Inventions That Shook The World Part 1 - Discovery

telephones with cables to wireless radio waves it changed how we communicate from back-breaking chore to gliding across the floor it revolutionized house cleaning and from watching birds fly to doing it ourselves it opened up the world these were all innovations of the 1900s the decade that started a century and a technological revolution in day to day life the AM radio air conditioning and the airplane were all inventions that shook the world we take for granted hearing the voices of people talking or singing even if there are thousands of kilometers away but it's all down to radio waves and an inventor who developed a way of transmitting sound in the late 1800s Reginald Fessenden was one of many scientists intrigued with a concept of spark-gap transmission he thought it could be the basis for the next great leap in communication if only the sparks could generate waves of energy strong enough to carry the human voice at the time the idea of sending a message wirelessly was revolutionary the telephone had only recently been invented and required cables to carry a signal and so did the Telegraph when it sent out messages in Morse code but demand was growing for communication that didn't need wires especially in the shipping industry the problem with maritime transportation in terms of communication is that once a vessel leaves the port until it reads its destination or at least approaches land in a very short range it's unable to communicate so there's an understandable desire for safety reasons for commercial reasons to be able to communicate wirelessly with with these vessels to transmit a voice across an ocean without using wires to be a huge breakthrough especially if it was invented by a man such as Fessenden who didn't even finish high school as a young man he worked for Thomas Edison laying cables under the streets of New York he worked any literally digging ditches but because he was clearly one of the brighter people in that crew he soon achieved promotion and was eventually hired by Edison's own lab and very quickly was appointed Edison's chief chemist Fessenden proved to be naturally brilliant at everything from chemistry to electrical engineering his brilliance also came to the attention of another big-name Westinghouse where he worked using electromagnetic radiation on instruments such as x-ray machines he was learned by George Westinghouse himself to what is now the University of Pittsburgh to run the electrical engineering department there Fessenden realized electromagnetic radiation could be the key to a breakthrough in wireless communication a few decades earlier scientists have discovered that electromagnetic radiation was everywhere and produced invisible waves of varying lengths and frequencies everything from x-rays and gamma-rays to radio waves Fessenden wanted to use radio waves as a type of highway to carry a voice signal in order to do so he would have to create radio waves artificially because the slow-moving voice signal needed a starting point where it could be linked to a speedier radio wave that is why Fessenden wish to use spark gap technology to create artificial radio waves it's two balls and a charge is built up between the two balls so literally a spark will go from one electrode to another that causes an electromagnetic wave to be emitted it's invisible but it can be very powerful but there was a problem radio waves produced by the spark method faded quickly so we're not able to carry understandable voice signals it also made a dreadful noise because essentially spark gaps create artificial static that's exactly what they are his reports from 1899 indicated that he heard very little except sparking while Fessenden pondered how to solve this problem a european made headlines around the world on the 12th of December 1901 Marconi transmitted a wireless signal across the Atlantic using Morse code but the achievement of Marconi didn't deter Fessenden from his own objective Fessenden had held a suspicion that spark gap technology was not the solution to transmitting radio waves he then considered a new idea the theory of continuous unbroken waves he understood that if he just kept throwing rocks in it would approximate waves that never stop Fessenden wondered that if one strong long continuous radio wave was created would it be able to carry a sound such as the human voice for hundreds even thousands of kilometres a continuous wave is very simple it contains a constant amplitude that is the the distances between the tops to the bottoms the peaks is exactly the same Fessenden foot it might be possible to create a continuous radio wave using an alternator which turns mechanical energy into electrical energy but to do so he would need a machine hundreds of times more powerful than any alternator available at the time and this was a formidable problem for engineers he wrote probably the greatest electrical engineers in the world a General Electric asking him if they could build such a device and they told him they could not but they would work on it in the summer of nineteen oh six General Electric delivered a high-powered alternator but even this machine wasn't powerful enough so Fessenden spent months making adjustments to produce an even stronger electrical current finally he was ready to test his theory he connected the alternator to a microphone at one end and to the world's largest antenna at the other this was Fessenden's theory a person would speak into the microphone creating sound waves the sound waves would then travel on the much stronger faster moving radio waves created by the alternator the alternator would then send this composite or modulated wave to the antenna which transmitted it to a receiver in some faraway place it's much like a hitchhiker getting onto a bus and the transmitter and then getting off the bus at the receiver on Christmas Eve in 1906 in Brant rock Massachusetts Fessenden put