Common things used by us..Innovations.

• Rubber bands were fitst made by Perry and Co. of London in 1845.
• Charles Gould invented the stapler in 1868 for use in bookbinding.
• A vaccum flask was demonstrated in 1892 by the Scottish physicist James Dewar. His mother in law remained sceptical of a flask made for his son in 1902 and knitted a wollen cosy for it to make sure that its contrnts remained warm.
• Vaccum flasks were first marketed in1902 by the German Reinhold who held a competition to name the invention. The winning entry was Thermos, the Greek word for'hot'.
• In 1900 the Norwegian Johann Vaaler patented the paperclip.
• The aerosol can was invented by another Norwegian, Eric Rotheim, but the idea was not developed commercially until 1941. when Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan took a patent in the USA. They saw the spray can as an ideal container for insectisides.

J. Michael Bishop

Harold E. Varmus

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1989 was awarded jointly to J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus "for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes"

The Story of the Escalator

Jesse Reno, Charles Seeberger
An escalator is a conveyor type transport device that moves people. It is a moving staircase with steps that move up or down using a conveyor belt and tracks keeping each step horizontal for the passenger. However, the escalator began as an amusement and not as a practical transport. The first patent relating to an escalator-like machine was granted in 1859 to a Massachusetts man for a steam driven unit. On March 15 1892, Jesse Reno patented his moving stairs or inclined elevator as he called it. In 1895, Jesse Reno created a new novelty ride at Coney Island from his patented design, a moving stairway that elevated passengers on a conveyor belt at a 25 degree angle. Escalator = Scala Elevator The escalator as we know it was later re-designed by Charles Seeberger in 1897, who created the name 'escalator' from the word 'scala', which is Latin for steps and the word 'elevator', which had already been invented. Charles Seeberger, together with the Otis Elevator Company produced the first commercial escalator in 1899 at the Otis factory in Yonkers, N.Y. The Seeberger-Otis wooden escalator won first prize at the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle in France. Jesse Reno's Coney Island ride success briefly made Jesse Reno into "the" escalator designer and he founded the Reno Electric Stairways and Conveyors company in 1902. Charles Seeberger sold his patent rights for the escalator to the Otis Elevator Company in 1910, who also bought Jesse Reno's escalator patent in 1911. Otis then came to dominate escalator production, and combined and improved the various designs of escalators. According to Otis, "In the 1920s, Otis engineers, led by David Lindquist, combined and improved the Jesse Reno and Charles Seeberger escalator designs, and created the cleated, level steps of the modern escalator in use today. Over the years, Otis dominated the escalator business, but lost the product's trademark. The word escalator lost its proprietary status and its capital "e" in 1950 when the U.S. Patent Office ruled that the word "escalator" had become just a common descriptive term for moving stairways."