THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Ice creams
For thousands of years, people have been experimenting with flavoured ice. Today the production
of ice cream is a multi-million dollar industry. The United States are the biggest producers of
ice cream (62 million hecto litres per year), but the New Zealanders are the biggest consumers;
eating 27 litres of ice cream each per year.
Experiments flavouring snow with honey, fruit and nuts first took place B.C. in the east in China and
further west in Greece. In 50 A.D., the Roman Emperor Nero used to send slaves to collect snow
to make his sorbets and in the 13th century, Marco Polo brought back recipes for water ices from
Asia.
But the first recorded iced desserts were made by freezing milk, cream, and eggs were made in
Italy in the 16th century. The recipes were then taken secretly to the courts of France and England
in the 17th century and eaten only by the aristocracy.
The Italians were the most famous ice cream makers in Europe, but ice cream was also very popular
in the United States of America. In 1843, Nancy Johnson invented the first hand cranked ice cream
churn (machine) and in 1851, the first factory-made ice cream was produced by American dairyman
Jacob Fussel. Immediately, ice cream became cheaper and very popular.
The first ice cream cone was patented by Italo Marchioni in New York in1896.
The choc-ice was invented when American confectioner Christian K. Nelson watched a boy in a
shop having problems deciding between ice cream and chocolate. He experimented with the ways
of combining the two, and in 1921 the first ‘choc-ice’ was launched.
Nowadays, there are hundreds of varieties of ice cream.
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Chocolate
Chocolate has been used for over 2000 years. It was first consumed in America as a spicy drink.
Later, in Europe it became a sweet drink and finally, in the 19th century, chocolate was produced
for eating. Chocolate remains one of the world’s most popular flavours.
The history of chocolate starts in Mexico. Cocoa was first grown by the Maya Indians, who lived in the
Amazon region around 600 A.D. Many centuries later, around 1300, Maya merchants travelled north
to the land of the Aztecs and traded cocoa beans for other things like cloth, jade and ceremonial
feathers.
Cocoa became very important in the Aztec culture. They believed that their God Quetzalcoatl had
given the cocoa tree to them as a present and they used cocoa in sacred ceremonies as gifts to the
gods. It was also the main food in their diet. Cocoa beans were even used as money. A rabbit cost
4 cocoa beans. A slave cost 100 beans.
The Mayas and Aztecs used the cocoa beans to brew a drink called “xocoatl” “bitter water”. They
mixed cocoa with corn, chilli and spices and then boiled it. When the Spanish explorer Hernan Cortés
reached Mexico in1519, he was received with a great ceremony, and offered a thick chocolate drink
out of a golden goblet by Aztec Emperor Moctezuma.
Cortés returned to Spain from Mexico in 1528 with cocoa beans and chocolate drink-making equipment.
The Spanish added sugar to the chocolate drink and kept the recipe for making chocolate a secret
for nearly 100 years. But in the 17th century, the fashion for drinking chocolate spread to all the
Courts of Europe where it was an expensive luxury.
In the 18th century, “Chocolate Houses” became the fashionable places to meet and chat, and after
the invention of the cocoa press in the 19th century, chocolate could be mass-produced and became
available to everybody.
In 1847, Fry & Sons developed the first solid chocolate bar for snacking. The first milk chocolate bars
were produced by the company Nestlé in Switzerland in 1875. Many chocolate bars today are made
by the same families that set up the first chocolate factories; Cadbury, Bournville, Lindt, Suchard, etc.
Nowadays, chocolate, to eat or to drink, is consumed everywhere in the world.
CD covers
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Transport on water
Early people travelled over water using rafts, dug out canoes and coracles; large baskets covered
with animal skin. Today there are a huge variety of boats and ships on the water.
Some of the first boats were made by the Egyptians from reeds around 4000 B.C. Even the sails
were made of reeds.
The Phoenicians and Greeks added oars to their ships about 1000 B.C. Some ships had two or three
decks of oars.
