitudes and, unlike fountain pens, did not have to be refilled frequently. The U.S. Department of State sent specifications to several American pen manufacturers asking them to develop a similar pen.  In an attempt to corner the market, the Eberhard Faber Company paid the Biro brothers $500,000 for the rights to manufacture their ballpoint pen in the United States. Eberhard Faber later sold its rights to the Eversharp Company, but neither was quick about putting a ballpoint pen on the market. There were still too many bugs in the Biro design.

Meanwhile, in a surprise move, a fifty-four-year-old Chicago salesman named Milton Reynolds became the first American manufacturer to market a ballpoint pen successfully. While vacationing in Argentina, Reynolds had seen Biro’s pen in the stores and thought that the novel product would sell well in America.  Because many of the patents had expired, Reynolds thought he could avoid any legal problems, and so he went about copying much of the Biros’ design.  It was Reynolds who made the deal with Gimbels to be the first retail store in America to sell ballpoint pens.  He set up a makeshift factory with 300 workers who began stamping out pens from whatever aluminum was not being used for the war.  In the months that followed, Reynolds made millions of pens and became fairly wealthy, as did many other manufacturers who decided to cash in on the new interest.

The competition among pen manufacturers during the mid-1940s became quite hectic, with each one claiming new and better features. Reynolds even claimed that his ballpoint could write under water, and he hired Esther Williams, the swimmer and movie star, to help prove it. Another manufacturer claimed that its pen would write through ten carbon copies, while still another demonstrated that its pen would write up-side down.  However, the effect of the slogans and advertising wore off as soon as the owners discovered the many problems that still existed with the ballpoint pens. As the sale of the pens began to drop, so did the price, and the once expensive luxury now would not even sell for as little as 19 cents.  Once again, it looked as if the ballpoint pen would be a complete failure.  For the pen to regain the public’s favor and trust, somebody would have to invent one that was smooth writing, quick drying, nonskipping, nonfading, and most important didn’t leak.

Two men, each with his own pen company, delivered these results.  The first was Patrick J. Frawley Jr.  Frawley met Fran Seech, an unemployed Los Angeles chemist who had lost his job when the ballpoint pen company he was working for had gone out of business. Seech had been working on improvements in ballpoint ink, and on his own he continued his experiments in a tiny cubbyhole home laboratory.  Frawley was so impressed with his work that he bought Seech’s new ink formula in 1949 and started the Frawley Pen Company.  Within one year, Frawley was in the ballpoint pen business with yet another improved model-the first pen with a retractable ballpoint tip and the first with no-smear ink.  To overcome many of the old prejudices against the leaky and smeary ballpoint pen of the past, Frawley initiated an imaginative and risky advertising campaign, a promotion he called Project Normandy.  Frawley instructed his salesmen to barge into the offices of retail store buyers and scribble all over the executives’ shirts with one of the new pens.  Then the salesman would offer to replace the shirt with an even more expensive one if the ink did not wash out entirely.   The shirts did come clean and the promotion worked.  As more and more retailers accepted the pen, which Frawley named the "Papermate," sales began to skyrocket. Within a few years, the Papermate pen was selling in the hundreds of millions.

The other man to bring the ballpoint pen successfully back to life was Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of penholders and pen cases.  Bich was appalled at the poor quality of the ballpoint pens he had seen and he was also shocked at their high cost. But he recognized that the ballpoint was a firmly established innovation and he resolved to design a high-quality pen at a low price that would scoop the market.  He went to the Biro brothers and arranged to pay them a royalty on their patent.  Then for two years Marcel Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen on the market, often working with a microscope.  By 1952 Bich was ready to introduce his new wonder: a clear-barreled, smooth-writing, non-leaky, inexpensive ballpoint pen he called the "Ballpoint Bic."  

Canadian Women's Independence and the Birth control Pill.
In 1960 Enovid 10, birth control pills were produced for sale.
The introduction of birth control allows the demographic transition to take place faster in rich countries and has important effects on the freedom of women to control their fertility for the first time in history.  There will be important changes in society and the participation of women in the work force which will have permanent effects on society in future.
Worldwide average birth rate of 4.6 children per woman in 1960 has fallen  to 2.6 in  2000.
Although first invented in 1954 with the help of Margaret Sanger who was a lifelong advocate of women's rights and the use of birth control. During the 1930s, it was discovered that hormones prevented ovulation in rabbits. In 1950, while in her 80s, Sanger underwrote the research necessary to create the first human birth control pill.  Sanger raised $150,000 for the project.
Margaret Sanger's mother was a devout Catholic who went through 18 pregnancies (with 11 live births) in 22 years before dying at age 50 of tuberculosis and cervical cancer

For Dictation only
In 1962 the audio cassette was invented by Philips. They never expected its frequency response to be tweaked into a medium for music, however they never complained about its great success. The audio cassette originally was intended for use in dictation machines only but by 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million music players.  In the early years, sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving.  

