Century of Innovation

As I mentioned so long ago that I probably can't find the post, I've started reading a coffee table book I have called A Century of Innovation - Twenty Engineering Achievements that Changed Our Lives.  Yesterday I covered two inventions as I will describe below.

With #1 and #2 being electrification and the automobile respectively, #3 is the airplane.  I think this one is pretty obvious.  It caused the world to go from taking days or weeks to cross the ocean to crossing it in hours.  Of course you know the Wright brothers:  Wilbur and Orville.  What you may not have known is that several people knew how to fly gliders before them and had several published works on aerodynamics and suggested next steps for flight.  What the Wright brothers did that was breakthrough was to gather more accurate data on cambered wings.  The biggest thing they figured out though was how to control the roll of an airplane.  Most people thought you should avoid it, but Wilbur figured out that instead of fighting it, you should use it in the same way you do while turning a bicycle.  In their first prototypes they actually moved the wings.  Someone who came later figured out how to do it with ailerons.

And there are so many other aviation accomplishments too.  WW I and WW II greatly sped up the development of aviation.  We're lucky the Germans weren't a little bit faster in their engineering since they invented the all-metal airplane near the end of WW I.  One other interesting tidbit of information is that the DC-3 (Douglas Commercial 3) was in production in 1936, and there are still DC-3s in the air today.  The first jet plane was flown in 1942 by a German - thank goodness they didn't have that perfected by the end of WW II.  Boeing has also been a big player for more than 50 years in the aviation industry.  The final thing that allowed a huge leap in aviation was electronics.  Weight could be greatly reduced by replacing many of the mechanical systems with electronics that even had redundancy.

Invention #15 is household appliances.  You can understand why this one had particular fascination for me.  However, I was not particularly impressed with this section.  My company only got one passing mention (for the first top-loading automatic washer).  This means one of two things.  Either my company isn't all that innovative - we're just really good at designing and making quality appliances (not necessarily inventing new ones), or else the people who wrote the book were biased.

This one is fairly obvious as far as how the invention of household appliances transformed the last century.  Instead of slaving over a cast iron stove that had to be fed on average with 50 pounds of fuel in a day, now you can tell your stove to turn on in two hours, bake for three hours, and then turn off.  Instead of slaving over a washboard and boiling pots, now you just toss your clothes in the washer.  One thing I was surprised by was that the electric clothes iron was a huge hit.  Instead of weighing 15 pounds like it used to, now it could weigh 3 pounds, and you didn't need multiple ones you could rotate in and out of sitting on top of the stove.  Another invention at the turn of the 20th century that we still use today is the good old automatic pop-up toaster.  The underlying invention that supported many of these things was the invention of electricity and the invention by Albert Marsh of a nickel-chrome alloy.  The special thing about the alloy is that it could take the heat without rusting.

There are many other household appliances and I could probably go on and on.  How can we forget the vacuum cleaner?  The coffee maker?  The microwave is another interesting one.  An engineer at Raytheon who was working on radar development during WW II noticed that microwaves heated up water, fats, and sugars.  This spawned the creation of the microwave, which at first was a behemoth at 5.5 feet tall and 750 pounds for the small price of $5,000.  Last but not least, did you know that the first patented clothes dryer was invented by a man from North Dakota in 1935?  J. Ross Moore built an oil-heated drum in a shed next to his house so his mother didn't have to hang wet laundry outside in the winter.  He had both an electric and gas model.  Due to financial difficulties the next year, he sold his invention to the Hamilton Manufacturing Company.

OK, I think I've bored you enough now.  Have a good inventive week people!