Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
Speaker 1: the podcast that looks at the future and says she
Speaker 1: blinded me with science. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocal,
Speaker 1: and I'm Joe McCormick. And that slow, condescending shake of
Speaker 1: the head from Lauren means it's once again time to
Speaker 1: dive into a discussion about the future and invention and
Speaker 1: science and technology. And uh, this this week we're actually
Speaker 1: talking about kind of uh the spirit of invention and innovation. Well,
Speaker 1: we were kind of tying it into our buddies over
Speaker 1: at maker Fair, and we thought, wouldn't it be fun
Speaker 1: to sort of talk about some of the some of
Speaker 1: the crazy inventors of the past who have come up
Speaker 1: with really creative inventions. Uh. Many of these people are
Speaker 1: ones who worked on inventions on their own and either
Speaker 1: experienced amazing success or we've enjoyed their inventions though they
Speaker 1: did not reap too many benefits from them at the time. Um,
Speaker 1: but we do you make a point, Joe in that
Speaker 1: in that episode that the not all inventions come from
Speaker 1: like the crazy guy working in a garage somewhere. A
Speaker 1: lot of them come from massive R and D departments.
Speaker 1: I mean, if we want to get real, it's not
Speaker 1: as fun to say, but it is true that most
Speaker 1: of the biggest inventions come from well funded labs in
Speaker 1: R and D departments, which is because it's easier to
Speaker 1: make a living when you're making a living. Obviously, when
Speaker 1: when you've got the money where you've got endless resources
Speaker 1: at your disposal to to invent, it makes it a
Speaker 1: little bit easier to keep going down different roads. But
Speaker 1: one of the points I wanted to make in the
Speaker 1: video is that, um separating these two things is kind
Speaker 1: of an artificial distinction, saying though, well, on one hand
Speaker 1: you have these big, well funded invention projects, and on
Speaker 1: the other hand you've got the little tinker. I mean,
Speaker 1: these are two ways of operating that feed into each other.
Speaker 1: They're they're both part of the inventing spirit. And lots
Speaker 1: of these great inventors who you know worked for big companies,
Speaker 1: were probably also hobbyists, many of them makers on their own.
Speaker 1: Many of them were very much makers on their own,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of how they ended up being where
Speaker 1: they they got this job. Yeah, so, uh, we wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of look back at some of the kind
Speaker 1: of the godfathers of invention in a way. And uh,
Speaker 1: and one of the first ones we had was a
Speaker 1: fellow who whose inventions may or may not have ever happened.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of stories about his inventions that could
Speaker 1: be completely apocryphal, and that is Archimedes Archimedies. Some of
Speaker 1: his inventions are more well attested than others, I think,
Speaker 1: but he's mainly known actually for his proofs, right, like, yes,
Speaker 1: stuff about physics and mathematics, calculating volume density, hydrostatics, so
Speaker 1: like how how you know, well, is this really made
Speaker 1: of pure goal old or something? Right? Right? The whole
Speaker 1: idea of displacement and things of that nature. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: you could figure out if something was pure gold if
Speaker 1: it displaced the correct amount of water. But he's also
Speaker 1: remembered for all these strange inventions. Um. One of them,
Speaker 1: of course is the is the screw right right? The
Speaker 1: water lifting screw. And this is a pretty cool idea
Speaker 1: for the ancient world. I don't know how they figured
Speaker 1: this out, but well, yeah, it's kind of neat. It's
Speaker 1: so imagine that you have a an area of water
Speaker 1: that it's slightly lower than where you would like the
Speaker 1: water to go. So, you know, when you're trying to
Speaker 1: irrigate a large part of of landscape to make it farmland,
Speaker 1: this is obviously something that you you know, if if
Speaker 1: the biggest source of water is further down, like downhill,
Speaker 1: how do you get that to come uphill? You could
Speaker 1: just dig a really deep trend. You could, but that's
Speaker 1: not necessarily easy or safe to do. So what our
Speaker 1: commedees discovered was that by creating a actually what I
Speaker 1: think imagine a rod angled down so that the bottom
Speaker 1: of the rod is underneath the water and wrapped around
Speaker 1: this rod is essentially what amounts to be a straw
Speaker 1: or a hose, And by turning this you can actually
Speaker 1: scoop water into that hose. And because of the way
Speaker 1: that the uh, the hose curls, you keep on changing
Speaker 1: what the lowest point of that curl is and you
Speaker 1: urge the water. Yeah, so it's essentially a pump in
Speaker 1: a way well that the angle the screw meets the
Speaker 1: water creates a little sort of moving bucket. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's it's it's difficult to envision unless you actually
Speaker 1: have a picture in front of you. But that and
Speaker 1: this is something that's attributed to Archimedes, and as far
Speaker 1: as we know, that is in fact the origin of
Speaker 1: this particular invention. But even this is one of those
Speaker 1: that's a little under contention. Well, one of the big
Speaker 1: ones that everybody always remembers is the death ray. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Martian the one that was tested on mythbus is
Speaker 1: actually where multiple times. Actually yeah, and this was the
Speaker 1: way passionate about it. We really want a death ray,
Speaker 1: and so we're kind of upset when it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: but it's no. But this is this is actually the
Speaker 1: romantic inventor concept that we were just talking about, because
Speaker 1: we have death rays. I mean, we have really really
Speaker 1: good death rays that we can make with modern technology.
Speaker 1: But people are still they're so attached to this idea
Speaker 1: that Archimedes made a death ray. So so here's the story. Um,
Speaker 1: Archimedes say, wants to defend a Greek city against attackers. Well,
Speaker 1: how do you do it? Um? What if you were
Speaker 1: to get a whole bunch of mirrors and polish them up.
Speaker 1: And of course, in in Archimedes time, they didn't have
Speaker 1: really good polished mirrors like we have now, so would
Speaker 1: have to be like a highly polished copper or bronze
Speaker 1: or something, and you lined a bunch of those up
Speaker 1: so they all catch the sun's rays and you angle
Speaker 1: them toward a central pointed up. Yeah, creing a focal point,
Speaker 1: so that whatever the target is, we'll get heated up
Speaker 1: very very rapidly. And this is actually it's not a
Speaker 1: bogus idea. In fact, this is how we create solar
Speaker 1: thermal power, isn't it. Yeah, I mean you just focus
Speaker 1: mirrors on something to collect the heat and turn that
Speaker 1: into usable energy. In this case, the usable energy would
Speaker 1: be death. Well that in this case the usable energy
Speaker 1: is heat, and the heat converts things what date of
Speaker 1: wood into fire like converts to death. Um, yeah, I know.
Speaker 1: The various tests that have been done on this have
Speaker 1: shown that it's it's a feasible uh object, but it
Speaker 1: may not actually work in any kind of practical use
Speaker 1: like you could you can set Yeah, you might have
Speaker 1: to wait a while. Yeah. I read about some mixed results,
Speaker 1: like some experiments were like, yeah, this this would work
Speaker 1: pretty good, but of course when MythBuster did it got
Speaker 1: busted twice. Yeah, they just couldn't. They couldn't make it
Speaker 1: work in any reasonable amount of time. It was like
Speaker 1: they had to sit there for a long You have
Speaker 1: to ask ask the Roman forces if they wouldn't mind
Speaker 1: waiting just a little while longer before they actually disembark
Speaker 1: from their ships and invade your city a cloud. You know,
Speaker 1: we've got to start over. Uh. And of course there's
Speaker 1: just the fact that it would probably be way easier
Speaker 1: to just go and light the ship on fire or
Speaker 1: shoot it with a flaming arrow or something, right, right,
Speaker 1: But I mean, the idea of a device that could
Speaker 1: inflict huge amounts of damage without any visible sign of
Speaker 1: projectile was something that could easily frighten your enemies terrifying.
