Universal Encyclopedia of Inventors

By Jorge Lucendo

The history of the inventors is exciting, we know very little of those geniuses and their prodigious minds, they changed the World and wrote the most brilliant pages of History. They knew that the bulb was not invented by Edison, and that the radio was not invented by Marconi, and the telephone, could you tell me who invented the telephone, most of us would say that it was Graham Bell, and the steam engine, we would surely say it was Watt, because none of them were the real inventors, with the Universal Encyclopedia Of Inventors we will discover the true geniuses that were behind all these inventions and many others that were hidden throughout the ages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jorge Lucendo
• Release date: May 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393865827

Book preview

Universal Encyclopedia

of

Inventors

- 600 Inventors -

by

JORGE LUCENDO

––––––––

[e-mail]

Year of Birth of Inventors

THE WHEEL

ABACUS

BIRTH OF THE IRON FOUNDRY

BIRTH OF THE ALPHABET

FIRST MAPS OF HISTORY

CALENDAR

PAPER

CLOCK

NUMBER 0

COMPASS

GUNPOWDER

FIRE ARMS

PRINTING

MICROSCOPE

THERMOMETER

BANK NOTE

TELESCOPE

SPINNING MACHINE

STEAM MACHINE

HOT AIR BALLOON

VACCINE

GAS FUEL

ELECTRIC BATTERY

CANNED FOOD

STETHOSCOPE

BLOOD TRANSFUSION

ELECTRIC MOTOR

TIRE

ANESTHESIA

TELEGRAPH

PHONE

TV

INVENTOR CHRONOLOGY

610 BC- 1899

INVENTORS BORN BEFORE CHRIST

610 BC

507 BC

310 BC

285 BC

276 BC

287 BC

280 BC

262 BC

190 BC

INVENTORS OUR ERA BC

10

50

78

100

181

220

370

780

810

965

990

1003

1020

1031

1100

1136

1214

1232

1370

1395

1400

1452

1549

1485

1500

1501

1502

1508

1509

1512

1514

1526

1531

1535

1537

1550

1553

1561

1564

1570

1571

1572

1573

1574

1580

1581

1592

1602

1608

1617

1620

1623

1624

1627

1629

1631

1638

1643

1646

1647

1650

1651

1655

1656

1660

1663

1673

1674

1682

1683

1685

1686

1692

1693

1699

1700

1701

1704

1706

1709

1710

1711

1713

1718

1719

1720

1721

1724

1725

1728

1729

1731

1732

1733

1734

1735

1736

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1740

1742

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1747

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1750

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1754

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1766

1767

1768

1771

1772

1773

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1775

1777

1778

1779

1781

1782

1783

1784

1785

1786

1787

1788

1789

1790

1791

1792

1793

1794

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1796

1797

1798

1799

1800

1801

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1806

1807

1808

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1810

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1813

1814

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1818

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1821

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1824

1825

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1828

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1839

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1850

1851

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1886

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1894

1895

1896

1897

1898

1899

THE ORIGIN OF THE INVENTIONS

THE WHEEL

Scholars of the historical development of the Humanity and archaeologists, assure that the first vestige of human invention was found in Mesopotamia, specifically in a site identified as Fertile Crescent. It is about the invention and construction of the wheel, made with wood from the same sector, 3,200 years before our era. It is assumed that this first wheel was built by the imperative need to have means of transport, pulled or pulled by animals domesticated by humans in ancient times. In books of Universal History it is reported that in this territory of Mesopotamia the first human civilizations such as Sumerian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Phoenician flourished, and nowadays it is the territory of Iraq.

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ABACUS

The exact date of the invention of the Abacus is not known. The data provided by historians take us to the mysterious China of 2,000 years ago before the era of the current calendar, imposed by the Romans, that is, before or after the birth of Christ. In relation to this very useful invention for arithmetic and calculation operations, in antiquity, Babylon and Greece are also mentioned.

The Abacus is a box, or rectangle, of wood with 10 ropes or wires of wires (mechates, hemp, nylon, etc.) parallel, with an equal number of moving balls, which slide on the strings, according to the will of the operator. . The emergence of this very useful tool fostered the commercial development of the sites in which it was used, because it was perfectly adapted to any calculation, that is, from small figures to large operations, not as we currently have very fast electronic calculators or instruments. .

