 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  | ||||
| By N2H | |||||||
Articles
- Home
- Who Discovered the Constellation Aries
- Who Discovered Gemini
- Who Discovered Constellation Sagittarius
- Who Discovered the Constellations
- Who Discovered Constellation Leo
- Who Discovered the Quadratic Formula
- Who Discovered Venus
- Who Discovered Saturn
- Who Discovered Potassium
- Who Discovered Pi
- Who Discovered the Mitochondria
- Who Discovered Mercury
- Who Discovered Planet Mars
- Who Discovered Magnets
- Who Discovered DNA
- Who Discovered Planet Earth
- Who Discovered Heart Disease
- Who Discovered Hydrogen
- Who Discovered Influenza
- Who Discovered Leukemia
- Who Discovered Iron
- Who Discovered Jupiter
- Who Discovered Magnesium
- Who Discovered Constellation Pegasus
- Who Discovered Copper
- Who Discovered Constellation Taurus
- Who Discovered Big Dipper
- Who Discovered Calcium
- Who Discovered Chocolate
- Who Discovered America
- Who Discovered Albinism
- Who Invented the Snickers Candy Bar
- Who Invented the Television
- Who Invented the CD Player
- Who Invented the American Flag
- Who Invented Football
- Who Invented Chocolate
- Who Invented Basketball
- Who invented the Telephone
- Who invented Video Games
- Who invented Opera
- Who invented Radio
- Who invented Electricity
- Who invented Soccer
- Who invented the Airplane
- Who invented the Car
- Who invented the Cell Phone
- Who invented the Paper Clip
- Who invented the Segway
- Who invented the Space Shuttle
Who Invented the Television
The invention of the television often generates very heated discussion even amongst friends as to who actually invented the TV. Unfortunately several people were all working on television independently of each other, and a variety of different technologies were tested, all of which contributed to the actual design of the first commercial televisions.
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone actually demonstrated sending images over a telegraph wire in 1880, but this has never been considered a precursor to television, but could be considered the first example of videophones, a technology that is today used mostly in security video intercom systems.
Traditionally John Logie Baird from Scotland is credited with inventing television because he was the first person to broadcast a moving image that could be received in another location in 1926, though the picture Baird transmitted wasn’t actually video as we would understand it today. Baird and a colleague, Charles Jenkins, used a mechanical electrical system for transmitting a bunch of black and white silhouettes.
The following year Philo Farnsworth of the US demonstrated a different concept for television broadcast using a completely electronic camera to capture motion compared to the mechanical system developed by Baird. In 1922 Farnsworth first discovered that a cathode ray tube could be used for displaying a picture, and using a similar principle he invented a camera called an image dissector that was fully electronic. Unfortunately his camera couldn’t be demonstrated until 1927, and wasn’t very efficient at detecting light and very hot bright lights were needed to illuminate the object or person being filmed.
Farnsworth’s experiments never led to successfully patenting his invention, and resulted in a major lawsuit with RCA who had employed a Hungarian scientist named Kálmán Tihanyi to develop their own television system. Tihanyi had first started thinking about television broadcasting in 1917, but it wasn’t until 1924 that he finally began his experiments, and 1926 when he applied for his first patent. Tihanyi was a pioneer who some believe should be rightfully considered the father of television.
Despite Tihanyi’s early patent for an electronic television system, Farnsworth successfully defended his rights when a former high school teacher testified that Farnsworth had drawn a diagram of how he intended to create an electronic television system when he was just 14, at least 4 years before Tihanyi’s first experiments.
Ironically, a Japanese inventor, Kenjiro Takayanagi, experimented with electronic television and successfully demonstrated a working system before both Farnsworth and Tihanyi, but isn’t considered the father of television since he only started his research after reading about John Logie Baird’s experiment.