Speaker 1: There were you know, the reason why Archimedes came up
Speaker 1: with some or at least why we attribute these ideas
Speaker 1: to Archimedes and the whether or not they ever actually
Speaker 1: came from him or that's a matter of debate. But
Speaker 1: the reason why all of these were coming from this guy,
Speaker 1: this this brilliant inventor, because he was in Syracuse, which
Speaker 1: was under siege for like two years by Roman forces.
Speaker 1: And another one of his supposed inventions was a giant
Speaker 1: arm that could rush or not. Yeah, the idea mean
Speaker 1: that you would be able to destroy incoming ships or
Speaker 1: foul them in some way, so that uh a besieging
Speaker 1: force would be toppled, at least the the naval part
Speaker 1: of it would be toppled. These these these are things
Speaker 1: that repeat throughout history. I mean, it's it's we We've
Speaker 1: we've got the maker fare here in a giant robot arm,
Speaker 1: cruscious stuff. And then you know, and everyone is always
Speaker 1: talking about Tesla's hypothetical and sorry that you were going
Speaker 1: to say, oh no, well, I was just gonna say.
Speaker 1: It's funny how with the arm, there's this great diversity
Speaker 1: of how people have envisioned it. I've found some site
Speaker 1: on the Internet that just had this huge list of
Speaker 1: different illustrations of the arm, and they all completely different.
Speaker 1: Like one looks like a literal arm. It's like a
Speaker 1: big metal hand that slapping down on the ship somehow,
Speaker 1: and I don't know how that would work. The other
Speaker 1: ones that seem more feasible is that it's um it's
Speaker 1: using a big sort of grappling hook, like it shoots
Speaker 1: over the ship and then you can pull it using
Speaker 1: the leverage of this big lever back at the joint.
Speaker 1: Sounds slightly more useful maybe than just um, but who knows.
Speaker 1: And he certainly worked on things like block and tackle
Speaker 1: systems and stuff that made it a lot easier to
Speaker 1: move very large heavy loads by just a few people,
Speaker 1: really simple machines, right, And he's famous for his discussions
Speaker 1: about the lever and the applications of a lever. And
Speaker 1: you know, of course there's the saying that's attributed to him,
Speaker 1: you know, find me the right place to stand and
Speaker 1: I can move the world. You know, that kind of idea, UM.
Speaker 1: And also you know there are other UH inventions that
Speaker 1: are attributed to him. His death, of course completely tragic.
Speaker 1: That was the story that the invading Romans were sacking Syracuse,
Speaker 1: and that the Roman soldiers had been given the UH
Speaker 1: the order not to hurt our Coimedes because he was
Speaker 1: considered to be two precious, right and yet Braun. But
Speaker 1: but a soldier killed him, and they're different reports on
Speaker 1: what happened, Like some people say that what happened was
Speaker 1: the soldier commanded our commedees to come to meet with
Speaker 1: the general, and our commedees refused, and the soldier got
Speaker 1: upset and then put a sword through our comedies. And
Speaker 1: then there are other ones that said that our committees
Speaker 1: was carrying some equipment that he used in his experiments,
Speaker 1: and the soldier thought that they were valuables, and so
Speaker 1: he killed our committees to loot his body. At any rate,
Speaker 1: our commedees was a casualty of war. And so, uh,
Speaker 1: the big inventions he had suggested weren't actually built. But
Speaker 1: that's one of those early examples of someone who was
Speaker 1: really creative and came up with some very uh, out
Speaker 1: of the box ways of of inflicting huge amounts of damage.
Speaker 1: Um the night. This one I have on my list
Speaker 1: is similar to that in that he took many commissions
Speaker 1: for instruments of war, even though he himself was not
Speaker 1: someone who was particularly warlike. And that's Leonardo da Vinci.
Speaker 1: So good old Leo came up with lots of different ideas.
Speaker 1: He did also improve over previous ideas things that had
Speaker 1: already been invented, like ball bearings. That was one of
Speaker 1: those things that had been around since Roman times. But
Speaker 1: Leonardo kind of showed new applications for ball bearings. Were
Speaker 1: were devices that needed to be able to turn freely
Speaker 1: without too much friction and um, and began to show
Speaker 1: some of the first really practical uses for ball bearings.
Speaker 1: Da Vinci invented or not invented, but designed a tank.
Speaker 1: Didn't he look like had Yeah, it looks kind of
Speaker 1: like a flying saucer. It had thirty six guns. Uh
Speaker 1: in the design and uh what's interesting about that tank
Speaker 1: is if you really take a close look at the drawings,
Speaker 1: it was supposed to move based on a big series
Speaker 1: of gears, and you would, you know, turn these gears
Speaker 1: and that would make the wheels turn. But if you
Speaker 1: really pay attention to the way the gears are laid
Speaker 1: out in the drawing, it would never move because the
Speaker 1: front wheels would be turning one way while the back
Speaker 1: wheels would be turning the other way. So you would
Speaker 1: what he needed in there was a transmission. We need
Speaker 1: to have some sort of differential. But what what what
Speaker 1: some people suggest is that da Vinci was a pretty
Speaker 1: smart guy and that maybe maybe you know, it could
Speaker 1: have been a mistake. But it's also possible that maybe
Speaker 1: he put it in there on purpose because he one
Speaker 1: didn't want anything to ever really, no one. He didn't
Speaker 1: want anyone to really build it and to and too
Speaker 1: he thought that or to maybe that he wanted to
Speaker 1: do this in case it ever fell into the wrong hands.
Speaker 1: Whoever did get a hold of it would not be
Speaker 1: able to make a working tank because if they followed
Speaker 1: the instructions in the in the drawings, they would have
Speaker 1: an immobile structure. So it would be more like a
Speaker 1: hut with a whole bunch of guns in it. Um,
Speaker 1: that's not guess. In the Renaissance period of tank was
Speaker 1: kind of like a nuclear bomb. Well, you'd just be
Speaker 1: he definitely, he definitely came up with other ideas that
Speaker 1: were equally terrifying in this and and part of that
Speaker 1: was these were inventions that were never actually built. Uh
Speaker 1: And and maybe it was just that you knew that
Speaker 1: da Vinci had designed this thing, and that would give
Speaker 1: you second thoughts before you tried to muscle in on
Speaker 1: one of da Vinci's patrons. You know, this is a
Speaker 1: guy who received patronage from various very wealthy people. And
Speaker 1: so one of the inventions was a thirty three barreled gun.
Speaker 1: And so imagine imagine a triangle. All right, So you
Speaker 1: got a triangle, and you got it mounted on a tripod,
Speaker 1: and across each edge of the triangle you have eleven guns.
