| Brooke Bond | PG Tips tea cards offered in the interest of education | Inventors And Inventions


	01 THE WHEEL The origin of the wheel is lost in the mists of time However, it is reasonable to suppose that the first wheels were roughly hewn tree trunks used as rollers. The unknown builders of Stonehenge probably used this method to drag the huge stone blocks on to Salis bury Plain. Wooden disc wheels on axles were In use In Sumeria between 2000 and 3000 BC. Copper tyred wheels and copper studded rims were in use after 2000 BC Carved seals and painted clay models found in Mesopotamia, dated about 1600 BC, show spoked wheels Celtic wainwrights in Europe made spoked wheels in 500 BC
	02 THE PLOUGH Crude wooden ploughs were used in Egypt and Mesopotamia around 2000 BC, although it is likely they were known a thousand years earlier. The first iron ploughs hares were found in Palestine, and in other ancient Mediterranean countries Both the Romans and Greeks used them, and the Chinese used a wooden plough about 500 BC Surprisingly, the plough was not introduced into Europe until the 11th century AD An English ploughing machine was patented in 1619 by David Ramsey and Thomas Wildgoose There are many types of modern plough, yet some of the ancient designs are still in use
	03 ARCHIMEDES (C. 287-212 BC) Many of the great minds of history not only invented machines but made important discoveries as well. The Greek: Archimedes, invented the simple, practical water screw for raising irrigation water short distances and these screws are still in use in parts of the Middle East. But it was also Archimedes who explained the principles of the lever, and made the great discovery that since bodies of equal volume displace equal amounts of water, it is quite simple to find the Relative Density and thus purity of many substances, (One simply compares its weight with the volume of water it displaces,)
	04 THE CARD COMPASS, 1302 The trouble with early ships' compasses -lodestones or magnetised needles suspended from thread or floating in water was that their direction was difficult to read, especially in bad weather, A big step forward was the invention of the card compass by Flavio Gioja of Italy in 1302, Gioja's compass consisted of a circular card marked with the points of the compass N, NNW, NW, etc. The card, to which was fixed the magnetised needle or bar, rotated on a sharp pivot. Although the card still tended to swing wildly, the ship's heading could quickly be read off against a fixed pointer.
	05 HISTORY OF PRINTING The oldest known printed book was produced in China about the middle of the 9th century AD. Early books were called 'block' books because they were printed from letters carved of wood, in reverse, which were inked and stamped on cloth and paper. These block books first appeared in Europe about AD 1350, but printing as we know it today really began with the invention of movable type by a German named Johann von Gutenberg, born about AD 1400, whose printed Bibles are now worth a fortune. England's first printer was William Caxton of Kent, who learned the printing trade in Germany, returning to England in 1476.
	06 LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519) Leonardo da Vinci has been called the greatest genius who ever lived. He was certainly a most remarkable man with an incredibly inventive and versatile mind. Apart from being a highly talented artist and producing such masterpieces as the Mona Lisa, he had one of the keenest minds in the realms of science and engineering. Drawings and sketches show that he had ideas for submarines, tanks and other weapons of war which did not come to fruition until some 400 years after his death. He designed a diving dress, a parachute and a helicopter, and produced superbly accurate anatomical drawings.
	07 THE MICROSCOPE, 1590. The simplest microscope is merely a powerful single convex lens or magnifying glass but it shows little that cannot already be seen by the naked eye. The compound or multi lens microscope, however, opened up a whole new unsuspected world to Man of microbes, the structure of minerals and living tissue and even of tiny fossils invisible to the naked eye. The first true compound microscope a simple arrangement of two lenses was created by Zacharias Janssen in 1590, But the 'father of microscopy' is the Dutch scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who not only created the first high definition instrument but studied tiny life forms with it.
	08 THE TELESCOPE, 1608 Although it is quite easy to magnify close objects with a simple lens, bringing distant objects close, baffled many minds including that of the famous English scientist Roger Bacon, Eventually, a Dutch spectacle maker, Hans Lippershey, solved the problem with a practical two lens telescope, The great Italian scientist, Galilei Galileo, quickly recognised the true value to astronomy of this invention and became the first man to see the craters on the moon and the moons of Jupiter. But Galileo's telescope aided his then revolutionary theories about the universe to such an extent that eventually his church denounced him as a heretic.
