What a great idea!
SANTINI GOVINDAN
|
A need arose and these clever, imaginative people created objects that are ever useful.
|
Photo: M. Periasamy
VERY USEFUL: The ballpoint pen.
These objects are used every day — safety pins, band-aids, paper clips, ballpoint pens and cellophane paper. The objects came into being simply because a clever person had a great idea.
Walter Hunt was a mechanic who lived in New York. Hunt was looking for a way to pay off a $15 debt. His creditor handed him a length of brass wire and told him that he would buy the rights of anything useful that Hunt could create from it. Hunt fiddled around with the wire and finally coiled it at one end, made a shield at the other and lo! the world's first safety pin was born. Hunt took out a patent for his invention and sold the rights to his creditor for $400.
Earle Dickson worked for an American company called Johnson and Johnson that manufactured gauze and adhesive tape. Finding that his wife Josephine was accident-prone he decided to do something. He cut adhesive tape into strips, and stuck a little gauze in the centre, so that whenever Josephine cut herself, a readymade bandage was ready for use. Dickson's bosses heard of these bandages and decided to make them. In 1924, they installed machines to mass-produce Dickson's little bandages.
The Byzantines are thought to have invented the paper clip as they had a type of expensive brass paper clip to hold imperial documents. However, The Gem Manufacturing Company in Great Britain produced the inexpensive modern paper clip with rounded edges in the 1890s. That is why these clips are referred to as gem clips. The Gem Company did not patent the pattern of these clips and their simple design is available the world over today. A Norwegian inventor, Johan Vaaler, patented another version of the paperclip in 1899. During World War II, it became a symbol of resistance against the Germans. When the Norwegians were forbidden to wear buttons in support of their exiled king, they took to wearing paper clips on their coats to show that they were bound together and united against the German occupation. A giant paper clip was even erected in Oslo in honour of Vaaler. Microsoft uses an animated paper clip, Clippit, as an office assistant.
Simple inventions
In the 1930s a Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro was working as the editor of a small newspaper. Biro was frustrated by the amount of time that he wasted in filling up fountain pens and cleaning up smudged pages. The sharp tip of his fountain pen often tore his page too. Biro had noticed that the type of ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge free. He decided to create a pen using the same type of ink. Since this thicker ink would not flow from a regular pen nib, Biro, with the help of his brother George, a chemist began to work on designing new types of pens. Biro fitted his pen with a tiny ball bearing in its tip. As the pen moved along the paper, the ball rotated, picking up ink from the ink cartridge and leaving it on the paper. Biro first patented his ballpoint pen in 1938. The British Government bought the licensing rights to this patent, for the war effort in World War II. The British Royal Air Force needed a new type of pen that would not leak at higher altitudes in fighter planes as the fountain pen did. Their successful performance for the Air Force brought Biro's pens into the limelight. Today ballpoint pens are referred to as biros.
In 1908, Jacquest Brandenberger, a Swiss textile engineer, was dining at a restaurant when he saw a bottle of wine being spilt all over the tablecloth. Brandenerger thought it would be good idea to develop a material that he could coat over cloth to make it waterproof. He experimented, and finally came up with a way to apply liquid viscose over cloth. But he found that this combination did not work, as the new material made the cloth too stiff and clumsy. But the new clear material, which was like a thin film, could easily be separated from the cloth, and its amazing possibilities were immediately apparent to Brandenberger.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Young World