his theory to the test hundreds of kilometers away in the Atlantic Ocean ships received a message in standard Morse code we got that something great interest to fall it was a prior warning from Fessenden who wanted to ensure every sailor was paying attention to what happened next the stars are brightly shining it was an astonishing sound for the first time ever a voice was transmitted over a great distance without cables or wires Fessenden had successfully transported sound on a continuous radio wave a theory called amplitude modulation or AM radio far earlier than any other wireless inventor fest and understood how AM radio was going to work it wasn't until the 1920s however that the broadcasting boom began to take off but has spread like wildfire faster than probably any other technology has ever spread included the Internet Fessenden didn't become rich or famous myth invention but there was one victory his Italian competitor Marconi had to admit that Fessenden was right and subsequently bought a license to use his patent other inventions during the 1900s 1903 the electrocardiograph for ECG records the heart's electrical impulses and diagnosis without surgery it transformed medicine and its inventor was awarded a Nobel Prize 19:01 fingerprinting a signature that can't be forged that became the method of identification and 1908 cling film clearly indispensable in the kitchen the food for the entire meal was taken right out to the patio well frequently ever thought what it was like prior to having a machine that sucked up all that dust and those dust mites an Ohio inventor found out and revolutionized carpet cleaning in the process in 1907 James Spangler had a tough job he was the night janitor at a department store that there was a big problem Spangler had asthma and the rugs were very dusty was a terrible environment for him to be in because nightly fits of coughing and it described simply as fits of coughing meant that 10-15 minutes of his time was sitting down on the floor coughing trying not to cough up blood the early nineteen hundreds was harsh for anyone who had asthma dust was everywhere the streets and sidewalks in Canton Ohio when I paved they were dirt streets so people's shoes and boots brought a lot of this dirt into the department store the carpet sweeper itself a primitive brush on wheels with a dustpan only made things worse for someone with bad lungs Spangler was desperate to develop something better mr. Spangler dreamed big dreams and he really dreamed of becoming a world-famous inventor Spangler was not famous but he had already invented some interesting devices he had patents for a grain Harvester and of the Lassa peed wagon but he hadn't made much money from either idea once you invent something the next thing you have to do is sell it and therein lies is problem because it wasn't a natural salesman he also naturally didn't have the funds to be able to manufacture things that he invented so he was stuck doing menial jobs to make ends meet six nights a week for pennies an hour but all those hours working the night shift gave Spangler a lot of time to think his mind was always working as any inventors mind does the smallest of problems he would think of ways to solve them or make them easier then one night it suddenly dawned on him the ceiling fan was powered by a small motor but what if the motor could be used to power a carpet sweeper and make pushing and pulling easier as he unscrewed the fan blades took them off and set the motor into the carpet sweeper and where the blades were he took a leather belt and put it in a figure eight to the brush power propelling the brush Spangler founded adding a motor made the sweeper a lot easier to push however he created more dust than ever so it kicked the dust straight up out of the machine into the air which he had to breathe Spangler then needed to design something to direct and contain all the dust something such as the blades from the ceiling fan he enclosed a smaller version of the blades in a tin box that was attached to the sweeper the motor rotated the brush and beat the dirt from the carpet the revolving blades then sucked the debris upwards straight into a pillowcase that Spangler had found in a linen closet his time the empty signal was when the fan motor blew the pillowcase off the back of the machine through the back pressure oh stop empty it haha he needed to make a few adjustments so he kept using the department store at his test laboratory he started to perfect it he would make the fans out of a different shape he would make the opening different and so night after night after night it started to really work and he could see the color come back to the carpets Spengler had invented the electric carpet sweeper what he came up with in that department store cobbled together from bits and things that he had in that janitor's closet are still today the perfect way of getting a carpet completely clean oh you missed a spot in August 1908 James Spangler sold his invention to a relative William Hoover and we've been hoovering our floors ever since controlling indoor humidity was once just a crazy idea as impossible as stopping the rain falling or the sun shining until a man from Buffalo proved that it was possible and that control meant comfort in 1902 Willis carrier was a keen young electrical engineer working for a heating and ventilation company on one muggy summer morning he was at a job carrier believed that you could do anything in life if you set your mind to it you really believed in hard work the job was at a high quality publishing company extreme heat and humidity were ruining the paper as it went through the printing machines Sackett Wilhelm's was a publishing company that published in color and it was important for the paper to go through the printing presses the same way each time to take on a new color the damn bear was making the paper swell and shrink so it was a different size every time it went