	09 MEASUREMENT OF TIME The first time measuring devices were sundials, water clocks (allowing water to escape at a fixed rate) and candle clocks. In the 13th century came the first true mechanical clocks, Because reliable springs did not yet exist, weights were used for power. But the early regulating mechanism a 'foliot', or weighted arms rotating backwards and forwards was still inaccurate by modern standards and even good clocks of this type could gain or lose ten minutes or so each day. Only with the invention of the pendulum and then the balance wheel was real accuracy attained.
	10 THE STEAM ENGINE, 1705 Although Giambattista della Porta (15381615), Denis Papin (1647-1712), Thomas Savery (1650-1715) and other inventors produced suggestions on how steam could be used to work an engine, it is generally accepted that the first practical steam engine was built by Thomas Newcomen. His engine was the 'atmospheric' type in which the condensation of steam created a partial vacuum in a cylinder, so that the pressure of the atmosphere forced the piston down, These engines were used to pump water out of mines and some were still in use many years after James Watt's pressure steam engine was invented more than 60 years later.
	11 THE PIANO, 1709 A whole family of stringed instruments preceded the modern piano, but the two which most closely resembled it were the harpsichord and the clavichord, Both these instruments had keyboards, but they differed in that the harpsichord had strings which were plucked by quills or pieces of leather, while the clavichord's strings were struck by brass wedges. Bartolommeo Cristofori, an Italian harpsichord maker, developed a keyboard action which transmitted the player's true touch on the keys to the hammers. Hence the pianoforte able to play piano (soft) or forte (loud),
	12 MARINER'S SEXTANT After the compass, this was the most important invention for navigation, It simply measures the altitude (number of degrees) of the sun above the horizon, Before reliable ships' clocks existed, this was done at midday when the sun was highest in the sky, and by checking from a table of the sun's altitude on each day of the year, the latitude or distance from the Equator was quickly found, However, longitude East or West was still largely a matter of guesswork until Harrison, some two hundred years ago, produced a remarkably accurate chronometer unaffected by the motion of a ship. Only then did navigation become a science.
	13 THE FIRE EXTINGUISHER, 1734 It is possible that in very early times when men first became aware of the danger of fire, they kept containers of sand or water near at hand when they kindled cooking fires, But what might be called a true fire extinguisher did not appear until the 18th century when M Fuchs of Germany invented the idea of glass balls filled with water which could be thrown on the fire, Then, in 1762, a Dr, Godfrey of London used salammoniac filled round containers burst by gunpowder, Two Swedes, Von Ahen and Nils Moshein, designed a water chemical extinguisher in 1792. Some of today's complex extinguishers are computer controlled.
	14 THE TYPEWRITER, 1744 The first crude attempt at a typewriter was made by Henry Mills, an Englishman, who applied for a patent in 1744, Mill's machine was slow and unwieldy, but it printed clearly. The next development came in 1856 when A, E, Beach devised a typewriter for the blind which printed embossed or raised letters, But it was another eighteen years before a really practical typewriter was placed on the market by a firm of gun manufacturers in America called E, Remington and Sons, The design came from C L Sholes, an American journalist, Today, typewriters are not only electrically powered, but can be remotely controlled (as with the Telex) and even connected to computers,
	15 BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1706-1790 More than two hundred years ago, there was much argument as to the nature of lightning, and Benjamin Franklin, who about the year 1746 had begun to be interested in electricity, devised a simple way to 'trap' some lightning. It was already known that certain materials, when rubbed together, would emit a spark. But was lightning the same kind of energy? Franklin flew a kite into a thunderstorm and showed by bringing his knuckles near to a key at the lower end of the kite string that an electrical spark would be produced. It was a dangerous experiment. Some of those who later tried it were electrocuted.
	16 THE SPINNING MACHINE, 1768 Until the invention of the spinning machine, yarn for the making of cloth had for centuries been spun by hand in people's homes. It was a 'cottage industry', By the time of the Industrial Revolution the output was too small to meet the needs of weavers who made cloth. Sir Richard Arkwright's famous 'Spinning Frame', which he made at Bolton in Lancashire, was able to spin strong warp yarn or 'twist' a better product than the slightly twisted yarn produced by a machine invented by Lewis Paul in 1738, Arkwright's machine introduced the Industrial Revolution and so began to change the whole world's way of life.
