Inventions & Gadgets – CFFC

Unfortunately I was unable to join in last week so today I’m merging two CFFC’s together as I post for this week’s Fun Foto Challenge.

Inventions… These are sometimes credited to a specific person and used when talking about a specific item… Perhaps the most commonly heard in our current time is the ‘Diesel’ Engine. These are a form of internal combustion engine used mainly where Torque is very important like in trucks and trains…

…Here’s a 450HP Scania R employed on logistics – delivering food to supermarkets.

Many inventions aren’t attributed to a single person either because there were many persons involved or, more likely, because the origins are lost in the mists of time. The Plough is a good example – without it modern farming wouldn’t exist and we’d probably still be hunter-gatherers 😅 Another example is beer…

…Someone, somewhere, found that grain can be fermented in water to produce a mildly intoxicating drink. In doing so they produced an answer to the issue of dysentery and other illnesses caused by contaminated water – the fermentation process killed off a lot of the germs associated with such diseases. What is today a social drink was once an essential way of avoiding illness.

Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the Telephone. Tie that in with the invention of Radio – linked to Guglielmo Marconi and you find our modern world in which we rely phones for communication. Then think back to the beginnings of Photography and the likes of William Henry Fox Talbot working to make a permanent image that could be reproduced as and when you wanted…

…This window in Lacock Abbey was used in his early experiments while perfecting the Calotype process for photographic imagery. Combine phones with photography into a portable gadget and sooner or later you’ll get the Selfie Stick 😅…

Steam Engines… Without them you don’t have the industrial revolution. When I was at school we were taught that the Steam Engine was invented by James Watt. Of course, it turns out to be much more complicated than that. It seems that the first ‘steam engines’ were actually the work of Thomas Savery and he was taking advantage of the work of a French scientist called Papin. Savery’s beam engine could pump water from a shallow mine but for deeper pits more power was needed. Enter Thomas Newcomen who improved the design to allow the clearance of water from much deeper mines. Then came James Watt who improved the design once more by separating the condensing function which made the engine more efficient and paved the way for the steam locomotive. And they provided one of our key means of transportation for over a century…

Flight or more importantly, powered flight is credited to the Wright Brothers though many others pioneered the basic aerial technologies necessary for them to succeed. The German inventor Otto Lilienthal was one of those with his work in gliders. John Stringfellow achieved powered flight in 1848 but his steam powered machine was never going to be able to carry a person. The Wright Brothers finally did it in 1903 – The rest is history. Here’s an Auster Aiglet at Fenland Aerodrome…

Of course flying requires a lot of mathematical stuff if it’s to be done safely over longer distances than the Wright Brothers could achieve. To do it with just a map and compass as you would in the aircraft above, you need one of these…

…Affectionately know as a Whiz-Wheel, this circular slide rule can calculate just about anything you need to know when planning a flight from take-off weights to fuel consumption and the effects of air temperature/density on lift, length of take-off run and airspeed. Turn it over and you can even calculate your required heading…

…to achieve the desired course over the ground in whatever wind is forecast though you will need a chinagraph pencil to assist 😅 There are modern electronic computers available now but they don’t give the same visual insight that the good old Whiz-Wheel does!