A man who read his own obituary
In 1867 the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel invented DYNAMITE, a safe-to-handle explosive that made mining, tunnelling and building railways far quicker, and it made him extremely rich. In 1888 his brother Ludvig died, and a French newspaper, confusing the two, printed an obituary of Alfred under the headline The merchant of death is dead. According to the story, reading how he would be remembered shocked him. When he died in 1896, his will left most of his fortune to create prizes for the people who had done the most good for humanity, and the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901.
A milkmaid's hands and a word from cows
In the 1700s smallpox killed hundreds of thousands of people a year. Country people in England had noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox, a mild disease from cows, seemed never to catch smallpox. In 1796 a doctor in Gloucestershire, Edward Jenner, tested the idea. He took material from a cowpox sore on the hand of a milkmaid, Sarah Nelmes, and scratched it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps. Weeks later, the boy did not catch smallpox when exposed to it. The word VACCINE comes from vacca, the Latin for cow. After a worldwide vaccination campaign, smallpox was declared wiped out in 1980.
PENICILLIN, the first antibiotic, was found by accident on a dish in a laboratory, as our lab equipment page tells.
A clock that found the way home
For centuries sailors could not work out how far east or west they were, and ships were wrecked as a result. Sailors could find it by comparing noon at sea with the time at home, but only if they carried a CLOCK that kept perfect time on a rolling, damp ship. In 1714 the British government offered a huge prize for a solution. A self-taught carpenter and clockmaker from Lincolnshire, John Harrison, spent more than forty years building sea clocks. His fourth, a large pocket watch finished in 1759, lost only a few seconds on a voyage to Jamaica, though he had to fight for years to be paid. His clocks still survive, and three of them still tick at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
The first plastic and the smallest switches
The first fully synthetic PLASTIC, Bakelite, was invented in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-born chemist in New York. It could be moulded into any shape, did not conduct electricity, and did not melt when heated again, so it was used for telephones, radios and light switches. Plastic's usefulness is also its problem: it lasts for hundreds of years.
In 1958 an American engineer, Jack Kilby, made the first integrated circuit, putting several electronic parts onto one piece of material. A modern MICROCHIP holds billions of tiny switches, called transistors, in an area smaller than a fingernail, and it runs every COMPUTER, phone and TELEVISION. Early television had a very different start: in 1926 the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird showed moving pictures to scientists in an attic room in London, made with spinning discs. The WHEEL, PAPER, GUNPOWDER and PRINTING are older still, and our ancient China page covers several of them.