Speaker 1: Now the idea was that you would be able to
Speaker 1: fire those eleven guns along the top edge and then
Speaker 1: you would rotate at once one click. Now when it's rotated,
Speaker 1: that those eleven guns start to cool, and then you
Speaker 1: can fire the next eleven guns. So now you fired
Speaker 1: off twenty two, you rotate it. Now that second of
Speaker 1: guns is starting to cool while you start to load
Speaker 1: the first set of guns, and you can still fire
Speaker 1: the third set. So the idea is that you're constantly
Speaker 1: cooling and reloading these guns while firing off the top
Speaker 1: level of guns. So it's kind of like a very
Speaker 1: primitive version of a machine gun, although it's all still
Speaker 1: you know, manually reloaded, and you know, it's not that
Speaker 1: you would fire all eleven simultaneously, but it would allow
Speaker 1: you to fire them in quick succession right right, and
Speaker 1: you know, in comparison to the to the muskets of
Speaker 1: the day, right where you would fire and then three
Speaker 1: minutes later you'd be able to fire again. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you were really really good, you could probably fire
Speaker 1: I think it's it might be as frequently as three
Speaker 1: times in a minute if you were really really good,
Speaker 1: But otherwise it was just like boondock Saint style if
Speaker 1: just you know, like drop the guns, pull out more
Speaker 1: more kind Yeah, why why reload? I have more guns? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And then the he had other inventions that were never built,
Speaker 1: things like the aerial screw. So you know, our commedees
Speaker 1: figured out how to use a screw to to pull
Speaker 1: water out of a low area into a higher area.
Speaker 1: Uh da. Vinci was looking at using the screw shape
Speaker 1: to try and generate lift. So this is sort of
Speaker 1: a precursor to the helicopter. And the idea would be,
Speaker 1: if you could turn this screw fast enough, you might
Speaker 1: be able to generate enough lift to get off the ground.
Speaker 1: He also tried to design oriandopters, didn't he yep, which
Speaker 1: kind of a precursor to airplanes or gliders. Flapping wings.
Speaker 1: Flapping wings, and the wings were more were designed more
Speaker 1: after the wings of a bird. Um right, Yeah, not
Speaker 1: not stiff enough to actually create the lift that we
Speaker 1: would need to. Yeah, but none of them would have
Speaker 1: really generated enough lift for anyone to to get off
Speaker 1: the ground or survive a great fall, if that's how
Speaker 1: you wanted to start. Uh He also but he didn't
Speaker 1: invent parachutes which would have worked. Um. They again, we're
Speaker 1: not built, but they would have worked had they been built.
Speaker 1: People have built parachutes based upon his designs and shown
Speaker 1: that they would have slowed the descent so that you
Speaker 1: would be able to, uh, in his words, throw yourself
Speaker 1: down from any great height without suffering injury. Although without
Speaker 1: suffering injury part may not be completely valid. But you
Speaker 1: wouldn't you probably wouldn't die. Um, so right there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know, davincion bounce in that day. We're not
Speaker 1: a good You might die later, um, or you might
Speaker 1: just find yourself a couple of legs short, um, significantly
Speaker 1: shorter than the da Vinci though, was you know, truly
Speaker 1: the Renaissance man, right, I mean, that's the guy we
Speaker 1: think of when we think of the Renaissance. Is this,
Speaker 1: here's this guy who was an artist and a scientist
Speaker 1: and an inventor. He had sort of the leading one
Speaker 1: of the leading thinkers of the day. Uh. And then, Lauren,
Speaker 1: you have some information about another person who just a
Speaker 1: few decades after da Vinci, well more like a century
Speaker 1: after da Vinci, was really taking that role. Yeah, sir
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton you might have heard of him. He built
Speaker 1: the first reflecting telescope. I believed that another fellow had
Speaker 1: created a design for it earlier, but he was the
Speaker 1: first person who actually put it into practice. UM. And
Speaker 1: I was also just doing some of the most important
Speaker 1: mathematical stuff, you know, really building the Western foundation for
Speaker 1: calculus and um, doing important work with with gravity and
Speaker 1: light and uh and stuff. Yeah, he designed this, um,
Speaker 1: this so called orbital cannon, which was basically a thought
Speaker 1: experiment to explain how how we could put an object
Speaker 1: in orbit of the Earth and you know which which
Speaker 1: which in is that the late sixtus was pretty cool,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, and in the design involved putting
Speaker 1: a cannon on top of a mountain so high that
Speaker 1: it was in space, so it was not really feasible,
Speaker 1: but as a thought experiment was really cool. Um. This
Speaker 1: whole idea of that you're falling at the same rate
Speaker 1: that the Earth is turning, so therefore you're just constantly
Speaker 1: in that same position relative to the Earth. I mean
Speaker 1: that's the basis of orbit, which is that's a pretty
Speaker 1: pretty yes. Yeah. Um. He He also, according according to
Speaker 1: some sources, was was a great animal lover. And although
Speaker 1: you know, he never really had um any any deep
Speaker 1: friendships or deep romantic relationships that he had a lot
Speaker 1: of cats and dogs kind of running around in his life,
Speaker 1: and uh supposedly at Cambridge UM he created the first
Speaker 1: cat door to to let so so that cats would
Speaker 1: stop scratching at the door and interrupting his calculus. I
Speaker 1: think I think we can all blame Newton for all
Speaker 1: the cat videos that are on the internet. I think
Speaker 1: I think that if you were to trace it all back,
Speaker 1: there's some some contention about that maybe, but maybe you
Speaker 1: could argue ancient Egypt. But um also one of one
Speaker 1: of Newton's contemporaries, Robert Hook is occasionally referred to as
Speaker 1: the British Da Vinci. He he was. He was, you
Speaker 1: know again living in the sixteen seventeen hundreds and created
Speaker 1: what was also working with with light and gravity in
Speaker 1: conceptual ways and created just a lot of really pervasive
Speaker 1: simple machines. The he was the one. Hook's law, the
Speaker 1: that the extension of a spring is proportional to the
Speaker 1: weight hanging from it, is named after Robert Hook. Also
Speaker 1: Hook's joint or the universal joint, which is a way
Speaker 1: of connecting two immobile rods in a way that lets
Speaker 1: them uh create rotational force around each other. Also compound
Speaker 1: microscopes kind of an important thing. He was doing a
Speaker 1: lot of research into biology. He was the one who
Speaker 1: coined the term sell in terms of like a unit
Speaker 1: of biology um, which he was a He was a
Speaker 1: connected to the Catholic Church and they these these He
Speaker 1: was examining cork under a microscope under a microscope, and
Speaker 1: the walls of the cork reminded him of monastery cells.
Speaker 1: So supposedly that's where that comes from. Well, uh, moving
Speaker 1: forward just a bit, we get up to uh to
Speaker 1: an American Benjamin Franklin, known for his uh inventiveness. He
Speaker 1: invented lightning. Right, you gotta go stand the corner for
Speaker 1: the rest of the episode. Uh, I'm just gonna sit
Speaker 1: over here, Allison in the corner. You guys take over now.
Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin, who invented many things. He's also known for,
Speaker 1: you know, his his diplomatic missions over to Europe. He's
Speaker 1: known as one of the founding fathers of the United States.
