by Phil Mason
The development of the railways in Britain in the 1820s and 1830s might not have progressed as rapidly as it did if George Stephenson had not deliberately lied to parliament.
After the inauguration of Stephenson’s first railway, the Stockton – Darlington line in 1825, a rush of other proposals were put forward for other routes. A parliamentary committee scrutinised Stephenson closely on this newfangled form of transport. The chief concern was speed, and the fear that too rapid speeds would cause physical or mental injury to passengers.
Stephenson lied when he told the committee that no engine would ever be able to travel faster than 12mph. He knew it was already possible to reach at least double that speed.
Had he been honest, he would have reinforced parliament’s fears, and the prospects for rapid expansion of the railway network, which was to bring untold economic and social change to Britain in the next 30 years, might well have been significantly checked.
Thomas Edison, inventor of electric lighting, also used outright deception to advance his cause. Without it, he would not have secured the funds necessary to develop his ideas to commercial levels.
In 1878 he had approached New York bankers J.P. Morgan for $50,000 to equip the laboratory he needed to make a marketable electric light. If it were feasible, it would make a fortune for investors. But few believed it possible. The bank failed to sell the shares in the company they set up, so Edison lied to New York newspaper reporters that he had already invented the device. It tipped the balance, the shares were snapped up and Edison got his $50,000.
It would take him a year, working 20 hours a day, to develop the world’s first working electric light. He did indeed make a fortune for everyone involved. But without the lie, he might never have had the chance, and we might never have had the light bulb.
Charles Goodyear’s discovery in 1839, after five years of fruitless experimenting on how to make rubber in a usable and durable form, came after he tried to cover up his work from his long-suffering wife. He was trying out another new idea mixing sulphur with rubber when Clarissa returned home unexpectedly. According to one account, as the couple were by now nearing penury he had promised her that he would cease his apparently pointless tinkering with rubber and get a proper job. When he heard her arriving home, he stuffed the materials into the family oven to hide them from her.
He later returned to the kitchen to retrieve them, and discovered that the heat of the oven had changed the properties of the rubber. It was the clue he was looking for. He had discovered the principle of vulcanisation, which made natural rubber resistant to temperature change (unvulcanised rubber melted in heat and became brittle when cold), and ultimately mouldable for practical use.
It took another five years before he had worked out the processes required at an industrial level. He patented the invention in 1844. If he hadn’t tried to deceive his wife…?
Another accidental domestic drama led to German chemist, Christian Schönbein, creating the modern explosives industry by discovering guncotton. Unknown to, and against the wishes of, his wife, Schönbein experimented in his kitchen in 1845 and accidentally spilt a mixture of nitric acid and sulphuric acid. He used his wife’s cotton apron to mop up the mess, but when he hung it up it caught fire spontaneously as it dried out.
He had, unwittingly, converted the cellulose in the cotton apron into nitrocellulose. As it heated and dried, it oxidised spectacularly. It was to be several decades before a way was developed to manufacture the stuff safely, but by the 1890s guncotton had replaced gunpowder as the standard base for modern military ammunition.
Elisha Gray is a name unknown to us today. But it could have been as famous as Alexander Graham Bell, for Gray is, on the evidence, the true inventor of the telephone. He just messed up a bit on presentation and was disadvantaged by an incredible chance encounter by his opponent.
Gray’s design for the telephone actually worked better than Bell’s. They both applied for their patents on the same day, Valentine’s Day 1876, Gray just a few hours after Bell and putting in a caveat – a detailed notice of intention to file – rather than the full technical description. Although not a complete application, it was nonetheless a powerful enough method to protect Gray’s claim to be the inventor.
Officials decided they would scrutinise both applicants’ work to determine who had proper claim on the invention. While Gray stayed at home in Chicago, Bell was more assertive, travelling from his Canadian home in Ontario, whence he had emigrated from Scotland, to Washington and pressed his case personally with the Patent Office.
By chance, the patent official Bell saw turned out to have a lot in common with him. He was reportedly a deaf mute. (Bell had started his work on telephony through the family’s interest in working with the deaf and teaching speech to them.) According to one account, the official showed Bell Gray’s design, which had a better method for transmitting sound. Bell wrote Gray’s mechanism in the margin of his own patent. Bell’s first practical working telephone had Gray’s version of the sound transmitter.
The Patent Office decided in Bell’s favour. Gray discovered the dubious additions by Bell, tried to challenge the patent award in court but eventually settled for a modest cash compensation and signed away all his claims to the telephone.
Two curious footnotes to the saga of who invented the telephone have emerged in recent years. In June 2002, the US Congress passed a resolution formally recognising Italian-American immigrant, Antonio Meucci, as the true inventor. Meucci is said to have developed a working model as early as 1870 – six years before Bell and Gray – and filed notice of the impending patent application in 1871. He was simply too poor to renew the claim when it expired in 1874, allowing Bell to trump him two years later.
