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https://www.invent.org/inductees/edwin-binney

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Edwin Binney

In 1885, Edwin Binney, with his cousin C. Harold Smith, took over his father's lamp black factory and established Binney & Smith. The company quickly became a leader in manufacturing carbon black.

Carbon black was used for paint, printing ink, and enameled leather. Later applications included stove and shoe polishes, coloring paper, pencils and crayons, and ink for high-speed printing presses. The partners created a Pigment Division, introducing carbon black for reinforcing automobile tires; before, tires were typically white.

In the early 1900s, the company created the first dustless white chalk and received a Gold Medal at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

In 1903 Binney and Smith noticed the need for a safe, quality wax crayon. They were confident the pigment and wax mixing techniques they had developed could be adapted for a variety of safe colors. The name "Crayola" was created by Binney's wife, combining the French word craie (chalk) with oleagineux (meaning oily). The first box contained eight pieces (black, brown, blue, red, purple, orange, yellow, and green) and sold for five cents.

Binney was known not only for his impeccable business sense and innovation but also for his integrity and goodwill. He was a philanthropist who cared about his community and an entrepreneur whose vision encompassed the economic possibilities of a growing nation.

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NIHF Inductee Edwin Binney and the Manufacturing of Lamp Black

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Pause all videos Back to Inductee Search In 1885, Edwin Binney, with his cousin C. Harold Smith, took over his father's lamp black factory and established Binney & Smith. The company quickly became a leader in manufacturing carbon black. Carbon black was used for paint, printing ink, and enameled leather.

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https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-the-flush-toilet

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The centerpiece of today's modern bathroom, the flush toilet has equal roots in ancient sanitation practices, Elizabethan politics and Industrial Revolution know-how. Primitive latrines that utilized a constant stream of water to carry away waste date back at least 5,000 years, and early toilet systems were used by the several ancient civilizations, including the Romans and the Mohenjo-Dara and Harappa of the Indus Valley.

The first modern flushable toilet was described in 1596 by Sir John Harington, an English courtier and the godson of Queen Elizabeth I. Harington's device called for a 2-foot-deep oval bowl waterproofed with pitch, resin and wax and fed by water from an upstairs cistern. Flushing Harington's pot required 7.5 gallons of water-a veritable torrent in the era before indoor plumbing. Harington noted that when water was scarce, up to 20 people could use his commode between flushes. Harington described his device in a satirical pamphlet entitled 'A New Discourse on a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax"-a pun on the term "a jakes," which was a popular slang term for toilets. Although Harington installed a working model for Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace, it took several centuries-and the Industrial Revolution's improvements in manufacturing and waste disposal - for the flush toilet to catch on.

In 1775 English inventor Alexander Cumming was granted the first patent for a flush toilet. His greatest innovation was the S-shaped pipe below the bowl that used water to create a seal preventing sewer gas from entering through the toilet. In the late-19th century, a London plumbing impresario named Thomas Crapper manufactured one of the first widely successful lines of flush toilets. Crapper did not invent the toilet, but he did develop the ballcock, an improved tank-filling mechanism still used in toilets today. Crapper's name would become synonymous with the devices he sold (although the English word "crap" predates him by centuries), thanks in part to American servicemen stationed overseas during World War I. These doughboys, unfamiliar with the relatively new-fangled invention, referred to the toilets as "crappers"-due to the Crapper brand's ubiquity in England and Franc-and brought the term back home with them after the war.

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The centerpiece of today's modern bathroom, the flush toilet has equal roots in ancient sanitation practices, Elizabethan politics and Industrial Revolution know-how. Primitive latrines that utilized a constant stream of water to carry away waste date back at least 5,000 years, and early toilet systems were used by the several ancient civilizations, including the Romans and the Mohenjo-Dara and Harappa of the Indus Valley.

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The practice of immunisation dates back hundreds of years. Buddhist monks drank snake venom to confer immunity to snake bite and variolation (smearing of a skin tear with cowpox to confer immunity to smallpox) was practiced in 17th century China. Edward Jenner is considered the founder of vaccinolog…

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Morse Code
https://www.history.com/topics/inventions/telegraph

It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations. In addition to helping invent the telegraph, the Morse code assigned a set of dots and dashes to each letter of the English alphabet and allowed for the simple transmission of complex messages across telegraph lines.

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A compass is a device that indicates direction. It is one of the most important instruments for navigation.

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Highlights

Humans have always used yeast, well before writing was invented.

Egyptians used it to make bread some five thousand years ago.

They ignored the yeast fermentation process and they believed this chemical reaction to be a miracle.

In 1876, Pasteur published his "Etudes sur la bière" in which, one could read about his findings concerning the 'mystery of the fermentation processes'; this later became known worldwide.

Pasteur had noted in his book that yeast was a living organism and that the decay of beer was caused by occurrence of other microorganisms.

In the 1780s and 1790s, the development of compressed yeast began to appear in England, Germany, and Netherlands

By May 1996, the first complete genome of yeast was mapped and is now giving us new insights into our very own existence.

The true story of yeast

New research suggests the use of organisms for fermentation could have come as early as a million years ago when early hominins possibly fermented fruits using yeast. ¹

The earliest known records of yeast being used for more traditional uses such as baking bread comes from Ancient Egypt in 1300-1500 BCE and China in 500-300 BC. While yeast's use in beer brewing and wine making has been observed in Sumeria, Babylonia, and present-day Georgia as far back as around 6000 BCE ² ³ ⁴.

In this context though researchers believe that the use of yeast for grain fermentation, including that associated with bread making is much older than those dates based on archaeological data It is noteworthy that recent genomic evidence indicates that the recognized beer and bread yeast, ⁵. S. cerevisiae, originated in China before moving west 16-14 tya via the route which would later become known as the Silk Road ⁶.

Therefore, yeast's relationship with humans can be seen as one of humanity's oldest friends and can consequently probably be considered the oldest domesticated organism ⁷.

Yeast Spreads Across the World

Historians posit that understanding of these fermentation and baking methods passed from Egypt and Babylon to ancient Greece and ancient Jewish cultures From Greece, historians believe that the knowledge passed to Rome. Pliny the Elder records that professional bakers did not appear in Rome until 168 BCE, after a war with King Perseus ⁸. ⁹. By this time yeast was widely known and used across the world for food and drink.

First Microscopic Evidence of Yeast

We owe the first description of the microscopic appearance of yeast to Anton van Leeuwenhoek in 1680, who was also responsible for observing bacteria and other small organisms for the first time. However, the word "yeast" as we know it today was not associated with fermentation until 1859, when J. H. van den Broek, working in Utrecht, Netherlands, identified vegetative cells that existed and replicated in fermenting forms, which he dubbed "yeast". Before this the word was largely associated with where yeast could be found (in the foam) as the Late Old English gist, a cognate to the Middle German words gest, meaning dregs or dirt, and jest, meaning foam. ¹²

Thanks Pasteur!

The history of yeast took a decisive turn in 1857 when Louis Pasteur discovered the fermentation process. Relive this small nineteenth-century revolution! Pasteur believed that the agents responsible for fermentation were yeasts. He established the key role of yeast as the microorganism responsible for alcoholic fermentation. He unveiled these mysteries by proving that the yeast cell can live with or without oxygen. Pasteur understood very early on that yeast was indispensable for forming bread's aromas and flavors. Baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, has imposed itself, throughout history and worldwide, as the best way to make the dough rise.

First Commercial Production of Yeast

While up to this point professional bakers and brewers were using yeast for their products, the first commercial production of yeast, or growing of yeast for the explicit purpose of selling it, arose only in the 1700s. This was different however from modern pure culture production, and instead was more of an art as these commercial producers were largely trying to support a large colony of fermenting yeast in dough or hops for use primarily in brewing rather than baking Prior to the introduction of these "commercial" yeasts, the primary yeast source for bakers and others was the yeasty foam collected from completed beer fermentation, which were sold by breweries In the 1780s and 1790s, the development of compressed yeast began to appear in England, Germany, and Netherlands. ¹³. ¹⁴. ¹⁵

In addition to compressed yeast, documents from 1771 suggest a simple drying method used for yeast, which required mixing yeast and wood ash together before placing it in the sun to dry further This dried yeast was first sold commercially in Vienna in 1822. Other preservation methods for yeast included bottling yeast, covering the yeast with oil, and burying it several feet underground to keep it cool. ¹⁶. ¹⁷

First Patents for Yeast

The first known patent that followed Pasteur's insistence on the sterility of both media and equipment was in 1891, by Alfred Jörgensen and Axel Bergh, in Sweden. With superior aeration methods and the invention of centrifuges, which replaced filters, increased production capability was possible by the early 1900s. This, in turn, facilitated the development of the commercial baking industry, and by the 1920s commercial yeast as we know it today had been born. ²¹

The future of Yeast

By May 1996, the first complete genome sequence of a eukaryote, the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was obtained. At that time, it was the largest genome sequenced to date. It contains just over 12 million base pairs packaged in 16 chromosomes. Yeast has approximately 6,000 genes in all and roughly a third of these genes are related to human genes. These genes have survived with relatively little alteration over the one billion years of evolution that separate humans and yeast. Yeast, once used only for baking in brewing, is now giving us new insights into our very own existence.

It is no wonder that yeast has played such a fundamental role in human society since ancient times as we now know we may have a lot more in common with yeast than we could have ever imagined. And just like humans' yeast's potential continues to grow and will continue to benefit humankind, hopefully for the next 5,000 years to come.

1. Dunn, R. R., Amato, K. R., Archie, E. A., Arandjelovic, M., Crittenden, A. N., and Nichols, L. M. (2020). The Internal, External and Extended Microbiomes of Hominins. Front. Ecol. Evol. 8:2020 doi: 10.3389/fevo.2020.00025

2. Samuel, D. (1996). Investigation of Ancient Egyptian Baking and Brewing Methods by Correlative Microscopy. Science 273, 488-490. doi: 10.1126/science.273. 5274.488

3. Shevchenko, A., Yang, Y., Knaust, A., Thomas, H., Jiang, H., Lu, E., et al. (2014). Proteomics identifies the composition and manufacturing recipe of the 2500- year old sourdough bread from Subeixi cemetery in China. J. Proteomics 105, 363-371. doi: 10.1016/j.jprot.2013.11.016

4. Feldmann, H. (2012). Yeast: Molecular and Cell Biology: Second Edition. 10.1002/9783527659180.

5. Lahue, C., Madden, A. A., Dunn, R. R., & Smukowski Heil, C. (2020). History and Domestication of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in Bread Baking. Frontiers in genetics, 11, 584718. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.584718

6. Lahue, C., Madden, A. A., Dunn, R. R., & Smukowski Heil, C. (2020). History and Domestication of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in Bread Baking. Frontiers in genetics, 11, 584718. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.584718

7. Feldmann, H. (2012). Yeast: Molecular and Cell Biology: Second Edition. 10.1002/9783527659180.

8. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

9. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

10. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

11. Barnett, J. A. (2000). A history of research on yeasts 2: Louis Pasteur and his contemporaries, 1850-1880. Yeast 16, 755-771.

12. Barnhart, R. (1995). "Yeast," in The Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology: The Origins of American English Words, ed. R. Barnhart (New York, NY: W.H. Wilson Company), 894.

13. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

14. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

15. Lahue, C., Madden, A. A., Dunn, R. R., & Smukowski Heil, C. (2020). History and Domestication of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in Bread Baking. Frontiers in genetics, 11, 584718. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.584718

16. Lahue, C., Madden, A. A., Dunn, R. R., & Smukowski Heil, C. (2020). History and Domestication of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in Bread Baking. Frontiers in genetics, 11, 584718. https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2020.584718

17. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

18. Gélinas, P. (2010). Mapping Early Patents on Baker's Yeast Manufacture. Compr. Rev. Food Sci. Food Saf. 9, 483-497. doi: 10.1111/j.1541-4337.2010.00122.x

19. Frey, C. (1930). History and Development of the Modern Yeast Industry. Ind. Eng. Chem. 22, 1154-1162. doi: 10.1021/ie50251a012

20. Lahue, C., Madden, A. A., Dunn, R. R., & Smukowski Heil, C. (2020). History and Domestication of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in Bread Baking. Frontiers in genetics, 11, 584718.

21. Gélinas, P. (2010). Mapping Early Patents on Baker's Yeast Manufacture. Compr. Rev. Food Sci. Food Saf. 9, 483-497. doi: 10.1111/j.1541-4337.2010.00122.x

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Yeast: One of Humankinds Oldest ingredients - Explore Yeast

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The true story of yeast New research suggests the use of organisms for fermentation could have come as early as a million years ago when early hominins possibly fermented fruits using yeast.1 The earliest known records of yeast being used...

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For thousands of years, people have looked up at the sky and imagined what it would be like to fly. Today, people no longer have to imagine that feeling. Let's explore how humankind developed aviation technology to fulfill that innate desire for flight.

History of Flight Timeline

A comprehensive history of flight could fill volumes of books. However, we can take a bird's eye view of this history and touch on the highlights that demonstrate how flight developed over time, starting in ancient history and ending with our current century.