Speaker 1: One of the things Benjamin Franklin, well he didn't invent it,
Speaker 1: but he did improve upon it was the odometer. Odominters
Speaker 1: has been around for quite some time, but he created
Speaker 1: a really practical precise one. And the reason he made
Speaker 1: one was because he was working with the postal service
Speaker 1: at the time. This is before the Revolution, so he's
Speaker 1: technically working for the British authorities at this point, and
Speaker 1: they were having trouble figuring out how to get mail
Speaker 1: from various cities and in a way that was efficient
Speaker 1: and made sense. Franklin the first post pastor of General Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, we think about him when we talked about
Speaker 1: the post office as well. But he so what he
Speaker 1: did was he actually designed this odometer as a set
Speaker 1: of gears that would fit on against the rear wheel
Speaker 1: of his horse drawn carriage, and he took the carriage
Speaker 1: between cities and every four hundred revolutions of the wheel
Speaker 1: would be equivalent to a mile or one point six
Speaker 1: kilometers and uh and it turned out to be pretty
Speaker 1: pretty accurate, and so he was able to measure the
Speaker 1: distance between the different cities and with those measurements start
Speaker 1: to help plan out more efficient routes. So that uh
Speaker 1: so that mail carrying even made sense in a place
Speaker 1: has spread out as the United States, and so that
Speaker 1: was a pretty cool early invention. He's also known, of
Speaker 1: course for the invention of the Franklin stove. Um. He
Speaker 1: was working in Philadelphia at the time, which if you
Speaker 1: are unaware during winter, it can get a bit chili
Speaker 1: and uh. Fireplaces are not terribly efficient at generating heat
Speaker 1: in a way that is useful for us. A lot
Speaker 1: of that heat just goes straight up the chimneys, so
Speaker 1: you're losing a lot of the energy that you are
Speaker 1: trying to generate, which meant that you were going through
Speaker 1: a lot more fuel for a lot less heat. You
Speaker 1: could just like heat up something thick, and which is
Speaker 1: exactly what he did. He came up with this idea
Speaker 1: of the Franklin stove, which was much more efficient at
Speaker 1: distributing heat and at at preserving fuel, so you didn't
Speaker 1: have to, you know, start ranging even further out from
Speaker 1: Philadelphia in order to gather the fuel you need to
Speaker 1: stay warm. And then um. He also, of course was
Speaker 1: famous for inventing bifocals. He had trouble both with near
Speaker 1: sightedness and far sightedness towards the latter part of his life,
Speaker 1: and so he essentially took glasses for far sightness and
Speaker 1: glasses for near sightedness, cut the lenses and then put
Speaker 1: them together and UH, and that was the basic design
Speaker 1: for bifocals for for decades and uh yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was one of those things where out of necessity
Speaker 1: he invented. So now, the next person I have on
Speaker 1: my list is another American, someone who the the only
Speaker 1: US president to ever have received a patent, and that
Speaker 1: of course is uh Abraham Lincoln. He received a patent
Speaker 1: for a a method of helping ships navigate shallow waters
Speaker 1: or or things that are like in a river that
Speaker 1: a boat would need to get over or around. And
Speaker 1: so it's really was a design to try and prevent
Speaker 1: ships from or boats from grounding or or getting stranded.
Speaker 1: And um, his invention was pretty pretty clever. It was
Speaker 1: a series of waterproof bladders that could be inflated. So
Speaker 1: what you would do is inflate the bladders and create
Speaker 1: more clearance between the bottom of the boat and whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, like like if if the river gets pretty shallow,
Speaker 1: you inflate these, you raise the level of the ships
Speaker 1: the body of the ship or bottom of the boat.
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say ship, I should just say boat because
Speaker 1: we're talking your rivers here. Um. And it would give
Speaker 1: enough clearance so that you could get through the shallow
Speaker 1: parts without the boat just grounding. But that's interesting. The
Speaker 1: the only president who holds a patent so far anyway,
Speaker 1: and um, he was known as kind of a tinkerer
Speaker 1: and an inventor beyond just this, but this was the
Speaker 1: only patent he was ever awarded. And then we've got
Speaker 1: three people who are kind of another Yeah, big names. UH.
Speaker 1: They were all involved in in some pretty well known
Speaker 1: UH competitions and all electric personalities. Yeah. I want to
Speaker 1: start with George Westinghouse because out of the three, he's
Speaker 1: probably the one that people know the least about from
Speaker 1: a general perspective. Like, you know, everyone's probably heard of Westingham,
Speaker 1: they've heard of Westinghouse, but they probably have seen comic
Speaker 1: strips about Edison and Tesla at the Thank You Oatmeal,
Speaker 1: But Westinghouse people don't know as much about him, I
Speaker 1: think in general. So he was the son of a
Speaker 1: machine shop owner, and he actually served time in both
Speaker 1: the Army and the Navy during the Civil War. UH.
Speaker 1: He returned home after the Civil War to enroll in
Speaker 1: Union College, which he would subsequently drop out of. UH.
Speaker 1: And then he started using his practical experience of working
Speaker 1: with his father in the machine shop to start inventing things.
Speaker 1: Over his lifetime, he held over three hundred patents, more
Speaker 1: than three hundred patents, I should say not over and uh.
Speaker 1: One of his inventions I thought this was pretty interesting
Speaker 1: was a gas shock absorber for cars. So in the
Speaker 1: early days of cars, back in uh, one of the
Speaker 1: problems that you had with those early cars was that
Speaker 1: if you were to go over a bumpy road, and
Speaker 1: back then almost all roads were bumpy, it was a
Speaker 1: jarring experience. I mean, if you've ever been in a
Speaker 1: car with really bad shocks, or on any other kind
Speaker 1: of vehicle that doesn't have any sort of shock system,
Speaker 1: then you know, you feel every single one of those
Speaker 1: bombs and like being on a wooden roller coaster or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: something something that you know has just got a lot
Speaker 1: of bumps to it where it's just not a very
Speaker 1: comfortable ride. And so a lot of the shock systems
Speaker 1: that were around back then all were dependent upon metal springs,
Speaker 1: so you get a bit of a bouncy ride and
Speaker 1: it was kind of jostling. It wasn't necessarily comfortable. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He used compressed air used gas shock absorbers or air
Speaker 1: shock absorbers that were designed to kind of um to
Speaker 1: to cushion you on this so and it was a
Speaker 1: system that a lot of luxury cars use now. I
Speaker 1: mean they essentially use an updated version of that same invention. It's,
Speaker 1: you know, obviously a more sophisticated implementation now than it
Speaker 1: was back in Westinghouse's time, but it's the same principle.
Speaker 1: And he also invented air brakes for trains. One of
Speaker 1: the problems that trains had in those early days is
Speaker 1: that the brake systems were not uh, we're not accessible
Speaker 1: by the conductor the engineer. They actually had brakeman who
Speaker 1: worked on the train, and so the engineer had to
Speaker 1: give signals to the brakeman for the train to break,
Speaker 1: and sometimes these signals would get lost, which means that
Speaker 1: you could have a massive, horrible accident. So we'll just
Speaker 1: go past the station, right past. The best case scenario,
Speaker 1: you miss your stop. Worst case scenario, you just hit
Speaker 1: another train or something else. That's funny when I think
Speaker 1: back on you know, trains, it seems like you always
Speaker 1: see them in movies, no matter how far back you
Speaker 1: hear that pneumatic break sound, hissing and the popping, But
Speaker 1: you're saying that that came along, that was that was
Speaker 1: Westing else who created the actual early Yeah, he was.