More than 1000 years ago, this invention of the Abacus was attributed to Pythagoras, a Greek mathematician and philosopher. The modern meaning of Abacus is different, since nowadays it is called a particular class of monograms or, more generally, a special type of numerical tables or graphs that allow to find the value of a certain function of two or more independent variables.

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BIRTH OF THE IRON FOUNDRY

The historical indications that are known about the use of iron date from the fourth millennium before Christ, on the part of the Sumerians and Egyptians. In the second and third millennium BC, more and more iron objects (distinguished from iron from meteorites by the absence of nickel) are appearing in Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Egypt. However, its use seems to be ceremonial, being a very expensive metal, more than gold. Some sources suggest that it may have been obtained as a byproduct of copper production. Between 1600 a. C. and 1200 a. C. Its use in the Middle East is increasing, but it does not replace the predominant use of bronze.

Between the XII century a. C. and X a. C. there is a rapid transition in the Middle East from bronze to iron weapons. This rapid transition may have been due to the lack of tin, rather than to an improvement in iron working technology. This period, which occurred on different dates according to the place, is called the Iron Age, replacing the Bronze Age. In Greece it began to be used around the year 1000 a. C. and did not arrive in Western Europe until the seventh century BC. C. The replacement of bronze by iron was gradual, since it was difficult to manufacture pieces of iron: locate the ore, then melt it at high temperatures to finally forge it. In Central Europe, it emerged in the ninth century BC. C. the culture of Hallstatt (replacing the culture of the ballot boxes, which is called first Iron Age, since it coincides with the introduction of this metal). Around 450 a. C. La Tène culture was developed, also called «The II Iron Age».

Iron is used in tools, weapons and jewelry, although bronze objects are still found. Along with this transition from bronze to iron, the process of carburization was discovered, consisting of adding carbon to iron. The iron was obtained as a mixture of iron and slag, with some carbon or carbides, and was forged, removing the slag and oxidizing the carbon, thus creating the product with a shape. This wrought iron had a very low carbon content and could not be easily hardened by cooling it in water. It was observed that a much harder product could be obtained by heating the piece of wrought iron in a bed of charcoal, to then immerse it in water or oil. The resulting product, which had a steel surface, was harder and less brittle than the bronze, which it began to replace.

In China the first iron that was used also came from meteorites, having found wrought iron objects in the northwest, near Xinjiang, from the VIII century BC. C. The procedure was the same as that used in the Middle East and Europe. In the last years of the Zhou Dynasty (550 BC) it is possible to obtain cast iron (product of the fusion of pig iron). The mineral found there has a high phosphorus content, which melts at lower temperatures than in Europe and other places. However, for quite some time, until the Qing Dynasty (around 221 BC), it did not have a great impact.

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Cast iron took longer in Europe, because the temperature was not enough. Some of the first samples of cast iron have been found in Sweden, in Lapphyttan and Vinarhyttan, from 1150 to 1350. In the Middle Ages, and until the end of the 19th century, many European countries used the Catalan farga as a steel method. Iron and low carbon steel were obtained using charcoal and iron ore. This system was already implemented in the fifteenth century, and could be achieved up to about 1200 ° C. This procedure was replaced by that employed in blast furnaces.

In the beginning, charcoal was used to obtain iron as a source of heat and as a reducing agent. In the eighteenth century, in England, charcoal began to become scarce and expensive, and this led to the start of the use of coke, a fossil fuel, as an alternative. It was first used by Abraham Darby, at the beginning of the 18th century, who built a blast furnace in Coalbrookdale. Likewise, coke was used as an energy source in the Industrial Revolution. In this period the iron demand was increasing, for example for its application in railroads. The blast furnace was evolving over the years. Henry Cort, in 1784, applied new techniques that improved production. In 1826 the German Friedrich Harkot built a blast furnace without smoke masonry. Towards the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, iron was widely used as a structural element (in bridges, buildings, etc.).

Between 1776 to 1779, the first iron smelting bridge was built, built by John Wilkinson and Abraham Darby. In England it is used for the first time in the construction of buildings, by Mathew Boulton and James Watt, at the beginning of the 19th century. Other works of that century are also known, for example the Crystal Palace built for the Universal Exhibition of 1851 in London, the architect Joseph Paxton, which has an iron frame, or the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, built in 1889 for the Universal Exhibition, where thousands of tons of iron were used.