By 1200 A.D. the Chinese had added a single steering rudder to their large ships called ‘junks’.
Sailing ships dominated the seas until paddle steamers were invented in the late 18th century.
Brunel built the first steam ship made of iron in 1845; the ‘SS Great Britain’. It had a six-blade
propeller instead of side paddle wheels.
In the 1950s the hovercraft was developed by Christopher Cockerell in G.B. It skims over the water
on a cushion of air.
The Jet Ski was invented in the USA by Clayton Jacobsen in 1973.
Nowadays you can move on water in a basic canoe, a sailing boat, a jet ski or a huge cruise ship.
The Queen Mary 2 is the largest ship. It can carry 2,620 passengers and 1,253 crew.
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Transport on the road
Nowadays we travel long distances on land by car, bus and train. But for millions of years,
prehistoric people walked. By 3000 B.C. wheeled vehicles pulled by animals had been invented.
And it was not until the 18th century that transport by machine appeared.
Wheels were invented 5,000 years ago. They were made from solid wood. A thousand years later,
spokes were added which made the wheels much lighter.
The first vehicle to move by itself was the steam tractor, invented in 1769 by the Frenchman Nicholas
Cugnot. Steam pumped pistons up and down to move the wheels. But the tractor was very heavy
and unstable.
The first steam train was built in England in 1804 by Richard Trevithick and travelled at 8 kph.
In 1829, George Stevenson and his son Robert won a competition to find the fastest steam train.
The Stevensons’ ‘Rocket’ could travel at 48 kph.
Transport on the road and rail did not advance until the invention of the internal combustion engine
in 1859. The combustion engine burnt fuel inside cylinders and was much smaller and lighter than
a steam engine. And in 1885 the German engineer Karl Benz built the first petrol-powered car.
These early hand built cars were too expensive for ordinary people. But in 1908 Henry Ford started
mass-producing cars in his factories. In the first 20 years of production, 15 million ‘Model T’ Ford
cars were sold.
By the 1900s diesel engines (named after Rudolf Diesel, another German engineer) were also
replacing steam trains.
Nowadays, cars and trains are often powered by diesel or petrol, but these fuels will run out. We
need to find alternative sources of energy to power our transport. High-speed electric trains, such
as the French TGV or the Japanese bullet train, can travel over 300 kph. Scientists are also
experimenting with magnetic levitation trains and fuel cell cars (hydrogen) and solar powered cars.
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Writing and printing
For thousand of years, people did not write. Instead they passed on information and stories by
word of mouth.
Shapes and pictures were the first kind of writing, developed to keep a record of farming business.
The books that we know today were not made until printing was invented. Until then books were
copied by hand.
The Sumerians, an ancient people living in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) were the first people to
write down their language around 3500 B.C. Their writing is known as pictographic because it used
pictures to represent words. They wrote on clay tablets.
Five hundred years later, around 3000 B.C., the ancient Egyptians used symbols called hieroglyphics.
Each symbol represented words, syllables or sounds. The Egyptians wrote on papyrus.
The first true alphabet evolved in Syria around 1300 B.C. Each symbol or letter represented a sound.
Letters could be put together to form a complete word. This is the basis of our present-day alphabet.
Paper was invented by the Chinese around 150 A.D. They used brushes made of hair to write in
ink.
The first printed book is thought to have been made in China in 868 A.D. It was a long roll of paper
made by using carved, wooden blocks coated with ink, which were pressed onto the paper.
But the first printing press was built in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450. It could print
about 16 pages every hour. And the first newspapers were first printed in Europe in the early 1600s.
The pencil was invented in England in 1564 when a graphite mine was discovered in the north of
England. The mine was the only one in the world at the time, so for many years, only the English
could make pencils made of graphite rods inserted into wooden holders. In Europe, quills (feathers)
were used as pens until fountain pens were invented in the 1800s. The modern biro was invented
in 1940 by Georg Biró and the fibre or felt tipped pen was invented in the 1960s.