Speaker 1: It was an idea that involved using the compressed air
Speaker 1: so that the conductor, the person in the actual engine,
Speaker 1: could use So it's not that they weren't ever using
Speaker 1: compressed air before. It was that they didn't have a
Speaker 1: brake system that was accessible from the engine before the
Speaker 1: brakes were elsewhere on the train. So uh, that ended
Speaker 1: up making him quite a bit of money. He also
Speaker 1: invented a valve that was useful to reduce the pressure
Speaker 1: in uh natural gas lines so that someone could actually
Speaker 1: have natural gas in their home because the you know,
Speaker 1: they could tap into a well and they could get
Speaker 1: natural gas, but they had to pressurize it so that
Speaker 1: they could move it through distribution pipes. Well, the problem
Speaker 1: was that if you tried to have your natural gas
Speaker 1: come out of your distribution pipe into your home at
Speaker 1: that pressure, it would be way too high for you
Speaker 1: to operate it in any kind of safe way. So
Speaker 1: the heat created a valve that would reduce that pressure
Speaker 1: so that you would get it at a controlled rate
Speaker 1: and not just turn your oven into a flamethrower. Um.
Speaker 1: But you can see that all of these inventions are
Speaker 1: kind of wrapped up together in things like air pressure,
Speaker 1: compressed air valves, things like that, and through that he
Speaker 1: was able to build the Westinghouse Corporation, which branched out
Speaker 1: into all forms of invention. One of the inventors that
Speaker 1: westing House, Yeah, Westinghouse hired a a guy by the
Speaker 1: name of Nicola Tesla. Tesla also for a while had
Speaker 1: worked for the Edison Company. He worked for the Edison
Speaker 1: Company while he was still in Europe, and so it
Speaker 1: was not part of the company that was I mean,
Speaker 1: ultimately they answered to Edison, but he did. He didn't
Speaker 1: work for Edison himself until he came over to America
Speaker 1: a little bit later and then had a falling out
Speaker 1: and then went to work for west western House for
Speaker 1: a while. Yeah, and so a lot of people credit
Speaker 1: Tesla as the guy who quote unquote invented alternating current,
Speaker 1: which is not true. Alternating current existed before Tesla was
Speaker 1: even going to school. Uh. It existed mostly in Europe.
Speaker 1: It wasn't really being used widely at all, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't being used in the United States. But it did exist.
Speaker 1: But four he came over. He did, however, create lots
Speaker 1: of improvements that made it practical. It wasn't practical before,
Speaker 1: and he was a lot of the work he did
Speaker 1: made it practical, the turbines that he was working with,
Speaker 1: the turbines, his improvements to things. Westinghouses Company was the
Speaker 1: one the company that was in charge of making transformers,
Speaker 1: and some of Nessla, some of Nesla's some of Tesla's work. Boy,
Speaker 1: it's warm in here. So of Tesla's work UH went
Speaker 1: into improving transformers as well. So Tesla was known as
Speaker 1: an inventor. He was known for making some stuff that
Speaker 1: again kind of like Archimedes, may be pretty apocryphal. What
Speaker 1: he earthquake machine would be a big one. Death ray
Speaker 1: that Lauren mentioned, the death ray in his in his case,
Speaker 1: was supposed to be some sort of ray that would
Speaker 1: make aircraft drop out of the sky. UH, and that
Speaker 1: his idea was that if you were to create such
Speaker 1: a thing, you would end all war because no one
Speaker 1: would want No one would ever brave the the the
Speaker 1: death ray because it would mean that they would lose immediately.
Speaker 1: You know. It's that whole idea that if you just
Speaker 1: create a weapon strong enough, you in war because no
Speaker 1: one would be crazy enough to engage in war, which
Speaker 1: we've disproven multiple times throughout our history. But he was
Speaker 1: also there's also the legend about him creating the the
Speaker 1: broadcast towers that could broadcast electrical power over over miles
Speaker 1: and miles. Uh. There's no really, there's no great proof
Speaker 1: that that ever worked. There's there are accounts, but the
Speaker 1: accounts could are not necessarily reliable. And I do want
Speaker 1: to make it clear that wireless electricity is a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about I think a lot of people don't
Speaker 1: even realize that that you actually can harvest ambient wireless electricity.
Speaker 1: But it's you're talking about scale. Can you get enough
Speaker 1: of it? And Tesla's version was using a a tower
Speaker 1: and then turning it on and essentially lighting up light
Speaker 1: bulbs that were twenty miles away. That's different than either
Speaker 1: using some sort of of magnetic resonance so that you
Speaker 1: can create a wireless power transfer, or using an antenna
Speaker 1: to uh to gather in radio waves and create electricity
Speaker 1: that way, which by the way, you can do. It's
Speaker 1: just not efficient at all. You don't get enough juice
Speaker 1: there to really do anything useful. You'd have to have
Speaker 1: an enormous antenna, and even then, by by the time
Speaker 1: you get to that you're talking about pouring in more
Speaker 1: energy into building the antenna than you would ever get
Speaker 1: from harvesting radio waves. Well, I did see something about
Speaker 1: some cool I can't remember the kid's name now because
Speaker 1: it was a while back, but he was some young
Speaker 1: guy who would come up with an invention that, uh,
Speaker 1: it would harvest ambient radiation from electrical towers. So you
Speaker 1: just go stand by an electrical line and turn this
Speaker 1: thing on and it would I mean still wouldn't get
Speaker 1: that much, but yeah, at least then what you're talking
Speaker 1: about is maybe a system that could recapture wasted energy. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when ech case, you're talking about improving efficiencies over uh,
Speaker 1: you know, established systems. There's nothing wrong with that. That's
Speaker 1: a fantastic invention. You know. It means that we end
Speaker 1: up getting more for what we're you know, what we're
Speaker 1: putting into it. It does not mean that we're you know,
Speaker 1: suddenly tapping into free energy or anything like that, but
Speaker 1: it's still important. Um well, even Tesla's towers wouldn't be
Speaker 1: free with the idea, but the idea was that it would.
Speaker 1: Uh Like the the conspiracy theorists all say that the
Speaker 1: reason why these don't exist is because power companies don't
Speaker 1: want that information to ever get out because it means
Speaker 1: that they would no longer have because how, yeah, how
Speaker 1: would you meter it? Like if you're just broadcasting electricity,
Speaker 1: then you don't know who's using what and you can't
Speaker 1: charge people. You can charge a flat fee for everybody,
Speaker 1: but that's all you could do. I can believe that
Speaker 1: power companies would definitely be against this, but I don't
Speaker 1: buy the conspiracy. There's there's also you know, there was
Speaker 1: that brief period of time after he passed away that
Speaker 1: that his notes kind of sort of disappeared in the
Speaker 1: fans of the U S government. The US government ended
Speaker 1: up essentially commandeering his notes u partially because they didn't
Speaker 1: want it to fall into other other government's hands. Um,
Speaker 1: So there was there was a definitely a conspiracy theory
Speaker 1: there for a while that the US government was trying
Speaker 1: to to to keep it quiet, like the death ray
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. But then it may
Speaker 1: very well be more along the lines of they just
Speaker 1: didn't want some other nation to get hold of this
Speaker 1: and then take advantage of it and uh and set
Speaker 1: the United States back. The papers were eventually released, so
Speaker 1: they were not held forever. Um Beyond that, we then
Speaker 1: have Edison. Thomas Edison. He actually did invent quite a
Speaker 1: few things, although many of the things that are attributed
Speaker 1: to he was more of a businessman honestly than an inventor.