The Earliest Contributions to Flight

Our timeline begins as far back as around 1000 B.C. when kites first appeared in China. Kites were a significant invention in the history of aviation because they are the oldest known device that is heavier than air and uses lift from the wind to fly. This same principle would be used later to keep airplanes in flight.

Throughout the next millennia, people occasionally theorized and experimented with flight. One of the most famous examples comes from Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote extensively on the topic of flight and created over 500 sketches of various flying machines.
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Hot Air and Gas Balloons

In the late 18th century, the hot air balloon arrived on the scene, marking a significant milestone in the history of flight. People were finally able to fly, starting with the first untethered hot air balloon ride in Paris on November 21, 1783. This balloon, built by the Montgolfier brothers, was made from paper and silk. It soared about 500 feet above the ground and traveled over five miles in 25 minutes.

Just 10 days later, Jacques Alexander Charles and Nicholas Louis Robert launched the first gas balloon. Rather than relying solely on hot air, this balloon used hydrogen. Gas balloons were more practical than hot air balloons. In 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries crossed the English Channel in a gas balloon.

Steam-Powered Airships and Biplane Gliders

By the mid-19th century, people were exploring other options for flying. William Henson published a design for an aerial steam carriage in 1843. That same year, George Cayley published a biplane design. In 1852, Henri Giffard completed the first flight with a steam-powered airship.

In the 1890s, Otto Lilienthal experimented with and then successfully flew biplane gliders, though he ended up dying due to a crash in 1896. Octave Chanute also experimented with biplane gliders in 1896. The first major occurrence in flight in the 20th century was Alberto Santos-Dumont's flight around the Eiffel Tower in an airship.

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Powered Flight

A watershed moment in aviation history came in 1903 when Orville and Wilbur Wright - brothers from Dayton, Ohio - successfully executed the first powered, sustained and controlled flight for a heavier-than-air flying machine. This famous flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina lasted just 12 seconds, but the Wright Brothers quickly refined their machine to make it more functional.

By 1909, the newly invented airplane was sophisticated enough to cross the English Channel. As soon as powered flight became possible, aviation technology advanced rapidly. Planes were quickly militarized, and brave aviators set new records in flight.

Jet-Propelled Airplanes

The 1930s saw another significant development in flight history: the invention of the jet engine. Frank Whittle is credited with this invention since he registered a patent for his turbojet engine in 1930. A German physicist named Hans von Ohain was the first to develop a jet plane. The plane, called the Heinkel He 178, flew for the first time on August 27, 1939.

Other scientists and engineers, such as Anselm Franz, would build on these early models to create powerful jet fighters for use in World War II and eventually commercial jetplanes.

The Space Race

In the next major chapter in the history of flight, people set their sights on achieving new heights. The space race was on. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made earth satellite into space. This satellite was called Sputnik 1. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to enter space. The following year, the U.S. sent John H. Glenn, Jr. into space to orbit the Earth.

In 1969, American astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. made the first moon landing, and the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s all saw historic launches. The first space station was launched in 1971, followed by the first reusable spacecraft in 1981 and finally the first two modules of the International Space Station in 1998. In 2000, astronauts arrived at the International Space Station.
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History of Flight FAQ

Since our history of flight timeline was brief, you may still have some questions about how flight developed. We have answers to some of the most common questions about flight history.

Who Started Aviation?

A long list of scientists, engineers, inventors and visionaries contributed to aviation's development, so it's difficult to credit one person with starting aviation. That said, Orville and Wilbur Wright tend to receive the most credit for ushering in a new era where people could finally fly as they had imagined doing for millennia.

Who Was the First Person to Fly?

There is no straightforward answer to this question as historical accounts suggest that many people attempted to fly in some way or another throughout early history. None of the attempts were successful, however. Francois Pilatrê de Rozier and Francois Laurent, Marquis of Arlanders were the first people to fly in a hot air balloon, so they may be considered the first to fly. Orville Wright was the first to successfully experience flight with a heavier-than-air machine.

When Was the First Manned Flight?

The first manned flight in a lighter-than-air device occurred on October 15, 1783, when Francois Pilatrê de Rozier stood in a hot air balloon, tethered to the ground. For heavier-than-air flight, Sir George Cayley executed the first manned glider flight with the help pf his coachman in 1853. The Wright Brothers' 1903 flight was the first manned flight of a powered flying machine.

What Year Did the First Passenger Plane Fly?

People started using airplanes for transportation earlier than you might think. On New Year's Day in 1914, the Airboat Line took its inaugural flight - the first-ever scheduled passenger flight. The passenger was Abram C. Pheil, who won the ticket at auction. The flight went from St. Petersburg, Florida to Tampa, Florida. The Airboat Line became quite popular, operating 12 flights every week.

How Long Can a Modern-Day Airplane Fly?

The answer to this question depends on a number of factors, such as the size and type of airplane in question. Recently, the Boeing 787 set the record for the longest passenger flight, covering 9,765 miles of airspace without stopping.

Contact JETechnology Solutions

With over 75 years of experience in the industry, JETechnology Solutions understands how important it is to appreciate aviation's rich past and to embrace its innovative future. We create customized aircraft maintenance stands right here in the U.S. Our past partnerships include Boeing, Airbus and the U.S. military, so we understand how to effectively address a wide range of needs. Contact us online today to learn more.

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A Brief History of Flight - History of Flight Timeline

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For thousands of years, people have looked up at the sky and imagined what it would be like to fly. Today, people no longer have to imagine that feeling. Let's explore how humankind developed aviation technology to fulfill that innate desire for flight. A comprehensive history of flight could fill volumes of books.

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Peter Henlein - The Inventor of the Watch

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After centuries and millennia’s of using analogue watch designs that used movement of the celestial bodies and flow of water to calculate passage of time, modern human civilization finally achieved mechanical and industrial environment in which precise clock could be made. This invention was fue…

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Invention of the Telephone

Born on March 3, 1847, Alexander Graham Bell was an inventor, scientist, and innovator. He came up with and patented the first practical telephone. Bell's father and grandfather engaged in a speech development program known as elocution, and as a result, Bell was inspired to study communication and speech. Bell's extensive research work was also strongly influenced by the fact that his mother and wife were deaf. Although Bell patented the electromagnetic transfer of vocal sound, Antonio Meucci is credited as having created the very first telephone.

Alexander Graham Bell's Early Life and Education

Bell was born in Edinburg, Scotland to Eliza Grace and Professor Alexander Melville Bell. He had two brothers, Melville and Edward Bell. Bell received early schooling from his father, and then proceeded to study at the Royal High School Edinburg Scotland until the age of 15. While at school, Bell did not take much interest in any other subjects apart from the sciences. After completing high school, Bell went to live with his grandfather in London. At the age of 17, Bell joined the University of Edinburg, but did not write his exams at the specified time since he and his family moved to Canada. When he finally completed his exams, he passed and was admitted at the University College of London. Bell was married to Mabel Hubbard on July 11, 1877.

Alexander Graham Bell's Career

Bell was naturally curious of his surroundings from a very young age. He even created a simple de-husking device at the age of 12. The device was used for many year's at his friend's family grain mill. He then started showing interest in sound and sound devices. In 1863, Bell's father arranged a trip for Bell to see an automaton. It had been developed by Sir Charles Whitestone. The machine, which simulated human voice, impressed the young Bell, who later became a professor in elocution at Boston University. Subsequently, Bell started performing experiments on sound and even built his first automaton head. Alexander eventually began using electricity to transmit sound, and also installed a telegraph wire to assist in his experiments of transmitting sound from one place to another.

By 1874, Bell's experiments became greatly successful. One such experiment was on the phonautograph, which was a machine that could use vibrations to draw shapes on a piece of glass. In 1875, Bell developed an acoustic telegraph (telephone) and applied for it to be patented. Afterwards, on March 10, 1876, he succeeded in making his telephone work. Subsequently, over 145,000 people in the United States possessed a telephone by 1886. The invention of the telephone received various awards such as the Albert Medal, the John Fritz Medal, and the Eliot Cresson Medal .

Death and Legacy

Bell died on August 2, 1922 at his estate in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, after battling diabetes. The Bell Memorial stands in Brantford, Ontario to commemorate the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell.

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Born on March 3, 1847, Alexander Graham Bell was an inventor, scientist, and innovator. He came up with and patented the first practical telephone. Bell's father and grandfather engaged in a speech development program known as elocution, and as a result, Bell was inspired to study communication and speech.

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Those who depend on glasses to see the world in detail owe an abundance of gratitude to the Romans, who discovered that glass could be manipulated to magnify things. Like modern-day magnifying glasses, wealthy Romans commissioned glass blowers to make glass spheres. Put against small text, the letters and words became legible.

The History Of Eyeglasses From Glass Spheres To Glass Lenses

Over time, glass workers and engineering minds continued to perfect this art, creating thinner and thinner curved glass blocks and lenses. This was no easy feat because, as you can imagine, glass had to be as clear, clean, and smooth as possible to minimize distortion.

While we don't know the name of the first person who set these glass lenses into a frame, we do know that the longest surviving glasses that we know of date back to the 13th century (the 1200s). They emerged in Italy and were mostly worn by monks, who were some of the only people allowed to learn to read and write at the time.

Over time, glasses have gone through many design phases. These have included lenses set into frames with a metal "headband" that ran from the bridge of the glasses, up and over the forehead, spanning the crown, and with the other end of the band anchored to the back of the head.

There have been glasses that hinged in the center and perched on the nose like spectacles and glasses held in place with leather or material straps that secured at the back of the head. We also have images, mostly from Renaissance art paintings, of men wearing glasses perched on the nose but secured by an extended handle the wearer could hold on to. This version looked much like the opera glasses you may have seen in images from the 18th - 19th centuries.

Three Hundred Years Of Glasses Design Stagnation

As we mentioned above, art renderings form the largest body of evidence that glasses existed during this period. They more or less continued to look the same until the 1700s. By that point, most glasses were worn without any handheld devices necessary. They became "hands-free," and the lenses continued to get thinner and thinner, and the frames got thinner, too, as glass and metalwork innovation improved over time.

Even so, eyeglasses were costly and highly prized. They were originally only used by men (women weren't allowed to be literate for much of the early centuries of glasses-wearing). Once women were able to learn to read, glasses were only available to religious scholars and the super-wealthy classes.

Then Came Benjamin Martin's "Martin's Margins" Spectacles

Scholar, inventor, and politician Benjamin Franklin had a personal interest in improved spectacle design since he needed them to read and write. It was Franklin who invented the first pair of "bifocals," which allowed the wearer to see far distances and have the ability to read or look at things at a close distance without having to remove their glasses. In the beginning, Franklin did this by cutting two different lenses in half and then replacing them in a frame.

Eyeglasses continued to be a luxury for the rich all the way into and beyond the 19th century. Fortunately, the industrial revolution made large-scale production possible. While still pricey, most middle-class adults finally could save up and purchase a pair. As you can imagine, eyeglasses were considered "precious" to the owners since their price made them almost impossible to replace on the spot for all but the upper classes.

Contemporary Eyeglass Innovations

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The History Of Eyeglasses | Atlantic Eye Institute

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Ever wondered how someone discovered engineered glass could improve vision? Read more and share the knowledge of the history of eyeglasses.

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Here's a question for makeup users and nonusers alike: Would you believe that philosophers once determined makeup trends?

What about poets?

To understand the origin of makeup, we must travel back in time about 6,000 years. We get our first glimpse of cosmetics in ancient Egypt, where makeup served as a marker of wealth believed to appeal to the gods. The elaborate eyeliner characteristic of Egyptian art appeared on men and women as early as 4000 BCE. Kohl, rouge, white powders to lighten skin tone, and malachite eye shadow (the green colour of which represented the gods Horus and Re) were all in popular use.

Makeup is mentioned in the Bible too, in both the Jewish scriptures and the Christian Old Testament and New Testament. The Book of Jeremiah, which details the titular prophet's ministry from about 627 BCE to 586 BCE, argues against cosmetics use, thereby discouraging vanity: "And you, O desolate one, what do you mean that you dress in crimson, that you deck yourself with ornaments of gold, that you enlarge your eyes with paint? In vain you beautify yourself. Your lovers despise you; they seek your life." In 2 Kings the evil queen Jezebel exemplifies the connection between cosmetics and wickedness, being described as having "painted her eyes and adorned her head" before her death at the behest of the warrior Jehu (though Jezebel's makeup use was not the impetus for her murder).

So too was there a disdain for cosmetics among ancient Romans, though not for religious reasons. Hygiene products such as bath soaps, deodorants, and moisturizers were used by men and women, and women were encouraged to enhance their natural appearance by removing body hair, but makeup products such as rouge were associated with sex workers and hence were considered a sign of shamelessness. Deriding makeup users is a common theme in Roman poems and comic plays (though theatrical performers constituted one of the few classes of people expected to use cosmetics), and admonitions against makeup appear in the personal writings of Roman doctors and philosophers. The elegiac poet Sextus Propertius, for instance, wrote that "looks as nature bestowed them are always most becoming." And the philosopher Seneca the Younger, in a letter to his mother, praised the fact that she "never defiled her face with paints or cosmetics."

