My Science School

            Before the invention of modern hearing aids, ear trumpets made from animal horns were used by people who suffered from hearing loss.

            The first firm to begin commercial production of the ear trumpet was established by Fredrick C. Rein in 1800. In 1901, Miller Reese Hutchinson of New York invented the first electrical hearing aid, called the Acousticon. It was a large box containing batteries and electric circuit, which was attached to a telephone receiver.

            One of the first manufacturers of the electronically amplified hearing aid was the Siemens Company in 1913. Smaller, modern hearing aids were made practicable by transistors from the 1950s onwards.

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            The earliest spectacle, a pair of convex glass discs was produced by an Italian glazier. These eye-glasses actually looked like two small magnifying glasses riveted together at the top of their handles. These eyeglasses were revolutionary.

            Initially, chords and chains around the head, or behind the ears, were used to hold spectacles in place.

            In about 1500, the first eyeglasses with pads to secure the frames were made in Britain. It was the British optician Edward Scarlett who first made rigid arms, or side pieces, for spectacles in 1727.

            The American statesman Benjamin Franklin has long been credited with the invention of bifocals. John Herschel, in 1827, proposed the idea for contact lenses, but they did not become a reality until 1887. It was not until 1933 that a practical version was introduced, by the German ophthalmologist Josef Dallos.

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            In olden times the Chinese used to give patients a mixture of strong wine and herbal drugs derived from the mandrake plat, to alleviate the excruciating pain of surgery. They Greeks and Romans also used mandrake extracts.

            Opium and alcohol were the most commonly used natural anaesthetics in ancient Europe. In 1844, an America dentist named Horace Wells introduced nitrous oxide for pain relief during dental surgery with his colleague, William T. G. Morton.

            In 1846, Morton used ether to anaesthetize a patient undergoing neck tumour removal surgery. Sir James Young Simpson, a British obstetrician is remembered best for his introduction of ether anaesthesia into obstetrics in 1847.

            For many years, Morton was credited as being the pioneer of general anaesthesia, although the claim is disputable. Many think that it was Crawford W. Long who first initiated general anaesthesia.

            It is said that the people of the Indus Valley Civilization had surgical knowledge. Sushruta is considered as the ‘founding father of surgery’. The Egyptians and Chinese were also said to have practiced surgeries.

            The Greek physician Galen is believed to have had great expertise in anatomy, surgery, pharmacology, and therapeutic methods. Later, in the 13th century, skilled European craftsmen called barber-surgeons, performed amputations and set broken bones.

            Ambroise Pare was a reputed surgeon. The practice for cauterizing gunshot wounds on the battlefield had been to use boiling oil, an extremely dangerous and painful procedure. Pare began to employ a less irritating emollient, made of egg yolk, rose oil and turpentine.

            Many helpful, precise devices were introduced later to be used in surgery.

            In the early days, basic computers were nothing but calculators. The abacus is an example. The ancient Greek-designed Antikythera mechanism, used for astronomical prediction, is considered as the world’s oldest analogue computer. Later, many models were developed like the astrolabe, the differential analyzer etc.

            Charles Babbage, who is known as the father of computers, first conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. He designed the Analytical Engine and it was this design that the framework of the computers of today are based on. The first modern analogue computer was invented by Sir William Thomson in 1872.

            The first electronic digital computer was built by Dr. John. V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. The general purpose digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) was built in the 1940s.

            Earlier computers were huge but the introduction of transistors reduced the size of computers, and made them portable.

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            Modern digital recording began with the introduction of the CD or compact disc. It was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982.

            It was in 1982, in Japan, that the first CD players using laser beams to scan the discs were released. DVD and Blue-rays were introduced later.

            The DVD, or digital video disc, was co-developed by Philips and Sony in 1995. A DVD is a type of optical disk technology, similar to the CD-ROM. It holds a minimum of 4.7 GB of data, enough for a full-length movie.

            The Blu-ray or Blu-ray Disc was designed to supersede the DVD format. The Blu-ray Disc format was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). Sony unveiled the first Blu-ray Disc prototypes in October 2000.

            The name ‘Blu-ray’ refers to the blue laser (actually a violet laser) used to read the disc.

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            Modern digital recording began with the introduction of the CD or compact disc. It was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982.

            It was in 1982, in Japan, that the first CD players using laser beams to scan the discs were released. DVD and Blue-rays were introduced later.

            The DVD, or digital video disc, was co-developed by Philips and Sony in 1995. A DVD is a type of optical disk technology, similar to the CD-ROM. It holds a minimum of 4.7 GB of data, enough for a full-length movie.

            The Blu-ray or Blu-ray Disc was designed to supersede the DVD format. The Blu-ray Disc format was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA). Sony unveiled the first Blu-ray Disc prototypes in October 2000.

            The name ‘Blu-ray’ refers to the blue laser (actually a violet laser) used to read the disc.

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        John Logie Baird strategically opened a television studio in London in 1928, knowing the mass impact of television as a medium.

            The world’s first regularly scheduled television service in the United States began in the same year. In 1929, Baird collaborated with the BBC for daily transmission.

