Trivia - Inventions

• Thomas Edison held over 1,300 US and foreign patents.
• Thomas Jefferson invented the dumbwaiter.
• While fighting with the French underground during World War II, Jacques Yves Cousteau invented the aqualung, the self-contained device that supplies air pressure for underwater divers.
• A man named Ed Peterson is the inventor of the Egg McMuffin.
• As of 1940, total of ninety patents had been taken out on shaving mugs.
• At the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, Richard Blechyden, and Englishman, had a tea concession. On a very hot day, none of the fairgoers were interested in hot tea. Blechyden served the tea cold--and invented iced tea
• Benjamin Franklin invented crop insurance.
• Camel's-hair brushes are not made of camel's hair. They were invented by a man named Mr. Camel.
• Credit for the invention of the parachute goes to Sebastien Lenormand in 1783. In 1495, Leonardo da Vinci designed a pyramid shaped chute. J.P. Blanchard (1753-1809), a Frenchman is said to have been the first to use a parachute. In 1785 he dropped a dog in a basket, to which a parachute ws attached, from a balloon high in the air. Blanchard claimed to have descended from a balloon in a parachute in 1793.
• Did you ever wonder what the WD in WD-40 stands for? WD is an abbreviation for Water Displacer 40th attempt.
• Early mattresses were filled with straw and held up with a rope stretched across the bed frame. If the rope was tight, sleep was comfortable. Hence the phrase, "sleep tight."
• Henry Ford did not invent the automobile. It was the invention of several 19th century engineers, paramount among them being tow Germans, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. What Ford did was to mass-produce automobiles and provide cheap service for them.
• In 1875 the director of the United States Patent Office sent his resignation and advised that his department be closed. There was nothing left to invent, he claimed.
• It was while he was examining urine, seeking the philosopher's stone (the magic elixir needed to change base metals into gold), that the German chemist Hennig Brand discover phosphorus.
• James J. Ritty, owner of a tavern in Dayton, Ohio, invented the cash register in 1879 to stop his patrons from pilfering house profits.
• James Ramsey invented a steam-driven motorboat in 1784. he ran it on the Potomac River, and the event was witnesses by George Washington.
• Johann Behrent built the first piano in America at Philadelphia in 1775 under the name "Piano Forte".
• Joseph Priestley, the English chemist, invented carbonated water. It was a by-product of his investigations into the chemistry of air.
• Kilts are not native to Scotland. They originated in France.
• Leonardo da Vinci invented the scissors.
• Levi Hutchins of Concord, N.H., invented the first alarm clock in 1787. It only rang at 4 a.m. because that's what time he got up.
• Mark Twain secured a patent in 1873 for a self-pasting scrapbook. A series of blank pages - coated with gum.
• Out of the 11 original patents made by Nikola Tessla, for the generation of hydroelectric energy, 9 are still in use, (unchanged) today.
• Playing Cards were invented by the Chinese as early as 1120.
• Roulette was invented by the great French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal. It was a by product of his experiments with perpetual motion.
• Rudyard Kipling, living in Vermont in the 1890's invented the game of snow golf. He would paint his golf balls red so that they could be located in the snow.
• Russian submarine designers are building military submarines out of concrete. Because concrete becomes stronger under high pressure, (C-subs) could settle down to the bottom in very deep water and wait for enemy ships to pass overhead. Concrete would not show up on sonar displays (it looks just like sand or rocks), so the passing ships would not see the sub lurking below.
• Shampoo was first marketed in the USA in 1930 by John Breck, who was the captain of a volunteer fire department.
• The Chinese invented eyeglasses. Marco Polo reported seeing many pairs worn by the Chinese as early as 1275, 500 years before lens grinding became an art in the West.
• The Colgate Company started out making starch, soap, and candles.
• The electric chair was invented by a dentist.
• The first "braces" were constructed by Pierre Fauchard in 1728. Fauchard's "braces" consisted of a flat strip of metal, which was connected to teeth by pieces of thread.
• The first automobile to have air conditioning was The Packard in 1939.
• The first ballpoint pens sold in 1945 were priced at $12.00 a piece.
• The first black and white motion picture to be digitally converted to color was "Yankee Doodle Dandy", the 1942 biopic of George M. Cohen.
• The first commercial vacuum cleaner was so large it was mounted on a wagon. People threw parties in their homes so guests could watch the new device do its job.
• The first plastic ever invented was celluloid, it came about as an alternative for billiard balls made from Ivory.
• The first product to have a UPC bar code on its packaging was Wrigley's gum.
• The first stethoscope, invented in 1816, was made from a roll of paper.
• The first subway was built in London (1860-63) by the cut and cover method. Other notable subways: Paris (the Metro 1898), New York (1900).
• The first VCR, made in 1956, was the size of a piano.
• The first wooden shoe comes from the Netherlands. The Netherlands have many seas so people wanted a shoe that kept their feet dry while working outside. The shoes were called klompen and they had been cut of one single piece of wood. Today the klompen are the favorite souvenir for people who visit the Netherlands.
• The invention and development of the telegraph in the 1840s made possible the swift collection of information from widespread weather stations, and thus enabled the first weather maps to be drawn.
• The largest light bulb was a foot-long 75,000 - watt bulb hand-blown at the Corning Glass Works to celebrate the seventy-seventy-fifth anniversary of Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp.
• The Manhattan cocktail--whiskey and sweet vermouth--was invented by Jennie Jerome, the beautiful New York who was the toast of the town until she went to England as the wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, in 1874, and gave birth to Winston.
• The monkey wrench is named after its inventor, a London blacksmith named Charles Moncke.
• The oldest registered food trademark still in use in the United States is the red devil on cans of Underwood's deviled ham. It dates back to 1886.
• The pop top can was invented in Kettering, Ohio by Ermal Fraze
• The Popsicle was invented by eleven-year-old Frank Epperson in 1905. He left a container of soda and a stirrer outside overnight and in the morning discovered them frozen together.
• The rickshaw was invented by the Reverend Jonathan Scobie, an American Baptist minister living in Yokohama, Japan, built the first model in 1869 in order to transport his invalid wife. Today it remains a common mode of transportation in the Orient.
• The shoestring was invented in England in 1790, Prior to this time all shoes were fastened with buckles.
• The single blade window cleaning squeegee was invented in 1936 by Ettore Sceccone and is still the most common form of commercial window cleaning today.
• The yo-yo was first patented in the USA in 1929.