through the machine this meant the colors didn't align carriers assignment was to work out how to make the rooms temperature and humidity remain constant agree temperature control had been done but nobody had ever developed a safe and reliable way to control the exact percentage of humidity in a room Karia became obsessed about how to make a room less humid without making it too dry one of carrier's interesting personality traits was that he had tremendous focus when he was thinking of an engineering problem he couldn't be distracted by anything else that meant that he often forgot everyday details of life and everyone had a story about carriers famous absent-mindedness when he was thinking about engineering he thought of nothing else once when he was travelling he opened his suitcase to discover he had packed only one handkerchief and had nothing else in the suitcase it was not until many weeks later on the platform of a foggy train station the dancers began to surface cariann knew that fog was air that's 100 percent saturated with water this made him think what if he could create 100 percent humidity so that he had an exact starting point then add enough dry air to reduce humidity to 55 percent just as the boss requested carrier knew if he could recreate fog he would have a hundred percent saturated air he would know precisely how much humidity he had and he would have the basics to reproduce any relative humidity that he wanted carrier began to work on his theory he built a box in which he could trap air and control what happened to it inside he then gathered together a couple of fans a garden sprayer and heating coils he used one fan to suck the hot air into the box he then lowered the temperature of that air with a fine spray of cold water as the air passed through the water it turned into fog carrier have now got 100% relative humidity he then began reducing the level of humidity by adding a precise amount of dry air to the chamber so as to reduce it to a relative humidity of 55 percent Karia then released that perfectly conditioned air into the printing room his client was delighted with the result carriers unique idea had created perfect temperature and humidity the world's first air conditioner a very few people would have thought of using water to take excess moisture out of the air carrier perfected his contraption and obtained a patent in 1906 his invention revolutionized everything from textile factories to cinemas carrier reset our expectations about indoor comfort we now expect to have wonderful weather every day even if we have to stay inside to get it he went on to form carrier engineering corporation with seven other young innovators the result an international company worth billions other inventions during the 1900s 1903 the crayon a non-toxic stick of wax and pigment turns children into artists and marks the start of a colorful century and 1908 nicknamed the tin Lizzie the Model T Ford rolled off the assembly line and introduced mobility to the middle classes to fly with the birds had been a long-held dream but today it is taken for granted and it was all due to the genius of the Wright brothers 1896 Dayton Ohio Wilbur and Orville Wright built and sold bikes but were also known for being incredibly helpful around the town if you live next to the Wright brothers in Dayton in 1896 1897 you would have thought of them as great guys honest because the day is long but you never would have picked them out as speak to people who are gonna change the world with the invention of the airplane neither of them finished high school but both had a talent for understanding mechanics especially mechanical things such as bicycles highly popular in 1896 but bikes were not the only new contraptions gaining attention around the world inventors were trying to build and fly gliders the most famous was otto lilienthal of germany he had attempted more than 2,000 flights but in 1896 he crashed and died which made headlines as far away as Ohio you can almost see the lightbulb go off over Wilber right Ted and she said later it was at that moment that he began to think to himself well you know the great lilienthal is dead maybe we can pick up that gauntlet and push this thing forward a little farther and I think if at that moment in 1896 again that the spark catches and the light bulb goes off and Wilbur Wright and then Orville Wright begin to think seriously about flying machine experiments Wilbur and Orville believed it was sensible to follow lilienthal's idea of trying to control a glider before trying to build a plane with a motor and the two brothers already knew how to control motion from their work with bicycles if you think about a bicycle you have to lean into a turn with a bicycle and that gave them a conceptual notion of how complicated it was going to be to turn an airplane they also worked out the de fly a plane control was vital on three separate axes nose up or nose down known as pitch nose right or nose left also called your and a third axis wing up or wing down or lateral movement the tough one was how do you control an airplane like this birds were obvious master of that difficult lateral movement banking effortlessly on currents of air the Wright brothers noticed Birds change the angle of their wingtips to create lateral motion known as wing warping but how could the brothers build wing warping into a machine an incident to their bike shop provided the critical clue can I purchase a bicycle inner tube please I'll be two cents the long narrow box reminded Orville of wings all he had to do was to find a way to build a glide with wings that twisted one way or the other the breakthrough idea was the notion that by changing the geometry of the wing by twisting it you can increase or decrease the lift on either side of the wing and that meant you could balance the wing Orville had just discovered how to adapt the concept of wing warping for human use the brothers experimented for the