This Roman view of cosmetics was at least partially rooted in Stoicism, a philosophy that foregrounded moral goodness and human reason. Stoics regarded beauty as intrinsically related to goodness. While an attractive physical form might be desirable, true "beauty" was instead associated with moral acts. Decorating the body with cosmetics implied a vanity or selfishness that, to Stoics, was undesirable. Though Stoicism was not confined to ancient Rome-it was also prevalent among ancient Greek thinkers, some of whom shared the same ideas about makeup-in Rome it affected the mainstream opinion of cosmetics. Not every Roman was resistant to makeup; some people continued to rouge their cheeks, whiten their faces, and line their eyes. But the Stoic ideal leaned toward what we today might call "no-makeup makeup"-using skin care products and other toiletries to enhance one's natural appearance, not to decorate it.

So continued a pattern of embracing and rejecting makeup in the Western world. Cosmetics were so popular in the Byzantine Empire that its citizens gained an international reputation for vanity. The Renaissance era embraced all forms of physical beauty, which people sought to attain especially through hair dye and skin lighteners (which, containing powdered lead and other harmful products, often proved toxic). Another widespread movement against cosmetics appeared in the mid-19th century, when Britain's Queen Victoria declared makeup to be vulgar, and cosmetics once again went out of fashion. Though many women didn't give up makeup entirely, many now applied it in secret: who was to say their cheeks weren't naturally rosy?

It wasn't until about the 1920s that highly visible cosmetics, such as red lipstick and dark eyeliner, reentered the mainstream (at least in the Anglo-American world; not everyone had listened to Queen Victoria and eschewed makeup in the first place). As the beauty industry gained a financial foothold, often in the form of individual women selling to other women, dissenters found that they could no longer compete. Cosmetics, now " productized" and advertised, again became a mark of wealth and status, and emphasizing physical features, even for sex appeal, was no longer considered quite so selfish or wicked. Eventually, advertisers persuaded women to take the opposite view: cosmetics were a necessity.

But that's another story entirely.

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Here's a question for makeup users and nonusers alike: Would you believe that philosophers once determined makeup trends? What about poets? To understand the origin of makeup, we must travel back in time about 6,000 years. We get our first glimpse of cosmetics in ancient Egypt, where makeup served as a marker of wealth believed to appeal to the gods.

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The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first burst onto the scene in the 1940s and ‘50s and forever transformed American life.

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The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first burst onto the scene in the 1940s and '50s and forever transformed American life. Decade after decade, TV technology has steadily advanced: Color arrived in the 1960s, followed by cable in the '70s, VCRs in the '80s and high-definition in the late '90s. In the 21st century, viewers are just as likely to watch shows on cell phones, laptops and tablets as on a TV set. Amazingly, however, all these technological changes were essentially just improvements on a basic system that has worked since the late 1930s-with roots reaching even further back than that.
READ MORE: 11 Innovations That Changed History
Early TV Technology: Mechanical Spinning Discs

No single inventor deserves credit for the television. The idea was floating around long before the technology existed to make it happen, and many scientists and engineers made contributions that built on each other to eventually produce what we know as TV today.

Television's origins can be traced to the 1830s and '40s, when Samuel F.B. Morse developed the telegraph, the system of sending messages (translated into beeping sounds) along wires. Another important step forward came in 1876 in the form of Alexander Graham Bell 's telephone, which allowed the human voice to travel through wires over long distances.

Both Bell and Thomas Edison speculated about the possibility of telephone-like devices that could transmit images as well as sounds. But it was a German researcher who took the next important step toward developing the technology that made television possible. In 1884, Paul Nipkow came up with a system of sending images through wires via spinning discs. He called it the electric telescope, but it was essentially an early form of mechanical television.
READ MORE: 6 Key Inventions by Thomas Edison
TV Goes Electronic With Cathode Ray Tubes

In the early 1900s, both Russian physicist Boris Rosing and Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton worked independently to improve on Nipkow's system by replacing the spinning discs with cathode ray tubes, a technology developed earlier by German physicist Karl Braun. Swinton's system, which placed cathode ray tubes inside the camera that sent a picture, as well as inside the receiver, was essentially the earliest all-electronic television system.

Russian-born engineer Vladimir Zworykin had worked as Rosing's assistant before both of them emigrated following the Russian Revolution. In 1923, Zworykin was employed at the Pittsburgh-based manufacturing company Westinghouse when he applied for his first television patent, for the "Iconoscope," which used cathode ray tubes to transmit images.

Meanwhile, Scottish engineer John Baird gave the world's first demonstration of true television before 50 scientists in central London in 1927. With his new invention, Baird formed the Baird Television Development Company, and in 1928 it achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York and the first transmission to a ship in mid-Atlantic. Baird is also credited with giving the first demonstration of both color and stereoscopic television.

In 1929, Zworykin demonstrated his all-electronic television system at a convention of radio engineers. In the audience was David Sarnoff, an executive at Radio Corporation of America (RCA), the nation's biggest communications company at the time. Born into a poor Jewish family in Minsk, Russia, Sarnoff had come to New York City as a child and began his career as a telegraph operator. He was actually on duty on the night of the Titanic disaster; although he likely didn't-as he later claimed-coordinate distress messages sent to nearby ships, he did help disseminate the names of the survivors.
READ MORE: How TV Killed Hollywood's Golden Age
Utah Inventor Battles Giant Corporation

Bettmann via Getty Images

Sarnoff was among the earliest to see that television, like radio, had enormous potential as a medium for entertainment as well as communication. Named president of RCA in 1930, he hired Zworykin to develop and improve television technology for the company. Meanwhile, an American inventor named Philo Farnsworth had been working on his own television system. Farnsworth, who grew up on a farm in Utah, reportedly came up with his big idea-a vacuum tube that could dissect images into lines, transmit those lines and turn them back into images-while still a teenager in chemistry class.

In 1927, at the age of 21, Farnsworth completed the prototype of the first working fully electronic TV system, based on this "image dissector." He soon found himself embroiled in a long legal battle with RCA, which claimed Zworykin's 1923 patent took priority over Farnsworth's inventions. The U.S. Patent Office ruled in favor of Farnsworth in 1934 (helped in part by an old high school teacher, who had kept a key drawing by the young inventor), and Sarnoff was eventually forced to pay Farnsworth $1 million in licensing fees. Though viewed by many historians as the true father of television, Farnsworth never earned much more from his invention, and was dogged by patent appeal lawsuits from RCA. He later moved on to other fields of research, including nuclear fission, and died in debt in 1971.

Sarnoff, with his company's marketing might, introduced the public to television in a big way at the World's Fair in New York City in 1939. Under the umbrella of RCA's broadcasting division, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Sarnoff broadcast the fair's opening ceremonies, including a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
WATCH: Full episodes of 'The Machines That Built America' online now.
The Rise of a New Medium

By 1940, there were only a few hundred televisions in use in the United States. With radio still dominating the airwaves- more than 80 percent of American homes owned one at the time-TV use grew slowly over the course of the decade, and by the mid-1940s, the United States had 23 television stations (and counting). By 1949, a year after the debut of the hit variety show Texaco Star Theater, hosted by comedian Milton Berle, the nation boasted 1 million TV sets in use.

By the 1950s, television had truly entered the mainstream, with more than half of all American homes owning TV sets by 1955. As the number of consumers expanded, new stations were created and more programs broadcast, and by the end of that decade TV had replaced radio as the main source of home entertainment in the United States. During the 1960 presidential election, the young, handsome John F. Kennedy had a noticeable advantage over his less telegenic opponent, Richard M. Nixon in televised debates, and his victory that fall would bring home for many Americans the transformative impact of the medium.

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The way people watch television has changed dramatically since the medium first burst onto the scene in the 1940s and '50s and forever transformed American life. Decade after decade, TV technology has steadily advanced: Color arrived in the 1960s, followed by cable in the '70s, VCRs in the '80s and high-definition in the late '90s.

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(Image credit: Everett Collection / Shutterstock.com ) The silvered-glass mirrors found throughout the world today first got their start in Germany almost 200 years ago. In 1835, German chemist Justus von Liebig developed a process for applying a thin layer of metallic silver to one side of a pane of clear glass.

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The History of the Shipping Container created in 1956 | IncoDocs

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Learn how the creation of the shipping container in 1956 became the catalyst for global trade around the world.

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https://www.whoinvent.com/who-invented-school/

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The name that comes as the inventor of school is Horace Mann who born in Franklin Massachusetts in 1796. He was a college professor of the subject Latin and

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Who Invented the Calendar? A History of Days, Months, & Years

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The first calendar was used by the Sumerians in the Bronze Age. Explore the history of calendars to learn why we track time the way we do.

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The credit for the invention of the pencil is given to Nicholas-Jacques Conte. He invented the modern pencil in 1795.

Nicholas-Jacques Conte and the Invention of Pencil

Nicholas-Jacques Conte, born in 1755, was an army officer who served in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was also a scientist and inventor in France. Nicholas was charged to find an alternative to the graphite. He took around eight days and produced the lead. It took Nicholas just a week to device a process known as the Conte process. It was a process of making pencils from powdered graphite and clay, which is still used today.Graphite was used even before the invention of this process. However, the Conte process was unique as Nicholas found out how to mix powdered graphite with clay. His process was so efficient that by baking the mixture, pencils with varying hardness can be produced. Moreover, he also invented the machinery required for the production of round leads.

The graphite and the invention of the pencil

When a large deposit of graphite was discovered in Borrowdale, England, graphite was popularly used. Soon, it was observed that graphite makes darker marks as compared to the lead. Moreover, graphite is soft and brittle. Thus, a case to hold the graphite was necessary. Initially, graphite was shaped into sticks and was wrapped in string. Later on, wooden holders were used to covering the graphite. Hence leading to the invention of the wooden pencils we use today.

The History of Pencils

In ancient times people used stylus made up of lead rock to make impressions on the papyrus. Romans began using a stylus to write on the papyrus. Eventually, people began sawing graphite blocks and made sticks out of them for writing. Earlier, the pencil looked like crayons which were later developed with the wooden case. Attaching of an eraser at the end of pencils was not done until 1858.

The Evolution of Pencils
Beginning of the Invention
In the 1500s, graphite was discovered on a stormy night in Borrowdale when a tree uprooted after the storm. Afterward graphite was used as a lubricant in machines and people started their research and developing on the erasable writing methods. The chemical composition and its properties were later discovered in 1779.
Ancient Pencils
Pencils were first used to mark sheep. Later, people required to take notes and started using pencils for writing notes. Subsequently, the graphite sticks which were sawed and wrapped were widely used. Afterward, the wooden pencils came into the picture. These initially had square cross-section leads, which made them easy to manufacture.
Composites of Graphite
The small leftover pieces of pencils, which were difficult to use and wasted, were ground to convert into graphite powder. This graphite powder was again utilized to manufacture the new pencils. Binders like gum, wax, etc., were used to bind the graphite but made the pencils less dark.
Conte Method
In 1795 Nicholas Conte patented the Conte process, which later became popular in Europe.

Advantages of Pencils

Following are the advantages of pencils over other wring materials -

Pencils are cheaper.

Pencils provide a range of hardness degrees that can be selected according to their use.

Pencils are easy to use and handle, which is also why kids first learn to write using a pencil.

Pencils are reliable regardless of the temperature changes.

Pencils do not need a specific position for writing, and they can also be used to write in space.

Pencil marks can easily be erased to reduce mistakes.

Pencils last longer; hence one can write more using pencils.

How Pencils have affected our lives

Over the years, pencils have improved the way we work. It has added value to human society by providing a better way of writing. The fact that a pencil is cheap and lasts longer has benefited poor people to afford education, and it is the crucial first step for the kids learning to write. It is used to make marks to measure, and even carpenters use pencils. Many creative areas which require a rough draft or design use pencils. Although technological developments, pencils have now been replaced by drafting software, the convenience with which a pencil can be used has made it a remarkable invention.

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The credit for the invention of the pencil is given to Nicholas-Jacques Conte. He invented the modern pencil in 1795. Nicholas-Jacques Conte, born in 1755, was an army officer who served in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. He was also a scientist and inventor in France.

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https://itstillworks.com/invented-usb-flash-drive-5484089.html

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Universal serial bus (USB) flash drives are removable storage devices that offer portability and storage capacities that older storage devices are unable to match. For this reason, USB flash drives have helped computer users that require a stable means of quick data storage and transfer. The history…

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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170620093153.htm

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by Maureen Coyne My second commentary is located in this wiki too: Course:ETEC540/2009WT1/Assignments/ResearchProject/InventionTelephone History The telephone is an instrument used to transmit and receive sounds, most commonly the human voice. The word telephone comes from the Greek words tele meaning far and phone meaning voice.

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Not many people know the history of who invented the camera. With so much information being shared on social media, it can be hard to find what is true and what isn't.