Related Articles:
Who Invented the CD Player
The Compact Disc (CD) player has revolutionized music recording and completely changed the way people enjoy audio playback in less than thirty years of production. CD players use a system of lasers that read digitally encoded bits of information that are assembled in the main processor into their original audio tracks.
The very first commercially available CD player was released in Japan in 1982 by Sony and was an immediate hit with the press and the buying public despite the high price of $900. The year before Sony had announced that in partnership with Philips, they had developed the compact disc player, but each company had been independently developing their own technologies since the mid 1970s. The Sony CDP101 was the very first CD player sold, and feature a horizontal drive tray, whereas the prototype machine shown the year before had used a vertically mounted tray.
A joint patent for the CD player and its technology was registered by Sony and Philips in 1980 when they published their Red Book which details the standards for creating CD players, recorders, and the way discs should be encoded. Kees Immink (Philips) and Toshi Doi (Sony) are listed as the inventors of the compact disc standard, so the simple answer to the question who invented the CD player has been answered, or so we think.
The story doesn’t stop here, optical discs from which the CD is derived were actually invented a long time before Sony and Philips ever joined forces to create the Red Book. It is often forgotten that in fact using lasers for reading data had been experimented with since the 1960s, with the Laserdisc being invented in 1969 and a prototype machine made in 1972 by a joint venture formed by Philips and MCA of the US. Holographs had been encoded into optical discs in those early tests, and it didn’t take long for scientists to start thinking about fully digital encoding.
The laserdisc technology had been invented even earlier than the first LaserDisc by an American scientist, David Gregg in 1958, who named his technology VideoDisk, and registered patents in 1961 and 1969. Gregg’s VideoDisk invention wasn’t really anything like the modern CD, but he was the first person to recognize that optical media could be used. Gregg later sold his company and patents to MCA but the very first commercially produced VideoDisk didn’t arrive on the market until the late 1970s.
To make matters even more confusing, the Optical Recording Corporation (ORC) of Toronto, a company founded by some of Gregg’s former associates, bought the rights to other optical recording patents from another American scientist, James Russell in 1985. They immediately issued notices to Philips, Sony, and other corporations that CD technology actually belonged to ORC. Sony and Philips subsequently licensed the technology from ORC, whilst Time Warner chose to fight the claim, but losing in court and being forced to pay $30 million in damages.
Related Articles:
Who invented the Telephone
The telephone, that dinosaur of 20th century technology that seems to be rapidly going out of favor as cellphones and the Internet take over, is also probably one of the most influential inventions of the post industrial age era.
For more than a hundred years business has depended on having access to phones, and it is no accident that the wealthiest of nations have very high telephone use across all parts of society.
In the mid 1800s telegraph services had expanded to most major cities in the US and Europe, and was considered the height of technological progress, in fact most commentators of the time wouldn’t have been able to see a use for telephones, and inventors of the era were usually discouraged from experimenting with useless techniques that weren’t needed.
Thankfully several of them chose to ignore the advice of their peers, namely Alexander Graham Bell, a man who started his career working with deaf people, partly trying to teach them to speak, and partly trying to invent technology that would let them hear. It was while researching hearing devices that Bell discovered it was possible to send a sound across a telegraph line instead of just a short or long tone.
From his experiments Bell realized it must be possible to send multiple tones thru a single telegraph line, and then managed to find investors who could see the value in owning technology that would allow telegraph lines to carry more traffic using different frequencies. Bell’s discovery, and employing Thomas Watson, an electrical engineer as his assistant, were pivotal in the invention of the telephone, the only thing missing was a decent microphone that would be capable of converting sound to a signal that could be transmitted across a telegraph line.
On the 14th of February 1876 Bell’s lawyer presented his patent application to the USPO, but so too did another inventor Elisha Gray, who had been working on a similar idea, and whose idea was actually a bit more advanced than Bell’s. In fact Bell’s lawyer had been holding off on presenting Bell’s patent while it was registered in England, but when he found out from the patent office clerk that Gray had submitted his application, $100 was paid to the clerk to let the Bell’s lawyer see the patent application and delay Gray’s while changes were made and then Bell’s application submitted.