BIRTH OF THE ALPHABET

The history of the alphabet begins in Ancient Egypt, more than a millennium after having begun the history of writing. The first formal alphabet emerged around 2000 a. C. to represent the language of the Semitic workers in Egypt (see alphabets of the Middle Bronze Age), and was developed from the alphabetic principles contained in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Most of the current alphabets of the world either descend directly from this root, for example the Greek and Latin alphabets, or were inspired by their design.

There are two types of well-documented writing systems that emerge in the 4th millennium BC. C .: the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia and the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both were well known in the eastern Mediterranean area, where the first alphabet that reached wide spread, the Phoenician alphabet, was developed. There is some evidence that would indicate that the cuneiform system was developing some alphabetic properties in some languages ​​to which it had been adapted, as it is later observed in the old Persian cuneiform system, but everything indicates that these developments were lateral lines and not ancestral to the alphabet. The Biblos syllabary has suggestive similarities with hieratic Egyptian as well as with the Phoenician alphabet, but since it has not been deciphered, it is not possible to specify if it had any role in the history of the alphabet. Towards the year 2700 a. C. the ancient Egyptians had already developed a set of 22 hieroglyphs to represent the consonants of their language, plus a symbol 23 that could represent vowels at the beginning or end of a word.

These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides in logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and later to transcribe foreign words and names. However, while the system was alphabetical in nature, it was not used for purely alphabetic writing. Therefore, although the system allowed to be used as an alphabet, it was always used with a strong logographic component, possibly due to the great symbolic value of the complex Egyptian hieroglyphic system.

The first fully alphabetic writing system is estimated to have been developed around 1850 a. C. by Semitic workers in the Egyptian area of ​​Sinai. During the following 5 centuries it spread to the North, and many Western alphabets come from it, or have been inspired by one of its descendants. The Meroitic alphabet was an adaptation in the third century BC. C. of the hieroglyphs, in Nubia in the south of Egypt, although many scholars suspect that there were influences of the first alphabet.

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FIRST MAPS OF HISTORY

The first ancestral maps were made by the Babylonians about 2300 BC, being carved on clay tablets. Most of these maps were measurements of terrain distances made for the purpose of collecting taxes. Ancient maps of China date back 300 years, these maps were made of silk. In ancient Greece the first cartographers of History emerged, these cartographers were the best known until that time. The concept of the spherical earth was present among the Greek philosophers in the time of Aristotle (350 a.C.) and was accepted by geographers ever since. Roman cartography reached its peak thanks to Ptolemy. His new map represented the Old World from latitude 60º N to 30º S. He wrote an impressive study, entitled Guide to Geography, known as Geographike Hyphegesis, which remained a reference of great weight until the Italian Renaissance, emerged at the end of the 14th century.

CALENDAR

According to the most prestigious historians, it is said that 4241 years before Christ, the Egyptians already had a method to keep track of the days, but it was not a calendar in itself. In contrast, the Babylonian calendar of the sixth century BC already had 12 months of 30 days each. Later, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar changed it to a 445-day calendar, the same one that Pope Gregory XIII replaced by the previous one (Babylonian) in 1582. This Pope ordered that on October 5 of that year 1582 it became the October 15 and suppressed three out of four secular leap years, leaving only those who fall in ten of the century. This Gregorian reform to the Calendar is the one adopted by almost all the peoples of the World. Other civilizations, such as the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca, at that time already had their own calendars. A lexicographical definition indicates that a Calendar is the table of the days, months, seasons, holidays and holidays of the year.

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PAPER

Paper has been crucial to write what has been invented, learning and experiencing the human being in different latitudes of Planet Earth. It is used to accumulate the printed knowledge of Human Civilization, in all the plots of knowledge. In special publications it has been reported that a Chinese, called Cai Lun, spent several years researching to invent paper, as we know it today. Commissioned by the Eastern Han Chinese dynasty, Lun finally achieved his purpose of inventing paper in 105 AD, using bark from trees, rags or clothing and nets to fish. Some historians say that Lun jumped for joy when he was finally able to write on plain paper, made by him from old tree rags and rags that he was picking up in Chinese streets and villages. As is well known, this invention produced a colossal advance in writing among human beings, contributed to the printing of books, letters were sent to different parts of the world.