The first person to invent the camera was Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1816 who had been experimenting with photographic techniques since 1813.

Out of the many inventions made in the 20th century, one invention has revolutionized how we capture moments.

The camera is an incredible device that can take pictures at any moment and preserve them for all time.

WHEN WAS THE CAMERA INVENTED

When Was The Camera Invented?

The camera was invented in 1826 by Joseph Nicephore Niepce a French inventor.

The first photograph ever taken is of the view from his window at Le Gras.

It took 8 hours to expose and resulted in a blurry image that would not be recognized as anything other than an abstract painting if it were not for the date written on the bottom left-hand corner, "1826".

A History Of Who Invented The Camera?

The first photograph was taken by Joseph Nicephore Niepce on a piece of paper coated with bitumen (a natural tar) in 1826. He called his process heliography because it involved exposing light to create images.

Louis Daguerre improved Niépce's work and named their joint effort daguerreotype which became known as photography.

In 1834, Louis Daguerre introduced another photographic process called daguerreotyping and became the inventor of the modern-day camera.

The invention of cameras has advanced over time with new technologies like digital cameras and cell phone cameras.

When Was Camera Invented

The history of the camera is a long one, but what we do know is that it was created in 1839 by Frenchman Louis Daguerre. The first daguerreotype was taken on July 13th of that year and ever since then photographers have been taking pictures and capturing memories.

In 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce took the first photograph. The first photo was of a view from his window in Gras near Lyon, France.

The camera was invented by French inventor Nicephore Niepce in 1826. It is one of the most important inventions of all time because it has enabled people to capture images and share them with others around the world without having to be present at the scene.

The first camera was invented in 1826 by French inventor Nicephore Niepce. He used a pewter plate coated with light-sensitive silver nitrate.

The exposure time required to capture an image was eight hours because the only way to develop the photo was through exposure to sunlight.

However, Louis Daguerre improved on this process when he published his daguerreotype process which offered short-term exposures that ranged from minutes to hours.

Who Invented The First Movie Camera?

In the late 1800s, a bunch of inventors was trying to figure out how to capture images on film.

There are many people who claim to have invented the first movie camera, but no one knows for sure.

Many historians and scientists believe that Thomas Edison is responsible for inventing the first movie camera because he had a patent on a device called a kinetoscope in 1891 (the same year that "A Trip to the Moon" was released).

Others argue that it is more likely that Etienne-Jules Marey or Louis Le Prince was actually the true inventors of this technology.

Sadly, he died before he could enjoy his invention and never saw it in action.

However, there were other patents issued before his invention of this particular device.

The Aftermath Of The Invention Of The Cinema Camera

The invention of the cinema camera is a breakthrough for motion picture technology. Cinema cameras have changed the way movies are made and created, influencing everything from how actors act to which scenes get filmed.

The first use of the movie camera was in 1895 by French inventor Louis Le Prince. His work helped pave the way for future inventions that would change film history forever.

What started as a simple tool for recording still images in motion has evolved into a full-fledged art form that dominates popular culture.

The history of the camera is littered with some fascinating innovations and inventions, from the very first camera obscura to the invention of color film.

The early 20th century saw an explosion in innovation that would change cinema forever - namely the introduction of sound and color film which ushered in what we now know as "classical Hollywood."

The invention of the cinema camera changed filmmaking and opened up a new world for directors to explore. The first use of it was in 1895 by the Lumière brothers, but it only became popularized in 1913 when Thomas Edison developed his own version.

The cinema camera was invented in the late 1800s by Thomas Edison. This invention helped to revolutionize filmmaking and changed filmmaking as we know it.

When Were Movies Invented

No one knows exactly when movies were invented, but some people believe they could have been as early as 1894. On December 28th of that year, Thomas Edison filmed a boxing match between James J. Corbett and Tom Sharkey at the Olympic Club in New Orleans for an exhibition called "Boxing With The Stars."

Today, we see movies on screens big enough to fill our entire vision with images and sounds so clear they can make us forget where we are sitting or standing. But back then, audiences in small towns had to travel to enjoy this new form of entertainment - a movie theater was born from these traveling exhibitions!

Movies have been around for a long time, but what exactly is a movie? The answer to that question is not so easy.

Some say the first movies were created in 1895 by Thomas Edison, while others claim they originated as early as 1878. It's hard to pinpoint when people started calling these moving pictures "movies" because there are no records of anyone using this term before 1903.

A movie is a recorded sequence of images that creates the illusion of moving pictures when shown on a screen. A projector or camera is used to capture these images and then play them back at different speeds, creating the illusion of movement.

Eadweard Muybridge also was an important figure in the creation. He wanted to prove whether horses lifted all four feet off the ground during gallops; this couldn't be proven with still photography alone.

One hundred years ago, when Thomas Edison invented the kinetoscope, he had no idea that it would lead to a new form of entertainment called motion pictures.

It is only fitting then that we celebrate one hundred years of movies by highlighting some of the most iconic and influential films from Hollywood's history.

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When Was the Camera Invented? A History Of Cameras * Filmmaking Lifestyle

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Not many people know the history of who invented the camera. With so much information being shared on social media, it can be hard to find what is true and what isn't. The first person to invent the camera was Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1816 who had been experimenting with photographic techniques since 1813.

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/creation-of-sign-language

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For millennia people with hearing impairments encountered marginalization because it was believed that language could only be learned by hearing the spoken word. Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, for example, asserted that "Men that are deaf are in all cases also dumb." Under Roman law people who were born deaf were denied the right to sign a will as they were "presumed to understand nothing; because it is not possible that they have been able to learn to read or write."

Pushback against this prejudice began in the Renaissance. The first person credited with the creation of a formal sign language for the hearing impaired was Pedro Ponce de León, a 16th-century Spanish Benedictine monk. His idea to use sign language was not a completely new idea. Native Americans used hand gestures to communicate with other tribes and to facilitate trade with Europeans. Benedictine monks had used them to convey messages during their daily periods of silence. (See also: New device translates brain activity into speech. Here's how.)

Breaking the silence

Inspired by the latter practice, Ponce de León adapted the gestures used in his monastery to create a method for teaching the deaf to communicate, paving the way for systems now used all over the world.

Building on Ponce de León's work, another Spanish cleric, priest and linguist Juan Pablo Bonet, continued exploring new communication methods. Bonet criticized some of the brutal methods that had been used to get deaf people to speak: "Sometimes they are put into casks in which the voice booms and reverberates. These violent measures are by no means to the purpose."

In 1620 he published the first surviving work on the education of people with a hearing disability. Bonet proposed that deaf people learn to pronounce words and progressively construct meaningful phrases. The first step in this process was what he called the demonstrative alphabet, a manual system in which the right hand made shapes to represent each letter. This alphabet, very similar to the modern sign language alphabet, was based on the Aretina score, a system of musical notation created by Guido Aretinus, an Italian monk in the Middle Ages, to help singers sight-read music. The deaf person would learn to associate each letter of the alphabet with a phonetic sound. Bonet's approach combined oralism-using sounds to communicate-with sign language. The system had its challenges, especially when learning the words for abstract terms, or intangible forms such as co junctions like "for," "nor," or "yet."

In 1755 the French Catholic priest Charles-Michel de l'Épée established a more comprehensive method for educating the deaf, which culminated in the founding of the first public school for deaf children, the National Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris. Students came to the institute from all over France, bringing signs they had used to communicate with at home. Épée adapted these signs and added his own manual alphabet, creating a signing dictionary. Insistent that sign language needed to be a complete language, his system was complex enough to express prepositions, conjunctions, and other grammatical elements. Épée is known as the father of the deaf for his work and his establishment of 21 schools. (See also: Why the deaf have enhanced vision.)

Épée's standardized sign language quickly spread across Europe and to the United States. In 1814 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a minister from Connecticut who wanted to teach his nine-year-old, hearing-impaired neighbor to communicate, went to France to train under Épée's successor, Abbé Sicard. Three years later, Gallaudet established the American School for the Deaf in his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut. Students from across the United States attended, and just as at Épée's school, they brought signs they used to communicate with at home. American Sign Language became a combination of these signs and those from French Sign Languag e.

Thanks to the development of formal sign languages, people with hearing impairment can access spoken language in all its variety. The world's many modern signing systems have different rules for pronunciation, word order, and grammar. New visual languages can even express regional accents to reflect the complexity and richness of local speech.

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Vows of silence and humanist beliefs led European clerics to create new communication methods for the deaf 500 years ago.

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Gabriel Suárez

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The first printing presses were invented around 600 C.E. by Chinese monks, and were further developed during the reign of the Tang Dynasty in China and in Korea and Japan. Eventually, the inventions made their way to Europe, where Johannes Gutenberg co-opted and developed the ancient model. He printed 180 copies of the Bible, thereby cementing his place in history. Ultimately, the printing press shaped modern communication as we know it, catalyzing everything from infrastructure and technology to universities and symphonies, and shaping most of the factors that define our modern era.
Before the advent of the Internet, before telephone wires and radio waves made it possible to instantly transmit information across the globe, before the days of newspapers and literature-and centuries before Johannes Gutenberg printed the first copies of the Bible-there was a Chinese peasant named Bi Sheng.

Most of the details of his life have been lost over time, but at some point in the 11th century, Bi Sheng was the first to develop moveable type-an innovation that streamlined the printing process, launched the widespread publication and distribution of Buddhist and Taoist texts, and eventually enabled Gutenberg to create his famous Bibles.

Though Bi Sheng might be the earliest innovator in the printing press business to whom we can put a name, he was not the first to develop printing technology. That distinction stretches much further back in time.

Ancient Origins of the Printing Press

The earliest texts on record are believed to have been created by Chinese monks, around 600 C.E. The world's first known printed text is a book of Buddhist scripture, the Diamond Sutra, which appeared in approximately 868 C.E. during the reign of the Tang Dynasty. The book-which remained sealed in a cave near Dunhuang, China for over 1,000 years before it was discovered in 1900-was created using a method called block printing . Similar methods were utilized in Korea and Japan during the same time period.

"As a lamp, a cataract, a star in space

an illusion, a dewdrop, a bubble

a dream, a cloud, a flash of lightning

view all created things like this."

Over the next few hundred years, Chinese inventors produced other texts, manuals, and scrolls. Eventually, Bi Sheng came on the scene and created the first moveable clay text printing method. This involved carving letters into clay and baking them into hard blocks that could be pressed against an iron plate to create letters.

Finally, late in the 13th century, a magistrate of the Yuan Dynasty named Wang Chen created and mass-produced a series of books on agriculture called the , circa 1297, using moveable type, which allowed for great speed and mass production. Some of the books printed with Wang Chen's processes actually made it to Europe. And, ironically, they detailed many other Chinese inventions that were later attributed to Europeans.

The first use of moveable metal type is believed to have been in Korea. The oldest surviving example of this advance is the Jikji Simche Yojeol, a Buddhist text printed in Cheongju during Korea's Goryeo Dynasty and dated to 1377.

The printing press-beginning with the earliest efforts of Chinese monks who painstakingly carved each character into metal-altered the DNA of human relationships and knowledge and sparked revolutions in countless dimensions of human life, the reverberations of which are still felt today.

Johannes Gutenberg Invents an Economical New Model

Though the earliest print technologies came from China, most of us associate the name Johannes Gutenberg with the invention of the printing press. Though he did not invent the device, his refinements made the printing press economically feasible for widespread European distribution of both written materials and presses themselves.

Gutenberg was born in Mainz, Germany, the third child of a patrician named Freile mum Gensfleisch and his second wife, Else Wirick zum Gutenberg. In his youth, he is believed to have tinkered in metalwork, and in his young adulthood he and his family were exiled from Mainz due to a conflict between the guilds and the patricians of the city. They moved to what is now Strasbourg, France, at some point between 1428 and 1430. Johannes worked in fields like gem cutting, crafting, and teaching, but around this time he also conceived a secret project that would change history. It all started with an idea that he is believed to have said came to him "like a ray of light."

Little is known about the routines of Gutenberg's daily life-it was the 1400s, after all-but one can imagine him toiling away in a cool, candlelit church basement in the wee hours of the morning, long after everyone else had gone to sleep, pulling his wires and metals into strange shapes and watching ink bleed onto parchment. Perhaps he sensed that he was altering the course of history, and could feel some strange force animating his fingertips; or maybe he was just in the fever of a midnight passion project. Regardless, what he would create would make it possible for billions of people to share and distribute their scientific revelations, musical scores, and literary endeavors-as well as details of their intimate lives-but at that time, what happened in solitude remained there.

Some of his business partners must have noticed the ink on his fingertips, or the bags under his eyes, or the strange hieroglyphs on his walls. Regardless of what gave his secret away, they insisted that he make them partners in his venture, whatever it might be. This was the beginning of complicated legal and monetary struggles that would haunt Gutenberg until his death.

Old Century, Same Money Problems

By 1448, Gutenberg's invention was taking shape, but his financial life was in shambles. In order to finish his project, he needed to borrow money from Johannes Fust, who later joined him as a business partner in printing.

