Fasinating Facts About Famous Inventions

Fasinating Facts About Famous Inventions MISCELLANEOUS EQUIPMENT Miscellaneous 22-6-23 The following items were sent to us by Inventors Digest Magazine, which is the best publication on the market for anyone with an invention that they want to patent or market (call 1-800-838-8808 for a sample is-sue of the magazine). • The inventor of the World Wide Web, British-born Tim Berners-Lee, never made money on his invention, which revolutionized the computer world. In 1989 he envisioned a way to link documents on the Internet using "hypertext" so "surfers" could jump from one document to another through highlighted words. Berners-Lee decided not to patent his technology since he feared that, if he did patent it, use of the Web would be too expensive and would therefore not become used worldwide. He therefore passed up a fortune so the world could learn and communicate. • Power steering was invented by independent inventor Francis W. Davis. As chief engineer in the 1920s of the truck division of the Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company, he saw how hard it was to steer heavy vehicles. Davis left his job, rented a small engineering shop in Waltham, Mass., and developed the first hydraulic power steering system. • Melting ice cream inspired the invention of the outboard motor. It was a lovely Au-gust day and Ole Evinrude was rowing his boat to his favorite island picnic spot. As he rowed, he watched his ice cream melt and wished he had a faster way to get to the is-land. At that moment the idea for the out-board motor was born. • The first Apple computer was built in Steve Jobs' parents' garage. College students Jobs and his partner Steve Wozniak worked furiously in that garage assembling computers for fellow students and were totally unprepared for their first commercial order for 50 computers. To raise the needed $1,300 for parts, Jobs sold his old VW bus and Wozniak sold his Hewlett Packard calculator. The next year - 1977 - Apple sales hit $800,000 and the company went on to become a Fortune 500 company in a record five years. • The formulas for Coca-Cola and Silly Putty have never been patented. These trade secrets are shared only with selected trust-worthy company employees, and while there have been many attempts to duplicate these products, so far, no one has been successful. Hot Products With Humble Beginnings • While attempting to develop a super strong glue, 3M employee Spencer Silver accidentally developed a glue that was so weak it would barely hold two pieces of paper together. However, his colleague Art Fry needed the glue. Fry sang with his church choir and marked the pages of his hymnal with small scraps of paper that often fell out. He used Silver's glue to hold the papers in place. Today we call this invention Post-it Notes. • The Eveready Battery began as an invention called the "electric flowerpot", which was a tube with a battery and light bulb inside. The idea was to fasten this gizmo to the side of a flowerpot so it would illuminate the flowers from the bottom. The idea died on the vine and the businessman who licensed the flower pot, Conrad Huber, was left with a pile of useless tubes - until he found a way to market them as batteries to light the world.

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