CLOCK

The first sundials were used around the year 3,500 BC. Thanks to the invention of the Benedictine monk Gerberto de Aurillac (Silvestre II), in the eleventh century, those of mechanism that we know today arose. They were large, with weights and wheels, and existed only inside the Monasteries. Pocket watches, on the other hand, were invented in France in the mid-15th century, shortly after the spiral spring was applied to watchmaking. A century later were built in Nuremberg profusely and in ovoid form, from which the name Eggs of Nuremberg is derived. Today we observe how the clock has been perfected. It went from pendulum clocks, to ropes, mechanical and electronic nowadays watches.

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NUMBER 0

Ancient and great civilizations -such as those of Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Ancient Greece and the Mayan civilization- possess documents of mathematical or astronomical character showing symbols indicative of the value zero; but by various peculiarities of their numerical systems, they failed to obtain the true benefit of this discovery capital. In Ancient Egypt the sign -nfr- (nfr) was used to indicate the zero (in Papyrus Boulaq 18, dated around 1700 BC). The zero appeared for the first time in Babylon in the third century BC. C., although his writing on clay tablets dates back to 2000 a. C.

The Babylonians wrote in uncooked clay, on flat surfaces or tablets. His notation was cuneiform. In tablets dating from the year 1700 a. C. numerical notations are seen in their particular form. The Babylonians used a base 60 system. With their notation system it was not possible to distinguish number 23 from 203 or 2003, although this ambiguity did not seem to worry them. Around 400 a. C., the Babylonians began to place the sign of two wedges in the places where in our system we would write a zero, which was read several. The two wedges were not the only way to show the positions of zero; in a tablet dated in 700 a. C. found in Kish, ancient city of Mesopotamia east of Babylon, they used a three hook sign. On other boards they used a single hook and, in some cases, the deformation of the hook resembles the shape of zero. Mayan glyph for zero, year 36 a. C. It is the first documented use of zero using positional notation. The zero also arose in Mesoamerica and devised by the Mesoamerican civilizations before the Christian era, by the Mayan culture. It was possibly used before by the Olmec Culture.

The first documented use showing the number zero corresponds to the year 36 a.C., making use of the Maya Numeration. Because of the anomaly introduced in the third place of its positional notation, it deprived them of operational possibilities. Claudio Ptolemy in the Almagest, written in 130 d. C., used the value of empty or 0. Ptolemy used to use the symbol between digits or at the end of the number. One might think that the zero would have taken root then, but the certain thing is that Ptolomeo did not use the symbol as number but considered it a sign of annotation. This use was not spread, because very few adopted it. The Romans did not use zero. His numbers were letters of his alphabet; to represent figures they used: I, V, X, L, C, D, M, grouping them. For numbers with values equal to or greater than 4000, they drew a horizontal line on the number to indicate that the value was multiplied by 1000.

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COMPASS

It was invented in China approximately in the ninth century in order to determine the directions in the open sea, and initially it consisted of a magnetic needle floating in a vessel full of water. Later it was improved to reduce its size and facilitate use, changing the water vessel by a rotary axis, and adding a Rose of the Winds that serves as a guide to calculate directions. Currently the compasses have received small improvements that, although they do not change their operating system, make the measurements easier to perform. Among these improvements are lighting systems for taking data in dark environments, and optical systems for measurements in which the references are objects located in the distance.

GUNPOWDER

The Chinese created a type of explosive powder, based on a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and coal, in the year 1200 after Christ. It burned with a sudden combustion when it was ignited. The Chinese began to use it in pyrotechnic games, without yet thinking about using it to shoot projectiles or other explosive purposes, as happened later when the gunpowder was brought to Europe. In history texts it is claimed that gunpowder appeared, precisely in Europe, in the hands of the colonialist English Empire, which used it in the Battle of Crecy, in 1346.

FIRE ARMS

Its appearance occurred in Europe in the fourteenth century, and for 500 years they remained without significant modifications; They were loaded with gunpowder through the canyon. At the end of the 15th century a trigger was added that allowed the soldiers to shoot without releasing the butt. Today there are firearms of all kinds: machine guns, machine guns, automatic rifles, automatic pistols, etc.