Frustrated by his lack of funds, Gutenberg decided to invest his energy in a new project in the meantime: making metal mirrors, which he and his partners believed could reflect holy light. His invention was never successful, but perhaps it did reveal a bit of wisdom from the beyond.

In 1452, he managed to finish the first and only book he himself would ever print: a Bible. He is believed to have printed 180 copies of the 1,300-page volume, an endeavor that required about 50,000 sheets of paper. At the time of their distribution, the Bibles were widely praised for the beautiful quality of their ink, which still remains a glossy black, even 550 years later.

Gutenberg sold some of them at the Frankfurt Book Fair that year. Today, only 49 copies are known to exist, and they are considered some of the world's most valuable books.

"[The Bibles are] exceedingly clean and correct in their script, and without error, such as Your Excellency could read effortlessly without glasses."

- Pope Pius II to Cardinal Carvajal

Though Gutenberg's invention was a smash hit, he never really had the chance to enjoy the fruits of his labor. By 1455, his business partner and investor Johannes Fust had turned on him, foreclosing on their shared business venture and, following a lawsuit, taking ownership of all of Gutenberg's equipment. Gutenberg is believed to have continued printing, but by 1460 he had stopped entirely, possibly because of eyesight issues. The man whose invention would determine the course of history had lost almost everything.

His invention, however, would continue to grow in prominence. Peter Schoffer, one of Fust's business partners who had acquired part of Gutenberg's equipment in the lawsuit, continued to build on Gutenberg's original model, eventually producing his own print copies of The Book of Psalms. Soon after, the printing press model began to spread like wildfire through Germany, eventually making it to Paris-and then taking the whole world by storm.

The Key to Success: Meticulous Attention to Detail

Though he is often given credit for the printing press, Gutenberg did not actually invent it. What he did was refine existing models of the printing press, making it more economical and feasible for widespread use.

Part of the reason his model was so successful was because of the care with which he crafted it. He made his own ink, designed to work well with metal, and he perfected a method of flattening paper by using a winepress. He also utilized a process called replica-casting, which involved creating brass outlines of letters and then filling them with a specially made, extra-durable type of molten lead.

"Printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors."

Ultimately, his innovative efforts slashed the cost of book production, making the process of printing written works far more economical than ever before. Still, the fact that he is largely credited with inventing the printing press is an undeniable example of European erasure of other societies' contributions and inventions.

Impacts of the Printing Press: A Foundation for Cultural Overhauls

The issues surrounding proper credit for invention of the printing press notwithstanding, its worldwide influence cannot be understated. From the moment of its creation, it inspired fear, paranoia, and new forms of thought. Following its widespread distribution, members of the Catholic Church's hierarchy grew worried about heresy and banned any book printed without their approval. Their fears were validated when revolutionaries like Martin Luther and John Calvin used print materials to create new forms of Christian worship.

Of its many benefits, the printing press enabled scientists to share their findings with others. Among them was Copernicus, whose On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres was classified as heresy by the church.

From the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution, from the advent of new technologies to democracy itself, the effect of the printing press has been indisputably vast and multifaceted. Since its inception, print media has been a mechanism through which radical new ideas are disseminated and individual stories and plights reach much wider audiences. It is no wonder that authoritarian governments suppress journalism, or that slave owners before the U.S. Civil War forbade their captives to become literate.

The printing press certainly changed the world, opening up space for the rapidfire dissemination of every kind of thought-good and evil, corrupt and revolutionary, unifying and divisive. Often cited as the greatest achievement of the first and second millennia, its existence forever altered communication, science, and the social world, redefining human relationships and-for better and for worse-shaping our society into what it is today.
Editor's Note, August 2021: A callout has been added to this article to highlight the first use of moveable metal type in Korea in the 14th century.

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from chinese origins to gutenberg's bible: how the invention of the printing press changed the world

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The Printing Press: From Chinese Origins to Gutenberg's Bible

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The first printing presses were invented around 600 C.E. by Chinese monks, and were further developed during the reign of the Tang Dynasty in China and in Korea and Japan. Eventually, the inventions made their way to Europe, where Johannes Gutenberg co-opted and developed the ancient model.

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Laura Gonzalez - NETFLIX

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Netflix, the top video streaming service in the world, started out by shipping DVDs to customers by mail. Now it consumes more than 15 percent of the world's internet bandwidth and has subscribers in more than 190 countries.

How did it achieve such staggering success? It has been a long road of trial and error, luck, and incredibly good timing.

The Early Days of Netflix

Netflix was founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in a small California city called Scotts Valley, in Santa Cruz county. Reed Hastings has said the idea was sparked by a $40 fine he got for renting the movie Apollo 13 from long-dead Blockbuster and returning it six weeks late. While working out at the gym one day, the sting from the fine inspired him to think up a service that allowed one to order a movie online and get it by mail.

RELATED: What "Netflix and Chill" Really Means According to Marc Randolph, however, this story is not true and was just a marketing gag. Instead, at the time in early 1997, Reed was the CEO of the company they worked for (Pure Atria) and Marc was its VP of Corporate Marketing. Because a looming merger with another firm would leave them both out of a job, Marc says Reed had told him, "Let's come up with an idea and you can run it and I'll fund it."

As they carpooled to work every day from their homes in Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley, Marc, who wanted to start something like Amazon.com, pitched all sorts of e-commerce ideas to Reed: surfboards, custom-built baseball bats, personalized dog food, and home-delivery shampoo. To all of them, Reed's reply was simply "that will never work."

Then, Marc heard of a hot new product that had been invented in Japan called the DVD. He realized DVDs would soon replace VHS Cassettes as the home viewing standard. After a bit of brainstorming in the car on Highway 17, Reed was sold on the idea.

On a hot summer day in 1997, Marc and Reed walked into Logos Books & Records in Santa Cruz, bought a CD of Patsy Cline's greatest hits, and mailed it to Reed's house a few blocks across the town. When the CD arrived intact, they knew they had found their ticket to e-commerce glory.

On August 29, 1997, Netflix was registered and set up using at least $1.9 million from Reed Hastings. This capital was later supplemented by other investors. Reed Hastings, 37, became Chairman with 70% ownership, and Marc Randolph, 39, the CEO and a minority owner.

After a few iterations in its first few years, Netflix eventually crafted a successful business model: a subscription-based service with no due dates or late fees and unlimited access to content at $19.95, a "Queue" that subscribers use to specify the order in which DVDs should be mailed to them, and a delivery system that automatically mails out a DVD as soon as the previous DVD is returned. The DVDs arrived in thinly packaged red envelopes with a postage-paid return sleeve inside. All postage costs were covered by Netflix.

This formula proved a hit and Netflix steadily added subscribers. Within five years of launch, Netflix was shipping millions of DVDs per day.

Related: How to Enter Netflix's Secret Codes

Key Netflix Milestones

August 29, 1997: Netflix is registered in Scotts Valley, California. The service is called Kibble in beta testing, which is a kind of dog food, to remind the team of the old advertising adage that "It doesn't matter how good your dog food advertising campaign is, if the dogs won't eat the dog food."

April 14, 1998: The website launches as Netflix at 9 am. The video library is approximately 900 titles. Marc orders the movie Casino as a test. It works. Within 15 minutes, the website crashes as other orders start coming in, forcing them to run to the store to buy more servers. At the end of the first day, they book 137 orders.

1999: 239,000 subscribers sign up. Netflix's video library expands to 3,100 titles. After a meeting between Marc and Sony goes bad, and growth becomes sluggish, Reed demotes Marc to President and takes over as CEO.

2000: Reed Hastings approaches former Blockbuster CEO John Antioco and asks him to buy Netflix for $50 million. John turns him down and laughs at Reed and the Netflix team during the meeting.

2001: Netflix hits one million subscribers and continues to grow.

2002: Netflix goes public in May. The IPO raises $82.1 million and values Netflix at $309.7 million. Reed has 500,000 shares and Marc has 166,000 shares.

Netflix opens regional warehouses, bringing overnight delivery in response to subscriber complaints that it took too long to get their DVDs.

2003: Marc Randolph leaves Netflix and sells his shares.

2006: Netflix finally becomes profitable, generating more than $80 million in profits. Subscribers rise to 6.3 million.

2007: Netflix begins streaming content, delivering directly to TVs, computers, and tablets through its Watch Now service. The first trial is in Canada. The service launches with 1,000 titles and is included free in Netflix's $5.99 per month physical DVD subscription tier.

2010: Netflix changes focus to streaming and introduces it to the United States. Reed tells investors, "Three years ago we were a DVD by-mail company that offered some streaming. We are now a streaming company which also offers DVD-by mail."

Blockbuster files for bankruptcy.

2011: Netflix splits its streaming business and its DVD rental business into two distinct subscription packages: Netflix for streaming and Qwikster for DVD rentals. Reed reverses the unpopular decision in less than a month after 800,000 subscribers abandon Netflix.

2012: Netflix starts making original shows. Its first show is Lilyhammer followed by House of Cards in 2013. Since then, it has produced over 1900 originals, many of which, like Squid Game and The Crown, have gone on to be tremendously popular and won many awards.

2013: Netflix introduces user profiles and rolls it out to all Netflix subscribers in August.

2015: Netflix is present in 50 countries.

2016: Netflix goes live in 130 countries simultaneously and adds local languages to its user interface, subtitles, and dubbing.

2017: Netflix officially hits 100 million subscribers worldwide.

2021: Netflix hits 209 million subscribers in over 190 countries. Notable exceptions are North Korea, Syria, China, and Iran. It has more than 15,000 titles across all its international libraries and earns annual revenues of over $25 billion.

RELATED: How to Watch Every Netflix Show in Any Country

The Future of Netflix

Netflix is aggressively creating original content for local audiences. According to Dorothy Ghettuba, the head of African Programming, it is no longer necessary to go to Hollywood. With Netflix, one can be a superstar in their backyard and export their content to the world.

Over the years, Netflix has been joined by competitors. These include Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Prime Video, HBO Max, and YouTube TV. These competitors are investing heavily in augmented reality and virtual reality content. Netflix will also have to embrace these emerging technologies and move its content into headsets to stay ahead of the pack.
About The Author

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How and When Did Netflix Start? A Brief History of the Company

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Netflix, the top video streaming service in the world, started out by shipping DVDs to customers by mail. Now it consumes more than 15 percent of the world's internet bandwidth and has subscribers in more than 190 countries. How did it achieve such staggering success?

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The very first discovery of the solar cell marked the beginning of the change in energy production. This change would be iterated over and over to make new progress in the field of solar energy by researchers and is still going on. The history of solar energy is a story of innovation that all started in the early 19th century.

Solar Energy in the 1800's

In 1839, French scientist Edmond Becquerel discovered the photovoltaic effect at the young age of 19. He realized when electrons were in an excited state in a conduction band, they could move freely through a material, thus creating a current. But this wasn't widely recognized until Einstein wrote a paper about the power of solar for which he eventually received the Nobel prize in 1922. The first solar panel was invented by Charles Fritts in 1883 where he coated a thin layer of selenium with an extremely thin layer of gold. The resulting cells had a conversion electrical efficiency of only about 1%. This invention led to the launching of a movement for producing solar energy.

Solar Energy in the 1900's

The solar era began in 1950 when Bell Laboratory scientists focused on photovoltaic (PV) developments and began utilizing silicon to produce solar cells. This breakthrough is credited to Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller, and Gerald Pearson which produced an efficiency of 4% only. This breakthrough led the US government to pour more money into solar cell technology. In the 1960s and 1970's the production of solar panels was made possible but the downside was it was too expensive for mainstream consumers but scientists continued to develop solar energy technology to reduce the cost. With the rise of semiconductors in 1941, Russel S Ohl described a process of forming silicon ingots that led to the first P-N junction cell. Ohl cut a section from the ingot including the top, barrier, and bottom portions, and attached electrodes to the top and bottom portions, yielding the first silicon solar cell. The figure below represents the first-ever patented silicon P-N -EMF (PN junction Electromotive force ) cell.

The image below is an advertisement photo that appeared in the 1956 issue of Look Magazine, show off the "Bell Solar Battery" to the American public.

Solar Energy in the 2000's

In the 1950s the world had less than a watt of solar cells powering electrical equipment. Fast-forward to the 21st century, 50 years of continued discovery and development of silicon and other PV materials and still ongoing, today solar panels provide electricity to millions of houses worldwide, power up buildings, satellites and provide clean energy all around the world.

The global solar energy installed capacity is estimated to be around 728GW and is estimated to grow up to 1,645 GW in 2026. Solar energy has exhibited the most rapid cost decline among energy technologies. The price of silicon PV cells in the 1950s was 76 US$/Watt which significantly declined to 0.20 US$/Watt in 2021. From 2000 - 2019 the prices were reduced significantly but the reductions started to level off after that. The figure below shows the trend in the reduction of the cost.

Bigger factories, the use of automation and more efficient production methods have delivered economies of scale, lower labor costs, and less material waste for the solar sector. The average cost of a solar panel dropped by 90% from 2010 to 2020.

