John Jewkes

The Moulton Bicycle

The bicycle must be one of the most useful and serviceable of all machines. There are probably more than a hundred million bicycles in use throughout the world and they continue to be produced by the million annually. The extraordinary fact about this machine, however, is that although it had long been manufactured by large firms, it had not changed in basic design in the seventy years from the introduction of the ‘safety’ model. It was left to an independent inventor outside the industry to take up the challenge and introduce a novel design which has been widely accepted.

Long-Playing Record

Music lover found in the long-playing record the answer to their desire to hear a work uninterrupted by record changing. The four fundamental features of the successful long-playing record system are: (1) the slow rotational speed of r.p.m.; (2) finer grooves, usually from 224 to 300 per inch; (3) vinylite plastic record; and (4) lightweight pick-up. The industry had long been seeking a practicable high-quality long-playing record of the normal ten or twelve inch diameter size, but these four features had not been combined until the Columbia Company introduced their long-playing record in 1948.

The Individual Inventor

There is a sharp and intriguing conflict of opinion between those who hold that the day of the individual inventor is done1 and those who consider that not merely is he very much with us but that, from present appearances, he will continue to play an active part in technical progress. The views of the first group have been set forth in Chapter II.2 Against them can be set the notions of some eminent scientists, technologists, individual inventors and students of invention. A few of many possible quotations follows.

Catalytic Cracking of Petroleum

Methods of cracking petroleum by the use of heat had been known and employed in the nineteenth century, but it was not until large quantities of gasoline were needed that serious commercial interest was taken in them. Dr. Burton of the Standard Oil Company pioneered the first practical thermal cracking process in the early years of the present century and his and other methods were widely adopted by the oil companies.

Ball-Point Pen

This type of pen has a ball-bearing for a point which rolls the ink on to the paper and, with its special ink, is so constructed that it needs refilling only at long intervals. Although the idea that the writing point of a pen should consist of a revolving ball goes back much earlier, the modern form of this pen was the invention of two Hungarians, Ladislao J. Biro, who at various times had been a sculptor, painter and journalist, and his brother Georg, a chemist. The brothers conducted their original experiments in Hungary and patents were applied for in 1938. At the outbreak of war they moved to the Argentine and there, with the help of financial backers, especially H. G. Martin, a company was formed to perfect and produce the pen. In 1943 a defect in connection with the piston reservoir became apparent: ink was forced out by the piston whether the pen was being used or not. Biro and his colleagues found the solution in the provision of a ball-point in which the ball rested on a base seat intersected by feed channels and the employment of a reservoir consisting of a tube in which the ink was maintained as an uninterrupted column by capillary forces.

Modern Views on Invention

There is one type of mind which finds it tempting to stress the contrast between the world of today and that of yesterday and to think of change as a series of big fresh starts: there is another type congenitally disposed to believe that there is nothing new under the sun, that all that has been said and done has happened before. As between these two extremes, both likely to give a distorted perspective, there can be little doubt that the greater part of modern writing about invention and technical progress strongly inclines to the view that we live in a new world in which thinking of the present or the future in terms of past experience is largely irrelevant, and that our ideas must be recast and our institutions reformed to fit fresh surroundings. Social scientists are now tending to speak with more confidence about the scale on which inventions will be made and the sources from which they will arise. There have, indeed, been some odd switches of thought since the end of the First World War. In the early 1930’s it was widely believed that technical progress would normally be so swift and disturbing that a high level of ‘technological’ unemployment would be usual and inevitable.

Conclusions and Speculations

There is nothing in the history of technology in the past century and a half to suggest that infallible methods of invention have been discovered or are, in fact, discoverable. It may be true that in these days the search for new ideas and techniques is pursued with more system, greater energy and, although this is more doubtful, greater economy than formerly. Yet chance still remains an important factor in invention and the intuition, will and obstinacy of individuals spurred on by the desire for knowledge, renown or personal gain the great driving forces in technical progress. As with most other human activities, the monotony and sheer physical labour in research can be relieved by the use of expensive equipment and tasks can thereby be attempted which would otherwise be wholly impossible. But it does not appear that new mysteries will only be solved and new applications of natural forces made possible by ever increasing expenditure. In many fields of knowledge, discovery is still a matter of scouting about on the surface of things where imagination and acute observation, supported only by simple technical aids, are likely to bring rich rewards.

Inventors and Invention in the Nineteenth Century

There has been much writing about the many nineteenth-century inventors, from which it seems possible to obtain an accurate general picture of the manner in which they lived. It is much less easy to be certain about how they worked and thought. The inventor’s mind must always be a matter of some mystery, although it ought to be possible to discover how far he based his work on scientific knowledge, how methodical was his approach to a subject, and whether he was disposed to seek the help of scientists. In fact, many contradictory answers have been given to these questions, especially to the second, and usually the more extensive the writings about a particular inventor the more numerous the contradictions. In such cases all that can be done is to draw attention to the conflicting opinions, although, wherever an inventor’s own statements are available, they have been given because they sometimes resolve the conflicts and should, perhaps, be treated with more respect than those of writers whose information is second-hand.

Self-Winding Wrist-Watch

The idea of the self-winding watch can be traced back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, when Abraham-Louis Perrelet, a Swiss, Abraham-Louis Breguet, a Frenchman, and Louis Recordon, a Swiss settled in England, all produced pedometer pocket watches in which the mainspring was wound up by a small internal weight swinging with the movement of the wearer. These watches remained curiosities; they were easily damaged, difficult to repair, bulky and expensive. Later, in the nineteenth century, a number of patents were taken out on self-winding watches, but these were still of the pedometer type and embodied no radical innovation.

The Prevention of Rhesus Haemolytic Disease

The first recorded description of haemolytic disease of the newborn was in 1609 but until the discovery of the human blood groups during this century, and in particular the description of the group known as the Rhesus (Rh.) factor in 1939, no treatment was possible. The American physician and research scientist, Dr. P. Levine, discovered and described the hitherto unknown antibody (later named the Rhesus factor by Drs. Wiener and Landsteiner, then at Wisconsin University) when he established that the disease occurs when a Rh. negative mother produces a Rh. positive baby, who inherits this blood type from its father. Since the baby’s cells usually, although not always, invade the mother at delivery the first baby is not normally affected; such foreign foetal cells entering her circulation may cause her to react, as the body does to any foreign material, by producing antibodies to destroy them. The presence of these antibodies becomes a permanent factor in the mother’s blood stream and, as the level of antibodies may rise after each birth, subsequent Rh. positive children’s cells are attacked with increasing severity. Although about eight per cent of all pregnancies may give rise to antibodies, only about I in 180 babies in western countries are affected because the child may not be Rh. positive, may be a first child, or may be protected by one or other of several factors. In the Inilder form of the disease anaeinia and jaundice develop; increasing severity leads to stillbirth, to infant death or to brain damage of the surviving children.