	17 HISTORY OF THE LOCK No one is certain where the first locks were invented, but they are usually attributed to the Chinese. It is known that the ancient Egyptians used locks with movable tumblers. Some early ones were designed to chop off the hand of anyone who fumbled with them without having the right key! The Greeks also had tumbler locks which were opened with a key, A number of Roman locks has been found which had keys to raise levers or lift pins in order to release the bolt, The first modern compound lock was invented by Joseph Bramah of Britain and patented in the year 1784,
	18 THE SEWING MACHINE, 1790 In the year 1790 Thomas Saint, a cabinet maker who lived in London, invented a machine for sewing leather which produced a chain stitch a stitch which 'locked' itself and prevented running and so led the way to the modern sewing machine, It incorporated other features of the modern machine such as the vertical needle, the over hanging arm that carries it, and the feed plate that moves the material along under the needle, Earlier attempts at a stitching machine had been made, such as Englishman Charles Weisenthal's device with its double pointed needle, but none was successful.
	19 THE ELECtrIC BATTERY, 1799 Although scientists had known about the strange power of electricity for centuries, the first man to 'capture' it, so to speak, was an Italian chemist named Alessandro Volta. Volta, from whose name we get 'volt', discovered that electricity could be produced by chemical means. He made his first electric cell a 'wet' cell in 1799 by using a zinc plate for the negative terminal and a copper plate for the positive terminal, immersed in a solution of sulphuric acid. 'Dry' cell batteries work on much the same principle today known as the electrochemical generation of power.
	20 GEORGE STEPHENSON'S 'ROCKET', 1829 The Stephensons George, and Robert his son were undoubtedly the fathers of the modern efficient steam train, although engineers such as Trevithick had had some success earlier. George Stephenson's first locomotive, in 1814, pulled several trucks at four mph. His second engine marked a milestone it forced the .exhaust steam up the chimney and so greatly increased the draught for the fire. His engine 'Locomotion No.1' opened the world's first fare paying railway for freight and passengers, between Stockton and Darlington. And his 'Rocket' four years later easily won the important Rainhill Trials. One of the Rocket's competitors was disqualified as its "engine" was a horse on a treadmill !
	21 THE MINER'S SAFETY LAMP, 1615 As the Industrial Revolution got under way, more and more coal had to be mined-and more and more coal-miners were killed as their crude candles and lamps ignited deadly mixtures of inflammable gases underground. Sir Humphry Davy, aware of the strange fact that fine wire gauze allows a flame to burn on one side without igniting inflammable gas on the other side, used this principle in a lamp. It worked perfectly, and soon a small glass cylinder was added to give good visibility with complete safety underground. Only when battery lamps were introduced were the Davy lamps superseded.
	22 THE BICYCLE, 1816 Amazingly, what may have been the first bicycles appear on bas reliefs from Babylon and Egypt: two wheeled machines with no pedals and no means of steering. In modern times, the first crude bicycles were made by J N Niepce, a Frenchman, in 1816 and Karl von Drais, a German nobleman, in 1817. Both machines could be steered, but had to be pushed along the road by the feet of the rider. The pedal driven 'velocipede', forerunner of the modern bicycle, was invented in France in 1865. Simple though it may seem, the bicycle is one of the most efficient machines created by man.
	23 READING FOR THE BLIND, 1829 Blindness is a condition that can lead to a terrible sense of isolation. Yet little was done to help the blind until the 19th century, when the first specially designed reading system for the sightless was invented by Louis Braille, a Frenchman, in 1829. His system of raised dots, read by touch, is still used today, but Braille books are now produced by automated printing processes. A new method of blind 'reading' utilises a TV camera which scans every letter, and is linked to a small panel of studs. By placing his palm on the panel, the blind person can feel each letter pattern being raised as it is scanned.
	24 THE DYNAMO, 1831 Although it was known that an electric current could be produced by moving a coil of wire across the force field between the poles of a magnet, it was not until 1831 that Michael Faraday set about making practical use of the knowledge. Faraday experimented with a copper disc that could be turned between the poles of a horseshoe magnet, with thin pieces of metal connecting both the centre and outer edge of the disc to a galvanometer. When the disc was spun an electric current was generated. Faraday had designed the first dynamo today the world's main source of power.
	25 THE REFRIGERATOR, 1834 For many centuries in the past, large numbers of country houses used to have specially built 'ice houses' low buildings with thick walls where ice from frozen winter ponds was stored, covered with layers of straw, until it was needed in summer for cooling drinks. By the early 19th century, methods had been found to make ice artificially with huge if rather crude refrigeration plants, and this ice was sold to householders with ice boxes, helping to keep meat fresh and salad vegetables crisp in summer's heat. It was not long before a home refrigerator was on sale by Jacob Perkin of America. The first of the 'fridges'.