Major types of Solar panels available today in the market are monocrystalline, polycrystalline, and thin-film panels. Thin films include cells made by different materials, unlike silicon solar cells. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

The Future of Solar Energy

Solar energy has advanced at a rate that is astonishing even to experts in the field and now promises to have a prominent role in the ongoing energy transition. According to the Solar Energy Industry Data (SEIA) for the last decade, the global PV industry has been growing at an average compound annual rate greater than 35%. It is for sure that PV deployment will continue to grow as the global energy portfolio transitions more towards renewable energy.

The increase in the module power of the panels from 250 W to 500 W in the last decade resulted in the decrease of the relative contribution of the module cost to the total PV system cost. Silicon solar cells still dominate the market and it will take some time for other generation solar cells to gain market dominance.

One of the key challenges is to reduce cost and improve efficiency, this can be addressed by coming up with new market competitive silicon wafer solar module manufacturing methods at a lower cost. Focusing on crystalline Silicon-based PV technology, this standardized industry has a steep learning curve and is well-positioned to meet the challenge of producing many terawatts of power. We are also reaching the theoretical limit of single-junction solar cells.

Ultimately, tandem technologies can be a solution to tackle this problem however significant research is still required to enable this at low costs for the mass market. Given the fact that this technology is more than fifty years old, more research and development are needed to navigate diverse possibilities.

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History and the Development of Photovoltaics - AESOLAR

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The very first discovery of the solar cell marked the beginning of the change in energy production. This change would be iterated over and over to make new progress in the field of solar energy by researchers and is still going on. The history of solar energy is a story of innovation that all started [...]

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What is the internet and How Does the Internet Work? | Network and Internet explained

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Like this? Share it!

Found our little history of the camera interesting? Where do you see the future of the camera heading? Share with your friends and followers via social and start the conversation.

And if we've inspired you to take your photos to the next level, check out Currys' great selection of DSLR cameras.

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From the camera obscura to the DSLR, Currys takes a look at the history of the camera.

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Found our little history of the camera interesting? Where do you see the future of the camera heading? Share with your friends and followers via social and start the conversation. And if we've inspired you to take your photos to the next level, check out Currys' great selection of DSLR cameras.

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Did you ever wondered who invented paper? Who enabled dramatic increase in the ability of our ancestors to record data and keep that knowledge safe for generations, enabling advances that defined our history?

The man who is today credited as the driving force of paper creation is none other than one of the most famous Chinese inventors Cai Lun who lived between 50 and 120 AD. He was born during the reign of the Eastern Han Dynasty in Guiyang (today known as Leiyang, Hunan), managing to slowly rise through the ranks of that court. Even though the history of paper created from the wood fibers, old rags and fishnets was commonly known in China ever since 3rd century BC, paper was regarded to be a very costly, defective and complicated to produce. What Cai Lun managed to change was to completely refine all the steps of the paper production - from ingredients, recipe, machinery, and the way the paper mix was finalized in its final state.

This happened around 105 AD after Sai became associate of the royal Consort Deng Sui. Using newly found resources he revolutionized the way paper was made, and for that effort he received some fame during his life. Sadly, he was ordered to go to prison after new Emperor managed to take the throne of China. Not wanting to die in prison, he poisoned himself in a traditional Chinese way. This move brought him much respect of following generations who remembered him fondly. Using his techniques, paper industry in chine rose to prominence in 3rd century, enabling slow expansion of the paper use all over the Asia. Eventually, secrets of papermaking were discovered by Arabs, who know well enough that Europe and North Africa did not have technology like it (Papyrus paper was dying off because of close extinction of that plant in Egypt, and European parchment was expensive and reactive to moisture).

The basic principles of Cai Lun's papermaking techniques remained in use for more than 1500 years, all up to arrival of Industrial Revolution in Europe when new machines, chemistry, and new basic ingredients enabled creation of much cheaper, stronger, durable and versatile paper.

Even though history of paper was filled with inventors that significantly improved its production and adoption in modern world, only Cai Lun can claim the place of the man who started it all. And because of that, he will remain remembered forever.

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Did you ever wondered who invented paper? Who enabled dramatic increase in the ability of our ancestors to record data and keep that knowledge safe for generations, enabling advances that defined our history? The man who is today credited as the driving force of paper creation is none other than one of the most famous Chinese inventors Cai Lun who lived between 50 and 120 AD.

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When was the microwave invented? The accidental creation of this household appliance.

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The microwave was invented in 1945 by Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer, who discovered a radar magnetron had melted a nut cluster in his pocket.

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In today's world, doctors order X-rays to diagnose all sorts of problems: a broken bone, pneumonia, heart failure, and much, much more. Mammography, the standard screening method for breast cancer, uses X-rays. We barely think about it, it's so ubiquitous. But not so long ago, a broken bone, a tumor, or a swallowed object could not be found without cutting a person open.

Wilhelm Roentgen, Professor of Physics in Wurzburg, Bavaria, discovered X-rays in 1895-accidentally-while testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass. His cathode tube was covered in heavy black paper, so he was surprised when an incandescent green light nevertheless escaped and projected onto a nearby fluorescent screen. Through experimentation, he found that the mysterious light would pass through most substances but leave shadows of solid objects. Because he did not know what the rays were, he called them 'X,' meaning 'unknown,' rays.

Roentgen quickly found that X-rays would pass through human tissue too, rendering the bones and tissue beneath visible. News of his discovery spread worldwide, and within a year, doctors in Europe and the United States were using X-rays to locate gun shots, bone fractures, kidney stones and swallowed objects. Honors for his work poured in--including the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901.

Clinical use of the X-ray flourished, with little regard for potential side effects from radiation exposure. There were a few early suspicions from scientists including Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and William J. Morton, each of whom reported injuries they believed resulted from experiments with X-rays. But overall, early use of X-rays was widespread and unrestrained, even to the degree that during the 1930's and 1940's, shoe stores offered free X-rays so that customers could see the bones in their feet.

We now have a far better understanding of the risks associated with X-ray radiation and have developed protocols to greatly minimize unnecessary exposure. And while X-rays remain a cornerstone of modern medicine, their discovery paved the way for the development of today's broad spectrum of imaging techniques, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), ultrasound, echocardiography, and many others -- some of which avoid the use of radiation altogether. Not a bad legacy for an accidental discovery.

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History of Medicine: Dr. Roentgen's Accidental X-Rays

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In today's world, doctors order X-rays to diagnose all sorts of problems: a broken bone, pneumonia, heart failure, and much, much more. Mammography, the standard screening method for breast cancer, uses X-rays. We barely think about it, it's so ubiquitous.

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Image

Image from Picturenow

Any seagoing vessel drawing energy from a steam-powered engine can be called a steamboat. However, the term most commonly describes the kind of craft propelled by the turning of steam-driven paddle wheels and often found on rivers in the United States in the 19th century. These boats made use of the steam engine invented by the Englishman Thomas Newcomen in the early 18th century and later improved by James Watt of Scotland. Several Americans made efforts to apply this technology to maritime travel. The United States was expanding inland from the Atlantic coast at the time. There was a need for more efficient river transportation, since it took a great deal of muscle power to move a craft against the current.

In 1787, John Fitch demonstrated a working model of the steamboat concept on the Delaware River. The first truly successful design appeared two decades later. It was built by Robert Fulton with the assistance of Robert R. Livingston, the former U.S. minister to France. Fulton's craft made its first voyage in August of 1807, sailing up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany, New York, at an impressive speed of eight kilometers (five miles) per hour. Fulton then began making this round trip on a regular basis for paying customers.

Following this introduction, steamboat traffic grew steadily on the Mississippi River and other river systems in the inland United States. There were numerous kinds of steamboats, which had different functions. The most common type on southern rivers was the packet boat. Packet boats carried human passengers as well as commercial cargo, such as bales of cotton from southern plantations. Compared to other types of craft used at the time, such as flatboats, keelboats, and barges, steamboats greatly reduced both the time and expense of shipping goods to distant markets. For this reason, they were enormously important in the growth and consolidation of the U.S. economy before the Civil War.

Steamboats were a fairly dangerous form of transportation, due to their construction and the nature of how they worked. The boilers used to create steam often exploded when they built up too much pressure. Sometimes debris and obstacles-logs or boulders-in the river caused the boats to sink. This meant that steamboats had a short life span of just four to five years on average, making them less cost-effective than other forms of transportation.

In the later years of the 19th century, larger steam-powered ships were commonly used to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Great Western, one of the earliest oceangoing steam-powered ships, was large enough to accommodate more than 200 passengers. Steamships became the predominant vehicles for transatlantic cargo shipping as well as passenger travel. Millions of Europeans immigrated to the United States aboard steamships.

By 1900, railroads had long since surpassed steamboats as the dominant form of commercial transport in the United States. Most steamboats were eventually retired, except for a few elegant "showboats" that today serve as tourist attractions.

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Director

Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society

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National Geographic Society

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Gina Borgia, National Geographic Society

Jeanna Sullivan, National Geographic Society

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Sarah Appleton, National Geographic Society, National Geographic Society

Margot Willis, National Geographic Society

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Last Updated

October 10, 2022

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Steam-powered vessels were important to the growth of the U.S. economy in the antebellum years.

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This article is about electric automobiles. For all types of electric transpotation, see Electric vehicle.

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The Evolution of Drones: From Military to Hobby & Commercial - Percepto

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At Percepto, we’re committed to developing the most advanced, fully autonomous UAS in the world. Read about Drones from Military to Hobby & Commercial

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Greatest Inventions of All Time: Who invented the Traffic Lights?

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Greatest Inventions of All Time: Do you who invented the traffic lights, when did the first traffic light was used and where did the first traffic

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Ruth De Leon - Honda had an idea: Motorbike

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Ruth De Leon - Honda had an idea: Motorbike

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Motorcycle builder Soichiro Honda incorporates the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan. In the 1960s, the company achieved worldwide fame for its motorcycles (in particular, its C100 Super Cub, which became the world's best-selling vehicle); in the 1970s, it achieved worldwide fame for its affordable, fuel-efficient cars. Today, in large part because of its continued emphasis on affordability, efficiency and eco-friendliness (its internal motto is "Blue skies for our children"), the company is doing better than most.

Before he founded the company that bore his name, Soichiro Honda was a drifter and a dreamer. He bounced from one mechanic's job to another, and also worked as a babysitter, a race car driver and an amateur distiller. Even his wife said he was a "wizard at hardly working." In 1946, he took over an old factory that lay mostly in ruins from wartime bombings, though he did not have much of a plan for what he would do there. First he tried building what he called a "rotary weaving machine"; next he tried to mass-produce frosted glass windows, then woven bamboo roof panels. Finally, after he came across a cache of surplus two-stroke motors, he had an idea: motorbikes.

Honda adapted the motors to run on turpentine and affixed them to flimsy cycle frames built by workers at the Hamamatsu factory. The bikes sold like hotcakes to people desperate for a way to get around in postwar Japan, where there was virtually no gasoline and no real public transit. Soon enough, Honda had sold out of those old engines and was making his own. In 1947, the factory produced its first complete motorbike, the one-half horsepower A-Type (nicknamed "The Chimney" because it was so smoky and smelly). After the company's incorporation, Honda produced a more sophisticated bike: the 1949 steel-framed, front- and rear-suspended D-Type that could go as fast as 50 miles per hour. At the end of the 1950s, it introduced the Cub, a Vespa clone that was especially popular with women and was the first Honda product to be sold in the United States.

Starting in the 1960s, the company produced a few small cars and sporty racers, but it wasn't until it introduced the Civic in 1973 that it really entered the auto market. The car's CVCC engine burned less fuel and could pass American emissions tests without a catalytic converter; as a result, the car was a hit with American drivers frustrated by rising gasoline costs. The slightly larger, plusher 1976 Accord won even more fans, and in 1989 it became the most popular car in the United States.

Soichiro Honda was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 1989. He died two years later at the age of 84.

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Motorcycle builder Soichiro Honda incorporates the Honda Motor Company in Hamamatsu, Japan. In the 1960s, the company achieved worldwide fame for its motorcycles (in particular, its C100 Super Cub, which became the world's best-selling vehicle); in the 1970s, it achieved worldwide fame for its affordable, fuel-efficient cars.

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Soap works-and has for thousands of years. Here's why, and how it came to be.

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Media Credits

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Illustrators

Editors

Producer

National Geographic Society

other

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Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Illustrators Editors Producer National Geographic Society other

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Umbrellas and parasols are primarily hand-held portable devices sized for personal use. The largest hand-portable umbrellas are golf umbrellas. Umbrellas can be divided into two categories: fully collapsible umbrellas, in which the metal pole supporting the canopy retracts, making the umbrella small enough to fit in a handbag; and non-collapsible umbrellas, in which the support pole cannot retract and only the canopy can be collapsed.

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Only one year after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that public schools must be desegregated in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, Marian Croak was born.

It was thirty years later, while working for AT&T at Bell Labs, that she pioneered, envisioned, and planned the technology that is responsible for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems. Without her skills and knowledge, VoIP technology may very well have faded into the forgotten technological past, as a forgone experiment.

