700th
anniversary : for the year 1311 |
■
portolan chart
(compass chart, or rhumb chart); creat- ed by Petrus
Vesconte at Genoa to help navigators to find safe harbors
and by some accounts marks the beginning of professional
cartography. Drawn on vellum and embellished with
decorations, the chart has rhumb lines that radiate from
the center in the direction of wind or compass points. |
■
Notre-Dame Cathedral at Reims is
completed after 99 years of construction on the site where
Clovis was reput- edly baptized in 496. The cathedral is a
masterpiece of Gothic architecture. |
500th
anniversary : for the year 1511 |
■
watches, mentioned for the first
time in print in the Nuremberg Chronicles, had hour hands
but no minute. |
■
the first description
of corn (maize) by Peter Martyr,
which he has heard about from the late Christopher
Columbus. |
400th
anniversary : for the year 1611 |
■
patent for coke:
the first British patent in which coal is used instead of
charcoal for smelting iron, obtained by Simon Sturtevant,
ironmaker from Lincolnshire. However, the process did not
become commercially successful for another hundred years. |
■
astronomical
telescope
with an inverting
refractor, described in Dioptrice by Johann Kepler,
Imperial Mathema- tician, Prague, Bohemia. |
■
the authorized (King
James) version of the Bible
is published for the Church of England after 7 years of
effort by a committee of some 50 men; a masterpiece of the
English language that will appear in countless editions
over the next 4 centuries, with more than 7 billion copies
sold. |
350th
anniversary : for the year 1661
|
■
manometer
invented by Christiaan Huygens, Nether- lands, "for
measuring the elasticity of gases". |
■
bank notes
issued by the Bank of Stockholm, Sweden. |
300th
anniversary : for the year 1711 |
■
tuning fork,
by John Shore, Sergent Trumpeter to the Court of Queen
Anne of England and lutenist at the Chapel Royal. |
250th
anniversary : for the year 1761 |
■
marine chronometer
(pocket watch size) by John Harrison Yorkshire carpenter,
undergoes its first real sea trial during a voyage to
Jamaica to test whether Harrison's method can be used to
find the longitude at sea; it lost 5 seconds during 81
days at sea. |
■
scissors and shears,
mass-produced in cast steel, by Robert Hinchliffe of
Sheffield, England. |
■
pencils,
mass-produced by German carpenter Kaspar Faber at Stein,
near Nuremberg, to launch a family compa- ny that will
continue into the 21st century. |
■
synthetic dyes,
manufacturing of which was initiated in England by A.W.
Hofman and W.H. Perkin, were greatly enriched when Hofmann
showed that magenta could be the parent of a whole series
of violet dyes. |
200th
anniversary : for the year 1811 |
■
paper money
as currency adopted in Britain May 10 to ease an economic
A bullion report issued by government economists
establishes the intrinsic-value theory of money: bank
notes may be a useful medium of exchange, but the notes
must bear a definite ratio to the amount of coin and
bullion in the vaults. |
■
New York adopts a Commissioners'
Plan marking off future Manhattan
streets and avenues in a grid
pattern. The plan provides for 12 numbered avenues, exten-
ding to the north. The 155 numbered cross streets, exten-
ding from the North (Hudson) River to the East River, are
to be 60 feet wide, except for 14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd,
57th, 72nd, and 86th, which are to be 100 feet wide. |
■
The Russian ambassador to Paris
Prince Aleksandr Borosovich Kurakin, 35, introduces the
practice of serving
meals in courses
(à
la Russe) instead of placing many dishes on the table at
once. |
150th
anniversary : for the year 1761 |
■
bicycle propelled by
pedals attached to the front wheel
and used as cranks, introduced in France by Pierre Michaux.
