Category Everyday Things

            Paper making is one of the inventions made by the Chinese. Paper, as we know it today, was first made in China by Cai Lun, a Chinese court official.

            From 3000 BC onwards, the Egyptians started using papyrus made from dried reeds as a writing material. Parchment and vellum were used in the 2nd century BC in Turkey.

            The kind of paper used in the Middle East during the 8th century was made from linen, rags, and flax cord. However, this paper reached Europe only in the 10th century AD.

            As paper became common mills were built. The very first paper mill in England was built in 1494. The rise of literature soon increased the demand for paper. The continued use of rags and cloth made large-scale production impossible.

            This demand was met in 1800, when a Dutchman, Mathias Koops patented a paper made from straw and wood.

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               During the 13th century AD, sharpened goose feathers were widely used as quill pens in Europe.

               Metal pens were considered fancy and ornamental, even during the 16th century. Bryan Donkin is credited with having invented the steel nib. In 1822, John Mitchell of Birmingham started to mass-produce steel pen nibs, and their popularity took off.

               In 1832, John Joseph Parker became the first to introduce a pen which had its own reservoir of ink. When he was trying to invent a pen that could write on leather, John J. Loud invented the first ballpoint pen. He patented it in 1888 in America. But this was not commercially successful.

               In 1943, Ladislao Jose Biro launched a new model, using quick drying ink.

               Ink had been there even before the invention of the pen. Primitive men used natural inks made from charcoal and iron oxide. In 2000 BC, Chinese scribes used a durable ink made from soot mixed with gum solution.

               The first evidence of prints was Chinese wood cuts from at least the 7th century AD. Cloth printing was popular even before paper printing in China, India, and Europe. Woodblock printing, popularly known today as xylography, was the first method of paper printing. It became widely used throughout East Asia.

               Typography-printing was developed in Europe first, which helped in the mass production of letters on paper. Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1450’s. His was a durable machine. The Gutenberg Bible was the first major book printed using a mass-produced, movable, metal type printing press in Europe.

               Gutenberg developed an oil-based ink which was more resilient than water based inks.

 

            Typewriter is a machine that was commonly used in the past, and which has keys that are pressed in order to print letters, numbers, or other characters onto paper.

            The English claim that it was Henry Mill who invented the typing machine in 1714.

            Henry received the first typewriter patent in Britain for a machine that appears to have been similar to a typewriter.

            Although many went before him, it is the name of Christopher Latham Sholes that is generally linked to the title of ‘inventor of the typewriter’, as he introduced the first typewriter to be commercially successful in 1868. He worked along with Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule.

            The working prototype was made by the machinist Matthias Schwalbach. The patent was sold to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons, then famous as a manufacturer of sewing machines, to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. This was the origin of the term typewriter.

            It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which because of the machine’s success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. Later, many types of typewriters came into the market.

               The bicycle is a vehicle consisting of two wheels held in a frame, one behind the other, propelled by pedals, and steered with handlebars attached to the front wheel. The credit for creating the first bicycle belongs to a German, Baron Karl von Drais. In 1818, von Drais patented his design and this two wheeled, human propelled machine became known as the ‘velocipede’. The following year, the design was copied to produce an iron model.

                Later, Pierre Michaux got the idea of attaching pedals to the simple devices that were in use during the 1850s. Thus, Michaux and his son Ernest produced a velocipede with pedals.

               This principle was taken further by James Starley. He created a bicycle model nicknamed penny-farthing. It got its name because of the size of its wheels. It created a cycling boom. In 1889, gears were introduced to the bicycle.

               James Moore won the first cycle track race ever in 1869.

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               The introduction of the safe bicycle led to the invention of the motorcycle. The very first steam powered motorcycle was made in the 1860s by Pierre Michaux, a blacksmith in Paris. Those motorcycles were called the Michaux-Perreaux Steam   Velocipede.

               A German, Gottlieb Daimler invented the first petrol engine motorcycle in 1885. The modern day motorcycle design is adopted from a model made by Eugene and Michel Werner. Their motocyclette was exhibited in 1897.

               However, the German-built Hildebrand & Wolfmuller motorcycle was the first motorized, two-wheeled vehicle sold to the public.

               Hildebrand & Wolfmuller was also the first company to refer to the vehicle as a ‘motorcycle’.

               In the early 1950s the NSU Company in Germany started producing the evergreen motorcycles called mopeds.

               Motor scooters first appeared in Italy in 1946 and the first one was Vespa.

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               The earliest archaeological evidence of the use of natural latex comes from the Olmec culture. They cultivated natural latex from rubber tree for making rubber balls for games. The Aztec and Maya are also known to have made rubber using natural latex. By 1615, Spanish troops in South America were using a resin from Para rubber trees, to waterproof their cloaks.

               Joseph Priestly is said to have discovered rubber’s erasing properties. However, it is the British engineer Edward Nairne who is generally credited with developing the first rubber eraser in Europe. Giovanni Fabbroni is credited with the discovery of naphtha as a rubber solvent in 1779. In 1834, Charles Goodyear managed to find a way to harden rubber and make it waterproof and pliant. This was later patented by Thomas Hancock.

 

 

 

 

 

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               Ancient men used a variety of colours naturally collected from plants – madder, saffron, indigo, oak apples and myrtle. Wood smouldered to charcoal   was used to make deep black colour. Local minerals were another rich source of colour. Indigo is the oldest dye of all. Many minerals exhibit various colours; the varieties are mainly due to impurities, or a slight change in chemical composition.

               The oldest dyed fabrics were found in Egypt, dating from 2000 BC. However, the invention of dyeing was probably much older. In 1856, while attempting to produce quinine, William Henry Perkin accidentally synthesized mauve, the earliest synthetic dye. Later, other man-made dyes appeared, but the most significant was a synthetic version of alizarin by Heinrich Caro in 1869.

               In the 18th century, England was a hive of paint innovation. Linseed oil and zinc oxide became increasingly available. Mixed together they composed the new paints. A much whiter pigment titanium dioxide came into use after First World War.

               Oil and natural gas were formed from the remains of prehistoric plants and animals, and that’s why they’re called fossil fuels.

               This happened millions of years ago when plant and animal remains settled into the sea bed along with salt, silt and rocks.

               In AD 300, while drilling for brine, the Chinese accidentally came across natural gas, and learned how to extract it and use it.

               From the 9th century BC, people of the Middle East burned tarry bitumen, which they found seeping from the Earth’s surface. In 1908, oil was found near the city of Masjed Soleiman, in Iran by a British prospecting team funded by William D’Arcy. This event significantly changed the history of the Middle East.

               The demand for petrol increased after the invention of the combustion engine and vehicles driven by petrol engines.

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               The Indians discovered diamonds before the 4th millennium BC. The name diamond is derived from the Greek word ‘adamas’, which means impenetrable. This valued gem was traded between India and Mesopotamia. They have been used as a display of prosperity ever since.

               The first diamond discoveries in South Africa were alluvial. Diamonds were found on volcanic rocks in farms in Kimberley, South Africa in 1870. Till then, diamonds were always dug from sand and gravel. For a long time the world’s most important rough diamond producers were South Africa, Congo, and the former Soviet Union.

               In the 15th century, tools were invented to cut facets into diamonds. Until then, the stones were simply polished, or shaped into a dome, known as a cabochon. The largest diamond in the world is the ‘Star of Africa I’, or ‘Cullinan I’, which is a colourless diamond, set in the British monarch’s sceptre.

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