Growing up as an African-American girl in 60's New York City, there was very little privilege afforded to Marian Croak, save for her ingenuity, curiosity, and a supportive family. Despite growing up in a time when women - especially women of color - struggled to find acceptance and empowerment for achieving their goals and ambition, Marian Croak defied the odds, and not for her own personal gain.

Marian Croak's ambitions focused on reducing the barrier of entry to quality, affordable communication for the masses.

ATM VERSUS TCP/IP

After graduating from the University of Southern California with a Ph.D. in quantitative analysis (otherwise referred to as data science) and social psychology, Marian Croak soon began working for Bell Labs in 1982.

It was there, at Bell's Human Factors division, with the specific purpose of studying how technology could be used to positively impact human's lives, that Marian first began working on digital messaging applications, tasked with the study of determining if various messaging applications could communicate with each other.

It's important to put into perspective just how novel this kind of research was at the time - the earliest form of the internet would not come to full fruition until the next year in 1983.

Only fourteen years earlier, in 1969, was the invention of what could be described as the proto-internet, when two computers - one located at Stanford, and one in UCLA - connected to each other via satellite link. In 1970, the first permanent connections of ARPANET were formed, linking computers between Harvard, MIT, and BBN (the Raytheon-owned company that invented the "interface message processor," which was the early interface for engaging with ARPANET).

In 1973, two years after the invention of email, ARPANET consisted of forty university and government computers on its network, including the Norwegian Seismic Array, which allowed Norway and the United States to share data about Soviet nuclear launch tests. During this time, email accounted for seventy-five percent of all ARPANET traffic.

This was the state of the "internet" when Marian began her work; albeit a bit more that 40 computers made up ARPANET by the time Marian started working at Bell Labs, but other than scale, not much had changed. In fact, it wouldn't be until 1983 that DNS (domain name system) was invented. In 1982, if you wanted to connect to another computer via ARPANET, you dialed an IP address, not a website name.

Marian was at the forefront of this emerging technology. And while working with Bell's Human Factors division, tasked with creating digital messaging applications, she found herself having to convince Bell Labs' management that the technology that made ARPANET work had the potential to transform the way we communicate over distances.

At this time, Bell Labs knew they wanted to use the power of this new-fangled "internet" as a way to send voice, text, and video data digitally, rather than using a standard phone line - but the mechanism to do so was contested.

When Marian started her work at Bell Labs, the favored mechanism for this proposed system was Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol. However, Marian, along with the rest of her team, convinced AT&T to use TCP/IP.

To understand why this was an important decision, we'll need to widen the scope of this story out a bit.

At this time, during the era of ARPANET, there were no standards for how information would be sent between computers. Imagine, for example, you were at Berkley's computer lab, and you had dialed a computer at Harvard. Your connection would actually use the phone line like a regular phone call to send computer data across the country.

For those of us who remember dial up, these connections were four to five times slower. And, when your data was received by the other computer, it wasn't a guarantee that the other computer could actually read it. Each university had its own email client, and they all used different methods to process information. To top it off, data could be sent using all sorts of various packaging processes, meaning if your computer didn't know how to compile the received information, you were out of luck.

With the height of the Cold War, and the looming threat of Soviet missiles on the northern horizon, the US government found itself very interested in the reliability of the network that made up ARPANET.

Let's zoom out a little bit more. When you pick up a phone, and dial a number, you create what is referred to as a circuit connection. Your voice data travels across copper lines and is received by the other phone. When the other person on the call responds, their voice data travels across the exact same copper lines your voice data used to get to them. This happens for the entire duration of the call.

When you hang up the phone, the circuit is broken. If you were to call the same number again, it might not use the exact same copper line as before, but the principle remains the same: for the duration of the call, your information travels across the same path of copper wire, every time.

ARPANET, on the other hand, did not use circuit connections. Instead, computers used routers to determine the fastest and most economical path to send information to another computer you had dialed into. If you've ever wondered why your router is named as such, this is why. They literally route packets of information across the infrastructure that comprises the connections of the internet, determining the quickest path every time.

The fastest path changes every time you send data to another computer. So, imagine you're having text chat conversation on your computer. Your computer would take your message, package it up, and send it to your router. Your router would then determine the best path to send this package to the receiving computer. When the other computer responds to your message, their router will do the same. And because the best path changes in real time, your information will take a different route each time you press "send."

So, back to the Cold War; the US government was very aware of the need to communicate and perform logistical operations in times of war. And they quickly realized that if a phone network hub was destroyed in a nuclear exchange with the Soviets, they would lose the ability to communicate from coast to coast, because phones rely on circuit connections.

If New York City was bombed, for example, and an army base in Maine was trying to call another base in Iowa, they wouldn't be able to connect, because the network would have a gap. The circuit-based connection couldn't exist.

ARPANET, however, didn't have this flaw. Sure, it was slower than a phone conversation, but you could still send an email from Maine to Iowa without routing through New York. As long as one line remained intact, you could communicate with any other networked computer in the world.

It was also around this time that prominent users of ARPANET decided it was time for some regulations. The only way to ensure the users of ARPANET could communicate with each other was if the way information was packaged was standardized. This is when TCP/IP was invented. There were other ways to package data, but TCP quickly became the preferred method for ARPANET.

However, TCP was in no way set in stone. There was another major contender: ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) protocol. But the US government liked the idea of regulations on how information was sent, and began to pump serious amounts of funds to help create an even more robust ARPANET. They didn't care if TCP, or another method of packetizing information was used - they simply wanted to regulate communication to create a standardized system.

It's important to note that the infrastructure that makes up the internet today did not exist at all. ARPANET was a fraction of a fraction of a decimal point compared to the size of today's internet. And because of this, there were lots of ideas as to how best to send information between computers.

Unlike TCP, ATM made use of circuit connections. And as Bell Labs was the research division of AT&T - a phone company - ATM made more sense from a business perspective. They understood circuit connections. ARPANET and its open-ended connections were a foreign concept. So, rather than learning entirely new methods of packetizing information, and creating entirely new infrastructure, Bell Labs was heavily leaning towards ATM protocols for its new digital voice telephony system.

In fact, if you go research ATM, you'll find research papers that reference VToA (Voice Telephony over ATM), rather than VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol). Thank goodness, because VToA does not roll off the tongue.

Now, back to Marian Croak. At this time period of ARPANET and the beginnings of the internet, no one knew what protocol would win the day. But Marian believed in TCP, and with her knowledge, foresight, and expertise, convinced the entirety of AT&T and Bell Labs to switch to TCP. And the rest is history.

Marian wasn't done inventing new ways for us to use technology, however. Over the course of her 32-year career at AT&T, she filed over 200 patents, one of which was the technology that allowed cellphone users to donate money to organizations using text messaging.

So, if you've ever donated money to a charity or cause through text, (or voted on American Idol), you can thank Marian.

Now, Marian works as the Vice President of Engineering at Google, where she is most recently responsible for ensuring AI projects are researched ethically, possibly one of the most important projects of her entire career.

One thing is for certain; the world would be a much less talkative place without the mind of Marian Croak. And for that, we thank her.

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Only one year after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that public schools must be desegregated in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, Marian Croak was born.

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https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/home/F_Who_Invented_Aeroplane.html

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When you think of the first airplane, who do you think about? Most people think about Orville and Wilbur Wright. And, December 17, 1903 is the day to remember. That was the day that Orville won the toss of the coin. He made the first successful powered flight in history! The place was Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The Wright Brothers' dream of inventing a flying machine had come true.

It all started when Orville was 7 and Wilbur was 11 years old. Their father, Bishop Milton Wright, gave them a toy helicopter. It really flew. That toy made them dream of flying. Their parents helped them go after their dreams. Their mother, Susan K. Wright, was good with mechanical things. She went to college in Indiana. Very few women went to college at that time. She was very good in both math and science classes. Her boys learned a lot from her.

The boys still wanted to know about flight as they grew up. They read everything they could find about it. They studied what other people learned about flight. The Wright Brothers also went into the printing business. They even printed a four-page newspaper. Then, people started riding bicycles. So, the brothers opened a bicycle repair shop. Their shop opened in Dayton, Ohio. It wasn't long before they were making their own bikes. But, they still wanted to fly.

By 1900, the Wright Brothers were ready to test their first glider. It was like a kite. They studied the best place to fly. They picked a sandy spot in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They camped out there. Between 1901 and 1903, they went back and forth between Dayton and Kitty Hawk. They were getting closer to flying. Finally, on December 17, 1903, the time had come.

That day, they flew four times. Orville flew the Wright Flyer the first time. That flight lasted 12 seconds. It went 120 feet. Their second and third flights went up about 175 feet each. Wilbur flew the fourth flight of the day. It went 859 feet. It took 59 seconds. After that last flight, the wind blew very hard. It blew the Flyer across the sand. The plane was too smashed up to fly again. They sent the good news about the flight to their father. They then packed their gear to head home in time for Christmas.

The Wright Brothers kept studying and testing new designs. They wanted to make their Flyer better. They began to teach others to fly. They even opened their own flying school. The brothers became rich and famous. Everything was going well for them. Sadly, in May 1912, Wilbur died from typhoid fever.

Orville was 77 when he died. He died while trying to fix his doorbell. Orville had led a good life. He had traveled all over the world to meet with famous people. Even though he was so successful, Orville was still an ordinary guy. It is almost 100 years since that first flight. It is only right to honor the Wright Brothers, as the Centennial of Flight comes near. We honor Orville and Wilbur for making the dream of flight come true. And, for forever changing our world.

Kids Science News Network

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NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

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When you think of the first airplane, who do you think about? Most people think about Orville and Wilbur Wright. And, December 17, 1903 is the day to remember. That was the day that Orville won the toss of the coin. He made the first successful powered flight in history!

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https://www.livescience.com/43424-who-invented-the-light-bulb.html

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Though Thomas Edison is credited as the man who invented the lightbulb, several inventors paved the way for him.revolutionary technology was in fact developed by several inventors

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https://drinktinto.com/blogs/wine-wisdom/why-is-alcohol-called-spirits

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Introduction

The Internet is an increasingly important part of everyday life for people around the world. But if you've never used the Internet before, all of this new information might feel a bit confusing at first.

Throughout this tutorial, we'll try to answer some basic questions you may have about the Internet and how it's used. When you're done, you'll have a good understanding of how the Internet works, how to connect to the Internet, and how to browse the Web.

The Internet is a global network of billions of computers and other electronic devices. With the Internet, it's possible to access almost any information, communicate with anyone else in the world, and do much more.

You can do all of this by connecting a computer to the Internet, which is also called going online. When someone says a computer isonline, it's just another way of saying it's connected to the Internet.

What is the Web?

The World Wide Web-usually called the Web for short-is a collection of different websites you can access through the Internet. A website is made up of related text, images, and other resources. Websites can resemble other forms of media-like newspaper articles or television programs-or they can be interactive in a way that's unique to computers.

The purpose of a website can be almost anything: a news platform, an advertisement, an online library, a forum for sharing images, or an educational site like us!

Once you are connected to the Internet, you can access and view websites using a type of application called a web browser. Just keep in mind that the web browser itself is not the Internet; it only displays websites that are stored on the Internet.

How does the Internet work?

At this point you may be wondering, how does the Internet work? The exact answer is pretty complicated and would take a while to explain. Instead, let's look at some of the most important things you should know.

It's important to realize that the Internet is a global network of physical cables, which can include copper telephone wires, TV cables, and fiber optic cables. Even wireless connections like Wi-Fi and 3G/4G rely on these physical cables to access the Internet.

When you visit a website, your computer sends a request over these wires to a server. A server is where websites are stored, and it works a lot like your computer's hard drive. Once the request arrives, the server retrieves the website and sends the correct data back to your computer. What's amazing is that this all happens in just a few seconds!

Watch the video below from Tata Communications to learn more about how the Internet functions.

Other things you can do on the Internet

One of the best features of the Internet is the ability to communicate almost instantly with anyone in the world. Email is one of the oldest and most universal ways to communicate and share information on the Internet, and billions of people use it. Social media allows people to connect in a variety of ways and build communities online.

There are many other things you can do on the Internet. There are thousands of ways to keep up with news or shop for anything online. You can pay your bills, manage your bank accounts, meet new people, watch TV, or learn new skills. You can learn or do almost anything online.

/en/internetbasics/what-can-you-do-online/content/

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Learn the basics of using the Internet in this free lesson.

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Clothes Dryer.

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Clothes Dryer invention.

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In the early 1800s, it took an entire family all day to harvest their crop.

Today, the same task takes just seconds for one man in one combine.

Harvesting has come a long way since the days when farmers had to cut down the stalks with a scythe or a cradle - called reaping; separate the kernels from the inedible chaff by beating the cut stalks with a flail -threshing; and separating the kernels from the chaff - winnowing.

All this took a lot of time and a lot of people.

