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The Soap
Until the Industrial Revolution, soapmaking was conducted on a small scale and the product was rough. In 1780 James Keir established a chemical works at Tipton, for the manufacture of alkali from the sulfates of potash and soda, to which he afterwards added a soap manufactory. The method of extraction proceeded on a discovery of Keir's. Andrew Pears started making a high-quality, transparent soap in 1807 in London.Thomas J. Barratt, opened a factory in Isleworth in 1862. -
The Margarine
Margarine originated with the discovery by French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul of margaric acid.Scientists at the time regarded margaric acid, like oleic acid and stearic acid, as one of the three fatty acids that, in combination, form most animal fats. In 1853, the German structural chemist Wilhelm Heinrich Heintz analyzed margaric acid as simply a combination of stearic acid and the previously unknown palmitic acid. -
The Locomotive
The first successful locomotives were built by Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick. In 1804 his unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.The first commercially successful steam locomotive was Matthew Murray's rack locomotive, Salamanca, built for the narrow gauge Middleton Railway in 1812. This was followed in 1813 by the Puffing Billy built by Christopher Blackett. -
The Fresnel lens
The idea of creating a thinner, lighter lens by making it with separate sections mounted in a frame is often attributed to Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.The Marquis de Condorcet proposed grinding such a lens from a single thin piece of glass. French physicist and engineer Augustin-Jean Fresnel is most often given credit for the development of the multi-part lens for use in lighthouses. According to Smithsonian magazine, the first Fresnel lens was used in 1823. -
The Electric vehicle
Electric motive power started, when Slovak-Hungarian priest Ányos Jedlik built the first crude but viable electric motor, provided with stator, rotor and commutator, and the year after he used it to power a tiny car. A few years later, professor Sibrandus Stratingh of University of Groningen, the Netherlands, built a small scale electric car and a Robert Anderson of Scotland is reported to have made a crude electric carriage sometime between the years of 1832 and 1839. -
The Thermometer
Various authors have credited the invention of the thermometer to Hero of Alexandria. The thermometer was not a single invention, however, but a development. Hero of Alexandria knew of the principle that certain substances, notably air, expand and contract and described a demonstration in which a closed tube partially filled with air had its end in a container of water.[4] The expansion and contraction of the air caused the position of the water/air interface to move along the tube. -
The Aspirin
Chemist Charles Frédéric Gerhardt treated acetyl chloride with sodium salicylate to produce acetylsalicylic acid for the first time; in the second half of the nineteenth century, other academic chemists established the compound's chemical structure and devised more efficient methods of synthesis. The word Aspirin was Bayer's brand name, rather than the generic name of the drug; however, Bayer's rights to the trademark were lost or sold in many countries. -
The Airplane
In 1799, George Cayley set forth the concept of the modern airplane as a fixed-wing flying machine with separate systems for lift, propulsion, and control. Cayley was building and flying models of fixed-wing aircraft as early as 1803, and he built a successful passenger-carrying glider in 1853. In 1856, Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Bris made the first powered flight, by having his glider "L'Albatros artificiel" pulled by a horse on a beach. -
The Camera
Collodion dry plates had been available since 1857, thanks to the work of van Monckhoven, but it was not until the invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1871 by Richard Leach Maddox that the wet plate process could be rivaled in quality and speed. The 1878 discovery that heat-ripening a gelatin emulsion greatly increased its sensitivity finally made so-called "instantaneous" snapshot exposures practical. For the first time, a tripod or other support was no longer an absolute necessity. -
The Anesthesia
It was first used in 1859 by Karl Koller, at the suggestion of Sigmund Freud, in eye surgery in 1884. German surgeon August Bier (1861–1949) was the first to use cocaine for intrathecal anesthesia in 1898. Romanian surgeon Nicolae Racoviceanu-Piteşti (1860–1942) was the first to use opioids for intrathecal analgesia; he presented his experience in Paris in 1901. -
The Fluorescent lamp
Experimenters (of 19th century) had observed a radiant glow emanating from partially evacuated glass vessels through which an electric current passed. One of the first to explain it was the Irish scientist Sir George Stokes from the University of Cambridge, who named the phenomenon "fluorescence" after fluorite, a mineral many of whose samples glow strongly due to impurities. The explanation relied on the nature of electricity and light phenomena as developed by the British scientists -
The Telephone
Alexander Graham Bell is commonly credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. The classic story of him saying "Watson, come here! I want to see you!" is a well-known part of the history of the telephone. This showed that the telephone worked, but it was a short-range phone. Bell was the first to obtain a patent, in 1876, for an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically", after experimenting with many primitive sound transmitters and receivers. -
The Praxinoscope
The praxinoscope was an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. -
The Phonograph
The phonograph is a device invented in 1877 for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. In its later forms it is also called a gramophone. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". It was invented by Thomas Alba Edison. -
The Incandescent light bulb
In addressing the question of who invented the incandescent lamp, historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list 22 inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison's version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable. -
The Photophone
The photophone (later given the alternate name radiophone) is a telecommunications device that allowed for the transmission of speech on a beam of light. It was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell. Bell believed the photophone was his most important invention.The photophone was a precursor to the fiber-optic communication systems that achieved worldwide popular usage starting in the 1980s. -
The Electric generator
Before the connection between magnetism and electricity was discovered, electrostatic generators were invented. They operated on electrostatic principles, by using moving electrically charged belts, plates, and disks that carried charge to a high potential electrode. The charge was generated using either of two mechanisms: electrostatic induction or the triboelectric effect. Such generators generated very high voltage and low current. Invented by Nikola Tesla. -
The Cinematograph
The device was first invented and patented as the "Cinématographe Léon Bouly" by French inventor Léon Bouly. Bouly coined the term “cinematograph”, from the Greek for “writing in movement”. Due to a lack of money, Bouly was unable to develop his ideas properly and maintain his patent fees, so he sold his rights to the device and its name to the Lumière Brothers. In 1895, they applied the name to a device that was largely their own creation. -
The Zeppelin
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin's serious interest in airship development began in 1874, when he took inspiration from a lecture given by Heinrich von Stephan on the subject of World Postal Services and Air Travel to outline the basic principle of his later craft in a diary entry dated 25 March 1874. Count Zeppelin began to seriously pursue his project . He started working on various designs in 1891, and had completed detailed designs by 1893. -
The Vitascope
During the same period, Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat modified Jenkins' patented Phantoscope. It was publicly demonstrated in Atlanta at the Cotton States Exposition. The two soon parted ways, each claiming credit for the invention. Armat showed the Phantoscope to Raff and Gammon who recognized its profit potential in the face of declining kinetoscope business. They negotiated with Armat to purchase rights to the Phantoscope and approached Edison for his approval.