Nowadays, pens and pencils and felt tipped pens come in all sizes and colours, but many people
rarely write by hand. They press keys to write text messages.
Money
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Before the invention of money, people used to trade simply by exchanging goods e.g. cows or
food. Gradually, people began to use tokens, coins and banknotes to pay for things. Today, money
transactions are often made by computer and do not involve any cash at all.
Cowry shells were first used as money in China about 1200 B.C.
The first coins were made in Lydia, in present day Turkey, in the 7th century B.C. and soon spread
all over the Mediterranean countries. Lydian coins were made from a mixture of gold and silver and
they were stamped with the badge of the King.
Paper money was first issued on a large scale in the 11th century by the Mongolian Emperor, Kubla
Khan, in China. But banknotes only appeared in Europe in 1661 and were issued in Stockholm,
Sweden. They were originally receipts issued by bankers for gold deposited in their banks, promising
to repay the depositor.
Cheques are simply signed instructions to banks to pay money directly from one account to another.
The first cheque was handled by British bankers Clayton and Morris in 1659.
Cash registers were invented by the American saloon-bar owner James Rittyin 1879. His objective
was to stop dishonest employees from stealing money.
Credit cards, or 'plastic money', enable people to buy things or services and pay for them later with
cash or a cheque. The first credit card was issued in 1950 by the Diner’s Club and could be used
in any one of 27 restaurants in New York. Today all banks issue their own credit cards that can be
used all over the world.
Encrypted digital money, first used in the USA in 1995, will probably be the money of the future.
In Europe, we have entered the third millennium with a common European currency; the Euro.
The telephone
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
For many centuries, people tried to send signals over long distances, using fires and mirrors to
carry messages. In 1793, the telegraph was invented, and signals were first sent along wires.
Nowadays, over one billion people send messages by mobile phone using communication satellites.
The invention of the telegraph inspired inventors to try and send not just signals but the human voice
along the wire. But who invented the telephone? Johann Reis (Germany), Antonio Meucci (Italy),
Elisha Gray (USA) and Alexander Graham Bell (Scotland) were all trying out the first telephones in
1860s and 1870s, but Bell’s was granted the first patent in 1876.
Bell’s first telephones had one combined mouthpiece and earpiece. When you spoke into the horn,
the voice was converted into electric signals which were carried along telephone wires. Bell’s first
words on the telephone were to his assistant. “Mr Watson, come here, I need you.”
Soon after, in 1879, Thomas Edison made a telephone with a separate mouthpiece and earpiece.
In the 1880s, all telephone calls had to go through an operator. The operator answered your call,
took the number you wanted and plugged in your line to complete the electrical circuit and connect
your call. It was impossible to make a private call!
In 1896 the first dial phones were used and by the 1920s, cradle telephones were popular in Europe
and the USA.
Nowadays, many telephone circuits are connected by fibre-optic cables. A single fibre (strands of
glass twisted into a cable that can transmit light) can carry thousands of telephone circuits at the
speed of light.
The mobile phone was invented in 1979 at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the USA. The first
mobiles could certainly not fit in your pocket! A system of radio stations links the moving telephone
to a computer network that keeps track of the caller. Communication satellites orbiting the Earth pick
up signals and send them thousands of kilometres. The new generation of mobile phones or ‘cell’
phones are small and can carry voice messages, text messages, photos, videos, games and connect
to the Internet.
At the present time there are over one billion mobile phone users. Finland has the highest number
of users per capita. Can you guess why?
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Photography
Nowadays, photography is quick and clean, but in the 19th century it was a very slow, messy
business.
Photography evolved from the combination of optics and chemistry. If light is passed through a
small hole made in the wall of a dark room (camera obscura), an image of the outside scene is
made (upside down) on the wall. By the 17th century, portable camera obscurae with lenses were
used to give clear images.
In the 18th century, scientists found out that some chemicals (e.g. silver salts) turned darker when
exposed to sunlight.