	26 THE REVOLVER, 1835 For centuries, man tried to develop a small fast firing gun, and Samuel Colt was the first to effectively solve the problem. The story goes that the inventor of the famous Colt revolver ran away to sea at the age of 16. His ship was going to India and while on the voyage, Colt carved a wooden revolver. Realising its possibilities Colt had a number of metal models made between 1831 and 1835, and worked on his idea until he could take out a patent. The American Government ordered a thousand Colt revolvers for the Army, when the USMexican War broke out in 1846 and the age of the revolver had arrived.
	27 THE NUT AND BOLT The nut and bolt, one of the most important discoveries in the history of engineering, were not both invented at the same time. Their origins are lost in antiquity, but it is certain that the bolt or screw came first. it was probably invented by the Greek mathematician Archytas of Tarentum about 400 BC. The first recorded securing nuts seem to belong to the middle of the 15th century when they were used to secure parts of suits of armour. One of these bolted suits can be seen in the Tower of London. All kinds of complex nuts and bolts are now commonplace, including explosive bolts fitted to the escape hatches of spacecraft.
	28 PLATE AND ROLL FILM CAMERAS During the first half century of Photography, the pictures were made on plates originally metal Daguerreotypes, but later glass. The early glass plates, even in such processes as the collodion method, had to be coated with the light sensitive material just before the photograph was taken a tremendously complicated task. Obviously, anyone who could invent a simple method of photography could command a huge market for his method, and the honour fell to George Eastman, whose early Kodak roll film cameras at first using a paper roll film with room for 100 negatives in 1888 gave photography to us all.
	29 THE MORSE CODE, 1837 Samuel Finley Breese Morse left his home in America to study art in London when he was 24 years of age. He returned to America on board ship in 1832 and during the voyage he spent some time discussing electricity and magnetism with other passengers. Suddenly Morse thought of the idea of what he called 'transmitting intelligence by electricity'. He sat on deck and worked out the details of his idea, but it was five years later before he was able to apply for a patent. Contrary to general belief the famous SOS signal does not mean 'Save Our Souls' but was adopted because of its unmistakable character in Morse Code.
	30 THE PNEUMATIC TYRE, 1845 Although R W Thomson, a Scotsman, is credited with inventing the pneumatic tyre, it was a fellow Scot, John Boyd Dunlop who first made it a successful commercial proposition in 1890. Thomson's tyres consisted of tubes of rubber protected by an outside casing of leather, and many of these were used on early bicycles. Solid rubber tyres were widely used before the arrival of the pneumatic tyre. The greatly increased comfort of the pneumatic tyre was a great stimulus to the sales of bicycles, and in fact this kind of tyre, with its built in 'shock absorber', is much safer than solid tyres.
	31 THE SAFETY RAZOR, 1895 Razors with crude guards to prevent deep cuts have been tried out for many centuries past, but the man who gave the world a razor that was not only safe, but also had a separate disposable blade was an American named King Camp Gillette. Gillette is said to have got the idea while shaving with one of the dangerous old 'cut throat' razors one day in 1895. His American Safety Razor Company was formed in 1901 and by 1904 it had sold 90,000 razors and 12,400,000 blades. Today, this kind of razor has hardly changed, and is still the most popular shaving method in the world.
	32 THE LIFEBOAT, 1790 The British lifeboat service is second to none in the world, and is probably the first ever to be established on an organised national basis. The first lifeboat station was established around 1770 at Bamburgh, Northumberland, the birthplace of Grace Darling. Early lifeboats were simply adapted fishing 'cobbles' fairly small, open boats propelled by oars. The first lifeboat specially built for the job was made by Henry Greathead of South Shields and was named the Original. It was launched in 1790. The modern lifeboat is virtually unsinkable, is self righting, and may even have its own radar.
	33 trAFFIC SIGNalS, 1866 The first traffic signals were invented by a man named Hodgson and were of the semaphore type. But they were actually copied from railway signal arms. A set of signals was first erected near Westminster Abbey in London in 1868 as an experiment. They had two semaphore arms, one for Stop and one for Go, with red and green gas lamps for night use. The modern type of light signal was not introduced until early in the 20th century, the first ones being in use in New York about 1918. They are now sometimes linked to tubes in the road and to computers, so that the signals take into account the traffic requirements for the time of day.
