Who invented Pacemaker?

Wilson Greatbatch, 1946

The heart is essentially a muscle that serves as a pump, sending a pulse of blood into our arteries every second or so. Some heart problems can be traced to a faulty heartbeat. Nervous impulses, generated in a piece of heart tissue called the pacemaker, fail to drive the heart in a reliable rhythm. The solution is the artificial pacemaker, able to send regular pulses of electric current into the natural one if it is failing.

Why Pacemaker use in heart?

The idea of using electricity to shock the heart muscle back into regular action is an old one; 19^th century physicians tried to induce the needed currents from outside the body. The first to try this internally was probably Canadian engineer John Hopps, around 1941. Cables were run through the chest wall into the heart tissue, but the pulse was generated from outside from equipment the size of a modern TV, and the shocks delivered were painful.

The implantable artificial pacemaker, carried within the bodies of millions of people with troublesome hearts, was invented by American bioengineer Wilson Creatbatch around 1958. There was some serendipity. While building a device to record heart sounds, he stumbled upon a circuit that produces regular pulses like heartbeats. It was small enough to fit inside the patient’s chest. Having generated interest among heart surgeons, Greatbatch begin hand-crafting pacemakers. Once the pacemaker had been implanted, the user was soon unaware of its operation. Around 1970 Greatbatch matched his new device with a small lightweight lithium battery to power it, similar to the mobile phones and laptop batteries. With circuits driven by transistors, the pacemaker drew so little current that battery lasted for years.

Modern pacemakers have the added advantage of microprocessor control. They are able to respond more flexibly to changes in the heartbeat, including detecting and dealing with fibrillation or tachycardia, when the heart beats very fast and inefficiently. In 1983 the American National Society of Professional Engineers rated the pacemaker as one of the ten most important engineering contributions to human society in the previous 

Who invented Stethoscope?

Rene Laennec, 1816

The name ‘stethoscope’ comes from Greek words meaning ‘looking at the chest’, but the organs of ‘looking’ in this case are the ears. The name was given by its inventor, French doctor Rene Laennec. Various myths surround the discovery: that Laennec could not hear a patient’s heart because street urchins were making a racket outside, and/or that the urchins were scraping on one end of a wooden fence and listening to the sound at the other end.

Laennec gave his version of events in an article in 1821. His patient that day was a young woman with a diseased heart, but tapping on her chest provided no information due to, as he put it, ‘the great degree of fatness’. Her age and sex meant he could not put his ear directly to her chest.

Suddenly he recalled how the scratching of a pin on one end of piece of wood could be clearly heard by placing an ear to the other end. Laennec did not immediately search around for a piece of wood, but rather made tube from 20 sheets of paper. He placed one end of the tube on the fat girls chest, the other to his ear. ‘J’ender! (I hear!) he reputedly cried, as the sounds of her ailing heart reached him with unprecedented clarity.

Laennec treated patients with heart and lung diseases at the Necker Hospital in Paris. With his new device, he was soon able to develop new methods of diagnosis, ‘a set of new signs of diseases of the chest, for the most part, certain, simple and prominent’. It was a major step forward in medical practice.

Laennec experimented with various materials, seeking the best transmission of sound. Surprisingly, solid materials like glass, metals and wood did not work as well as the column of air in his paper tube, though he quickly moved to wooden tubes 30 centimeters long, turned (reportedly) on his own lathe, with one end flared out into a bell. Some decades later the availability of flexible rubber tubes allowed the development of a ‘twoered’ stethoscope, much as we have today.

Laennec himself died of consumption (TB) aged only 45, a decade after his great invention and six weeks after returning to his native Brittany.

Who invented Helicopter?

Igor Sikorsky, 1946

The idea for the helicopter supported and driven by large, rotating horizontal blades, was probably inspired by the spinning sails of a windmill. Instead of moving air pushing the sails around, the powered sails would push on the air. Later models had onboard clockwork motors, even steam engines.

History of Invention:

By the 19^th century ‘screw’ propellers were pushing ships and were used in early attempts at powered flight. But a practical load carrying helicopter came only in the mid 20^th century, mostly through Russian born engineer Igor Sikorsky. Son of a psychiatry professor and a doctor, Sikorsky’s early interest in aviation was stimulated by news of the Wright Brothers and Zeppelin airships. He became a major innovator, building the first ever multi-engine aircraft, promoting revolutionary ideas like all metal construction, enclosed cabins with upholstered chairs for passengers, even an onboard toilet.