Speaker 1: Not that he wasn't a terrific inventor, but he's I
Speaker 1: think to some extent. I think it's a little fairly vilified. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: so so Tesla on the Internet gets lionized, Edison gets demonized. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like I said in the Oatmeal comic strip,
Speaker 1: it's very which is a funny little comic strip. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't mean to say little either. It's a funny
Speaker 1: comic strip. I don't mean to I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: to belittle it. But it oversimplifies the relationship between Tesla
Speaker 1: and Edison and their contribution. It does, And the author
Speaker 1: has come out and said that, yes, it oversimplifies it,
Speaker 1: and I was I was making a comic that is
Speaker 1: the funny and so therefore, you know, please don't take
Speaker 1: that meant to be an Encyclopedia entering. For some reason,
Speaker 1: though this meme really latched on the thing about Tesla.
Speaker 1: People had been crazy about Tesla for a while, but
Speaker 1: the Oatmeal comic strip kind of put it into it,
Speaker 1: put it into a framework that people really identified. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you combine that on top of like David Bowie's
Speaker 1: performance and the prestige and stuff like that, and it's
Speaker 1: just a great story. You know, You've got where Edison's
Speaker 1: like this mob ball, He's got goons that come in
Speaker 1: and spoiler alert, some of us haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 1: So anyway, uh So, Anyway, what I was going to say, though,
Speaker 1: is that is a great story that you have the
Speaker 1: idealistic inventor who is and he's downtrodden because the corporations
Speaker 1: are the ones that keep pulling the rug out from
Speaker 1: underneath him. The actual story is way more complex than that.
Speaker 1: And anyway, going back to Edison and talking about what
Speaker 1: he actually did invent, he did invent lots of telegraph improvements.
Speaker 1: In fact, one of his earliest jobs was working for
Speaker 1: a telegraph company. Um the story I heard was that
Speaker 1: he rescued a young man from certain death and the
Speaker 1: young man's father ended up employing Edison in his telegraph company.
Speaker 1: And then Edison eventually in one of his wacky experiments
Speaker 1: because he did like to experiment with stuff, accidentally spilled
Speaker 1: some acid in his work room which was directly over
Speaker 1: his boss's office, and the acid leaked down and ended
Speaker 1: up earning holes and papers on the boss's desk, and
Speaker 1: he was subsequently let go. But that he he did
Speaker 1: create some improvements to telegraph operation and then his first
Speaker 1: major invention was an improved stock ticker, which he sold
Speaker 1: to the Gold and Stock Telegraph Company for the princely
Speaker 1: sum of forty thousand dollars, which back in those days
Speaker 1: was quite a bit of cash. Still not not a
Speaker 1: bad haul, but it was a lot back then. He
Speaker 1: used that money to help create his first R and
Speaker 1: D facility. Uh, and then eventually he ended up selling
Speaker 1: other inventions and moved that facility to Menlo Park, which
Speaker 1: is the famous one that everyone associates with Edison though, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was the wizard of Menlo Park. And Uh. The
Speaker 1: other big invention, the one that got him lots of
Speaker 1: fame was the phonograph that was and that that seems
Speaker 1: to be Edison's invention. It wasn't that, you know, he
Speaker 1: had he didn't have a team working on that that
Speaker 1: was now in Menlo Park. He end up getting a
Speaker 1: team of engineers and technicians together and you know he
Speaker 1: would direct the company, but a lot of the actual
Speaker 1: work in inventing, testing, discarding ideas, trying new ideas fell
Speaker 1: to his team. So while Edison was quite the inventor,
Speaker 1: many of the things, including things like the incandescent light bulb,
Speaker 1: were really the products of lots of people working together.
Speaker 1: That's true. But to be fair, a lot of the
Speaker 1: people we think of as uh discoverers inventors are project managers,
Speaker 1: you know, that's triple who were in charge of groups
Speaker 1: of people who were doing the hands on work. Well,
Speaker 1: especially the later you get and the more complex the
Speaker 1: technology is, the more important it becomes to have that
Speaker 1: team of people because it's getting increasingly complex for a
Speaker 1: single person to do one of these things. Also, we
Speaker 1: just have better records as we as we move up
Speaker 1: through history, And that's true to like this brilliant guy
Speaker 1: who comes up with these amazing ideas as fantastic, Thank goodness,
Speaker 1: he hasn't learned to read it write yet. Um. The
Speaker 1: impression I get when I look at Edison is like
Speaker 1: the name of the game was volume, so he is
Speaker 1: responsible for tons of Also he had hearing loss, so
Speaker 1: it would have been important. No, I just mean he
Speaker 1: had tons and tons of inventions and so lots were great.
Speaker 1: And then there are all these things that you look
Speaker 1: at and be like there. The one I saw the
Speaker 1: other day, just the other day online was something about
Speaker 1: Edison's patent for the single poor concrete house. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: was big on concrete. He he had a single park
Speaker 1: concrete house. He was big on concrete furniture. UM. Other
Speaker 1: patents that he held included a pneumatic stencil pen, which
Speaker 1: is basically a tattoo machine made use of those, an
Speaker 1: electric power meter which worked off of zinc cells UM
Speaker 1: and that that would have to be changed out by
Speaker 1: by the meter reader. UM. An electrographic vote recorder that
Speaker 1: that could have, you know, sent a basic on off
Speaker 1: signal to to record votes like for example, from the
Speaker 1: lobby of Congress or something like that. Right, okay, not
Speaker 1: one of those old voting machines. No, No, like that.
Speaker 1: The whole show about that. But moving moving on from
Speaker 1: our great triumvirate of Tesla, Westinghouse and Edison, the next
Speaker 1: name I have is a Philo Farnsworth, which is this
Speaker 1: is funny because it's we're talking about television here, and
Speaker 1: electronic television. Now, a lot of different people were working
Speaker 1: on the idea of television at this time, and this
Speaker 1: time being like in the early twentieth century, a lot
Speaker 1: of different people from all over the world. We're working
Speaker 1: on this and uh. And Farnsworth was developing ideas that
Speaker 1: other people had kind of started, and then he was
Speaker 1: picking up and carrying on. Uh. It's interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: he was fifteen years old when he first thought of
Speaker 1: using a lens to focus an image through a tube
Speaker 1: onto a section of photo electric cells. I was back
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty two. Uh. And then he eventually would
Speaker 1: file a patent for the idea he came up with
Speaker 1: in nineteen seven. And he wasn't the only person to
Speaker 1: come up with an idea of this nature that would
Speaker 1: eventually lead to the way we think of television today, because,
Speaker 1: like I said, there were other inventors who had come
Speaker 1: up with ideas for television, including some mechanical sets that
Speaker 1: weren't using electronics. They were using other means to try
Speaker 1: and bring a picture to a screen. So he was
Speaker 1: given the credit of being the inventor of television. But
Speaker 1: there are a lot of people who point out there
Speaker 1: are many other names that you could mention when you
Speaker 1: come to television in general. Uh and this this kind
Speaker 1: of illustrates how complex this is. Same sort of thing
Speaker 1: is true when you get to the discussion of who
Speaker 1: invented the radio. Uh, there's it's far more complex than
Speaker 1: just saying it's Mark, Yeah exactly, don't you remember. Uh So,
Speaker 1: the the point being that that Farnsworth, while we mentioned
Speaker 1: him as the inventor of television, it's the truth is
Speaker 1: it's far more complex. There was like one common part
Speaker 1: he was most directly responsible for, right, it was like
Speaker 1: the image dispersed or it was it was an anode
Speaker 1: finger that was it was a all right, magnetic coils
Speaker 1: that would move an anode finger with a scanning aperture
Speaker 1: over an image. That's the specific patent. Uh. And he also,
Speaker 1: you know, you would have thought that the guy who
Speaker 1: invinced TV, especially with how important TV is, that he
Speaker 1: would have you know, made a million billion dollars from it.
