Inventions and discoveries which changed the world

There was no universe before this theory. Some believe that there was a different universe before the Big Bang or it may be completely different from the one that you know today. Do you know air conditioning systems have been in existence since the ancient times?

However, in , the very first modern air conditioning was invented by engineer Willis Carrier in Buffalo, New York. Since prehistoric times, both ice and snow were used for cooling. The concept behind air conditioning is first applied in ancient Egypt, where reeds were moistened with trickling water. This process also made air humid that can be beneficial in a desert climate. Later, Chinese mechanical engineer Ding Huan invented rotary fan for A.

Designed to make the manufacturing process better, his invention controlled temperature and humidity. Instead of sending air through hot coils, he used cold coils. This is how the air conditioner was designed and invented. Over time, AC is used to improve comfort in automobiles and homes. Anesthesia is a temporary loss of sensation that is induced for medical purpose. It is not a direct means of treatment but allows curing an ailment or diagnosing which would be complicated. During 70 AD, crude forms of anesthesia like Mandrake and opium were used.

Earlier general anesthesia was the herbal remedy. Alcohol was one of the oldest sedatives and was used in ancient Mesopotamia. In , American surgeon Henry Bigelow invented chloroform or ether as general anesthetics to make surgeries less painful. The ideal anesthetic provides amnesia, muscle relaxation, hypnosis, and more. But it was first discovered by Swiss chemist Friedrich Miescher. DNA or Deoxyribonucleic acid is composed of two chains that are coil around each other to form a double helix.

After his discovery, other scientists researched more about DNA and helped us in understanding the process of how organisms pass on their genes. It is used by researchers to explore the physical laws and theories such as the theory of elasticity. I am impressed with these new and old scientific inventions. The other accomplishments are a reminder that scientists around the globe work hard to know about life and the universe. A year back, it was published that our brains can create neural structures of 11 dimensions.

With this research, scientists would be able to study the brain better. A lefty or left-handed uses his left hand more naturally and dominantly than the right hand.

These documents included the Bible and other important texts that allowed people to start questioning and reasoning by reading for themselves. By , twenty million had been printed in Western Europe. Inventor: Charles Babbage. The principal of the modern computer was first mentioned by Alan Turing and later the first mechanical computer was invented in early 19th century.

This invention has indeed accomplished amazing things in more areas of life than we realize. It has helped high performance military aircrafts to fly, put a spaceship into orbit, control medical equipment, create visual imagery, store vast amounts of information and allowed the functioning of car, phones and power plants. Its initial use was to provide a network of communication within research labs and universities within United States and expanded overtime.

This invention along with the World Wide Web has been the foremost revolutionary invention of the 20th century. In , more than 25 million computers were connected through the internet across countries.

World Wide Web. Inventor: Tim Berners-Lee. In fact, the main invention was not the wheel itself, which was likely invented the first time someone saw a rock rolling along, but the combination of a wheel and a fixed axle, which allows the wheel to be connected to a stable platform.

Without the fixed axel, the wheel has only very limited utility. This modern invention may have originally been created for spiritual purposes. Later it was adapted for navigational purposes. The earliest compasses were most likely invented by the Chinese, around BC. Some were made of lodestone, which is a naturally-occurring form of the mineral magnetite.

There is also evidence that other civilizations may have also used lodestone. At some point, possibly around CE, people began suspending the lodestones so they could move freely, and using them for navigation.

A description of a magnetized needle and its use among sailors occurs in a European book written in , so by that time, it is likely that the use of a needle as a compass was commonplace. Although the birth of the modern car is often said to have occurred in , when German inventor Karl Benz patented his Benz Patent-Motorwagen , automobiles had been in the works since , when Nicolas-Joseph Cugno developed the steam-powered automobile capable of human transportation. Over the years, a huge number of people contributed to the development of the automobile and its constituent parts.

In the early 20th century, Henry Ford innovated mass-production techniques that allowed automobiles to become affordable to the masses. These techniques then became standard with General Motors, and Chrysler following suit. The history of the automobile really reflects a worldwide evolution. The work of many people was required in order to develop the internal combustion engine and the other systems the automobile relies on.

Dozens of spin-off industries were also involved, including oil and steel. Hie patented a device that used steam power to propel water from mines. However, it is Englishman Thomas Savery, an engineer, and inventor, who is usually credited with developing the first practical steam engine, in His device was used to draw water from flooded mines using steam pressure.

In developing his engine, Savery used principles set forth by Denis Papin, a French-born British physicist who invented the pressure cooker. In , another Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, developed an improvement in the engine, and in , James Watt, a Scottish instrument maker employed by Glasgow University, added a separate condenser to Newcomen's engine, which allowed the steam cylinder to be maintained at a constant temperature — dramatically improving its functionality.

He later developed a double rotating steam engine that, by the s, would be powering trains, mills, factories, and numerous other manufacturing operations. Concrete is one of the most widely used artificial materials. It's a composite material made from a mixture of broken stone or gravel, sand, Portland cement, and water, which can be spread or poured into molds and forms a mass resembling stone on hardening.