next two years they started with a small box kite on ropes and worked up to a full-scale glider big enough to carry a man in the summer of 1901 they needed a location to test it they knew that they needed to fly into strong steady winds to increase the lift of their wings and they wrote to the weather bureau which sent him a list of the laziest places in the country Kitty Hawk North Carolina had the correct type of wind it also had sand dunes high enough to launch their glider Wilbert writes a letter he gets a letter back from sort of a leading citizen of Kitty Hawk not saying yeah strong steady winds news to fly from and if you come down I can promise you friendly folk will give you a hand that was enough for Wilbur right he was on his way to Kitty Hawk Orville posed with our strange-looking invention nose pointing upward with huge wings and no tail first they tested it without a pilot checking the wing warping using control ropes from the ground the results were encouraging then Wilbur the eldest brother prepared to test it in the air what you have to remember is that what these guys are doing is inherently dangerous this not only took intellectual brilliance but it took real physical courage Wilbur launched himself into the unknown and reached an altitude of 122 meters and it turns out to be just an extraordinarily frightening experience but Wilbur was almost killed because the glider tended to spin out of control the machine would do all sorts of squirrely things you would be flying along it'd be struck by a gust you would increase you'd work the wings and instead of coming back to normal you would begin to get control reversely they thought they had sold the wing whooping problem but they hadn't they had gone into this determined that they would understand control first and foremost and now there was a problem that they hadn't expected there is also a second major problem their prototype wasn't obtaining nearly enough lift and they actually talked about um stomping about quitting man will never fly not in our lifetime in the autumn of 1901 it seemed as if the Wright brothers bold experiment would just be another footnote in the history of flight sometimes when they warped one side of the wing up instead of increasing the lift in restoring balance the increase in the drag would cause the airplane to come back like this and so you'd be going into a spin as it were their test flights had led to one important discovery lateral movement must be controlled simultaneously with left-to-right motion or you're and what they discovered was that if you link the wing warping with the rudder so that when you work the wing this happens then you really do balance it and the wing warping works to solve the problem they designed a different type of rudder instead of the original fixed rudder the next would be movable so when wind warping put the plane into a spin it would compensate they had worked out the control issue but they still had to solve their lift problem the wing design data the brothers have been using was the same as the German Otto Lilienthal they reassessed and believed he had miscalculated when designing the shape of his wings so they built a wind tunnel to calculate their own data it was a wind box about six feet long with a fan on one end the ingenious part the brilliant part was the balance that went inside the wind tunnel it was made out of hacksaw blades and bicycle wire and you pinned these little model wings onto it this is a thing that you can hold in the palm of your hand and yet when you run wings a wind over the model wing that's mounted on the balance a little needle at the bottom of the balance pops out the number that you need to calculate the coefficient of lift and drag they spent months testing 200 different wing shapes to determine which shape would provide the best lift their tests revealed that making the wing thicker at the front so it tapered like a teardrop at the back decreased air pressure above the wing and increased pressure below the wing a design that maximized lift and it's when you see how they've done that kind of thing that you begin to realize that these are no ordinary lucky bicycle mechanics these guys are engineers of genius who have a clarity of vision that's extraordinary in the summer of 1902 the Wright brothers went back to Kitty Hawk keen to test their new improved glider well the brothers must have been apprehensive they knew that the airplane was in fact very difficult to control and that what they were doing was really tough but the latest glider worked magnificently it had great lift and the wing warping along with the new movable rudder worked superbly 1902 is a wonderful year for them because now everything's in place they can make glide after glide after glide after glide they are in pretty much control of the airplane now the glider and they know that this is it they have now moved beyond anybody else the following year they went further the brothers unveiled the flyer a motorized version of their glider they had added a petrol engine built in their bike shop and wooden propellers they had designed and carved it was December the 17th 1903 a small crowd gathered on the dunes at Kitty Hawk Orville clambered aboard as the spectators held their breath the first motorized flight lasted only 12 seconds but it was enough to change history Wilbur ran ecstatically alongside it's not all that often when a really important first a real breakthrough takes place and we have an image of that moment that picture shows you the very first time in the history of the world that a power controlled airplane is leaving the ground in full flight and there it is for you to what to see it's that picture about the beginning the brothers flew three further flights achieving a whole minute in the air after December 17th what you heard people say was Wow if we if human beings can do that can actually build a machine that will take off and fly into the sky what