In 1826, French inventor, Nicéphore Niépce covered a sheet of metal with tar, put it in a box with a
lens and pointed it out the window. Eight hours later, he had a permanent photograph.
By 1839, his colleague, Louis Daguerre’s was taking pictures in 15 minutes. But only one photo (a
glass plate daguerreotype) could be taken at a time.
At the same time, William Fox Talbot began experimenting with paper. He soon discovered a way
of taking negatives. From a negative, unlimited copies could be made of the picture.
By the 1870s the chemicals used were more efficient and less messy. Exposure times were reduced
to less than a second so cameras could be held in the hand for the first time.
In 1888, a small camera, the Kodak, was invented by American George Eastman. The film was on
a celluloid roll. And for the first time you did not need to know anything about optics or chemistry
to take a picture.
In 1900 the Brownie was invented by Eastman. It cost only 5 shillings. At last, everyone could buy
cameras.
Digital cameras were first developed for military and astronomy purposes in the 1970s. Silicon chips
with millions of light sensitive elements called pixels combine to convert light into electronic data.
Today you can find the tiniest digital cameras even in your telephone, under the water, in space or
used inside your body!
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Recording sound
Nowadays, listening to recorded music is something most people do every day. But 150 years
ago there was no way to save sound.
The first machine to record sound and play it back was the phonograph. It was invented by the
American inventor Thomas Edison in 1877. The sounds were stored as indentations on a piece of
tinfoil that was wrapped around a rotating drum. A needle converted the indentations into sounds
which were played through the horn.
The first disc record player or gramophone was made by Emile Berliner in 1888. The mechanism
was very similar to Edison’s phonograph except that the sounds were stored on a flat disc rather
than on a cylindrical drum.
A tape recorder records sound as a magnetic pattern on a long strand of tape. The magnetic particles
produce electric signals, which are reproduced as sound. They were used for the first time in the
1920s. Cassette tapes appeared on the market in the 1960s. Smaller tapes meant that smaller
tape recorders were made.
Personal stereos (Walkmans) were invented by engineers at the Sony Corporation in Japan in 1979.
Walkmans could not record sound but they were an instant success.
Soon after, compact discs (CDs) were first made in the 1980s by the electronic companies Philips
and Sony. The sound is recorded digitally as a series of numbers. A compact disc player uses a laser
beam to scan the disc and play the sound. The Discman quickly replaced the Walkman.
Nowadays, people use MP3s (first invented in Germany in 1989) to copy music from the Internet.
An MP3 can store hundreds of songs in its memory.
THE WORLD OF INVENTIONS
Flying
People dreamed of flying like birds for thousands of years, a long time before the first flying
machines were made. Many people tried to copy the way birds flew by tying wings to their arms
but without success.
Today there are many different kinds of aircraft and, everyday, millions travel around the world
in planes.
The first machine to carry a person into the air was a hot-air balloon. It was built by the Montgolfier
Brothers in 1783.
The first successful airship was built in 1852. Airships were pushed by propellers and they were a
popular means of transport in the early 20th century.
The first aircraft with wings were gliders. Otto Lilienthal made many short glider flights in the 1890s.
In 1903 the Wright Brothers, American bicycle makers, built the first powered aeroplane. Their plane
was driven by a very light petrol engine that they designed and built themselves because the other
available engines were too heavy.
The first true helicopters, which lifted vertically, had two blades that turned in opposite directions
and were first used in 1939.
However, jet power was also developed in the 1930s. Jet engines suck air in at the front and eject
it at the back at a very high speed and as the air goes backwards, the engine is forced forwards.
The Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and it flew for the first time in 1949.
In 1969 the first supersonic airliner (Concorde) flew for the first time at twice the speed of sound,
reaching a speed of 1600 kph and crossing the Atlantic from New York to London in less than three
hours.
The Super jumbo is currently the world’s largest passenger plane. It can carry 555 passengers on
2 decks.