Electric motor

Invented: 1821

Inventer: Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday was working at the Royal Institution when he demonstrated electromagnetic rotation for the first time. A free-hanging wire was dipped into a pool of mercury that had a fixed magnet in it. When an electric current was passed through the wire, it rotated around the magnet – the electricity produced a magnetic field around the wire, which interacted with the magnet in the mercury. This was the world’s first electric motor.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Invented: 1835
Inventor: William Henry Fox Talbot

It’s hard to say who was the inventor of photography – the first fixed image was made by Joseph Niépce in 1826 but took eight hours to expose. In 1835, Fox Talbot (right) made another breakthrough by using silver iodide on paper and found a way to produce a translucent negative that could be used to make any number of positives by contact printing – a system used until the advent of digital cameras.

HYDRAULIC PRESS

Invented: 1795
Inventor: Joseph Bramah

Locksmith Joseph Bramah made famously unpickable locks and was also a keen inventor. Of all his developments, the one that has had the most impact was the hydraulic press – two piston cylinders with different cross-sectional areas, connected with a tube and filled with fluid so moving one piston causes the other to move, too. Today it’s still one of the most useful and widespread machine tools.

SEWAGE SYSTEM (recommended by Dick and Dom)

Invented: 1865
Inventor: Joseph Bazalgette

The creator of the London sewers, Joseph Bazalgette, may be remembered as more of an engineer than an inventor, but developing the largest sewage system the world had ever seen in London changed life in the city completely. The previous system – an open sewer – tipped waste into the Thames but this new invention pumped it eastwards out to sea. Bazalgette estimated the population increase of the next 100 years so the system is still in use today.

ELECTRONIC PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTER

Invented: 1943
Inventor: Tommy Flowers

Built and designed by brilliant Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers, the Colossus arrived at Bletchley Park to crack the German Lorenz cipher, which was even more complex than Enigma. Constructed using 1,500 vacuum tubes, the Colossus was the first truly electronic, digital and programmable computer. Sadly for Flowers, the technology was reserved for military intelligence and remained top secret – with every Colossus machine dismantled after the war.

HOVERCRAFT

Invented: 1953
Inventor: Christopher Cockerell

Cockerell wanted to work out how to make the boats go faster, and was captivated by the idea of lifting them out of the water altogether. His breakthrough came when he blasted air down a narrow channel around the outside of the craft that trapped high-pressure air underneath and stopped it escaping, forming a “momentum curtain. Producing four times the lift for the same amount of power, the first hovercraft crossed the channel on 1 June 1959.

TIN CAN

Invented: 1810
Inventor: Peter Durand

It was Frenchman Nicholas Appert who first preserved food by packing it into glass jars and cooking it for hours to sterilise it but British merchant Peter Durand adopted the same method with the tin can. Initially a hammer and chisel were required to open the cans as the tin opener wasn’t patented until 1855!

STERI-SPRAY (recommended by Deborah Meaden)

Invented: 2008
Inventor: Ian Helmore

Plumber Ian Helmore sterilized water tanks to prevent lagionella breeding in them. Bacteria can live in the last two inches of pipework so he decided that putting a UV lamp into a tap or showerhead would deal with the problem. It’s now out there in NHS hospitals, hopefully saving lives.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16