The name combine derives from combining three separate harvesting processes

Reaping, threshing, winnowing - combining all three operations into one led to the invention of the combine harvester, simply known as the combine. Considered one of the most important inventions in agriculture, the combine significantly reduced manpower and sped up the harvesting process.

The combine harvester got its start in Scotland in 1826 when Reverend Patrick Bell designed a reaper-a large machine pushed by horses that used a type of scissors to cut the stalks. But Bell did not patent his invention.

The first working combine was the invention of Hiram Moore and John Hascall of Kalamazoo County, Michigan who tested it in the late 1830s, patenting it in 1836. In the same year, another American, Cyrus McCormick, was granted a patent for his famous mechanical reaper.

Moore and Hascall's combines incorporated most of the features integral to later versions: a reciprocating sickle to cut the stalks; a reel to push the grain onto the platform; and a canvas apron or drape to deliver it to a threshing cylinder. Screens and a fan cleaned the threshed grain.

Moore's earliest combine harvesters were pulled by teams of mules, horses or even oxen. His first version was 17-feet long with a 15-foot cut. Up to 30 mules or horses were needed to pull the combine, with a ground-driven bull wheel providing power to the moving parts of the combine.

Inventors continue to improve combines using steam power

In the late 1880s, California farmer George Stockton Berry integrated the combine with a steam engine to provide power to the mechanics. Men forked straw from the rear of the separator back into the firebox to heat the water in the boiler.

Around the globe, industrious farmer-inventors continued to streamline the harvesting process. In Australia, John Ridley made a successful stripper harvester that simply stripped the heads off the wheat stalks. Another Australian inventor, 20-year-old Hugh Victor McKay, refined the process and created the first commercial combine harvester called the Sunshine Header Harvester in 1885. The machine stripped the standing grain heads, threshed the grain, and cleaned it in one operation.

In 1911, California led the charge of manufacturing self-propelled combines with the Holt Manufacturing Company. Prior to the combine, the typical threshing crew consisted of 20 to 30 workers, while a combine crew consisted of only four or five men to operate the combine.

John Deere, Case, IH, Massey Ferguson and others release tractor-pulled combines

Beginning in 1915, International Harvester released its first line of tractor-pulled combines with an engine aboard that powered the threshing mechanism. J.I. Case and John Deere introduced their tractor-pulled combines in the 1920s. These tractor-drawn or pull-type combines were rapidly adopted after World War I, as many farmers had begun to use tractors. Kansas, with more winter wheat than any other state, had the most tractor-pulled combines - 8,274 were in use in 1926. By 1930, of the 75,000 combines in the United States, 27,000 were in Kansas, according to Isern, cited below.

In 1922, Massey-Harris (now Massey Ferguson) sent one of its pull-type combines to the Swift Current, Saskatchewan, Dominion Experimental Farm for testing and use under prairie conditions. At about the same time, a few other combines were sold by International Harvester and J.I. Case to farmers in southwestern Saskatchewan. This marked the beginning of combine use in western Canada. According to Wetherall and Corbet, cited below, in 1925 there were 17 combines in use in the three western provinces, by 1927 there were 791, by 1928 there were 4,448 and by 1930 there were over 9,500.

In 1923 in Kansas, the Curtis brothers and their Gleaner Manufacturing Company (now an Agco brand) patented a self-propelled combine which included several other modern improvements in grain handling. The Gleaner fit on a truck, which was a benefit to custom cutters who moved north with the harvest season, providing harvesting services to farmers.

In Australia, one of the first commercial center-feeding self-propelled combines was manufactured with T-shaped configuration, closely resembling today's combine. Its center feed crop intake made the machine narrower and easier to maneuver. Called the Sunshine Auto Header and patented in 1923, it was the joint venture of Headlie Shipard Taylor and H.V. McKay.

In order to keep up with growing demand, manufacturers competed for market share with Benjamin Holt buying up many of his competitors. In 1925, Holt and Best merged to form Caterpillar and dominated the market. Holt was also able to address the complaint that his combines would not work on steep hills in the northwest. He adjusted the combine's rear wheels in separate "wheel modules" that could be raised or lowered, as needed, allowing the operator to work on slopes of up to 30 degrees. In 1936, Caterpillar sold the entire combine line to Deere and Company, to concentrate on their crawler tractors.

Massey-Harris (now Massey Ferguson) leads the famous "Harvest Brigade"

By 1937, Thomas Carroll, working for Massey-Harris in Ontario, perfected the first commercially viable self-propelled combine. This eventually evolved into the very successful, lighter-weight Model No. 21 introduced in 1940. The No. 21 is well known for its role in the famous "Harvest Brigade," Carroll's innovative idea created during WWII. Massey-Harris convinced the War Production Board (WPB) that if it were permitted to build 500 extra machines over its allotment, they could harvest at least 15 million bushels of grain from more than 1 million acres while releasing some 1,000 tractors for other work and saving 500,000 gallons of fuel. Basically, the 500 machines would only be sold to farmers who signed a document guaranteeing that they would harvest at least 2,000 acres with their new combine.

The WPB approved the project and in May 1944, the Harvest Brigade began by cutting flax in Texas and California's Imperial Valley, then north, cutting rice and barley and the wheat crop in the Pacific Northwest. The brigade moved into northern Texas and Oklahoma, and by July, the red combines marched through Kansas, Colorado and Nebraska. By August, they reached the Dakotas, and by September, the Canadian wheat fields. When the war ended, and they were able to switch back to normal production, the popular campaign created a high demand for Massey-Harris combines.

New Holland launches commercial twin-rotor combine

Combine innovations continued, when in 1975, New Holland introduced the first commercial twin-rotor combine, a significant advance in harvesting technology still in use today. With the advanced design, grains could be harvested faster and were handled gentler than the previous method. Other manufacturers, including Massey-Harris, John Deere and International Harvester built and tested rotary combines, but never brought them to market before New Holland launched their twin-rotor combine.

John Deere 55 - A family farmer's first new combine

Dallas Blome, IronGuides® Managing Editor, grew up on his family farm in Central Iowa, and recalled the day his father replaced his Case pull-type combine, powered by a Wisconsin engine that never started easily during harvest season.

"I remember when we got our first new combine in 1963," Blome said. "My Dad bought a JD 45 from the local dealer. Dad and a neighbor had both purchased new combines at the same time. The dealer suggested they could get the combines in time for harvest and save the freight cost by driving the combines back home from the Moline factory, rather than having them delivered. So a friend drove Dad and the neighbor to Moline, IL, which is near Deere Headquarters. There they got in the combines and started the trip home which was about 200 miles from our 200-acre farm."

Blome's neighbor, driving at top speeds of 12 mph, made it home in about two days. Charlie Blome, however, got about an hour outside of Moline, and the combine's wheel fell off. Apparently, the factory forgot to put grease in the final drives and the axle broke. The dealer salesman met Charlie Blome off the highway, and they returned to the dealership. After spending an hour on the road in the 45, Blome decided he needed a bigger combine.

"He finally made it home with a new JD 55," Blome said. "Dad used that combine until he sold it in 1970 replacing it with a JD 6600. His last combine was a JD 6620 purchased in 1980."

Modern-day combines cutting small grain can harvest about 25 acres per hour

One agriculture equipment dealer has witnessed the combine's recent evolution firsthand.

Randy Tye, VP of Inventory Management at Mazergroup in Brandon, Manitoba, grew up around farm machinery working in the family dealership. Tye's father, Max, owned Tye Farm Equipment, a one-location dealership in southern Ontario in operation from 1957 to 1985.

Tye recalled changes in combines over the past 40 years.

"When I started back In 1979, the TR75 combine was powered with a 145 hp engine, and today's CR10.90 has a 600 hp engine," he said. "In those days, the majority of adjustments to the combine would be made outside of the cab, but today most adjustments can be made inside the cab," he said.

"The cabs now are a farmers' home away from home, as modern and high end as the nicest car you've ever seen," Tye said. "The technology is revolutionary."

Combines cutting small grain can harvest about 25 acres per hour, with multiple header types: draper and auger platforms that can run up to 45ft, and corn heads.

"While not common, there are farmers around Regina, Saskatchewan, who harvest up to 45,000 acres using as many as 10 combines running together with 40-foot headers," Tye said. "When they go down the field and back, they've taken off 800 feet of crop in that pass around."

"The old days of jumping up in the combine's cab to see how things are going are gone," Tye said. "Now, the farm boss can be in one of the combines or driving alongside the field in his truck and monitor each combine's performance, check fuel consumption, yields and make adjustments to the combine - - all from his iPad."

Combine prices, depreciation rate, and valuations in 2020

The majority of today's combines are rotary combines offering multi-crop threshing and rotary separation. Optional equipment includes GPS, data collection, luxury panoramic view cabs, touchscreen monitors, and more. The newest models are able to harvest almost 100 tons of small grains per hour. These combines can range in price from $400K to $700K. With the additional cost of headers, platforms and attachments, costs can rise to a million dollars.

The USDA reported in the 2017 survey of equipment on farms that there are currently 323,347 combines on farms in the US. This number is a testament to this amazing machine's utility.

The price of new combines fluctuates year to year. Looking at the period from 2010 to 2018 on the larger, Class 7 combines shows a trend with an annual price change of -4% to +13%. Factors like commodity prices, Section 179 write-offs (in the US), and changes in emission requirements are all factors that affect the annual price changes of new combines.

Just How Big Can Combines Get?

Combines are divided into classes based on their power. These classes are defined by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM). The class of combine is generally determined by the model's horsepower where the higher the horsepower the higher the class number. Today, most new combines sold are class 7 or larger (greater than 323hp). The largest is a class 10 combine that first began to appear in 2013 but these behemoth combines are relatively rare. In fact, in 2019, Class 9 and Class 10 combines represented only 10% of the total used combine market in 2019. More on this topic here: " Have Combines Maxed Out On Size?" Or, take a look at some of the biggest modern combines on IronSearch.

Should I Buy a New or Used Combine?

Consider the Total Cost of Ownership when buying combines and deciding if new or used is best for your situation. Factors like the efficiency of new technology, warranty considerations, and the depreciation rates of new versus used equipment should be considered. In some cases you may find that the Total Cost of Ownership Favors Used Combines.

What's My Combine Worth?

Because of the variety of options available on combines it's hard to find two that are identical. IronAppraiser has a broad dataset of combine valuation data that includes value adjustments for the wide variety of options as well as usage in engine hours and separator hours. If you're planning to buy or sell a combine, get a specific appraisal on just about any used combine manufactured in the last 50 years with IronAppraiser.

What do you think? Have questions? Contact Us!

Sources:

Mules pull farm equipment, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65466925

Early Sunshine Harvester, circa 1890 Museums Victoria

HV McKay, Sunshine Auto Header, c.1927 Museums Victoria

Adoption of the Combine on the Northern States, by Thomas D. Isern https://www.sdhspress.com/journal/south-dakota-history-10-2/adoption-of-the-combine-on-the-northern-plains/vol-10-no-2-adoption-of-the-combine-on-the-northern-plains.pdf

History of Grain Harvesting, by David Badger http://www.legacyquarterly.com/LQ/Outtakes-History-Grain-Harvesting

"Breaking New Ground: A Century of Farm Equipment Manufacturing on the Canadian Prairies" by Donald Wetherell with Elise Corbet published by Fifth House Publishers, Saskatoon, SK, 1993.

Kalamazoo Living History Show, The Grain Harvester and the Kalamazoo Connection, by Larry L. Coin http://www.kalamazooshow.com/Articles_html/KLHS_Articles_Grain_Harvester_page.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester

https://livinghistoryfarms.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/grain-harvest-and-threshing-time/

https://www.asabe.org/About-Us/About-ASABE/History/ASABE-Historic-Landmarks/Moore-Haskall-Combine-1978?SkinSrc=[G]Skins%2FASABE%2Fprint

https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/moore-hascall-combine-0

https://www.farmcollector.com/company-history/harvest-brigade

https://bangshift.com/bangshiftxl/the-harvest-brigade-how-government-industry-and-farmers-fed-the-country-and-world-during-wwii/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6qljFn9Law

https://books.google.com/books?id=3cJeffKoriEC&pg=PA118&lpg=PA118&dq=Holt%E2%80%99s+self-propelled+combine,+first+built+in+1911&source=bl&ots=bv_GEM1Qz9&sig=ACfU3U20u_U_7gTMQsHZGFRtY9vOitUYNw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiUl_jorcXpAhUC26wKHWjwAcQQ6AEwD3oECAwQAQ#v=onepage&q=Holt%E2%80%99s%20self-propelled%20combine%2C%20first%20built%20in%201911&f=false

https://agriculture.newholland.com/nar/en-us/about-us/new-holland/a-long-history

https://www.farmcollector.com/equipment/grain-cradle-zmnz15octzhur

https://assets.cnhindustrial.com/nhag/nar/en-us/assets/pdf/combines/cr-revelation-launch-document-us-en.pdf

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Harvest Equipment: A Brief History of the Combine - Iron Solutions

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In the early 1800s, it took an entire family all day to harvest their crop. Today, the same task takes just seconds for one man in one combine.