Even more strangely, the London Science Museum reported in December 2003 that evidence had been found in its archives that a telephone device invented in 1863 by German inventor, Philipp Reis, actually worked. Tests were conducted on the device in March 1947 by engineers from the British firm Standard Telephone and Cables which demonstrated its efficacy, and proving Reis to be the true inventor of the telephone. However, the results were suppressed by the chairman of STC because the company was then bidding for a contract with, ironically, the American Telephone and Telegraph company (AT&T, which had evolved out of Bell’s original company) and it was feared that the claims would jeopardise the company’s chances. All the files relating to the tests were secreted away in STC and only returned to the Science Museum in 1955, where they then lay undiscovered for half a century.
The development of the direct-dial telephone system, eliminating the operator, arose from a distinctly unsocial motive: an undertaker suspected that a female operator at the local exchange was directing business callers to her husband’s (or other stories have it, her lover’s) firm, a rival undertaker.
Almon Strowger, a mortician and electrical tinkerer then living in Missouri, patented the automatic exchange in 1891 in response, and the world’s first working direct-dial service began in his then home town of La Porte, Indiana, the following year. His frustrations at misdirected calls and lost business presumably ceased as records show he died a wealthy individual 10 years later.
The phonograph was a direct and unexpected offshoot of the telephone. One immediate development after the telephone’s invention was customers’ demand for a way of obtaining a permanent record of their conversation. In the summer of 1877, history’s other great inventor, Thomas Edison, was tinkering with telephone speakers when he noticed that the diaphragm of the speaker reverberated in tandem with the sound. He fixed a stylus to the speaker and saw how when he shouted at the speaker the stylus created a unique groove on waxed paper placed underneath it. It could then replay back the same sound.
From there he developed the wax cylinder recording device which, by accident, would become the forerunner of the vinyl record. The original intention was entirely for servicing the commercial world, replacing paper as the medium for recording agreements an
d contracts. However, in practice, the wax was fragile, the recording poor quality and they could not survive too many transits in the mail.
So manufacturers of the devices looked for other uses. In 1889, the first coin-operated phonograph was installed in an arcade in San Francisco. For a nickel, listeners could hear a two-minute musical recording. To the makers’ astonishment, that single machine took $1,000 in five months. Thus the recorded music industry was born.
By 1894, the more recognisably modern seven-inch gramophone record was on sale. Within five years, nearly three million records had been sold in the United States, and recorded music had become the most popular entertainment medium of all time.
The name James Swinburne might have been better known to the world had he not been overcautious about getting his invention patented. The 49-year-old Scottish-born chemist had developed the process for creating the world’s first plastic in his London laboratory in 1907. When he finally went to secure his patent rights, he discovered he had been beaten to it by Belgian Leo Baekeland, who had invented his version, Bakelite. Baekeland had been awarded the patent for his identical product… only the day before.
The inventor of the thermos flask saw no commercial purpose to his idea and never patented it. His assistant took the concept and made millions.
James Dewar invented the double-walled vessel that kept its contents at a steady temperature because of the vacuum between the inner and outer walls, in 1892. As a practising chemist pioneering in the liquefaction of gases, he wanted it for purely scientific purposes, to provide a device for sustained cooling.
One of his students, Reinhold Burger, instead saw the commercial potential of keeping contents hot, and began making the device in Germany in 1904 for domestic use, under the patented trade name thermos, the Greek for heat. The Thermos company, which still holds the rights to the invention, has been making millions from the idea ever since.
James Dewar remained a Cambridge chemistry don until the end of his life, co-invented the explosive cordite and ended up with a knighthood, but little monetary wealth.
Heroin was created in 1897 as a patent cough remedy. Its inventor, Heinrich Dreser of the German pharmaceutical company, Bayer, had also that year invented aspirin, which he thought was less effective than this second compound he had discovered. His notes record him as believing that aspirin would be counterproductive to a body trying to recover from an ailment as it had an ‘enfeebling’ effect on the heart. In contrast, in the tests he conducted on himself and fellow workers, he found that his second discovery, a derivative of morphine, had a ‘heroic’ effect.
With little further testing, the drug was commercially released in November 1898 under the brand name Heroin. Advertisements claimed it was 10 times more effective on colds than codeine with only a tenth of the toxic effects, and more effective than morphine as a painkiller. It was marketed as the era’s wonder drug.
Within a year, heroin was being used in all types of elixir medicines – there were heroin pastilles, heroin cough lozenges, heroin water-soluble salts. It was particularly popular in the United States. An authoritative medical journal in Boston published an editorial in 1900, saying, ‘It possesses many advantages over morphine. It’s not hypnotic, and there’s no danger of acquiring a habit.’ In the next six years, at least 180 clinical studies were published on heroin around the world, nearly all of them favourable.
It was not long before reports began filtering back of consumers who had become ‘immune’ to the new drug, and needed increasingly strong doses. It still took until 1913 for Bayer to stop making it as a medicine. By then, a flood of hospital admissions in America had begun to reveal an alarming new phenomenon of mass addiction.
Ole Evinrude, a Norwegian immigrant to Wisconsin, is credited as the inventor of the first commercially successful outboard motor for boats – and all because his girlfriend asked for an ice cream.