Speaker 1: But it didn't work out that way because what happened
Speaker 1: was he gets the invention just as electronic TVs are
Speaker 1: starting to get some traction, the United States goes into
Speaker 1: World War Two. As a result, almost all broadcasts halt,
Speaker 1: so just as television is about to get started, TV
Speaker 1: broadcasts essentially stopped. There were a few markets where they continued,
Speaker 1: but as a nation, it kind of ended. So suddenly
Speaker 1: he didn't have any money coming in from licensing. By
Speaker 1: the time World War Two ends, his patent had entered
Speaker 1: into public domain, so no one had to pay him
Speaker 1: licenses because now it's public domain information. Patents don't last forever,
Speaker 1: so less longer now than they used to write. I
Speaker 1: think it's the same amount of time actually, so because
Speaker 1: maybe it was seven was when he filed for the patent,
Speaker 1: and you know, we're nine six really at the end
Speaker 1: of the think you're thinking copyright, which has changed dramatically,
Speaker 1: but patents have been pretty much the same the the
Speaker 1: The interesting thing to me is that he got so
Speaker 1: disillusioned by how this turned out that he, according to
Speaker 1: his wife, would not even allow the use of the
Speaker 1: word television in the home because because he was burned
Speaker 1: by it. I mean, it was his work that was
Speaker 1: being used and he didn't really benefit from it. Um
Speaker 1: he towards the end of his life. He died in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one. Towards the end of his life, he
Speaker 1: was actually working on a different idea that we're still
Speaker 1: kind of hoping will pan out, which is using atomic
Speaker 1: fusion as a means of generating power. So he was
Speaker 1: invited to be part of the Manhattan Project but turned
Speaker 1: it down supposedly, I mean he definitely turned it down
Speaker 1: if he were, if he were in fact invited the
Speaker 1: invitation parts of the supposedly. Um. And then we've got
Speaker 1: some information about some some some wacky crazy inventions that
Speaker 1: weren't intended wacky crazy. I'm silly at least. Yeah, speaking
Speaker 1: of in the video, we talked about how so there
Speaker 1: were all these things where oh, people were messing around
Speaker 1: doing their thing and they discovered something important. But it
Speaker 1: also goes the other way, right, they were trying to
Speaker 1: discover something important, working towards something important, and then yeah,
Speaker 1: and accidentally discovered something really fun. Um. One of my
Speaker 1: favorite examples is the super soaker um so water gun.
Speaker 1: I used him when I was a kid. I thought
Speaker 1: it was great because the things sprays so hard it
Speaker 1: kind of hurts, and and what you really want to
Speaker 1: do with the gun is inflict pain. But it's hard
Speaker 1: to do that when it's a regular squirre gun. Unless
Speaker 1: you get them right in the eyes right so, or
Speaker 1: you're filling it with lemon juice or something, yeah, or
Speaker 1: anything cost it yet as a kid, no idea. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying that if you wanted to, I did not
Speaker 1: want to. I'm like Joe, I did not wish to
Speaker 1: inflict harm. Yeah, oh sure yeah. Um, so you've got
Speaker 1: the super soaker where well where did it come from?
Speaker 1: Turns out it was invented by accident, um by a
Speaker 1: nuclear engineer named lawn E. Johnson. And this he was
Speaker 1: an engineer who had worked for NASA before, and he
Speaker 1: was trying to design a cooling pump. Um and so
Speaker 1: what with the way he thought he could design this
Speaker 1: cooling pump was to use water to compressed water to
Speaker 1: disperse heat. And when he was testing a prototype at home,
Speaker 1: he was shooting the water out of the tank and
Speaker 1: it went, you know, and he thought, wow, I make
Speaker 1: a great water gun. Boom, there's your fortune. Change change
Speaker 1: change tracks go from the cooling pump to the water
Speaker 1: gun market and child satist rout he made crazy bank
Speaker 1: on that. But we also mentioned like, um, there's this Well,
Speaker 1: so we were talking about World War two earlier with Farnsworth.
Speaker 1: A couple of inventions came out of World War two
Speaker 1: era efforts. One was the slinky um, which was supposed
Speaker 1: to be Originally it was a steel torsion spring, and
Speaker 1: if you can imagine this, what it was supposed to
Speaker 1: do was stabilize a naval instrument. So if you imagine
Speaker 1: you're out on the ocean in rough weather and the
Speaker 1: ships being tossed around a lot, I, how do you
Speaker 1: keep your instruments stable energy to prevent exactly? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: you'd hang it from a thing like a slinky, and
Speaker 1: then it wouldn't it wouldn't be shaken, right, It ends up.
Speaker 1: It ends up. Yeah. Um. But so what this guy
Speaker 1: discovered was while he had this prototype sitting on a
Speaker 1: table and he knocked it off and just watched this
Speaker 1: beautiful arc. Yeah. The way it traveled was just so elegant,
Speaker 1: and then it's on your back. It's great for a snack.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, but the same thing, really log slinky, same thing.
Speaker 1: Another World War two era accidental invention that turned out
Speaker 1: really fun was silly putty, which was originally supposed to
Speaker 1: be a rubber substitute. Right in World or two, there
Speaker 1: was a rubber ration because you had to use rubber
Speaker 1: for boots, tires, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, stuff for
Speaker 1: the war effort. Um, So what are you going to
Speaker 1: use for the rubber you need? While people were trying
Speaker 1: to come up with another way to make something like rubber,
Speaker 1: synthetic rubber instead, what he made was a really fun
Speaker 1: toy that's cool to put, you know, in your sister's
Speaker 1: shoe or something like that. Exactly. Yeah, if you want to,
Speaker 1: you know, pick up the Funnies Sunday paper. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because he could actually transferred stuff. Yeah, you can pick
Speaker 1: up newsprint and then you could also make it balance.
Speaker 1: It was, yeah, it was, but it was just one
Speaker 1: of those things that accidentally happened. We got the names here, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the slinky guy was Richard James and the silly
Speaker 1: Putty Guy was James, right, yep. And uh you know,
Speaker 1: the spirit of invention, of course goes all the way
Speaker 1: up till today. We've got you know, we mentioned uh LYE.
