Technology: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 7

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WonderTechnology

In 1941 the Swiss engineer George de Mestral came home from a walk in the Alps curious about the burrs stuck to his dog. Under a microscope he saw tiny hooks catching in loops of fur, and he spent the next decade turning that idea into Velcro.

The burrs came from burdock, a common wayside plant whose seed heads are covered in tiny hooks that cling to passing animals. De Mestral worked for years with weavers in Lyon to copy the hooks and loops in fabric; nylon, sewn under infrared light, finally worked. He patented the system in the 1950s and named it Velcro, from the French velours (velvet) and crochet (hook). Textile experts at first laughed at it, and it only took off after NASA used it to hold objects in place in weightlessness on the Apollo missions. It is often cited as an early example of biomimicry, the practice of copying designs found in nature.

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WonderTechnology

Stainless steel was developed in Sheffield in 1913 by Harry Brearley, a metallurgist trying to stop gun barrels wearing away. As the story is often told, weeks after throwing out his failed samples he noticed that one of them, on the scrap heap, had not rusted.

Brearley left school at twelve to work as a labourer in a steelworks and taught himself chemistry and metallurgy at home and in evening classes. At the Brown-Firth laboratories he was testing steels with added chromium when, in August 1913, he cast one containing 12.8 per cent chromium. What he recorded himself is less dramatic than the scrap-heap story: the new steel resisted the acids used to etch samples for the microscope. Chromium forms a thin, invisible oxide layer that seals the surface. When vinegar and lemon juice did not stain it either, he thought of Sheffield's cutlery trade rather than guns. He called it 'rustless steel'; the name 'stainless steel' came from Ernest Stuart of the Sheffield cutlery firm R. F. Mosley.

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WonderFood

According to the popular story, the Popsicle ice lolly was invented in 1905 by 11-year-old Frank Epperson, who left a cup of soda powder and water outside overnight with the stirring stick in it and found it frozen by morning. He patented the idea in 1924 and first sold it as the 'Epsicle'.

Epperson's family told the story for decades, but food historians have raised doubts: weather records show no clear overnight freeze in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he grew up, in 1905, and fruit ices on a stick, such as the 'Hokey Pokey' sold in the 1870s, came earlier. What is well documented is the patent, granted in August 1924, for a frozen treat on a stick that could be eaten 'without contamination by contact with the hand'. His children called the treats 'Pop's 'sicles', and the name Popsicle stuck. Epperson later had to sell his rights during the Great Depression, and the brand grew under other owners.

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WonderTechnology

Laminated safety glass began with an accident in 1903, when the French chemist Édouard Bénédictus knocked a glass flask off a shelf. It cracked but kept its shape, because a dried film of plastic inside held the pieces together. Car windscreens use the same idea today.

The flask had held cellulose nitrate, an early plastic, which had dried and left a clear film on the inside. Bénédictus thought little of it until he heard about a car accident in which two women were badly hurt by flying glass. He patented glass sandwiched with plastic in 1909 and in 1911 founded the Société du Verre Triplex to make it. It was slow and costly to produce, so carmakers were slow to take it up; one of its first large uses was in the eyepieces of gas masks in the First World War. In the 1930s a clearer, tougher plastic called PVB replaced the old layer, which discoloured with age, and PVB is still used in windscreens today.

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WonderTechnology

In 1938 American pilot Douglas Corrigan was refused permission to fly the Atlantic. He took off from New York saying he was going to California, and landed 28 hours later in Dublin, claiming he had misread his compass. Nobody believed him, and nobody minded.

Corrigan had helped build Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis, assembling its wing and fitting its fuel tanks, and had spent years asking permission to fly the Atlantic himself. Inspectors kept ruling that his nine-year-old, much-modified Curtiss Robin was unfit for the crossing. So he filed a plan to fly home to California, took off from New York and turned east. His pilot's licence was suspended for just 14 days, which ran out the day his ship brought him and his plane back to New York. More people turned out for his ticker-tape parade on Broadway than had cheered Lindbergh, and Corrigan kept to the compass story for the rest of his life.

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WonderTechnology

The Slinky began in 1943, when naval engineer Richard James, designing springs to steady ship instruments in rough seas, knocked one off a shelf and watched it walk end over end across the floor. His wife, Betty, found its name in a dictionary.

James saw that the spring tumbled gracefully instead of clattering, and he and Betty spent two years turning it into a toy. Betty chose 'slinky', meaning sleek and graceful. Toy shops were unsure, but at a demonstration at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia in November 1945 the first 400 sold in 90 minutes. In 1960 Richard left the business and the family to become a missionary in Bolivia. Betty stayed with their six children, took over the company and ran it for decades. About 300 million Slinkys were sold in the toy's first 60 years, and in 1985 astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery filmed one to show how toys behave in space.