He came up with the need in 1906 when, according to his account, he found himself rowing a five-mile round trip in 90-degree heat for the ice cream while on holiday on an island in Lake Michigan. By the time he had returned, the ice cream had completely melted.
By the next summer he had developed a one-and-a-half horsepower engine weighing 62 pounds. With further refinement, by 1911 he had registered his patent and formed a business partnership with a manufacturer. He continued to develop better and more powerful engines until his death in 1934.
According to research published in 1998, an obscure British mathematician probably developed the concept of general relativity at least 40 years before Albert Einstein. Papers belonging to William Kingdon Clifford, a professor at University College London, were discovered which showed that in the 1870s he had formulated the same concepts of the relationship between space, matter and gravity as Einstein put together only in 1915.
Clifford had been a mathematical prodigy, and become professor at just 26. Clifford’s fate as a forgotten pioneer lay in the hostility his strange ideas provoked among his colleagues, who regarded him as a mad eccentric who was best ignored, and his early death from tuberculosis in 1879, aged only 33. He died just 11 days before Einstein was born.
Had Clifford lived longer, he might well have developed ideas beyond the theory we now know as relativity. As one promoter of Clifford’s cause remarked in 1998, ‘Just imagine what might have been achieved if the mature Clifford had met with the young Einstein.’
Alexander Fleming discovered the principles behind penicillin in 1922 by having a cold. The bacteriologist was preparing culture dishes for an entirely unrelated experiment when a drip from his nose fell into the dish. Annoyed that this had spoiled his culture, he put it to one side as a wasted effort. He noticed days later that the mucus had killed off bacteria in the dish wherever it had come into contact with it. Fleming isolated the active agent in the mucus – lysozyme – the antibacterial substance found in saliva and nasal mucus, but this was not strong enough against the bacteria that caused real illness in humans. He dropped the thought.
It might never have been resurrected had chance not intervened again in 1928. Fleming had grown cultures of staphylococci bacteria in dishes that he left on his desk when he went on holiday. One version of the story has it that his assistant left the window open overnight. He discovered on returning that mould had contaminated the dishes. Where the mould had grown it had destroyed the bacteria.
The mould was a rare one, Penicillium, being grown in the laboratory immediately below Fleming’s. By an amazing accident, it seems that spores had travelled between the two labs. Fleming recognised the antibacterial effect as similar to his accidental discovery six years before. It prompted him to identify the mould, but not being a chemist he did little to pursue the potential further. He had no idea he had discovered one of the 20th century’s most valuable medical advances.
It was 1940 before others, drawing on Fleming’s account, developed penicillin into a usable medicine.
Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, patented his first working design while a flying instructor with the RAF in 1930 at the age of only 22. Had the Air Ministry exploited the idea straight away, who knows how far the possession of jet-powered fighters might have affected Britain’s military balance with Germany in the 1930s. At the time, however, no official interest was shown.
Incredibly, not only did the Ministry show no interest in Whittle’s ideas, the authorities also failed to classify his patent. In 1932, it was published to the world.
Both Germany (in August 1939) and Italy (in August 1940) beat the RAF to developing the world’s first jet aircraft. Not until June 1939 was the Gloster company asked to develop an experimental aircraft. Within two years, in May 1941, the Gloster E28/39 flew successfully.
Ironically, it was then wartime shortages that hindered further development of the craft until almost the end of the war when, in 1944, the twin-jet Meteor made its appearance. What might have been…?
Copying of a more sinister kind enabled Soviet Russia to obtain
its first long-range nuclear bomber after the Second World War through the misplaced assumptions of an American air crew.
At the time, only the United States had the capacity to deliver a nuclear weapon. It had done so twice on Japan in 1945 to end the war using its strategic B-29 Superfortress bomber. As the wartime alliance broke down, an anxious Stalin was told he had been presented with a golden gift. Three B-29s had made forced landings in late 1944 at Vladivostock in the far east of Siberia, choosing Soviet territory over Chinese as they still believed Russia was an ally. It was to prove a calamitous mistake.
It emerged only in 2001 how Stalin’s aircraft designer, Andrei Tupolev, took apart one of the B-29s ‘rivet by rivet’ and measured and photographed every single one of its 105,000 components. Making 40,000 drawings, Tupolev produced a Russian version, the Tu-4, which was displayed at Moscow’s Aviation Day air show as quickly as August 1947.
With his atomic spies also active, within another two years Stalin also had his own nuclear bomb to go with it. His strategic position had been secured against the West.
But for a tragic accident, Britain could well hold the distinction of being home to the world’s first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight.
In 1896, Percy Sinclair Pilcher, who had long experimented with gliders in the small village of Eynsford in Kent, set out ideas in his extraordinary Patent 9144 that is considered by aviation historians to be the world’s first practical design for a powered aircraft.
By the summer of 1899 he had designed an engine that was both light enough but also powerful enough to power the craft. It was at a time when the Wrights had only just decided to start experimenting with gliders. Pilcher’s engine generated 4hp but weighed only 40lb. He then commissioned an engineer to build it.