Sikorsky had migrated to the USA after the Russian Revolution. In 1931 he returned to his early attempts at a helicopter, undertaken in 1909 aged only 20. The weight of engines kept his creation on the ground. The first real success with horizontally rotating blades came with the ‘autogyro’, devised by the Spaniard Juan de la Cievra in 1923. An ordinary airscrew pulled the plane forward, supported by large unpowered rotors spinning freely.

When more efficient light weight engines arrived, along with light, strong construction materials, a number of inventors began to experiment again, including the German Heinrich Foche. Sikorsky had the most success. To stop the whole machine turning in the opposite directions to the rotor, he added a second small rotor on the tail (other designers had used counter rotating blades). His prototype VS300 first flew in May 1940, with the designer at the controls. A year later, a production VS300 stayed aloft for 90 minutes. The largest R4 made the first ever helicopter rescue in Burma in 1944. Sikorsky,s single rotor machine remains the dominant design today.

Who invented Elevator?

Elisha Otis, 1853

Big cities today are dominated by tall buildings. About 125 years ago, the typical cityscape was very different; few buildings reached more than three or four stories, limited by building techniques, access and the provision of services.

Invention story:

Even then, numerous innovations were encouraging the upward urge Metal-frame construction, made possible by the new Bessemer steel and enhanced by Joseph Monier’s reinforced concrete meant that outer walls no longer carried the weight of a building. Water could be sent to the upper floors with powerful pumps driven by electric motors. Communication from the lowest floors to the highest was made easier by the telephone. Most significantly, the endless climbing of stairs was banished by Elisha Otis’s elevator.

Platforms pulled up and down on ropes had been carrying goods from floor to floor in warehouses for decades, but putting passengers in such lifts raised safety concerns. What if the rope broke? Otis, employed as a youth in a bed manufacturer’s warehouse, realized that a fail-safe lift needed some automatic, perhaps spring loaded, device that could snap into place if needed and lock the platform in the shaft.

In 1853 at the New York Crystal Palace Exhibition, standing several stories up on an open platform, he ordered his assistant to cut the rope supporting it. The watching crowd gasped, but Otis did not fall to his death. He stood on the unmoving platform, waving his top hat. It was a marketing triumph.

His safety elevator had lived up to its name. By 1873 more than 2000 Otis elevators were in place in office buildings, hotels, apartment blocks and department stores. In 1904 the Otis organization, run by his sons (Otis himself had died in relative obscurity in 1861), pioneered the high speed elevator that real skyscrapers needed.

The term ‘skyscraper’ had entered the language in the 1880s, when the tallest buildings were merely 20 stories; striking for the day, trivial now. The purpose in going up was of course, to make more efficient use of precious land space in cities, and to increase its value. The look of our cities changed forever.                

Who invented Credit Cards?

John Biggins, 1946

Today ‘plastic money’ or credit cards have transformed the handling of money, impacting retailing and personal finance heavily. The idea is at least a century old. In the 1890s in Europe, merchants began using cards to administer credit offered to valued customers. The practice gained popularity through the 1920s. Such ‘store cards’ did not involve the banks directly and could only be used at the issuing organizations, such as merchants, hotels chains or petrol retailers.

History of Invention:

John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank is usually acknowledged as inventing the bank issued credit card in 1946. His ‘Charge-It’ system allowed merchants to bill the bank, the bank then debiting the account of the card user. The practice spread rapidly through the 1950s. Banks collaborated to develop the widely accepted cards now known as Visa (1966) and Master Cards (1967). In 1950 Diners club issued 200 customers with a card that could be used to pay bills at restaurants, with the customer later repaying Diners. American Express, already profiting from the issuing of travelers cheques, followed in 1958.

Further advances were sparked by new technology. The introduction of magnetic stripes on cards allowed them to stroe important identification details. IBM had pioneered this in the 1960s and they were first used to speed ticketing at airports. By the early 1970s, the used of magnetic stripes had been standardized, with resulting improvement in security and efficiency, all cards still have tem , though there is increasing use of embedded memory chips to supplement or replace the strip, as they hold much more information.

Rapidly advancing information technology has further boosted the credit card industry. Most credit card readers are now online, linked into central computers that can instantly check the customer’s status and issue approvals. Fraud has decreased, paperwork has been decimated. Debit cards and EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at point of sale), available since the 1980s, allow people to use their own money for cashless purchases, with funds moved from their account to the merchants. We have not yet reached the long promised cashless society, but we have certainly moved a long way down that path.

Who invented Diesel Engine?