A Great Pill turns out to not be so Great.
The first beta blocker, Inderal, was launched in 1964 for treatment of angina. This drug has been hailed as one of great medical advances of the 20th century. Its inventor, James Black, was awarded the Nobel prize in medicine in 1988.
The 20 or so beta blockers now on the market are very widely used - almost 200 million prescriptions were written for them in the US in 2010. They are standard issue for most people with heart disease or high blood pressure. This may now change.
A large study published last month in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that beta blockers did not prolong the lives of patients - a revelation that must have left many cardiologists shaking their heads (JAMA, vol 308, p 1340).
The researchers followed almost 45,000 heart patients over three-and-a-half years and found that beta blockers did not reduce the risk of heart attacks, deaths from heart attacks, or stroke.  We may well be seeing a rare case of medical wisdom being overturned almost overnight. Beta blockers are not dangerous and have been in use for such a long time that it is unlikely that we will see an immediate cessation.

Another failed Pill invention turns out well by mistake.
In early 1992, 30 healthy men signed up to take part in a trial that tested the safety of a new drug called sildenafil, which was aimed at treating angina, the chest pain caused by heart disease. The drug, administered three times a day, had an unexpected side effect: erections. "We wondered what this would mean for the continuation of the angina program," says Ian Osterloh, who directed the studies in England. "The erections were a bit of a side issue." The researchers were about to give up on sildenafil.
But then a critical piece of information caught the attention of scientists at pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer. US researchers had been trying to figure out the mysteries of the male erection, and they'd discovered that a common gas, nitric oxide, seemed to play a key contributing role. Sildenafil inhibits the enzyme phosphodiesterase type 5, which in turn increases the effect of nitric oxide.
The Pfizer team put the pieces together and began testing sildenafil - soon branded Viagra - as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. The results are now well-documented. The drug was quickly approved by the FDA, and now more than 45 million prescriptions have been written worldwide. Viagra  Intended use: Stopping chest pain

The invention of DATA in 1970
Dr. Donald B. Keck along with Robert Maurer and Peter Schultz, invented low-loss optical fiber in 1970. This accomplishment launched the optical fiber telecommunications revolution and enabled the Internet. 
More than 1.6 billion kilometers of optical fiber are deployed worldwide today. Dr. Keck’s research areas include molecular spectroscopy, gradient index and aspheric optics, guided wave optics, optical fiber sensing, and optical fiber waveguides and communication. He is the author of more than 150 papers and he holds  36 patents.
 "In 1970, we invented the fiber. Then the room-temperature laser was demonstrated. The first Internet experiment, called ARPANET, was run at UCLA. Ted Hoff invented the microprocessor, or PC chip, in early 1971. Before these four advances, all you had was telephone. As soon as you began transmitting the DATA, then everything broke loose."  Email was invented in 1972.


Smallpox *Almost* Eradicated

 Janet Parker, a British medical photographer, died of smallpox in 1978, ten months after the disease was eradicated in the wild, when a researcher at the laboratory where Parker worked accidentally released some virus into the air of the building. Parker is the last known smallpox fatality.

Invented in a Dream

Elias Howe is famous for inventing the sewing machine in 1845. But not many know that it was a dream that brought him the critical solution.

Howe was trying to figure out how to automate the sewing process, but could not design a process that would work. He fell asleep at his desk one night pondering the issue. 

In his dream, he was in Africa, running from wild cannibals. They caught him and put him into a huge pot of water, and set it boiling. He tried repeatedly to climb out of the pot, but the natives kept pushing him back into the pot with their sharp spears.

When Howe awoke, terrified, he went back over the dream in his mind. He realized that each spear had a hole at its tip, just like a long needle. All at once, he saw that this was the solution to his problem, and his sewing machine became hugely popular!

