Make People Happy Through Invention [video]

Kingsized Dreams – The Groovy Origins Of The Waterbed [video]

5 Famous Inventors Who Stole Their Big Idea

This Cracked article purports that Galileo, Alexander Graham Bell, Einstein, Edison, and Alexander Fleming stole their greatest inventions. I think “stole” is too strong; “built upon” or “borrowed” or even “refined” would be more accurate. Even given that, I think the back stories presented are fascinating.

Read all 5 stories HERE.

Inventor Plans To Produce Cardboard Bicycle

Engadget reported –

His (Izhar Gafni) maintenance-free bike uses a “secret” mix of organic materials to make it waterproof and fireproof, and is then lacquered to give it a friendlier appearance. It’s expected to cost a mere $20 and weigh about 20 lbs (9 kg) — that’s 65 percent lighter than an average metal ride. In fact, this bicycle doesn’t use any metal parts at all — the solid tires are made of reconstituted rubber and a car timing belt is used instead of a chain.

Continue reading and watch video HERE

 

 

 

Einstein’s Refrigerator

According to Wired –

1930: Albert Einstein and fellow nuclear scientist Leo Szilard receive an American patent for a new kind of refrigerator that requires no electricity. The most famous physicist of the 20th century wasn’t a Thomas Edison: The fridge would prove to be one of Einstein’s few forays into the world of commonplace engineering. The refrigerator uses chemical reactions of ammonia, butane and water to turn a heat input into a cold output. Though the fridge never became a commercial product, Swedish company Electrolux did license the scientific duo’s most promising patents. And in recent years, some academics have built coolers based on the cycle Einstein and Szilard described. Beyond the desire to retrace Einstein’s footsteps, the refrigerator is intriguing because it doesn’t use freon or electricity, which could make it a cleaner, simpler alternative in poor countries. The only problem is that compared to a modern refrigerator, Einstein’s design isn’t very efficient at cooling per unit of energy input. The Oxford team, however, thinks it can quadruple the cooling output with some tweaks to the system.

Read the original post HERE

Edison’s 1911 Predictions For 2011

Paleofuture.com presented an excellent article about predictions made by Thomas Alva Edison in 1911 concerning what he thought the year 2011 would be like. The predictions are mostly wrong, very wrong. Mr. Edison thought that the future belonged to metals; he didn’t foresee new man-made materials, such as plastics. Perhaps the most bizarre prediction was that man would master alchemy – turning iron into gold.

The house of the next century will be furnished from basement to attic with steel, at a sixth of the present cost — of steel so light that it will be as easy to move a sideboard as it is today to lift a drawing room chair. The baby of the twenty-first century will be rocked in a steel cradle; his father will sit in a steel chair at a steel dining table, and his mother’s boudoir will be sumptuously equipped with steel furnishings, converted by cunning varnishes to the semblance of rosewood, or mahogany, or any other wood her ladyship fancies. Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound. More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. “Gold,” he says, “has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel. “We are already on the verge of discovering the secret of transmuting metals, which are all substantially the same in matter, though combined in different proportions.” Before long it will be an easy matter to convert a truck load of iron bars into as many bars of virgin gold.

Continue reading HERE.

 

 

Beware The Inventor

“A man about 43 years of age giving the name Joshua Coppersmith has been arrested for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires.”

– Boston newspaper, 1865

Read MORE.