After, when the patent office examiner checked both applications and found them similar he demanded a demonstration from each applicant. Bell managed to demonstrate his telephone first even though he used the same technique mentioned in Gray’s patent application, and was declared the patent holder. Some people still believe that Grey was robbed of the title inventor of the telephone, but Bell’s supporters counter that Gray hadn’t even created a prototype when he applied for his patent yet Bell had already proved the technology.
Related Articles:
Who invented Video Games
Video games in the 21st century are one of the biggest selling products in the entertainment industry, in some markets even starting to overtake conventional music sales. Video games are roughly described as an electronic game with some rudimentary form of interaction in terms of the player having control of some aspect of the game, and there being a point to playing.
Video games weren’t invented until after the invention of the computer since a processor is required to render graphics on screen, keep track of player interaction, keep score, and assume the role of game adjudicator or another player. Computer video games can be run on home computers, consoles using a TV screen, or mini consoles with their own screen built in. The difference between electronic games and video games is the addition of a screen, as compared to electronic board games for example which may only emit sounds.
Original OXO Screenshot
The very first games invented for computers used oscilloscopes to plot the movement a dot on screen, or simply displayed a character in a given position, and early games sometimes had a piece of clear film placed over the CRT screen to provide extra information. The first recorded video game was written in 1952 at Cambridge on the EDSAC computer by Alexander Douglas, and was a very simple yet effective rendition of tic-tac-toe. Many historians agree this was one of the first video games but disagree that it was influential since it could only be played at Cambridge.
A similarly simple game was developed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958 by William Higinbotham that also used an oscilloscope to display the game which consisted of a horizontal line, a short vertical line in it’s center, and a dot that flew from one side to the other and simulated a tennis game. Two players could operate dials to ‘hit’ the ball and get it to return to the opposite side.
The first game that could be played on more than one machine was Spacewar, written by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen in 1961 for the DEC PDP-1 platform. Source code for the game was freely shared amongst the academic fraternity so was likely played on hundred’s of machines, and definitely qualifies as the very first video game.
Pacman - Original Screenshot
The first video game that could be played on a TV set, called Chase, was written by Ralph Baer in 1967 for a new console being developed by Sanders Associates which was subsequently licensed to Magnavox and sold over 100,000 units, but shipped with other games developed by the firm. Ralph Baer’s patents were licensed to Atari as well, who developed the biggest selling arcade console of the 1970s.
Related Articles:
Who invented Radio
Radio refers to both the technology used to broadcast programs, and also the underlying science of radio waves, which are actually electromagnetic radiation that travels in waves just like light. Radio, even though it is used to broadcast audio signals is not in fact sound, though sound also travels in waves, but much much slower than radio waves.
Because radio is electro magnetic, it’s discovery goes back to around the same time that electricity was being experimented with in the early 1800s, however the ability to broadcast electromagnetic waves wirelessly wasn’t considered until much later. Many years of calculating the speed of electromagnetic waves, and creating formula for defining them went by. James Maxwell, the first person to start creating math for determining electromagnetic equations published his results in 1865, but the equations which are now known as Maxwell’s equations were extended by several other mathematicians, including Heinrich Hertz.
From these equations it became possible to experiment with broadcasting electromagnetic waves, and in 1879 David Hughes became the first person to successfully broadcast a morse code signal wirelessly across a room, however his achievements were dismissed and almost forgotten about, and Heinrich Hertz, a German university professor, has incorrectly been labeled the first person to send and receive radio signals.
Hertz deserves as much credit for helping the development of radio of any of his peers, but he in his own lifetime dismissed his radio experiments as worthless and doubted they would ever have a practical use. Hertz also inadvertently discovered radar, and once again dismissed his discovery as worthless and only useful in proving Maxwell’s theories to his students. Hertz died in 1894, so never saw how his discovery would change the world, but his writings were studied, and his experiments copied by a young Italian inventor named Guglielmo Marconi.