PRINTING

In the 15th century, copyist monasteries, or scribes, who transcribed manuscripts in colonial and religious institutions as in the Catholic Church, were replaced by the printing of mobile types of metal, invented by Johann Gutenberg, which allowed serial printing and dissemination of thought. The Printing with mobile metal types became a technological advance of that time, this being an extraordinary advance for Humanity, because in this way the accumulated knowledge, the historical and new feats, the scientific researches of all kinds, began to print and publish massively, especially in Europe, first, and then in territories where the European colonizers were installed, as in America, Asia and Africa. Of course, the Press came to eliminate the work that was done by the amanuenses, which consisted of being transcribing documents manually.

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MICROSCOPE

It is supposed to have been invented in the year 1590, in Holland. It is claimed that the Dutch manufacturers and inventors of lenses Hans and Zacharias Janssen brothers were the ones who developed this device. There is no absolute certainty that they were the inventors. It is also believed that Galieo Galilei was in 1610. However, years later this device, which enlarges the minuscule things, was used by the Dutch biologist Anton Van Leeuwenhoek to discover that in the environment organisms invisible to the naked eye proliferate. The old microscopes were heavy, complicated to handle, and today they are very powerful for huge enlargements of tiny and electronic things too.

THERMOMETER

The thermometer was invented by Galileo Galilei, in 1592, a well-known astronomer, mathematician, physicist, philosopher and rebellious scientific man of those dark and dark times of the Holy Roman Inquisition. It is known that Galileo Galilei was tried and imprisoned by the ignorant inquisitors, who tried to silence him for affirming that the Earth is round and that it turns on itself. ... And yet, it moves... he said. It has been said that Galileo invented the thermometer while at the same time with his telescope he explored the starry sky. The first attempt to measure the temperature of the human body with a thermometer as an element of medical diagnosis was carried out by Santorio, professor of medicine at the University of Padua, Italy, in 1616.

BANK NOTE

The first metallic coins, in the shape of an ingot, appeared in Turkey in the year 700 BC, but since they were made of metal they had the problem that they could be cut and filed, so their value was not well defined. In the eleventh century the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (1216-1294) began to pay his soldiers with paper coins or banknotes, which was forced to be accepted in the places conquered by this Asian Indochinese colonizer. When the techniques of coinage were perfected in Europe, in the seventeenth century (when the Industrial Revolution in England was already underway), the coins already had their value in engraved relief and the first paper money was issued in Stockholm, capital of Sweden, in 1661.

TELESCOPE

According to accounts of History of Sciences, Galileo Galilei showed in 1609 the first officially registered telescope, with which he made great astronomical discoveries, such as the observation of four of the moons of the Planet Jupiter. However, it was not until 1668 that Isaac Newton, through the use of superimposed mirrors, invented the reflector telescope, the direct predecessor of current telescopes. Through the current telescopes it has been established that, for example, our Galaxy or Milky Way has a diameter of 100,000 light years, that our Solar System is located to the west of that Galaxy, 30,000 light years from the Center of the Milky Way.

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SPINNING MACHINE

Since when human beings started using fabrics, leathers and leaves to cover their bodies, they always had to make the fabrics by hand, using fingers, thin metals or thin sticks, for basting threads in domestic areas and very slowly. It was not until 1771, in Derbyshire, England, that Richard Arkwright revolutionized spinning by installing machines in a spinning mill, which became the first manufacturing industry. These spinning mills spread rapidly throughout Europe, and then came to the United States. These spinning mills have had significant electrical and electronic technological advances, although, in some way, they still have the same principles to manufacture the fabrics.

STEAM MACHINE

The first steam engine was the Eolípila created in the first century by Heron of Alexandria. It is not known for sure if those inventions were nothing more than mere toys and, although it has been assumed that they were used to move objects in temples during rituals, it is surprising that since the time of Heron there have not been found evidence that the steam was used for a practical purpose, although the knowledge of the power of the steam was not lost as demonstrated by Malmesbury's description of the organ of Reims that in 1120 was made to sound by the air escaping from a deposit in the one that was compressed by heated water. Among the relics of Egyptian civilization we find the first known record of a steam engine in the manuscript of Heron of Alexandria entitled Spiritalia Seu Pneumatica.

The apparatuses described there are not