Lesson 66: Safety Elevator.
Rome and Greece had a sort of elevator, and the people in the Middle Ages also used one. One was needed for coal mining, but nobody used them because they just weren’t safe. Because of that buildings were limited to two or three stories because they used stairs.
Elisha Graves Otis was born in Vermont in 1811. He came from a rich family and he was the cousin of the inventor of the steam shovel. He left home and became a wagon driver. He married and had 2 sons. Then, he moved to a river town and built a grist mill. But, he converted it to a saw mill and then gave that up and turned to building wagons. His wife died in 1839 leaving him an 8 year-old son and a baby son still in diapers. Then he moved to Albany New York and went to work in a toy factory. He had an idea for a safety stop and used it to invent the Safety Elevator in 1852 to lift wood scraps.
Elevators lift people up and down without them having to walk. They are used in sky scrapers, constriction sites and lots of other places. They are lifted by steel cable and balanced by a counterweight. But what if the cables snap? The safety elevator used a backup ratchet system and required manual lifting.
It was remarkably slow to sale despite the benefits. It required good marketing so Elisha Otis rented a space at the World’s Fair and put on a dramatic demonstration of the elevator every hour. He would hoist himself up to the top and then order his assistant to cut the rope. The rope cut and sent him hurtling down the elevator, a couple of inches. It got him the sales he needed.
The elevator made sky scrapers possible, they can be hundreds of feet high now and you can have lots of people living on a little bit of land.
Lesson 67: Syringe
Early civilizations had something like the syringe but it was lost during the Middle Ages. Muslims used it to preform eye surgery and it also was used for injecting medicine into blood veins.
Alexander Wood was born in Scotland in 1817. He had a good education and attained a medical degree at Edinburgh collage. He used morphine to treat patients and then he invented the Syringe in 1853.
Doctors today use hypodermic syringes. The syringe consists of a reciprocating pump and it is used to control the dosage given to patients and other things. They are used outside the hospital and they are used to fill ink cartridges.
The syringe was popularized in France by a doctor and the one handed syringe was invented in 1899. The glass syringe was invented in 1946 and the disposable syringe in 1949.
The syringe improves diabetes control and it can be used to give a patient a safe anesthesia by making sure the administration is done smoothly. Also, using the syringe helps injections act quicker. Solders during World War 1 carried morphine syringes. And they are used in Epi- pins today.
Lesson 68: The Bessemer Process
The Ottoman Empire was powerful in the 1200s but it declined by the 1800s. England was nervous about the growing Russian Empire; And France was growing and expanding under Napoleon. Then the Crimean War happened between France, England, Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1853.
Henry Bessemer was born in England in 1813. His father was an inventor and he passed down those traits to his son Henry. Henry was a prolific inventor and had experience in steam powered machines. He grew interested in weapons because of the Crimean War and had a talk with Napoleon the 3rd who wanted more steel for his weapons. He invented the Bessemer Process in 1855.
The process converts useless pig iron into useful steel. The process forces hot air through molten iron to remove all the impurities and that leaves behind slag. The Bessemer process made mass scale steel production feasible and it increased production. The price of steel went down and less labor was required.
Henry Bessemer licensed his patent to 5 different area iron makers But the process was just too hard for them to understand. He had to open a factory of his own. The process came to America in 1862 and there he built 11 mills. He had a public demonstration and the railway liked his idea.
The process made the railway better and longer trains could be built. Roads use steel and concrete buildings use steel to reinforce them. Today no building is made without steel.
Lesson 69: Egg Beater
There was European conflict in the 19th century and America was running full steam towards industrialization. Americas Midwest was growing and the south was becoming rich although it relied on slave labor. The northeast moved to factories and the north stayed a farming community.
The Egyptians were bakers and so were the Romans. Baking grew though the Middle Ages and by 1800 it was used everywhere. The egg beater was invented by a man named Ralph Collier in 1856. Not much is known about him other than he came from Baltimore.
Today the egg beater is called the kitchen mixer. It helps you bake and it reduces labor. The beaters spin on the mixer or the bowl spins around the beaters. Some are hand held others are non-lift able. Collier’s first device was a hand held cranking machine. The crank turned the gears which turned the beaters.
Other inventors swathe egg beater and improved upon it. In 1859 a model was sold to a company, and in 1918 the Kitchen Aid was invented by Herbert Johnson.
The mixer produces large batches of things with almost no labor required. It makes baking a cake easy.
This was my favorite invention this week. It was the most interesting thing I learned about this week as well, because I love to cook and I use the mixer all the time but had no idea about how it was invented.
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