Gugliemo Marconi
Marconi is very well known worldwide as the inventor of radio, and in 1894 tested his first radio transmitter over a distance of a few yards. By 1896 he was in England working for the British Post Office developing a wireless telegraph system that would be cheaper and more convenient to use than running wire stretched between poles from one end of the country to the other. Marconi’s original techniques weren’t powerful enough to cover a great distance until he started using coils invented by Nikola Tesla.
Tesla had actually demonstrated wireless radio in 1891, several years before Marconi, at one time commenting that Marconi was a good chap who had used 17 of Tesla’s patents to build his business. In 1915, when Marconi received the Nobel prize for inventing radio Tesla became very upset, and started legal proceedings to have his place in history assured. In 1943 Tesla finally won his case, long after both Marconi had died, and sadly, a few months after Tesla himself passed away.
Learn about the complete history of radio.
Related Articles:
Who invented Electricity
Unlike the telephone, computer, or television, electricity wasn’t really invented since it is a naturally occurring phenomenon that is easily seen whenever lightning rods are present during a powerful storm. Electrical storms can release more electricity in a single storm than the entire world uses in a year, most of the time storms and lightning is quite safe, but whenever electricity is present, the natural attraction of the current is to the ground, and anything in the way will likely be hit.
From the earliest times people knew that lightning was dangerous, and it was common knowledge that the tallest trees, or tallest buildings would be hit more often than those that were shorter. The reason for this wasn’t discovered until much later but it did give people a healthy respect for the power of lightning or electrical sparks. In ancient time, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans believed the electrical charge from catfish or rays were therapeutic for headaches.
Thales of Miletos
Static electricity, which is just one form of electricity, was discovered by accident by a Greek philosopher named Thales of Miletos who in 600BC experimented with rubbing some things such a rod of amber with his hand or another object would attract some light objects such as feathers, and which Thales mistakenly attributed to magnetism instead of electrical charge.
A thousand years later in Baghdad, the Sassanid people discovered that copper and iron suspended in a pottery jar filled with an acidic fluid such as lemon juice, could generate a current that some historians believe was used to electroplate small icons with silver or gold. Known as the Parthian battery, it’s inventor is unknown but is the first clear example of electricity being used by people. Other historians disagree that electroplating was the purpose, instead they believe that electrical current was used in religious ceremonies by connecting a group of batteries to artifacts that when touched would give worshippers a low shock and which could be said to indicate the presence of God.
An English renaissance scientist, William Gilbert rediscovered Thales principles, but correctly identified that electrical charge was responsible, and then named the phenomenon electricus from the Greek word for amber. Benjamin Franklin, one of the presidents of the US, discovered in 1752 that lightning is generated by electricity in a famous kite experiment with an iron key suspended close to the string that he was holding. When lightning strayed close to the key, Franklin would feel the hairs on the back of his hand tingle.
In 1800, an Italian scientist Alessandro Volta, invented the first modern battery that could be used to draw a regular current, and it is in his honor that the method of measuring a unit of electricity, the volt, was adopted. By the 1820s scientists all over Europe were actively experimenting with electricity, and in 1819 Andre-Marie Ampere discovered electromagnetism, quickly followed in 1821 with the invention of the electric motor by Michael Faraday in 1821.
Related Articles:
Who invented the Cell Phone
Cellphones, also called mobile phones, are an invention that in the late 1990s and into the 2nd millennium have become so ubiquitous many people can’t imagine life without them anymore. Cell phones work wirelessly using radio waves to communicate with a tower that transfers the call to the network, and then to the phone of the other party.
Amos Joel
The idea of using towers arranged in a cellular pattern with each only handling a small area of the total number of subscribers has been around since after the second world war. The technology however didn’t exist to create a cellular network that would allow subscribers to move from tower to tower automatically, and a system of calling a specific phone didn’t exist either, so until the 1960s most mobile calls were operated like two way radios.