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WonderTechnology

Play-Doh began as a putty for cleaning coal soot off wallpaper, made by Kutol Products of Cincinnati. When homes switched from coal to gas heating, sales collapsed, until a nursery teacher found that children loved modelling with it.

By the 1950s Kutol was close to bankruptcy, and Joe McVicker had joined to try to save it. His sister-in-law Kay Zufall, a nursery school teacher, read a newspaper article about using wallpaper cleaner for children's art, tried it with her pupils and saw how much they enjoyed it. She persuaded McVicker and his uncle Noah to sell it as a toy, and she and her husband came up with the name Play-Doh. The cleaning detergent was left out, and colours and a new scent were added. In 1956 the McVickers set up the Rainbow Crafts Company to make it. The brand passed through several owners before Hasbro bought it in 1991, and more than two billion cans were sold in its first 50 years.

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WonderTechnology

In 1942 chemist Harry Coover was looking for a clear plastic for gun sights when his team made a compound that stuck to everything, and they set it aside as useless. In 1951 he met it again and realised it was an instant glue: what we now call superglue.

The compound was a cyanoacrylate, a liquid that hardens within seconds when it meets the slightest moisture, even the water on skin or in the air. In 1951 Coover was leading chemists at Eastman Kodak in Tennessee who were testing heat-resistant plastics for jet cockpit canopies. When a chemist in the group ruined an expensive laboratory instrument by gluing its parts together, Coover saw a glue that needed no heat or pressure. Kodak put it on sale in 1958 as Eastman 910. During the Vietnam War, medics used a cyanoacrylate spray to slow bleeding in wounded soldiers until they reached hospital, and related glues are still used to close cuts and surgical wounds.

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WonderHistory

Before Apollo 11 landed in July 1969, the White House had a speech ready for President Nixon to read if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were stranded on the Moon. It was never needed, and it stayed almost unknown for thirty years.

Speechwriter William Safire wrote it on 18 July 1969 in a memo to Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, for the case in which the lunar module's engine failed and the two men could not leave the Moon. Michael Collins, orbiting in the command module, would still be able to fly home. The memo set out a plan: Nixon would first telephone the astronauts' wives; after his broadcast, Mission Control would close down communications with the men, and a clergyman would commend their souls in a ceremony like a burial at sea. The speech's last line echoed 'The Soldier', a First World War poem by Rupert Brooke. The memo became widely known in 1999 and is held by the US National Archives.

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WonderTechnology

The Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing machine with a figure in Turkish robes, toured Europe and America for 84 years and beat players including Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon. A human chess master was hidden inside its cabinet.

Wolfgang von Kempelen built the Turk in 1770 to impress Empress Maria Theresa at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. Before each show the cabinet doors were opened one at a time to reveal gears, while the hidden player slid out of sight from one compartment to another; he followed the game through magnets under the board. The machine won most of its games but lost to François-André Philidor, the leading player of the day. After Kempelen's death it was bought by Johann Maelzel, who took it to America. Edgar Allan Poe argued in 1836 that a person must be inside, though many of his details were wrong. It burned in a Philadelphia fire in 1854, and in 2005 Amazon named its Mechanical Turk service, in which people do small tasks computers cannot, after it.

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WonderHistory

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls from a Roman villa at Herculaneum, carbonised by Vesuvius in AD 79, are too fragile to unroll. Researchers now scan them with X-rays and use AI to find the ink, reading the text without opening them.

The scrolls come from the Villa of the Papyri, found in the 1750s, the only large library known to survive from the Roman world. Early attempts to unroll them destroyed many. Brent Seales's team at the University of Kentucky found a way to unroll a scanned scroll in software, and machine learning, a kind of AI that learns from examples, was trained to spot the faint texture of carbon ink on the charred papyrus. In 2023 a prize contest, the Vesuvius Challenge, recovered its first word, the Greek for 'purple'. On 25 June 2026 the project announced that a whole scroll, PHerc. 1667, had been read end to end: a Stoic treatise on ethics, probably from the 2nd century BC. Hundreds more remain sealed.

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WonderTechnology

In 1942 the actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil patented a way to stop enemies jamming radio-controlled torpedoes: the signal kept hopping between frequencies. Bluetooth uses frequency hopping today.

Born in Vienna in 1914, Lamarr became a Hollywood star billed as the most beautiful woman in the world, but she was bored by her roles and kept an inventing table at home. Antheil, known for a piece written for synchronised player pianos, suggested using punched rolls like a pianola's to keep the transmitter and the torpedo hopping in step across 88 frequencies, the number of keys on a piano. The US Navy shelved the idea, and the patent expired without earning either of them anything. Frequency hopping later became common in military and civilian radio, including Bluetooth. Lamarr was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, fourteen years after her death.