The last of the One Man Inventions:
World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee internet in 1989 while working for CERN, who gives away the WORLD WIDE WEB technology to all humanity for free.  If Tim Berners-Lee had patented his invention and its subsequent developments, he could be far richer than Bill Gates today.  Another computer related invention that is free to use without copyright is the Free Lossless Audio Codec FLAC invented to replace MP3.

A Great invention but... Only later did we find out.
New Plastics .. New Toxic Chemicals
With approximately 80,000 chemicals registered by US EPA in commercial use, it is clear that there is little information available on exposure and health effects for many compounds. 
The few listed below are only the tip of the iceberg. 
When Teflon was first sold, it was not known to become toxic when overheated.
The first commercial production polyurethane foam for cushions and insulation building boards was a great chemical advance except that all of these applications require Fire retardants using Polybrominated diphenyl ethers and HBCD or other chemicals such as TRIS.  These are quite toxic to humans. Many are banned eventually 60 years later.  Phthalates are common plasticizers in polyvinyl chloride (PVC) resins but hardly as toxic as the flame retardant chemicals.  Anyone exposed to burning plastic of almost any type is certainly in danger.  Chlorine production for PVC uses almost as much energy as the annual output of eight medium-sized nuclear power plants each year

Polyethylene:  each year an average 13 billion plastic bags are dished out to consumers. They are generally employed for a mere 20 minutes before being discarded, and take a gargantuan 1,000 years to rot to nothing.

Recent reports have highlighted plastic bags as pollutants which maim birds, and annihilate vast numbers of seals, turtles and whales. The use of polythene is so ingrained in people's lives. But we need to consider how damaging it all is to the environment."

"If you're going to have a bag, you're much better having a polyethylene bag than any other material because of the amount of energy that goes into their manufacture; which is minimal. And they can be recycled. It's not the fault of the product that things are dumped in large quantities at sea."

By numbers

60 million Tonnes of polythene produced worldwide every year
13 billion Polythene bags handed out to shoppers in Britain every year
£424.1m Turnover in 2007 of British Polythene Industries plc
400 Number of plastic bags used per adult in the UK every year
1 million Number of plastic bags used worldwide every minute
70,000 Plastic waste, in tonnes, annually recycled by British Polythene Industries plc  

Fast Facts on Plastic Bags
Over 1 trillion plastic bags are used every year worldwide. 1/3 in China.
China, a country of 1.3 billion, which consumes 365 billion plastic bags yearly.
Each person gets 280 bags a year by this calculation.
About 1 million plastic bags are used every minute.
A single plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to degrade.
More than 3.5 million tons of plastic bags, sacks and wraps were discarded in 2008.
Only 1 in 200 plastic bags in the UK are recycled.
The U.S. goes through 100 billion single-use plastic bags.
This is about 200 bags a year for Americans.
This costs retailers about $4 billion a year.
Plastic bags are the second-most common type of ocean refuse, after cigarette butts 
Plastic bags remain toxic even after they break down.
Every square mile of ocean has about 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it.
Windblown plastic bags are so prevalent in Africa that a cottage industry has sprung up to harvest them. These are then woven and sold as hats and (more durable) bags.

Silicones not the miracle plastic once dreamed of:
For decades, doctors and scientists have thought it unlikely anything as inert as silicon could cause significant health problems. Besides breast implants, silicone plastics made from silicon have been used in valves, tubes and artificial parts in the body. They seemed benign. 
But the nature of science is surprise, and in recent weeks doctors and scientists have been surprised by reports of various ill effects from this abundant element. How did the safety of silicone come to be taken for granted if indeed it should not have been?  Looking back at the long medical history of silicone, it is now clear there were many warning signs, some of which were acted on, some of which may have wrongly been overlooked.  In the medical literature of the past 20 years, there has been a rising number of papers on silicon, the element; silicone, the flexible compound built of silicon molecules, and human illness.

Thomas Midgley Jr. of Delco Co. discovers that Tetraethyl Leaded Gasoline prevents engine knock in 1921. In 1922 leaded gasoline goes on sale in the U.S.; the first lead poisoning deaths occur in Du Pont's Deepwater, N.J. plant. With the discovery of the extent of environmental and health damage caused by the lead, however, and the incompatibility of lead with catalytic converters found on virtually all newly sold US automobiles since 1975 Leaded gasoline gradually disappeared. It was not until 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of leaded fuel