My Science School

               The idea of transporting things and people on rails has been around for a long time. Hero of Alexandria had experimented with steam in the 1st century AD. But only in 1698 was steam used for practical purpose. Thomas Newcomen designed the world’s first successful atmospheric steam engine in 1712. In the 1760s James Watt improved steam engine.

               By the 1780s both British and French pioneers were experimenting with the idea of using steam to drive heavy wheeled road engines. Richard Trevithick is credited with developing the first high-pressure engine, compact enough to operate on tramways. In 1813, William Hedley built the puffing billy, a locomotive. George Stephenson further developed it. His locomotive was used to pull the first engine-driven freight and passenger service along the 16 km route of the Stockton & Darlington railway.

               In 1879, the German engineer Werner von Siemens presented the world’s first electric train. Diesel power made its debut in 1912, in a locomotive built by the Swizz firm Sulzer.

               Many men got injured in their quest to take flight. One among them was Eilmer, who fixed wings to his hands and feet, and tried to take flight from a tower of Malmesbury Abbey in the 11th century.

               He broke his legs and was seriously injured after the attempt. It is said that many imaginary flying objects and machines were sketched by the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci.

               The brothers Joseph-Michael and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, prosperous paper manufacturers, began experimenting with lighter-than-air devices after observing that heated air directed into a paper or fabric bag made the bag rise. In 1783, the brothers Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier demonstrated the first hot-air balloon. It flew about 2.5 km, before crashing and bursting into flames.

               Since 1899, Wilbur and Orville Wright had been scientifically experimenting with the concepts of flight. They made four flights on 17th December 1903, on their first powered aircraft, at Kitty Hawk.

               The longest lasted just under a minute and covered 259.6 m. Thus the first flight changed the history of mankind. Wright Brothers’ aeroplane was crude. Later, many changes were introduced in aeroplanes.

 

 

            Germany’s Deutsche Luft-Reederei established the world’s first passenger airline in February 1919. The next month, the French started a route from Paris to Brussels. In the same year, a British company, Air Transport and Travel, started the first daily international service linking London and Paris.

            Britain had five, Germany had seven and France has eight airlines by the end of a decade after the introduction of passenger aircraft. Earlier, converted bombers were used as passenger aircraft. The first purpose-built airliner was the British de Havilland DH 16 in 1919. The first jet airliner was the de Havilland Comet introduced in 1952.

            In 1958, Boeing 707 became the first long-haul airliner. It had 179 seats and a cruising speed of about 910 km/h. Jumbo jets such as Boeing 747 were introduced later in 1970.

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               In the 9th century, Arab astronomers became the first to notice the properties of photography. They found that a beam of light reflected from an illuminated object and entering a darkened room through a hole, would project the image upside down.

               In 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulze, a German professor of anatomy, discovered that silver nitrate turns dark when exposed to light. The unexposed side remained white. He captured cut-out letters on a bottle of light-sensitive slurry. He was amazed to find that the results were durable.

               Thomas Wedgwood, in the early development of photography, managed to produce impermanent images on cloth and white leather.

               In the 1820s, the French inventor Nicephore Niepce first managed to get an image that was captured by the first camera ever made. Louis Daguerre, an associate of Niepce, developed the first commercially viable photographic process called daguerreotype. Later, the paper-based calotype negative and salt print process was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot. It was in the 1990s that digital photography was first introduced.

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            The earliest recorded use of limb prosthesis is that of a Persian soldier named Hegesistratus. In 1579, the French army surgeon Ambroise Pare used artificial limbs on his amputees. Later, a noncorrosive metal-vitallium was discovered. It was widely used for making artificial ligaments. Gore – Tex, a porous form of Teflon was approved for making artificial body parts in the US in 1988.

            The first-ever artificial pacemaker was engineered by Dr. A. S. Hyman in 1932. It was an apparatus to deliver regular electrical stimulations to the heart. The first artificial heart to be successfully implanted in a human was the Jarvik-7 in 1982, designed by Willem Johan Kolff and Robert Jarvik. One of the earliest instances of plastic surgery can be found in the Sushruta Samhita, an important medical text from Ancient India.

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            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.