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WonderTechnology

In April 1970 an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13, more than 300,000 km from Earth, forcing the three astronauts into a lunar module built for two. Engineers on the ground then had to make the command module's square air filters fit the lunar module's round sockets, using only what was aboard.

With three people breathing in a craft designed for two, carbon dioxide was climbing towards dangerous levels, and the lunar module's own lithium hydroxide canisters, which absorb the gas, could not keep up. Engineers led by Ed Smylie designed an adapter from items known to be aboard: plastic bags, cardboard from a flight-plan cover, duct tape, a spacesuit hose and a sock. Mission Control read the instructions to the crew step by step over the radio, and it worked. The lunar module, never meant as a lifeboat, kept Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise alive for about four days, and all three splashed down safely on 17 April 1970. NASA later called the mission a 'successful failure'.

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WonderTechnology

Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938, when the DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett opened a cylinder of gas that weighed full but released nothing. Sawing it open, he found the gas had turned into a white, slippery powder that almost nothing would stick to.

Plunkett was working on new refrigerant gases at DuPont's Jackson Laboratory and had stored tetrafluoroethylene gas as a starting material. Inside the cylinder its small molecules had joined into long chains, a process called polymerisation, forming polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE. PTFE resists almost every chemical and is one of the most slippery solids known. Its first important use was in the Manhattan Project, the wartime atomic bomb programme, where it sealed equipment against highly corrosive uranium compounds. DuPont registered the Teflon name in 1945. Non-stick pans came later: in the 1950s the French engineer Marc Grégoire, urged by his wife Colette, coated cookware with it and founded Tefal in 1956.

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DriveTechnology

British inventor James Dyson spent about five years developing a bagless vacuum cleaner that spins dust out of the air, and says 5,126 prototypes failed before one worked. When established manufacturers turned it down, he eventually sold it through his own company.

Dyson got the idea in 1978, when he noticed that his vacuum lost suction as its bag clogged with dust. He adapted cyclone separation, a technique used in sawmills and factories, in which fast-spinning air flings dust outwards so it drops into a bin and no bag is needed. By his own account he built 5,127 prototypes and only the last one worked. British manufacturers declined the design; Dyson has said one reason was their profitable trade in replacement bags. He licensed an early version, the G-Force, in Japan, where it went on sale in 1986, and in 1993 launched his own machine, the DC01, in Britain.

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DriveTechnology

Margaret Hamilton led the MIT team that wrote the flight software for Apollo's onboard computers. When the computer overloaded during Apollo 11's descent to the Moon, the software dropped lower-priority tasks and kept the critical landing work running.

In the last minutes before landing, the Apollo Guidance Computer flashed 1201 and 1202 alarms, meaning it had more work than it could finish in time. Much of the extra load came from the rendezvous radar, used for meeting the command module in lunar orbit, which was sending a stream of unneeded signals that ate up computing time. The software, built by Hamilton's team with other MIT engineers, ran tasks by priority: when overloaded, it restarted, dropped the least important jobs and carried on with navigation and engine control instead of freezing. Mission Control judged the alarms safe and told the crew to continue. A famous photograph shows Hamilton beside a stack of printed Apollo program listings as tall as she was.

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DriveTechnology

On 17 December 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first controlled, sustained flights in a powered aeroplane. They got there through years of glider tests, wind-tunnel measurements and work on steering, while Samuel Langley's well-funded Aerodrome crashed twice that year.

The Wrights ran a bicycle business in Dayton, Ohio. Finding published tables of wing lift unreliable, they built their own wind tunnel in 1901 and tested about 200 wing shapes. Their key insight was that a flying machine must be controlled in three ways at once: roll (tipping the wings up or down), pitch (raising or lowering the nose) and yaw (turning the nose left or right). They controlled roll by twisting the wingtips, a method called wing warping. Their first flight lasted 12 seconds and covered about 37 metres (120 feet); the fourth that day went about 260 metres in 59 seconds. Langley's Aerodrome, backed by a $50,000 War Department grant, fell into the Potomac River on both its 1903 launches.

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DriveTechnology

John Harrison, a self-taught English carpenter, spent decades building sea clocks accurate enough to find longitude, a ship's east-west position. A ship could work out its longitude by comparing local time with the time at its home port, but only if its clock kept time despite waves, heat, cold and damp.

Latitude could be found fairly easily from the height of the sun or the Pole Star, but longitude defeated navigators for centuries, and ships were wrecked because of it. In 1714 the British Parliament offered a prize of up to £20,000 for a practical method, judged by the Board of Longitude, which largely expected the answer to come from astronomy. Harrison built a series of sea clocks and finally H4, the size of a large pocket watch. On a voyage to Jamaica in 1761–62 it lost only about five seconds in 81 days. The Board still disputed whether he had met the terms, and Harrison received his final payment from Parliament only in 1773, after King George III took up his cause.