            However, it was still not possible to broadcast visuals and audio at the same time.

            It was Ramsay MacDonald who initiated the first simultaneous visual and audio transmission with the help of a receiver.

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            John Logie Baird, a Scottish engineer, demonstrated the first working television system in 1926.

            The German physicist Karl Braun contributed significantly to the development of television technology. He is the one who developed the cathode ray tube in 1897. The cathode ray tube is a tube in which cathode rays produce a luminous image on a fluorescent screen. This method of scanning electrically is the technological basis of modern television.

            Using this technology John Logie Baird produced the first image of a living face. Early in 1926 he used his Televisor to show such images to members of the Royal Institute.

Baird went on to produce a colour transmission system which he demonstrated in 1928. In the same year, his company (the Baird Television Development Company) achieved the first transatlantic television transmission between London and New York. Russian inventor Vladimir Zworykin played a key role in the development of television, including charge storage-type tubes, and the electron microscope. He was hailed as the father of modern television.

            Guglielmo Marconi was usually credited as the inventor of radio.

            He started working on wireless telegraphy in the 1890s. Numerous scientists had been exploring wireless telegraph technologies at that time.

            Heinrich Hertz, in 1888 demonstrated that one could produce and detect electromagnetic waves, at the time commonly called ‘Hertzian’ waves and now generally referred to as radio waves. Marconi began pursuing the idea of building a wireless telegraphy system based on Hertzian waves (radio).

            He made significant breakthrough on 13th May 1897 when he sent the world’s first-ever wireless communication over open sea. Marconi gained a patent on the system in 1896 and developed it into a commercial communication system.

            Commercial radio broadcasting began in the 1920s and became an important mass medium for entertainment and news.

            Valdemar Poulsen, popularly known as the Danish Edison, invented the first answering machine, by capturing sound on piano wire with magnetic recordings in 1898. Following the invention a flexible tape with magnetic coating was first patented by the German engineer Fritz Pfleumer in 1929.

            Pfleumer also built the first tape recorder in the modern sense in 1935. By the end of the Second World War, high quality tape recorders were made in Europe and the US also.

            Masura Ibuka, a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony, introduced the first walkman. The Sony Walkman went on sale in 1979.

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            In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This inspired him to try singing into the machine to hear it recorded. He termed his invention a ‘phonograph’, and it worked by recording sounds on round cylinders. However, poor recording quality was a big issue.

            Improving on Edison’s design, Alexander Graham Bell invented the first graphophone which recorded sounds on records instead of cylinders, allowing for mass production of recorded materials. This version offered better sound quality, but it also had a drawback that each cylinder had to be recorded separately.

            In 1887, Emile Berliner was granted his first patent on a device called gramophone. It had all the similar characteristics of Edison’s phonograph and Bell’s graphophone, but the storage medium was not wax or tinfoil-covered cylinders, but flat records made of glass. Thus, the mass production of records was made possible.

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            The history of cinema took off when the Lumiere Brothers held the first paid-for screening on 28th December 1895, of their 10 short films, in Paris. In the 1890s, films were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces.

            On November 21st, 1895, the Skladanowsky brothers unveiled their ‘Bioskop’ at the Winter-garten Hall in Berlin. That was the first official film screening in the Europe. Thus movie theatres became popular entertainment venues. In October 1896, the first movie was shown in Australia in the Athenaeum Hall in Melbourne. In 1897, a cinema building was built in Paris, solely for the purpose of showing films. The year 1900 marks the emergence of the first motion pictures that can be considered as films. Until 1927, it was the silent film era as motion pictures were produced without sound. The first films to consist of more than one shot appeared in the 19th century.

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               Thermometer is one of the most commonly found first aid instruments in almost every home. The thermometer was not a single invention, however, but a development.

               A primitive type of thermometer was mentioned by the Greek physicist, Hero of Alexandria in the second century BC. In 1592, Galileo devised an instrument similar to the modern-day thermometer, consisting of a glass bulb a glass tube, which he immersed in water. Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, is credited with developing the first thermometer that stays unaffected by atmospheric pressure.

               Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit from Germany made the first reliable thermometers, and the temperature scale he created is named after him. He made thermometers replacing water with mercury. In 1742, Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius invented the Celsius temperature scale. In 1866, Sir Thomas Allbutt invented a clinical thermometer for measuring body temperature.

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            Several men laid claim to inventing the telescope, but the credit usually goes to Hans Lippershey, a Dutch lensmaker. In 1608 he created an instrument consisting of a concave and convex lens in a tube.

            Galileo Galilei improved on Lippershey’s design and was the first to point a telescope toward the sky. In 1609, having identified the moons in orbit around Jupiter, Galileo deduced that the Earth was not the motionless centre of the Universe.

            Later, in 1668, Sir Isaac Newton improved on Galileo’s design.

            His reflecting telescope used curved mirrors to focus light from the heavens.

            Binoculars, first seen in Paris in 1823, consisted of a small telescope for each eye. However, the credit for the first real binocular telescope goes to J. P. Lemiere, who devised one in 1825.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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