Rudolf Diesel, 1895

Rudolf Diesel remains well known today through the type of engine that bears his name, now widely used, and its distinctive fuel. Diesel should have made a fortune from his inventions, but had no head for business.

How Diesel Engine Invented?

Diesel trained as a refrigeration engineer in Munich; his exam results were the highest ever achieved. Steam engines, though much improved by James Watt and others, remained unacceptably inefficient, turning perhaps 15 percent of the energy in coal into useful work. They were also too big and costly. More efficient (therefore smaller) engines could power vehicles.

Etienne Lenoir and Nicolaus Otto had already created ‘internal combustion engines’ in which the fuel was burnt inside the cylinder rather than outside, as in a steam engine. Seeking greater efficiency in a ‘rational heat engine’, Diesel proposed injecting fuel into the cylinder and igniting it, not with a spark or flame, but by the high temperature generated as the piston compressed the air in the cylinder. By working through a much wider range of temperatures and pressures, his engines would exploit more of the energy of the burning fuel.

Diesel’s first engine, set running in 1893, was a failure. The intended fuel was coal dust; funding came from industry giants like steel magnate Baron von Krupp. The coal dust fuelled engine exploded during trials, nearly killing him.

A second model, also operational in 1893, used heavy fuel oil, less refined and therefore cheaper than petrol, his 1895 model had unprecedented fuel efficiency, opening up many applications. Diesel became famous. Within a few decades, diesel engines were powering factories, water pumps, automobiles and trains and ships.

Diesel engines have traditionally produced smoky exhaust fumes, posing risks to health and the environment, and poor acceleration, making them less popular than petrol engines. But more refined technology, especially in fuel injection, and better quality fuels have largely solved these problems, letting the inherent benefits of Rudolph Diesel’s creation shine through.

Who invented X-rays?

Wilhelm Rontgen, 1895

Who invented X-rays? In the late 19^th century, German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen was interested in the newly discovered ‘cathode rays’ which were generated when high-voltage electricity was passed between two electrodes inside a glass tube almost empty of air. It would soon be shown that cathode rays were streams of tiny fragments of electric charge to be called ‘electrons’, the same particles that had caused the Edison Effect. The phenomenon would give rise in due course to television and other uses of the ‘cathode ray tube’.

Researchers had noted to their annoyance that photographic plates stored near such ‘discharge tubes’ were inexplicably fogged, as if they had been exposed to light. Rontgen wondered wondered if discharge tubes gave off invisible radiation, especially since the walls of the tubes glowed under the impact of the cathode rays. Perhaps the radiation could leak through the packaging surrounding photographic plates and expose them.

History of Invention:

In 1895, Rontgen found that radiation easily passed through a light proof shroud around the discharge tube, and made a plate covered with a fluorescent chemical glow several meters away. For something so unexpected and mysterious, the term X-rays seemed appropriate. They were also called Rontgen Rays for a time.

X-rays were stopped by a thin sheer of metal, but could cut through human tissue and emerge with enough energy to leave an image on a photographic plate. The first X-ray photograph’ ever taken was of Rontgen’s wife’s hand, clearly showing her bones and a ring surrounded by the shadow of her flesh.

Rontgen became famous winning the first Nobel Prize for Physics. He remained strikingly reticent and preferred to work alone, till he was taken by cancer at the age of 78.

Rontgen cannot be said to have ‘invented’ X-rays; they had always existed. But he did show how they might be used. X-ray images have proved of incomparable value to medicine and surgery and later to engineering and industry. More powerful and precise X-ray tubes were soon invented, particularly by the American William Coolidge from General Electric. The hazards of the technology, such as its capacity to cause cancer, were discovered only later.

Who invented Aspirin?

Felix Hoffman, 1899

Who invented Aspirin? The world’s most widely used medical drug is probably aspirin, known scientifically as acetylsalicylic acid. In an unrefined form, it was found in traditional portions made from the bark of the white willow tree (Salix Alba, hence the scientific name) and other plants. Aspirin is versatile. It reduces pain and lowers fever, particularly by affecting vital body chemicals called prostaglandins. In recent times aspirin has been found to thin the blood, reducing the risk of strokes and heart disease. In high doses it gives relief from arthritis.

History of Invention:

An early form of the drug, salicylic acid, was extracted from plants as the beginning of the 19^th century, but because of its severe side effects, little interest was shown until 1897, when Felix Hoffman and a colleague at the large German chemical firm Bayer discovered how to make acetylsalicylic acid, a form of the chemical that did not exist in nature and had fewer side effects. The first patient was Hoffman’s own father, who suffered severely from arthritis and could not tolerate straight salicylic acid.