In 1956 Ericsson, Sweden’s major telecommunications company and one of the world’s largest, invented the first fully automatic phone system that could be used away from normal telephone infrastructure. The system eventually had 125 subscribers in Stockholm and Gothenburg but hasn’t been considered a precursor to modern cell phones because the system was still more like a two way radio system.
In 1970, a breakthrough occurred when Amos Joel of Bell Labs invented a system he called “call handoff” that allowed phones to maintain an active call when traveling from tower to tower, and this invention, whilst often under appreciated by some historians, is in fact the most significant invention in the history of the cell phone because for the first time portable phones became truly mobile, capable of roaming many miles outside the range of the original tower.
Competition in the mobile radio market was intense in the US during the 1960s, and resulted in one of the most amusing anecdotes of the history of cell phones occurring in 1973 after a period of development at Motorola. A prototype cell phone was invented by a research team led by Martin Cooper. In a game of one-up-manship Cooper tested their prototype cell phone by calling Amos Joel over at Bell Labs to let him know that Bell had lost the race to produce the first cell phone. At the time Cooper was standing in a New York street and was witnessed by a group of reporters specially invited to the event.
Whilst Martin Cooper has been described as the inventor of the cell phone, he was actually the Motorola’s director of research and development, and shares the honor with a team f engineers who were also mentioned in Motorola’s patent for a radio telephone system.
Learn about the complete history of cell phones.
Related Articles:
Who invented the Segway
The Segway electric vehicle made by Segway Inc of the United States is a unique battery powered vehicle that needs only two wheels and self balances while riders stand with their feet placed on two small platforms located on the inside edge of each wheel. A steering column is positioned in the center of the vehicle with controls for acceleration and braking.
Dean Kamen
In 2001 the Segway PT, short for personal transporter, was officially unveiled by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway on the ABC TV show “Good Morning America” with Diane Sawyer who uttered the infamous line “That’s it?” in a very underwhelmed tone of voice after the wraps were taken off.
The previous year Kamen’s new invention had been widely speculated about as the new thing in transportation that Steve Jobs famously said would force cities to be redesigned. The story leaked about the imminent release of the Segway after Kamen had invited a journalist Steve Kemper to his DEKA factory to see the Segway prototype. Diane Sawyer’s reaction was sadly echoed by many and sales of the Segway were a disappointing 6,000 units in it’s first 3 years.
Dean Kamen had previously made his fortune with a number of other inventions such as the AutoSyringe allowing patients to receive medications reliably without having to be under constant care, and the iBot, a gyroscope balanced wheelchair that could climb stairs.
Kamen’s inventions have allowed him to develop an invention design company, DEKA, that employs over two hundred staff, and is the company that overseas all of his inventions. Shortly after the first Segway was launched, a spinoff company was founded with it’s own purpose designed factory to manufacture and sell the Segway PT. In 2002 the Segway finally reached the market.
Late 2002, after the disappointing release of the Segway PT it emerged that in fact Dean Kamen may not have been the actual inventor of the vehicle after a Japanese professor, Kazuo Yamafuji from Tokyo University announced that he had invented and produced prototypes of a similar vehicle in 1986, and that he and his colleagues had also registered a patent for their vehicle.
In fact Dean Kamen never claimed to be the inventor, his own patent application acknowledged the previous Japanese patent, thought Kamen’s representative stated that the Segway PT was so different being produced 15 year later that there was no need to change their belief that the Segway PT was invented by DEKA and Dean Kamen.
Related Articles:
Who invented the MP3 Player
MP3 players are different in some ways to portable music players, and shouldn’t be confused. Before the mp3 technology existed it was still possible to have digital audio files stored on portable players, but the invention of the mp3 standard paved the way for a great volume of music to be stored on a single small device, typically each mp3 is about 8 times smaller than the original uncompressed file.