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WonderLanguage

In 1999 Shigetaka Kurita, part of the team behind NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile internet service in Japan, drew 176 emoji, each on a grid of just 12 by 12 pixels. It is the best-known early emoji set, and New York's Museum of Modern Art added it to its collection in 2016.

i-mode, launched in February 1999, let people in Japan send email and open simple web pages on their phones, but the screens were tiny and messages were short. Kurita wanted small symbols that could carry information such as the weather, a mood or a place in a single character, and his set covered weather, transport, hearts, faces and everyday objects. He is often called the father of emoji, but his set was not the first: in 1997 a phone from the rival carrier J-Phone already offered 90 small symbols, though it sold poorly. Emoji spread worldwide from 2010, when Unicode, the international standard that gives every character a fixed code so it appears on any device, added them.

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WonderLanguage

Morse code gives the shortest signals to the letters used most: E, the commonest letter in English, is a single dot and T a single dash, while a rare letter such as Q takes four signals. That made everyday messages quicker to send by telegraph.

Alfred Vail, Samuel Morse's partner, is usually credited with fitting the code to letter frequency. He estimated how often each letter is used by counting the metal type in the cases of a newspaper printer in Morristown, New Jersey, reasoning that printers keep most of the letters they need most. The American version had dashes of different lengths and gaps inside some letters. In 1848 Friedrich Gerke simplified it in Germany, and his version, made an international standard in 1865, is the Morse code still used. Long before anyone spoke of data compression, the code already followed its main idea: spend the fewest signals on what people say most. Radio amateurs still learn it for pleasure.

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WonderArt

In October 2018, seconds after Banksy's painting Girl with Balloon sold at Sotheby's in London for just over £1 million, a shredder hidden in its frame cut the lower half of the canvas into strips. The half-shredded work was renamed Love is in the Bin.

The sale took place on 5 October 2018, at a final price of £1,042,000. Banksy, the anonymous British street artist, later released a video showing that he had built the shredder into the frame years earlier, and said it had shredded the whole picture in rehearsals; on the night it stopped about halfway. The buyer, a European collector, chose to keep the altered work. The stunt attacked the very room that had just priced the painting, yet the market absorbed it: in October 2021 the same work returned to Sotheby's and sold for £18,582,000, then a record for Banksy at auction. The destruction did not end the artwork; it became part of its story.

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WonderArchitecture

A windcatcher, badgir in Persian, is a tall tower on a roof that catches passing breezes and channels them down into the rooms below. It has cooled houses in hot, dry places such as Iran for centuries, without any machinery.

The top of the tower has openings that face the wind. Air pushed in is forced down a shaft into the house, while warm air leaves through openings on the sheltered side; on still days the sun-warmed tower works like a chimney and draws air through the rooms. Yazd, a desert city in central Iran listed by UNESCO in 2017, is famous for its many windcatchers, and the one in its Dowlatabad Garden, about 33 metres high, is often described as the tallest in the world. Paired with covered water reservoirs called ab-anbars, windcatchers helped keep drinking water cool. Similar towers are found from Egypt to the Persian Gulf, and architects now study them for low-energy cooling.

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WonderEngineering

A qanat is an underground channel, developed in ancient Persia, that brings groundwater from the foot of hills to fields and towns using gravity alone. From above, a qanat shows as a line of shaft openings across dry land.

Builders start with a 'mother well' dug down to the water table, then cut a tunnel back towards the surface on a very gentle slope, so the water flows without wearing away the channel. Vertical shafts along the route let workers lift out soil, bring in air and later clean the tunnel. The Qasabeh qanat at Gonabad in eastern Iran, dated to between 700 and 500 BCE, has a mother well more than 360 metres deep and about 33 kilometres of channels, and still carries water. In 2016 UNESCO listed eleven Iranian qanats together as a World Heritage site, recognising both the engineering and the old customs for sharing the water fairly.

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WonderClimate

When Syria's civil war cut the agricultural research centre ICARDA off from its genebank near Aleppo, it turned to the backup seeds it had stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Arctic Norway. Those seeds were used to rebuild its collections in Lebanon and Morocco.

ICARDA, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, kept one of the world's major collections of wheat, barley, lentil and other crop varieties at Tel Hadya, near Aleppo. A genebank stores seeds alive for plant breeders and researchers, and between 2008 and 2014 ICARDA sent duplicates of 116,484 samples to Svalbard. The vault, opened in 2008, is dug into a mountain on an Arctic island and keeps seeds frozen at about minus 18°C. ICARDA withdrew seeds in 2015, the first withdrawal in the vault's history, and again in 2017 and 2019, until every sample had come back. Once the seeds had been grown again in Lebanon and Morocco, fresh duplicates were returned to Svalbard.

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