Category Invensions & Discoveries

               Leonardo de Vinci (1452-1519) was thought until recently to have been the first to design a parachute. But drawings have now been found that were made five years before da Vinci’s sketches, possibly by an engineer in Siena central Italy.

               However, the first man to make and successfully use a parachute was a Frenchman, Andre Garnerin (1770-1825), who stretched cloth across a bamboo framework and parachuted from a balloon over Paris in 1797. It was an uncomfortable descent as the fabric was too thick o spill out any wind, and the parachute came down swinging violently like a pendulum. Garnerin was is a tiny basket, to which he clung tightly until his rough landing on the plain of Monceau. The parachutes of those days were developed from the crude canvas devices used to descend from hot air balloons.

               Modern parachutes are made of pure silk or good-quality nylon in small panels and have a small pilot parachutes which open first and helps to pull out the main parachute.

            The first boat ever to be moved by steam power was designed by a Frenchman Jacques Perier and tested on the Seine in Paris in 1775. But the first really successful steamboat was built by Perier’s fellow countryman, the Marquis Claude de Jouffroyd’Abbans. His craft which was 141 feet long and equipped with straight-paddled side wheels travelled several hundred yards against the current on the Saone at   Lyons on July 25, 1783.

              Among early American pioneers was James Rumsey who in 1786 drove a boat at four miles an hour on the Potomac River, propelled by a jet of water pumped out at the stern. Between 1786 and 1790 John Fitch experimented in the Delaware River at Philadelphia with different methods of propulsion, including paddle wheels a screw propeller and steam-driven oars.

              The first to apply successfully the principle of steam to screw propellers was John Stevens whose boat, equipped with two propellers was John Stevens whose boat, equipped with two propellers, and crossed the Hudson River in 1804. However, his achievements was soon eclipsed by Robert Fulton’s 150-foot long paddle wheeler Clermont which in 1807 covered the 150 miles from New York to Albany in 30 hours at a maximum speed of five miles an hour. With Fulton in command on the Hudson, Stevens looked elsewhere, and in 1808 his new boat, the Phoenix, sailed out of New York harbor to become the first steamboat ever to go to sea.

              Both Stevens and Fulton were following in the steps of the Scottish inventor William Symington who in 1802 constructed a steamboat in Scotland, the Charlotte Dundas, which was used as a tug on the forth and Clyde Canal. The Charlotte Dundas was a paddle-wheel steamer used this method of propulsion.

          The earliest wheels so far discovered were found in graves at Kish and Susa, two ancient Mesopotamian cities. These wheels are believed to date from 3,500 B.C. they were made from three planks, clamped together with copper clasps. This kind of wheel also existed in ancient times in Europe and the Near East. No one is sure where the wheel was invented, but this archaeological evidence suggests it was probably In ancient Mesopotamia

            A wheel with proper spokes was not invented until after 2,000 B.C. there are records of this wheel in northern Mesopotamia, central Turkey, and north-east Persia. By the 15th century B.C., spoked wheels were being used on chariots in Syria, Egypt, and the western Mediterranean.

           The solid wheel was used mostly in farming. Tripartite wheels- wheels with three spokes- were being used in the Bronze age in Denmark, Germany and Northern Italy for carts.

          The invention of the wheel made it possible for people to transport heavy objects much more easily. It also enabled them to travel farther and trade with each other more easily, and so find out about other countries and customs.

Picture credit: google

               The first ride able bicycle was made by Kirkpatrick Mac Milan of Dum-friesshire, Scotland, in 1839, although an attempt to construct one had been made by Jean Theson at Fontainebleau, France, in 1645.

               Before this, crude machines had been made, which had no farm o f steering and had to be propelled by publishing the feet against the ground. Machines of this type appear on bas-reliefs in Babylon and Egypt and on frescoes in Pompeii. In England, a stained glass window, dated 1580, in the church of Stoke Poges, Bucking hamshire shows a cherub astride such a machine.

               But all these machines seem to have been four-wheeled. The true bicycle belongs to the 19th Century.

               Macmillan’s bicycle was driven by rods attached from pedals to a sprocket on the rear wheel. The first chain-driven bicycle was produced by Tribout and Meyer in 1869. In this year the first bicycle show-in Paris and the first bicycle road race –from Paris to Rouentook place.

              An Englishman, James Starley, of Coventry in Warwickshire, is known as “the father of the cycle industry”. In 1871 he introduced a bicycle with a large driving wheel and a smaller trailing wheel. This was the “ordinary” bicycle, known to everyone as the penny-farthing. In 1874 a chain-driven bicycle with two wheels of equal diameter was designed by H.J. Lawson. This is known as the safety bicycle and became enormously popular from about 1885 when the Rover safety bicycle was built by John K. Starley, James’s nephew.

             The pneumatic tyre – in other words, a tyre filled with air-was invented in 1888 by John Boyd Dunlop, a veterinary surgeon of Belfast, Northern Ireland. By 1893 the design of the bicycle had been developed into the modern diamond frame with roller-chain drive and pneumatic-tyred wheels.