	34 THE TELEPHONE, 1876 The first words ever to be spoken over a telephone were "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you." They were spoken by the inventor himself, Alexander Graham Bell, in an hotel in Boston, USA, where he had been conducting experiments with the help of Thomas Watson, his assistant. Bell was born in Edinburgh in 1847, and studied at both Edinburgh and London Universities. His father was a teacher and elocutionist, and Bell came to realise that the pressure of sound waves on a thin plate held the key to the electrical transmission of sound. Yet even he was surprised at the high quality of sound reproduction he quickly achieved this way.
	35 thOMAS alVA EDISON (1847-1931) Anyone who worries about not doing well at school may feel encouraged by what happened to Thomas Alva Edison, who was perhaps America's most prolific inventor. His teacher considered him stupid so that he had only three months' official schooling. His mother knew he was far from stupid, so took him away from school to teach him herself. Young Edison went on to invent not only the forerunner of the gramophone, but even the first electric filament lamp in 1879. He also invented an early form of radio tube and a method of telegraphy between moving ships or trains.
	36 THE WASHING MACHINE, C 1860. The laborious washing of clothes by hand is still the only laundering method available in many parts of the world. Many methods have been used, from banging the clothes on flat stones by a river's edge to an old seaman's trick of dragging them behind the ship to force water through them. Modern washing machines evolved from an idea which appeared in the 1860's, when the first working model, a hand turned device, was built by the British firm of Thomas Bradford. It was made of wood and quite primitive but modern machines still use much the same principles of mechanical agitation, freeing women from back breaking labour.
	37 GUGLIELMO MARCONI (1874-1937) Marconi was interested in anything electrical when he was a young boy. At Bologna, in Italy, he watched Professor Righi doing experiments with Electromagnetic waves. In 1895, the young Marconi began his own experiments, and soon was able to send Morse Code messages more than a mile with a tapping device, but with no wires connecting transmitter and receiver. In 1897 the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company was formed and in 1899 a wireless message was sent across the English Channel. Strangely, even before this an article in The Strand Magazine in London had discussed the possibility of television !
	38 THE MOTOR CAR, 1885 Like many great inventions, the motor car was not the result of one man's effort. Nobody can be certain who built the first working petrol engined road vehicle, but the credit is usually given to two Germans Carl Benz and Gottlieb Oaimler. Benz used a tricycle to which he fitted a¼ hp engine in 1885, while in 1887, Oaimler built the first four wheeled road vehicle with a more powerful 4 hp petrol engine. Oaimler's invention was the more successful of the two, and his machine incorporated many of the features of the modern car.
	39 THE MOVIE CAMERA, 1889 The origin of 'moving pictures' is obscure, and a number of men were working at more or less the same time on the idea of taking a continuous series of photographs on one length of film. There seems little doubt, however, that an Englishman, William Friese Green, was the first man to project a film of an actual event on to a simple screen. He achieved this success in January 1889, after a number of experiments. The American inventor Alva Edison also designed an apparatus called a 'kinetoscope', a kind of moving picture viewer. But Frfese Green's invention had gone even further and featured an attempt at 3-D movies.
	40 THE VACUUM CLEANER, 1901 dirt not only makes carpets grubby, but sinks into the backing and cuts the fibres. The only way to get rid of this dirt was to hang the carpet up and give it a good beating a tiring and dirty business. It occurred to inventors a long time ago that the best solution was to suck the dirt up out of the carpet where it lay. The solution the vacuum cleaner began life as a much different machine from the trim 'Hoover' of today. It was actually a huge piece of equipment which arrived outside the house, hoses being put through windows to suck up the dirt!
	41 THE HEARING AID, C 1920. Men probably discovered at a very early stage that they could hear distant sounds better by cupping a hand to their ear. and this may later have led them to use animal horns as ear trumpets. Specially made metal horns were later used but no electronic device of any use appeared until the Marconi Company produced the valve operated Otophone in 1923. It was cumbersome and weighed 16 Lb including its sturdy case. Some modern hearing aids, far more efficient, weigh only one thousandth of this.
	42 TE1EVISION, 1925 A number of men contributed to a practical method of transmitting pictures by wireless. Dr. L Weiller, a German, invented a drum of mirrors which were used to 'scan' the scene to be viewed, and an Englishman, A A Campbell Swinton, thought of using electronic tubes for transmission and reception. But it was a Scotsman named John Logie Baird (1888-1946) who began experimenting in 19221 who built the first practical TV system. Baird used a disc scanning system and saw his first TV picture a Maltese Cross in 1925. The picture was very blurred but it was true television, and a few years later Britain had the world's first TV service.