can't we do I mean it it sort of opened the doors of possibility on the 20th century the Wright brothers soared to celebrity status because they had successfully built the world's first flying machine other inventions during the 1900s 1906 the electric cash register tallied the bill as fast as you could type printing a receipt for every sale and 1901 the flamethrower a terrifying weapon that spewed out flammable liquid at high velocity they're used across the globe around 600 million daily that's a lot of disposable razors and a lot of people who'd start their day differently if it wasn't for a salesman who became tired of knocking on doors 1895 Brooklyn Massachusetts and King Gillette prepared himself to try to make yet another sale on yet another porch it was quite successful he sold bottle caps up and down the East Coast almost everybody who met him seemed to like him they found him very sort of easy to get along with and he had a sort of charm about him but Gillette wasn't a natural at selling he hated rejection he'd rather be making things than trying to sell them he was always taking bits of hardware out of his sales box and trying to improve them he couldn't you know I think he was a bit of an obsessive and couldn't stop tinkering and thinking about improvement all the time one man Gillette admired was his boss William painter the man who had invented the disposable bottle cap that Gillette was selling and he'd had a tremendous success with one invention which I think was the idea that most inventors Gillette included always halves that one single idea is going to make your name King may I give you a piece of advice the advice would change Gillette's life he told him to come up with a product that can only be used once something which creates a customer a new customer every time you sell him one because he uses it he needs another one in other words invent something disposable Gillette had always thought that the key to success was building things that would last the idea that something that encouraged waste or encouraged disposability was was a different way of thinking for him Gillette couldn't stop thinking about his boss's advice and one morning in front of the bathroom mirror inspiration finally came after one painful moment when he'd cut himself with a dull razor it often happened in the 1800s as men were using the same thick straight blade over and over again first problem shaving with a straight razor was at an open blade which if it cut you could cut you very deeply the other problem was there was no pencil and blood poisoning so pretty common people would die from shaving Gillette's imagination started to race what if he could create a razor that didn't need sharpening something that could be thrown away before it became blunt preventing all those nasty dangerous cuts yet that point II thought you'd use it once and you throw it away and you'd buy another one for him this was the Eureka moment so much so that he telegrammed his wife that day and said I've got it our fortune is made gillette started to experiment with sheet steel the only material that was inexpensive enough to be disposable but he soon found out it was too soft to retain a sharp edge it was about six months before he got a prototype into shape and that was not what you'd call a working prototype it didn't work you couldn't shave with it he realized that he needed help from people who knew about metal so that took it to people at MIT he took it to Cutler's he took it to engineers everyone told him not to bother they said that the sheet steel he was using was too soft and wouldn't take an edge and it couldn't be forged or hardened because it was too thin it would just buckle he still didn't give up his efforts were proving fruitless then a young college graduate arrived William Nickerson at your service William Nicholson was known by local businessmen and entrepreneurs as someone who could solve the unsolvable if anyone could make two let's raise at work it was William Nickerson nickerson realized that sheet steel on its own was not going to work his first idea was to somehow get the metal to cool uniformly so he interleaved the sheet steel with iron plates but at that point the iron plates buckled as much as the steel did and that didn't work he tried to perforate each blade with strange pattern that would relieve the lateral stresses as it cooled and that didn't work either but one day the solution became clear how about sandwich Inge using sheet steel between other types of metal similar to the filling between slices of bread sheets of iron would provide out a strength sheets of copper would conduct heat and in the middle a thin layer of sheet steel for the blade the blades could then be heated and cooled without buckling the result was a piece of metal thin enough to be a blade strong enough to hold a sharp edge and cheap enough to be mass-produced and disposable Gillette patented the invention and over the next decade his razors sold by the millions on entering World War one the US government supplied its soldiers with Gillette razor kits because a close shave guaranteed a tight fitting gas mask and increased the men's chances of surviving a gas attack Tillett was the last of a breed of people or among the last of a breed of people who came up with a single idea started a company started manufacturing it and became rich Chia let the man that changed shaving and he was still a household name over a century later

Channel: Manu John

Views: 781,927

Rating: 4.5871067 out of 5

Keywords: Inventions, shook, world, Documentary, Discovery, Videos

Id: 82Oh6xJ25U0

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 16 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/PornulusRift]

These 2 are missing from the playlist.
1910s Episode
1920s Episode

[u/Sealbhach]

This looks like fun. Probably 1940s and 1980s were the most important decades, in my opinion, though I haven't watched any episodes yet.