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."

Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1992

Edmond H. Fischer

Edwin G. Krebs

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1992 was awarded jointly to Edmond H. Fischer and Edwin G. Krebs "for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism"

Mary Anderson patented the windshield wiper in 1905.
Picture: Mary Anderson
Patent drawing Mary Anderson's windshield wiper Related History • The History of the Automobile • Women Inventors Prior to the manufacture of Henry Ford's Model A, Mary Anderson was granted her first patent for a window cleaning device in November of 1903. Her invention could clean snow, rain, or sleet from a windshield by using a handle inside the car. Her goal was to improve driver vision during stormy weather - Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper. During a trip to New York City, Mary Anderson noticed that streetcar drivers had to open the windows of their cars when it rained in order to see, as a solution she invented a swinging arm device with a rubber blade that was operated by the driver from within the vehicle via a lever. The windsheld wipers became standard equipment on all American cars by 1916.

Instant Photography

Snapshot affair: the enduring power of the Polaroid

The Polaroid camera ought to be remembered as a powerful tool for photographic artists.

Long before the world was digital and we realised that it was made of bytes and pixels, there was instant still photography.
Polaroids were the creation of an American engineer called Edwin Land, who is said to have invented the process after his daughter asked him why she couldn't see the holiday snapshots they took together as soon as they took them. Plenty of fathers of course would like to make that kind of wish come true, but Land's daughter was lucky. Her dad wasn't just an indulgent parent, he was an engineer and inventor of genius — a 20th-Century Edison.
Land was said to wrap himself so intently in his work that his staff erected a barrier outside the front door of his office to prevent him from walking straight out into the traffic. The world still lives with his inventions — polarising lenses that eliminate glare and the high-flying cameras in U2 planes and satellites that gave the United States the edge in the Cold War.
His first instant camera had to be manufactured with extraordinary precision so that a system of tiny rollers squeezed the developing chemicals out of the thick padded film at just the right rate. The science and the manufacturing processes were complex, but the vision behind them was simple: Land wanted to give families photographs that developed in their hands. He had an artistic vision too, based on giant studio cameras he designed — behemoths the size of bedroom closets that produced large format (20 x 24 inch) prints.

Compact Disc

Compact Disc: Changing the Music Industry


The first phonograph was invented in 1877 and twenty-one years later, the audiocassette was invented. As the twentieth century progressed, scientists began to look for a more efficient and higher quality method to reproduce sound. In records, for example, after many years of use, the sound quality significantly goes down because of the stress that the needle places on the groove. Scientists were interested in developing a medium that would not have to be touched in order to be read!
Digital Recording’s First Use

Rather than attempt to create a new analog method for sound recording, where a physical reproduction of the sound wave is created, scientists wanted to create a digital recording, where samples of the sound wave are taken and stored in binary format (1’s and 0’s). The first person to suggest this method for recording was the French mathematician Jean Joseph Fourier (1768-1830). He noted that if enough samples of a wave were taken, the wave could be exactly reproduced. In 1928, Bell Labs mathematician Harry Nyquist found out that in order to maximize the accuracy of the reproduction, each wave would have to be sampled twice. Because the human ear can only hear frequencies as high as 20 kilohertz (20,000 Hz), a sampling of 40 kilohertz, or 40,000 times a second would produce a recording that would sound perfect to the human ear (Travers 154).
During the 1970’s Sony and Phillips saw the potential of a digital recording method and decided to join forces in developing a practical solution. They also realized that by joining forces in the research that they would hopefully avoid the “standards battle” that ensued after the introduction of the VCR (See VCR). The first product of their research was the videodisk, which was a plastic disc similar to the phonograph that had spiral grooves that held the recorded information (this was analog, not digital). For playback, a laser rather than a needle, read the information and passed it on to a television. The quality of the videodisk’s picture was much better than that of a VCR, nonetheless they did not gain much popularity except in Japan (Travers 456).
A little over ten years later, during the 1980’s, Sony and Phillips released yet another product, the compact disc (CD). While the videodisk used analog methods for recording, the compact disc was recorded digitally. This enables it to have a much higher quality sound and also conserve space. The compact disc basically a thin sheet of gold or aluminum coated with a film of protective plastic or glass. A high-energy laser burns “pits” in the metallic sheet to represent the 1’s and 0’s. A “pit” is the equivalent of a 1, while a smooth, unburned area corresponds to 0. A low-energy laser in the CD player then reads these 1’s and 0’s and converts them to sound (Travers 456).
The Compact Disc Today

The compact disc has taken the music industry by storm. The format has become so popular that it has completely replaced phonographs and audiocassettes. The popularity of compact disc has even made a dent in the computer industry, it is the most common method for data storage. Because of their huge capacity, companies can put software titles that include high quality sounds and multimedia on a single disc. Still, a replacement for the compact disc is in the works. The DVD or digital versatile disc, is a double-sided disc the same size as a CD than can hold about 25 times the data of a CD. DVDs are most often used for watching movies because they are much sharper than traditional VCR’s, and they can hold a single movie in up to 7 different languages.

20 Monday 2010..Sachin Tendular...First to score 50 centuries in test matches

Tendulkar hits 50th test century

Michael EdwaTONY EASTLEY: The man regarded by many as the greatest batsman since Bradman has just hit his 50th test century – 37-year-old Sachin Tendulkar, known as cricket's Little Master, has again rewritten cricket's history books.

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"

Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal (täzh muhäl', täj muhŭl') [key], mausoleum, Agra, Uttar Pradesh state, N India, on the Yamuna River. It is considered one of the most beautiful buildings in the world and the finest example of the late style of Indian Islamic architecture. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan ordered it built after the death (1631) of his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal. The building, which was completed between 1632 and 1638, was designed by the local Muslim architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori; set in its carefully laid out grounds, it is a reflection of the gardens of Paradise to which the faithful ascend. The entire complex, with gardens, gateway structures, and mosque, was completed in 1648.