Speaker 1: Johnson who invented the super soaker. Of course, he was
Speaker 1: working on one thing and came up with another. We've
Speaker 1: got some great examples of modern day inventors. I mean
Speaker 1: they're they're companies that are built on the fact that
Speaker 1: the founders were really enthusiasts who were trying out new
Speaker 1: things Apple example. Especially as we get into electronics, it
Speaker 1: starts getting really Yeah, if you're listening to this on
Speaker 1: a computer right now or an iPod or something like that,
Speaker 1: you want to thank a couple of pranksters from the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. Yeah, Steve Jobs, and Steve wasn'tiac. Wasn'tiac was
Speaker 1: of course the really the computer whizz of the two
Speaker 1: Jobs was not that he was bad at at computers,
Speaker 1: but he was really good at business, the business side
Speaker 1: and the marketing side. And Wasn'tiac he he actually, you
Speaker 1: know he was. He was known as a bit of
Speaker 1: a prankster. In fact, still is known as a bit
Speaker 1: of a prankster. But back in the day he was.
Speaker 1: He was one of those guys who was really interested
Speaker 1: in learning how things work and then kind of playing
Speaker 1: with them. So one of them was so, yeah, back
Speaker 1: in the back in the late sixties, early seventies, really
Speaker 1: the seventies, um was where it began to floor. There
Speaker 1: was this, uh, there was this culture called phone freaking
Speaker 1: freaking spelled with a pH. Yeah, So so phone freaking
Speaker 1: was all about finding ways to manipulate the telephone system,
Speaker 1: not necessarily just to make prank phone calls, although there
Speaker 1: were plenty of those being made, but also just learning
Speaker 1: that if you created certain tones on certain phone systems,
Speaker 1: for example, you could make a free phone call anywhere
Speaker 1: you wanted. You know, you would learn what tones the
Speaker 1: system relied on, and if you could replicate those tones,
Speaker 1: then you would be able to take advantage of it.
Speaker 1: One of the famous phone freakers was known as Captain
Speaker 1: Crunch because because he discovered that a little toy plastic
Speaker 1: whistle that came in the box of Captain Crunch created
Speaker 1: the exact tone he needed in order to manipulate one
Speaker 1: of the telephone systems, and so that that's where his
Speaker 1: nickname came from, was the fact that he discovered this.
Speaker 1: And uh Wozniak was known as one of the guys
Speaker 1: who was really into this phone freaking thing, like learned,
Speaker 1: and it was really more about he had the sensatiable
Speaker 1: curiosity to learn how these systems worked and to kind
Speaker 1: of learn how to do things within the system that
Speaker 1: the system was not necessarily designed to do, which is
Speaker 1: the very the very heart of hacking. And and innovation
Speaker 1: and tinkering, this idea of taking something that exists and
Speaker 1: then tweaking it in a way so it does something
Speaker 1: new and unusual. Um and sometimes it with amazing results. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean people probably don't even realize that the computer
Speaker 1: you have now you you can thank hobbyists for that.
Speaker 1: I mean, computers came from people who were screwing around
Speaker 1: doing something fun, right, Yeah, they were they were taking
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, yeah, well yeah, because the before the micro computer,
Speaker 1: we're talking about computers that took took up entire rooms
Speaker 1: in the research lab. That's a really good distinction. Actually
Speaker 1: we are talking about personal computers because because the macro computers,
Speaker 1: if you want to put it that way, we're all
Speaker 1: being developed by unif space at the time, absolutely in government.
Speaker 1: But so Wozniak built the Apple one for his computer club.
Speaker 1: You know, he was hanging out with his buddies and
Speaker 1: I guess it was Palo Alto, the Homebrew Computer Club. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they would just try to impress each other by
Speaker 1: building computers. And there was another interesting pair of people
Speaker 1: who would visit the Homebrew Computer Club in order to
Speaker 1: talk about a programming language. They had developed a programming language,
Speaker 1: a variant of basic which had been invented back in
Speaker 1: the sixties. Um, those two people were Paul Allen and
Speaker 1: Bill Gates, who would go on to found Microsoft. So
Speaker 1: you even had Apple and Microsoft both coming out of
Speaker 1: this culture at the same time. Now, in one case,
Speaker 1: we're talking about invention through software as opposed to hardware,
Speaker 1: but the same spirit was there, this idea of learning
Speaker 1: how things work and then creating new things based upon
Speaker 1: those principles, and we still see that today. So um,
Speaker 1: I think that's a good coverage of the history of
Speaker 1: invention from a link a ten thousand mile high perspective. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I do want to mention that, you know, all of
Speaker 1: our examples are basically here in the West. That's because
Speaker 1: we live in American and we speak English and and
Speaker 1: and and our research base is very Western, and a
Speaker 1: lot of our information comes from you know, the U. S.
Speaker 1: Patent Office and stuff that, and they have a terrific
Speaker 1: blog if you ever want to check it out. Um.
Speaker 1: They mentioned all kinds of really cool random stuff like
Speaker 1: the pattern that Michael Jackson got for the shoes that
Speaker 1: let him do the smooth criminal lean stuff like very important.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, critical critically. I remember seeing that video
Speaker 1: and thinking I want to be able to do that,
Speaker 1: and uh, two broken noses later, I said, I'm done.
Speaker 1: I'm done. Yeah, it's shoes that hook into the stage.
Speaker 1: Yeah that I did not realize that that was an
Speaker 1: important thing to to to learn later on, actually more
Speaker 1: important to learn you're not quite a smooth criminal yet
Speaker 1: sort of a rough criminal. Yeah, yeah, rough delinquent, that's yeah.
Speaker 1: I think the linquent is is probably the best best
Speaker 1: phrase to use. So, uh yeah, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of like you were saying, Lauren, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of inventions that have come out from other parts of
Speaker 1: the world, obviously, and they have been terrific. But yeah,
Speaker 1: there have been some fantastic examples. But uh yeah, we
Speaker 1: were looking at this from a Western perspective just because
Speaker 1: that's where we're from. Not to suggest that that's the
Speaker 1: only perspective, but anyway, that that's kind of a roundup
Speaker 1: of just some of the people we were thinking of
Speaker 1: when we were talking about this spirit of invention and innovation,
Speaker 1: and uh, in our next show, we're going to start
Speaker 1: talking about some of the really fun, crazy inventions that
Speaker 1: people have come up with as as part of the
Speaker 1: maker fare movement, and uh I can't wait to talk
Speaker 1: about them because some of them are not practical at
Speaker 1: all and incredibly awesome kind of like me. All right,
Speaker 1: So that wraps this up. Guys, if you have enjoyed
Speaker 1: this show, let us know, send us an email. Let's
Speaker 1: know what you would like us to talk about in
Speaker 1: the future. Our email addresses f W Thinking at discovery
Speaker 1: dot com. Go to FW thinking dot com for all
Speaker 1: the videos, the blog post, the podcasts, and all the
Speaker 1: other information we've got there. We've got some really great
Speaker 1: articles linked on there that I think you will enjoy,
Speaker 1: So go check it out and let us know what
Speaker 1: you think, and we will talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: For more on this topic in the future of technology,
Speaker 1: visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you by Toyota.
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