Showing posts with label invented. Show all posts

What did Wilhelm win his Nobel prize for?

In 1901, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics. He noticed that certain rays caused paper coated with barium platinocyanide to glow, even when the paper was in the next room. Baffled by the mystery, he called them "X rays".

The invention of the Frisbee

A baker named William Russel Frisbie, of Warren, Connecticut, and later of Bridgeport, came up with a clever marketing idea back in the 1870s. He put the family name in relief on the bottom of the light tin pans in which his company’s homemade pies were sold. The pans were reusable, but every time a housewife started to bake a pie in one, she would see the name Frisbie and, it was hoped, think, "How much easier to buy one". Eventually Mr. Frisbie’s pies were sold throughout much of Connecticut, including New Haven.

There, sometime in the 1940s, Yale students began sailing the pie tins through the air and catching them. A decade later, out in California, a flying-saucer enthusiast named Walter Frederick Morrison designed a saucer-like disk for playing catch. It was produced by a company named Wham-O. On a promotional tour of college campuses, the president of Wham-O encountered the pie-plate-tossing craze at Yale. And so the flying saucer from California was renamed after the pie plate from Connecticut. Of course the name was changed from Frisbie to Frisbee to avoid any legal problems.

Who Invented the Umbrella?

"Ancient umbrellas or parasols were first designed to provide shade from the sun."

The basic umbrella was invented over four thousand years ago. We have seen evidence of umbrellas in the ancient art and artifacts of Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and China.

These ancient umbrellas or parasols, were first designed to provide shade from the sun. The Chinese were the first to waterproof their umbrellas for use as rain protection. They waxed and lacquered their paper parasols in order to use them for rain.

Origins of the Term Umbrella

The word "umbrella" comes from the Latin root word "umbra", meaning shade or shadow. Starting in the 16th century the umbrella became popular to the western world, especially in the rainy weather of northern Europe. At first it was considered only an accessory suitable for women. Then the Persian traveler and writer, Jonas Hanway (1712-86), carried and used an umbrella publicly in England for thirty years, he popularized umbrella use among men. English gentleman often referred to their umbrellas as a "Hanway."

James Smith and Sons

The first all umbrella shop was called "James Smith and Sons". The shop opened in 1830, and is still located at 53 New Oxford Street in London, England.

The early European umbrellas were made of wood or whalebone and covered with alpaca or oiled canvas. The artisans made the curved handles for the umbrellas out of hard woods like ebony, and were well paid for their efforts.

English Steels Company

In 1852, Samuel Fox invented the steel ribbed umbrella design. Fox also founded the "English Steels Company", and claimed to have invented the steel ribbed umbrella as a way of using up stocks of farthingale stays, steel stays used in women's corsets.

After that, compact collapsible umbrellas were the next major technical innovation in umbrella manufacture, over a century later.

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Who created the pink flamingo?

The father of the pink flamingo (the plastic lawn ornament) was Don Featherstone of Massachusetts. Featherstone graduated from art school and went to work as a designer for Union Products, a Leominster, Massachusetts company that manufactured flat plastic lawn ornaments. He designed the pink flamingo in 1957 as a follow-up project to his plastic duck. Today, Featherstone is president and part owner of the company that sells an average of 250,000 to 500,000 plastic pink flamingos a year.

Why was the first plastic invented?

The first plastic ever invented was celluloid. It came about as an alternative for billiard balls made from ivory.

Who Invented Google?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented Google

A search engines is a program that searches the Internet and finds webpages for the user based on the keywords that you submit. There are several parts to a search engine such as:

· search engine software including: boolean operators, search fields, display format, etc.

· spider software

· a database

· algorithms that rank results for relevancy

Google - Googol

The very popular search engine called Google was invented by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google was named after a googol - the name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros - found in the book Mathematics and the Imagination by Edward Kasner and James Newman. To Google's founders the name represents the immense amount of information that a search engine has to sift through.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and BackRub

In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford University as graduate students in computer science. By January of 1996, the pair began collaborating on writing a program for a search engine dubbed BackRub, named after its ability to do back link analysis.

Next, fueled by the rave reviews that BackRub received, Larry Page and Sergey Brin began working on Google. Operating out of their dorm rooms, the pair built a server network using cheap, used, and borrowed PCs. They maxed their credit cards buying terabytes of disks at discount prices. They tried to license their search engine technology, however, after failing to find anyone that wanted their product at an early stage of development, Page and Brin decided to keep Google, seek more financing, improve the product, and take it to the public themselves.

Let Me Just Write You a Check

The strategy worked and after more development Google finally became a hot commodity. Co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Andy Bechtolsheim said after a quick demo of Google, "Instead of us discussing all the details, why don't I just write you a check?"

The $100,000 check was made out to Google Inc., however, Google Inc. as a legal entity did not exist yet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated within two weeks, cashed that check, and raised $900,000 more for their initial funding.

In September of 1998, Google Inc. opened in Menlo Park, California and Google.com, a beta search engine, was answering 10,000 search queries every day.

On September 21, 1999, Google officially removed the beta (test status) from its title.

Larry Page Google Co-Founder & President, Products - Sergey Brin Google Co-Founder & President, Technology
Google Inc.