Endless Curiosity about science, math and universe

  In short: The turbojet engine was patented in 1930 by a 23-year-old Royal Air Force officer named Frank Whittle. Then, in January 1935, a renewal fee of five pounds went unpaid — and nobody paid it. Not the inventor, who could not spare the money. Not the Air Ministry, which had already looked at his idea and set it aside. The patent lapsed, and the most valuable invention in aviation slipped into the public domain for want of one small banknote. Four years later, Germany flew a jet first. A Drawing Dated 1928, a Patent Dated 1930 Whittle drew the engine first in 1928, in his final term at the RAF College, Cranwell. His graduation thesis argued that an aircraft could go much higher and much faster if piston engines gave way to something new. In 1929 he refined the idea into the pure turbojet: a compressor forcing air into combustion chambers, the exhaust driving a turbine, and that turbine driving the compressor — a closed loop with a kick like a rocket. On 16 January 1930 h...

In short: The telephone was not decided in a laboratory. It was decided at a filing counter. On the morning of February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell's completed patent application was logged fifth in the day's filings at the U.S. Patent Office; Elisha Gray's preliminary notice for the same invention was logged thirty-ninth. Bell filed a finished application, Gray filed a caveat — and that difference in paperwork, a few hours apart, survived more than six hundred legal challenges and a Supreme Court decision split four to three. Two documents, one morning, two different kinds of paper Bell, a young Scottish-born teacher of the deaf, did not go to the Patent Office himself — his attorney carried the completed application, titled an improvement in telegraphy, covering a method and apparatus for transmitting vocal and other sounds. Gray, a professional inventor who already held dozens of patents and had co-founded Western Electric, sent a caveat: a preliminary notice anno...

In short: Nikola Tesla powered Niagara into city light, dreamed of free wireless electricity for the whole planet, and built a 187-foot tower to deliver it. The money ran out, the tower was sold for scrap to pay a hotel bill, and on January 7, 1943 he died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker — a room number, like everything in his late life, divisible by three. The tower that was going to light the world In 1901, in Shoreham, Long Island, Tesla began raising Wardenclyffe Tower — a wooden lattice 187 feet tall, crowned with an enormous copper dome. It was to be the heart of a "World System" carrying messages, and electricity itself, wirelessly anywhere on Earth. He meant to give that electricity to everyone, essentially free. J. P. Morgan put up $150,000 for what he believed was a transatlantic communications business. A free power grid for the world was not the business he had bought. Marconi, the meter question, and the money stopping In December 1901, Marconi se...

In short: The name is the lab notebook. WD-40 stands for "Water Displacement, 40th formula" — the first 39 tries failed. And the spray carries a genuine authorship dispute: the company's official story credits its president, chemist Norman Larsen, but in 2014 a San Diego historian argued the actual developer was a different man with an almost identical name — Iver Norman "Norm" Lawson. A rust problem on a missile On September 23, 1953, a tiny San Diego company called the Rocket Chemical Company opened with just three employees — founders Norman B. Larsen, Gordon Dawson, and John B. Gregory. Its laboratory made rust-preventing solvents and degreasers for the aerospace industry, and the pressing job was a coating that would displace water from the skin of the Atlas missile so the metal would not rust. Water displacement sounds simple. The notebooks say it took forty attempts. Thirty-nine failures with a number on them Most products hide their failures. This o...

In short: Television was sketched by a 14-year-old farm boy plowing a potato field, and Philo Farnsworth won the legal fight over who invented it — he beat RCA, the giant that tried to take it from him. He still lost television itself: the patents expired, the fortune went elsewhere, and the man who made the first electronic television broadcast died largely forgotten by the medium he created. A potato field, a plow, and parallel lines Farnsworth grew up on farms in Utah and Idaho, a boy who read science magazines cover to cover. At fourteen, plowing a field in straight parallel rows, he saw the trick that mechanical television could never manage: an image could be scanned line by line, electronically, the way his plow turned a field row by row. He sketched the idea for his schoolteacher, and that schoolboy drawing later became evidence in one of the most famous patent fights in American history. First transmission: a single straight line With backing scraped together in San Franc...