Karl-Heinz Brandenburg
Music compression had been a holy grail of digital audio for many years, and in 1987 the Fraunhofer Institut from Germany started researching a compressed form of audio that could be used for digital TV broadcast, and in 1991 the company finally succeeded in inventing audio music in compressed form. MP3 is an acronym of MPEG Audio Layer III, and the MPEG part means Motion Pictures Expert Group.
The patent for the mp3 compression format names Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Ernst Eberlein, Bernhard Grill, Bernd Kurten, and Thomas Sporer as the inventors of mp3, though Brandenburg had been researching a method of compressing digital audio since 1977 so is usually considered the most influential of the group who invented mp3.
For several years the mp3 format was used only in research institutes and amongst musicians who needed a compressed format for storing music compositions.By the middle of the 1990s home users were encoding music and swapping albums over the Internet, and by 1998 the Winamp player for Windows had been invented.
In the summer of 1998 a solid state mp3 player with a 32mb storage chip made by Saehan of South Korea, and marketed as the Eiger Labs MPMan, was the very first mp3 player to be sold. It wasn’t well received because it was limited to 32mb and could only be upgraded by sending the device back to Saehan.
A few months later Diamond Multimedia started shipping a much smarter looking mp3 player they called the Rio PMP300 which also shipped with 32mb but could be expanded using SmartMedia cards allowing users to buy several cards and fill them with music. The Rio PMP300 was only available for a few weeks before the RIAA forced Diamond to suspend sales pending a decision by the Central District Court of California.
On October 26th 1998 Judge Andrea Collins denied the claim by the RIAA that the Rio PMP300 breached the Audio Home Recording Act, allowing Diamond to resume sales, and by the middle of 1999 over 200,000 units had been sold.
Check also who invented the iPod.
Related Articles:
Who invented the Internet
Who invented the Internet should be a really simple question to answer, after all the Internet has only been around for a few years, yet already controversy and the shrouding mists of time are starting to obscure the true record. Most importantly, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing, and this leads to a lot of confusion amongst people who see web browsing as the whole point of the Internet.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
In 1989 two scientists working for CERN in Switzerland started working on a concept for sharing research information, they were Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau. Sharing information prior to the invention of the world wide web meant simply uploading text documents to a file server which other people could access if they knew the precise location of the document.
Berners-Lee and Cailliau wrote a proposal for a hypertext language that would let authors of documents add markup letting readers see the document as it was meant to be read, with the inclusion of images, text highlighting, and most important of all, direct linking to related pages. This was published in 1989, and in 1990 Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser that could interpret HTML markup, and used his new HTTP protocol to access pages.
The Internet as a network of computers, which is its main function has been in existence much longer than the invention of the world wide web, and was first written about back in 1961 when Leonard Kleinrock wrote a paper which described a process for packet switching. By 1969, the same year as the first moon landing, Kleinrock and a team of engineers created the first ARPANET, a wide area network that is the precursor to today’s Internet.
Probably the true inventors of the modern Internet are two Americans named Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn who invented the TCP protocol which controls the way information is sent from computer to computer. Applications such as email, web browsing, or file transfer are handled by the TCP protocol and the Internet could not exist without this technology. For this reason many people consider Cerf and Kahn the true inventors of the Internet, tho they have publicly stated the Internet was invented by many deserving people and dedicate their awards to their colleagues who helped them.
In 1999, while appearing on CNN interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, Al Gore, the democratic nominee for President of the United States claimed to have been influential in creating the Internet, a statement many opponents of Gore immediately seized upon as a lie. In fact Gore sponsored the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 while he was a congressman in the US senate. This act finally removed restrictions to commercial use of the Internet, so in some ways Gore can be included amongst those who directly contributed to the invention of the Internet.
Learn about the complete history of the internet.
Related Articles:
« Previous Entries