This version of the bicycle was often called the boneshaker
in English since it had no springs and, at first, used
steel tires. |
■
James Clerk Maxwell, assisted by
photographer Thomas Sutton, demonstrates in London the
first color reproduc-
tion using a photographic process,
projecting three separate images of the Scottish flag
taken through red, green, and violet filters and matching
them to form a single picture, using light of the same
three colors to produce the color image. |
■
roller mills come into use in
Britain; refined wheat flour without wheat germ will
become the dietary staple by the 1870s, and not just among
the rich. |
■
pneumatic drill, by Germain
Sommelier, chief engineer on the Mont Cenis railway tunnel
project, a rail tunnel of 13.7 km length in the European
Alps, connecting Modane, France and Bardonecchia, Italy. |
■
postcard by John P. Charlton,
Philadelphia, USA. |
|
|

|
SOURCE:
A short history of technology by T.K. Derry
& T.I. Williams, Dover Publ., New York, 1960; Fig.
273.
|
100th
anniversary : for the year 1911 |
■
electric
self-starter invented by C. F.
Kettering impro- ves automobile safety. Cadillac boss
Henry M. Leland gives Kettering's Dayton Engineering
Laboratories (Delco) a contract to supply 4,000
self-starters after losing a good friend who died after
his jaw was broken by a crank handle while trying to start
the balky engine of a woman's Cadillac. |
■
the last
horse-drawn bus of the London
General Omnibus Company goes out of service. The city had
1,142 licensed horse-drawn buses at the end of October
1910 and the same number of motor buses, but while at
least one horse-drawn bus will continue running (over
Waterloo Bridge) until 1916, the horse is now rapidly
being replaced by motorbuses and motorcars and trucks. |
■
Nivea creme
has its beginnings at Hamburg, where the 29-year-old
German cosmetics firm Beiersdorf AG creates a skin
moisturizer employing the first water-soluble emulsifier.
Owner Oskar Troplowitz has seen an opportunity to make
Eucerit into consumer products that will eventually be
sold in some 150 countries worldwide. |
■
the white
line marking the center of a highway
is first used in the United States in Indio, California.
It is suggested by resident Dr. June MacCarroll after a
near accident with an oncoming truck. |
■
motion-picture
camera, electric drive, by E.F. Moy
of London; with a gyroscope to stabilize it and a
displacement film-magazine, it replaced hand-cranked
machines. |
■
the six-passenger Blériot
Berline biplane built for Parisian Henri Deutsch de la
Neurthe is the first airplane
with an enclosed
passenger cabin. |
■
oil underwater
drilling, by Gulf Refining Co., in
Caddo Lake on the Lousiana-Texas border. |
■
German scientist P. Monnartz becomes
the first to realize that stainless
steels resist corrosion. |
■
US Patent No.
1,000,000 by Francis H. Holton,
Akron, Ohio: vehicle tire improvements. |
50th
anniversary : for the year 1961 |
■
the Helvetica
typeface introduced by Swiss
designers Edouard Hoffman and Max Meidinger is a
deliberately anonymous font that will be widely used by
European modernists. |
■
IBM introduces the Selectric
typewriter, designed by architect
Eliot F. Noyes, in which characters are printed on paper
by a rotating ball while the carriage remains fixed. A
moving "golf ball" cluster of interchangeable
type will be linked in 1964 to a magnetic tape recorder
that permits automated, individually addressed original
copies of any letter, and by 1975 will account for an
estimated 70 to 80 percent of the electric typewriter
market. |
■
broadcast in
stereophonic sound begins by the FM
radio stations in USA. |
■
Kodachrome II
color film is introduced by Eastman Kodak; it is 2½ times
faster than the Kodachrome introdu- ced in 1936. |
■
electric toothbrush
by Squibb & Co., New York |
■
electronic
calculator, commercial model, by
Sunlock Comptometer Ltd, UK, called Anita. |
■
hatchback estate car
(upward-opening rear door): Renault 4, France. |
■
man-carrying
spacecraft, USSR. Soviet cosmonaut
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin becomes the first human being to
orbit Earth, on April 12, in his 1.8-hour mission in
Vostok 1. Soviet cosmonaut Gherman S. Titov completes the
first multi-orbit spaceflight, of 17 orbits and 25.6 hours
duration, the Vostok 2 mission, on August 6. |
■
US Patent No.
3,000,000 by Kenneth R. Eldredge for
General Electric Co., New York: automatic reading
system. |
|