	43 CATSEYES, 1934 Percy Shaw, the inventor of those tiny reflectors which are sunk into the centre of roads, was born in Yorkshire. He used to run a road repair business and as a young man he realised how dark and dangerous unlit country roads could be at night. On his way home one night he noticed some reflectors on a poster by the roadside and this gave him the idea for 'cats eyes' in the road. His first road reflectors were. used in 1934 and the design has barely altered in 40 years, including the simple, effective, automatic collapse of the reflector system when a wheel runs over it.
	44 RADAR, 1935 Radar is one of those inventions which came about largely by accident, but which Nature had already created in a slightly different form in this case, the bat's method of avoiding obstacles in the dark. Sir Robert Watson Watt, a member of a British scientific team studying radio reflections from the upper atmosphere in 1934, noticed a strange echo on his cathode ray tube. It turned out to be from a distant building. Once It was realised that distant objects could be found, located and 'ranged' by radio waves the idea was used to track enemy aircraft and soon to make air and sea navigation much safer.
	45 THE JET ENGINE, 1930 Jet engines and rocket engines work in basically the same way a high velocity gas stream is emitted which produces a thrust in the opposite direction. But whereas a rocket carries all its combustible materials with it, a jet engine sucks in air at the front and mixes it with a suitable fuel. The first man to successfully produce an efficient engine of this type was Sir Frank Whittle, whose early turbojet engine powered the famous Gloster E28j39 jet in 1941. However, the German designer Heinkel had already flown a jet plane in 1939 the He 178. But Whittle's engine was superior in design, and modern jet engines are based on it.
	46 THE trANSISTOR, 1947 Three Americans are jointly credited with the invention of the transistor William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. Their invention was first demonstrated in 1948 at the Bell Telegraph Laboratories in the USA Transistors have brought about a revolution in radio and electronics, and have almost completely replaced the old radio valve because of their remarkable reliability, toughness and incredibly small size. In fact, without the transistor, the computers used in manned spacecraft would be so heavy that the rockets might never get off the ground !
	47 THE POLAROID CAMERA, 1947 The Polaroid camera does not actually use polarised light. It gets its name from the fact that Edwin H Land, its inventor, earlier created the company which makes Polaroid sun glasses. But his camera is an achievement photographers had dreamed about for a whole century instant pictures without the trouble of separate developing and printing. In fact, these processes are carried out not in the Polaroid camera itself, but in its film pack. After exposure, the negative, in contact with the positive, is drawn through rollers which break a pod of developing chemicals, squeezing them on to the sensitised surfaces. In ten seconds, the print appears developed and fixed.
	48 THE HOVERCRAFT, 1954 In 1953 Sir Christopher Cockerell became interested in the problem of 'drag' on ships' hulls as they travel through water. He experimented unsuccessfully with air films under model boats to give a kind of lubricated surface. In 1954 he tried using fixed sidewalls with water curtains, and also hinged end doors with air pumped into the centre. This led him to consider using air curtains, and one Sunday he made a model out of two empty coffee tins and a small industrial fan dryer. It 'worked, so in December 1955, Cockerell applied for his first 'hovercraft' patent. The full size SRN-1 soon showed that the craft could easily travel over land and marshes as well as over water.
	49 HYDROFOIL SHIPS, 1958 The idea of building small vessels which used underwater 'wings' to lift the hull above the surface of the water seems to have originated In France around 1850 when a priest named Ramus demonstrated a model hydrofoil It failed because he had no way of moving It fast enough through the water The first successful hydroplane was built by an Italian named Enrlco Forlanlni in 1905. It was moderately successful because he used a petrol engine for power. Hydrofoils today offer a simple way to achieve high speed with small vessels without excessive 'wash', which can damage river banks and wash levees away
	50 A PEEP INTO THE FUTURE It's an intriguing thought what inventions would a 'Famous Inventions' picture card series published in AD 2075 include? Dr one published in AD 2975? Matter transmitters? Faster than Light spaceship drives? Instant health pills? Certainly, some inventions of the future will be as far beyond our present understanding as the transistor would have been even to a keen mind like Faraday's. But the steps along the way will be marked with the useful everyday products of inventions like a shaving cream that dissolves whiskers, perhaps or a cheap, truly pocket sized colour TV set One thing is certain. the future holds inventions galore just waiting to be invented!
By Barry Rowe Len Roscoe	*Source material provided by Wudge*

"Fall In Mr Harper"
---------
[http://Spaghoops.com/squelch/inventors.htm]