GWR 2024 Look Inside - Flipbook - Page 8
INCREDIBLE INVENTIONS
A CATALOGUE OF ENGINEERING MARVELS FOR YOUR EDIFICATION
First mobile
phone call
On 3 Apr 1973, Motorola engineer
Martin Cooper (USA) phoned
his rival, Joel Engel of Bell
Labs, while standing in the
street in New York City. This
historic call took place just
over 97 years after the first
telephone call was made
by Alexander Graham Bell
(UK) in Mar 1876. Cooper’s
phone was the prototype
for what would become
the first commercially
available mobile phone,
the Motorola DynaTAC
(pictured), which was
eventually released in
Mar 1983.
IN
STOCK
NOW!
First...
Stone tools
Our capacity for invention is a
key feature that distinguishes
humans from other animals. The
earliest evidence for this ingenuity
dates back 3.3 million years,
when our hominid ancestors first
shaped rocks into sharpened
axes. A range of stone flakes,
cores and anvils from this period
were discovered in 2011 near
Lake Turkana in Kenya.
Musical instrument
Around 50,000 years ago, humans
and Neanderthals started boring
holes in bones to make simple
flutes. These were able to play
a sequence of notes similar to a
pentatonic scale. One such flute,
made from the femur of a cave
bear, was found at the Divje Babe
cave in Slovenia in 1995.
Paper money
In the Song Dynasty (960–1279),
Chinese merchants used
banknotes – with secret cyphers to
foil counterfeiters – as currency.
FIRST REGULAR
TELEVISION
BROADCASTS
Rockets
Ti lao shu, or “ground rats”, were
simple rockets created in late12th‑century China, comprising a
hollowed‑out bamboo stem filled
with gunpowder. They could
be attached to arrows or simply
ignited and set off as fireworks,
bouncing over the ground and
generating lots of noise, flames
and smoke.
Pendulum clock
Dutch scientist Christiaan
Huygens conceived of a fully
operational clock regulated
by the action of a pendulum in
late 1656. The following year,
clockmaker Salomon Coster
refined the idea into a working
concept that was accurate to
within a minute per day, and
additional refinements soon
reduced this to around 10 sec.
By the end of the century,
pendulum clocks were keeping
time to within 0.5 sec per day –
making them accurate enough to
warrant the introduction of the
first‑ever second hand.
Experimental TV broadcasts were first made in
the 1920s, but the television age as we know it
debuted on 2 Nov 1936 in London, UK. At 3 p.m.,
the BBC began the transmission of its very first
scheduled TV programme. Early adopters tuned
in to see Adele Dixon herald the new era by
singing the aptly titled “Magic Rays of Light”.
Oldest
clock
Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire, UK,
houses a faceless mechanical clock
dating to c. 1386. Its chimes were
designed to remind parishioners of
church services. After some 498 years,
and more than 500 million ticks, it
was replaced and put aside. But in
1929 it was rediscovered, and in 1956
it was restored to full working order.
FIRST PROGRAMMABLE ELECTRONIC COMPUTER
The Electronic Numerical Integrator
and Computer (ENIAC) at the
University of Pennsylvania, USA,
made its first calculations on
10 Dec 1945. Technicians rewired
the connections between its many
modules to create a “path” for data.
ENIAC would then automatically run
through the sequence (or program)
that had been laid out.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
ENIAC’s components were fitted into 40 panels,
each 8 ft (2.4 m) tall. It took up three walls of
a 1,500-sq-ft (139-m 2) room and needed its own
air-conditioning system to prevent overheating.
OLDEST SURVIVING PHOTOGRAPH First public electricity power station
Joseph Niépce (FRA) took the oldest known
photograph (above) in 1827 with a camera
obscura. It shows the view from his window.
The first photograph of a human (left) was
by France’s Louis Daguerre, c. 1838. The long
exposure needed for early photos meant
that moving objects didn’t register in his
eerily empty Parisian street scene. But a
static shoe-shiner and his customer did.
Oldest wheel
The Ljubljana Marshes
Wheel has been dated to
around 3150 bce . It was discovered
by archaeologists in Slovenia on 29 Mar
2002 within a Chalcolithic (or late Neolithic)
settlement known as Stare Gmajne. The body of the
wheel is formed from two thick planks of ash, jointed with
a tongue and groove and cut into a circle. Its axle is fashioned
from oak and fits into a square hole in the wheel’s centre. This
combination of strong, hard-wearing ash and oak would remain a standard
for wheelwrights across much of Europe until the early 20th century.
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Built by the Edison Electric
Light Company, the earliest
power station built for public
applications opened in Jan 1882.
It stood at 57 Holborn Viaduct
in London, UK. A Babcock &
Wilcox boiler provided steam to
power a 125-hp (93-kW) engine
that drove a 27-ton (24.5-tonne)
110-V DC generator, known as
“Jumbo”. This supplied power
to light the viaduct and local
businesses, along with London’s
City Temple, the Old Bailey and
General Post Office. It served as
a template for Thomas Edison’s
later projects in New York.
Steam locomotive on rails
On 21 Feb 1804, a locomotive
built by English engineer Richard
Trevithick hauled a train along a
tramway at Penydarren Ironworks
in Merthyr Tydfil, UK.
Electric Christmas tree lights
In 1882, Edison Electric Light
Company investor Edward H
Johnson (USA) hung the earliest‑
known incarnation of these festive
favourites at his home in New
York City, USA. They presented
“a most picturesque
and uncanny aspect”,
according to the
Detroit Post & Tribune of
22 Dec that year.
Powered flight
At 10:35 a.m. on 17 Dec 1903,
Orville Wright flew the wood‑
and-canvas Flyer I for 120 ft
(36.5 m) near Kitty Hawk, North
Carolina, USA. As he was flying
into a strong headwind, it had
a ground speed of just 6.8 mph
(10.9 km/h) and an altitude of
8–12 ft (2.4–3.6 m). Orville and
his brother Wilbur (both USA)
designed and built the Flyer I at
their bicycle workshop in Dayton,
Ohio, having used a home‑made
wind tunnel to test their theories.
FIRST
INTERNAL
COMBUSTION
CAR
In late 1885, the Motorwagen
– the earliest successful petroldriven car – was put through its
paces at Mannheim, Germany.
Built by Karl Friedrich Benz
(DEU) and patented on 29 Jan
1886, the three-wheeler weighed
254 kg (560 lb) and could reach
13–16 km/h (8–10 mph). The
significance of Benz’s invention
was somewhat overlooked at
the time: its first 1-km (0.6-mi)
road test was reported in the
local newspaper, the Neue
Badische Landeszeitung, on
4 Jun 1886, under the heading
“Miscellaneous”.
Did you
know?
Benz’s breakthrough
car was steered using
a tiller, like a boat.
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