Category: Invention Stories

Most people attribute the telephone’s invention to Alexander Graham Bell, but in reality both him and Elisha Gray developed a similar device early in the 1870s. Bell managed to arrive to the patent office a couple of hours before Gray, and afterwards he also won the legal battle to determine who could claim the invention.

Albert Einstein stated in 1917 that it should be possible, by using light of a certain frequency, to stimulate an atom and force it to release its excess of energy in the form of concentrated light. This process was called “stimulated emission” and it was the beginning of the story behind the laser.

The first attempt to come up with something similar to a match as we know it today appeared late in the seventeen century. Godfrey Haukewitz was the assistant of the famous chemist Robert Boyle who had discovered the phosphorus. Haukewitz designed his invention using pieces of wood, sulphur and phosphorus, and it would produce a small flame when frictioned. The only problem with the pseudo-match was the fact that it was poisonous and expensive.

Through out the first half of the twentieth century radio valves played an important role within electronic products. In 1947, however, scientists at the AT&T Bell Laboratories developed a device that would revolutionize the whole economy: the transistor.

Probably most of you know that Alfred Nobel was the inventor of the dynamite. Alfred derived his special interest to explosives from his father, Immanuel Nobel, who used to experiment with gunpowder (the only usable explosive by the time).

The Braille system was developed in 1829 by Loius Braille and it was adopted officially in France in 1854. The system is based on embossed dots, and each Braille character, also called a cell, is composed of 3 columns of 2 dots.

Necessity is the mother of invention, no doubt. Ladislao Biro, an Hungarian, was a sculptor, a painter and a journalist. But he was also a printer’s proof reader, and the need to incessantly refill his fountain pen from a bottle of ink was driving him crazy.