If you were on a battlefield, say, 700 years ago, Damascus steel mattered. The super-strong blades were fabled in their age, said to have sliced through the swords of foes and solid rock. Then we forgot how to make it.
Here’s a sampling of the most fascinating of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, culled from 7000 pages of original sketches and text, by H. Anna Suh.
When most kids complain about something taking too long, their father’s response isn’t usually as generous as pioneering an innovation that spans the next half a century. But Edwin Land, creator of Polaroid, was not your average dad.
The original clapper launched in 1986. It was a disaster. Because of shoddy engineering it started blowing up TVs, and Joseph Pedott ended up having the whole thing re-engineered. The rest is history. And a jingle!
When Lee de Forest accidentally created the first electronic audio amplifier – the Audion – he “inaugurated the age of electronics”. You can learn about it in this excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Thomas Edison was not an inventor for the love of the game. “I always invented to obtain money to go on inventing,” he said. For a tireless mind like that, a lab had to be far more than a lab.
It’s tough to think about inventors without remembering dear Dr NakaMats. He claims to have invented over 3000 items – frequently while almost drowning himself – and basically thinks Thomas Edison’s an uneducated wimp who quit at 1093 inventions.
After siring sci-fi satirist Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Kurt Vonnegut Sr dabbled in tobacco smoking, pipe cleaning and innovation. The result: this patent for an easily-cleanable, tubular-stemmed tobacco pipe for “a maximum of digital cleanliness”. That means clean fingers. [Atlantic]