One of the key ingredients of concrete is cement. The foundation of cement was laid in BC. Middle eastern builders coated the outside of their clay fortresses with a thin, and moist layer of burned limestone, which chemically reacted with gasses in the air to form a hard, protective surface.

Around BC, the first concrete-like structures were built by the Nabataea traders or Bedouins in the southern Syria and northern Jordan regions.

By BC, the significance of hydraulic lime was known, which led to the development of mortar supply kilns for the construction of rubble-wall houses, concrete floors, and underground waterproof cisterns. Around BC, the Egyptians were using early forms of concrete as a mortar in their building. In , Portland cement was invented by Joseph Aspdin of England. George Bartholomew had laid down the first concrete street in the US during , which still exists.

By the end of the 19 th century, the use of steel-reinforced concrete was developed. In , using steel-reinforced concrete, August Perret designed and built an apartment building in Paris. This building a wide admiration and popularity for concrete and also influenced the development of reinforced concrete. Gasoline is a fuel derivative of petroleum. To be more specific, petrol is a transparent, petroleum-derived liquid that is used as a fuel in internal combustion engines. Interestingly gas was initially discarded as an unwanted byproduct.

Before the discovery and commercialization of gasoline, the fuel of choice was a blend of alcohol, usually methanol, and turpentine called camphene, and later this would be largely replaced by kerosene. The first oil well dug in the US, i n , in Pennsylvania, refined the oil to produce kerosene. Although the distillation process also produced gasoline, this was discarded as a byproduct.

The method of distillation refining only produced about 20 percent gasoline from a given amount of crude petroleum. However, once it was discovered that the internal combustion engine ran best on light fuels like gasoline, the refining process was, well refined. In , to produce gasoline more easily using chemical catalysts and pressure. The new t hermal cracking process doubled the efficiency of refining and made refining gasoline more practical.

Railways can carry a large number of passengers with comfort while also being able to haul heavy loads to long distances. While tracks, or rails, had been in use for carrying wagons since the sixteenth century, the history of modern train travel is just over years old.

The first full-scale working railway steam locomotive was built in the United Kingdom in by Richard Trevithick , a British engineer. It used high-pressure steam to drive the engine. On 21 February , the world's first steam-powered railway journey took place when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway in Wales. However, Trevithick's locomotives were too heavy for the cast-iron plateway track then in use.

The commercial appearance of train networks came in the s. In , George Stephenson was appointed as an engineer for the construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the northeast of England, which was opened as the first public steam-powered railway in In , he built his famous steam engine, Rocket , and the age of railways had begun.

On December 17, , Wilbur and Orville Wright achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled flight. While flying machines had been dreamt up since Leonardo da Vinci's time, and likely long before, and thanks to the work of countless inventors over several centuries, the Wright Brothers became the first people to achieve controlled, powered flight.

Beginning with their work on gliders, the duo's success laid the foundation for modern aeronautical engineering by demonstrating what was possible.

Though fire is a natural phenomenon, its discovery as a useful tool marks a revolution in the pages of history. In fact, the controlled use of fire likely predates the emergence of Homo sapiens. There is evidence of cooked food from around 1. There is also evidence for the controlled use of fire by our ancestors, Homo erectus , beginning around 1,, years ago. Flint blades that have been burned in fires have been dated to roughly , years ago. There is also evidence that f ire was used systematically by early modern humans to heat treat stone, to increase its ability to flake, for use in toolmaking around , years ago.

According to a heavily debated hypothesis, it was the use of fire for cooking that allowed the larger brain of Homo sapiens to develop in the first place, by allowing hominids to eat a wider variety of foods. From the past to the present, fire has been used in rituals, agriculture, cooking, generating heat and light, signaling, industrial processes, and as a means of destruction.

Thus, combustion engines convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Decades of engineering by many scientists went in to designing the internal combustion engine, which took its essentially modern form in the latter half of the 19th century.

The engine ushered in the Industrial Age, as well as enabling the invention of a huge variety of machines, including modern cars and aircraft. Pictured are the operating steps of a four-stroke internal combustion engine. The strokes are as follows: 1 Intake stroke - air and vaporised fuel are drawn in. Though several inventors did pioneering work on electronic voice transmission many of whom later filed intellectual property lawsuits when telephone use exploded , Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone in His patent drawing is pictured above.

He drew his inspiration from teaching the deaf and also visits to his hearing-impaired mom, according to PBS. He called the first telephone an "electrical speech machine," according to PBS. The invention quickly took off, and revolutionized global business and communication. When Bell died on Aug. When all you have is natural light, productivity is limited to daylight hours.

Light bulbs changed the world by allowing us to be active at night. According to historians, two dozen people were instrumental in inventing incandescent lamps throughout the s; Thomas Edison is credited as the primary inventor because he created a completely functional lighting system, including a generator and wiring as well as a carbon-filament bulb like the one above, in As well as initiating the introduction of electricity in homes throughout the Western world, this invention also had a rather unexpected consequence of changing people's sleep patterns.

Instead of going to bed at nightfall having nothing else to do and sleeping in segments throughout the night separated by periods of wakefulness, we now stay up except for the 7 to 8 hours allotted for sleep, and, ideally, we sleep all in one go.