Bayer patented the drug in 1899; the modern pharmaceutical industry was born. Although another company was already selling it, and a French chemist had devised a similar form 40 years earlier but Bayer was first to mass produce the drug. During world war- I various countries devised ways to make the drug synthetically, from the chemical phenol found in coal tar. In Australia, the result was called Aspro.

At the time aspirin came into use, the only other antipyretics (drugs to reduce fever) came from the bark of the cinchona tree, along with the anti-malarial quinine. Supplies of the bark ran short in the 1880s and the hunt was soon on for alternatives. This quickly led to the identification of the antipyretic phenacetin and then of paracetamol, though the latter’s importance was not recognized for half a century. Not until the 1950s was paracetamol on the market, known as Tylenol in the USA and Panadol in the UK, where it was at first available only on prescription.

Between them, aspirin and paracetamol have fixed a lot of headaches and high temperatures; our lives would have been very different without them.

Who invented Traffic Light?

Lester Wire, 1912

Who invented Traffic Light ? Traffic lights are a technology with many claims to paternity. If we mean the present red yellow green system, its first appearance was in New York in 1918 or perhaps Detroit in 1920. In all probability, it was in the USA and in response to the growing volumes of traffic as the factories of Henry Ford and others poured out cars cheap enough for the average person to buy.

Attempts to control traffic by signals dated back at least 50 years earlier to a signal post with movable arms like railway semaphores set up to outside parliament house in London in 1868. Red and green gas lamps provided warnings at night, although according to reports the signal blew up after a year of use, killing a policeman and discouraging further experiment.

History of Invention:

The first electric traffic signals, though with only red and green lights, were the work of Salt Lake City policeman Lester Wire in 1912. Placed in charge of the traffic squad, he sought to ease the chaos on the city roads caused by the increasing popularity of automobiles. He also wanted to save fellow policemen from standing in the rain to direct traffic.

Instead they could control the lights from a shelter nearby. Wire refined his system but never patented it, and died having received no royalties.

In 1923 Afro-American inventor and sewing machine repairman Garrett Morgan, patented a cheap and simple traffic control system, using hand- cranked movable arms. This became quite popular, and the myth grew that Morgan had invented traffic signals, which is clearly not so. The US patent office had issued 50 patents before his.

Early systems could be operated either automatically, the lights changing at set time intervals, or manually, controlled by a policeman able to view the state of the traffic and make appropriate adjustments. Not until the 1960s were electronic circuits inserted in the roads to monitor traffic flows, so that the cycling of the lights could be adjusted to minimize delays. From the 1980s, information technology allowed a variety of light change cycles to be applied at any particular intersection as traffic conditions changed, and the succession of lights down a stretch of road to be coordinated.

Who invented Laser?

Thomas Maiman, 1960

Who invented Laser ? Lasers are everywhere in modern technology. Yet initially they were just a laboratory curiosity, ‘a solution in search of a problem’. The first laser (an acronym for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation) was built in 1960 by American Thomas Mainman, mostly to prove that it could be done. He used a rod of ruby, which sounds expensive and exotic, but lasers today use a wide range of solids, liquids and gases as the ‘medium’ to generate their unique radiation.

How it works ?

A laser’s talent lies in making the atoms or molecules in the medium behave in exactly the same way and at the same moment. When stimulated, all the particles release energy (in the form of light) simultaneously. Htat makes the light coherent, with the peaks and troughs of the light waves all lined up. And they all release precisely the same amount of energy, so that all the light is the one pure color. (The radiation can be invisible infrared or ultraviolet, rather than visible light, but the same properties apply.)

Coherent light has very little tendency to spread out, unlike the beam of a torch, and it can be focused into a very tight spot, less than a thousandth of a millimeter across. That makes lasers ideal for detecting the tiny marks that code information in the grooves of a CD or DVD. Tight focusing lets a laser deliver its energy into a tiny area, able, for example, to burn very tiny and perfectly formed holes in metal for precision engineering. Coherent light is also vital need in holography, a technology to give images a 3-D look.

The precise color of a laser beam means that many can be sent together down an optic fiber without confusion, greatly increasing the fiber’s capacity to carry data. It also let us measure distances with great accuracy, by timing how long a pulse of laser light takes to travel there and back. By bouncing laser beams off orbiting satellites, we know for sure that the continents are moving relative to each other at a few millimeters a year. Most likely, your builder or carpenter now uses a laser device to measure up the job.

All these are powerful applications. But in 1960, Maiman and his colleagues were not thinking about them. They just wanted the laser to work.