Inventors and Inventions You have to love the fact how ingenious a lot of inventors are. And when we talk about genius inventors what is one of the first names that comes to most of our minds? When I think of people like this the first one I think of is Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was not only a genius inventor, but he was also a genius artist. As many of us already know, Leonardo used books for his drawings and inventions and some of these books have been recovered. The cool thing about this is they have been digitized and put online where we can see them for free. Before you get too excited, much of Leonardo’s writing was in a sort of a code he developed which meant you needed a mirror image to read what he wrote. The British Library is the one with the digitized books and is allowing people to look at them for free. Another problem of course is the fact the books are not in English. We will never know about some great inventions and the reason for this is the fact many inventions are prevented from being copyrighted and are confiscated by the military. Believe me when I tell you this has angered many inventors. About seventeen years ago a man named Robert Gold thought he had developed a great invention. The invention had to do with communication and was said to enable people to communicate with each other with less interference and greater security. When he went to patent his invention the Department of Defense said it could be a threat in the wrong hands and slapped his patent with the secrecy order. This meant he could never discuss his invention with anyone. It took five years of lawsuits by attorneys trying to lift this order until they finally succeeded, but by then his patent was worthless. The same thing has happened to thousands of inventors. When I say this, I am talking about their inventions being hit with a secrecy order. Sometimes inventions are a joint effort. An example of this is what is going on now at MIT. Researchers there have decided ancient fire bricks made of clay can probably be used to store energy. We are talking about bricks which were invented thousands of years ago and it would be quite ironic to find this type of use for them. They call their project FIRES or Firebrick Resistance-heated Energy Storage. What they want to do is use the bricks in a storage system to store electricity. The idea would be for excess energy to be turned into heat, using electrical resistance heaters and this heat would then be transferred to adjoining insulated fire bricks. The next day the heat could be turned back into electricity after it is fed into a generator. There have been many ideas for storing excess power by turning it to heat, but this is the first one I know of which would use an ancient technology. One new invention which I don’t see having a problem getting to market was just invented by the Swiss. It is a new type of chocolate, known as Ruby Chocolate. It is said to be a combination between berry-fruitiness and luscious smoothness, at least this is the way it is described. The flavor from the Ruby bean is unlocked along with the natural color. The manufacturers do not add the berries, berry flavor or coloring. The chocolate is unique not only because it is red, but because the flavor emerges naturally from the Ruby cocoa bean. The chocolate is a milk chocolate. The experts claim there will be a chocolate crisis in 2020, because we are running out of chocolate. We are getting so short of cocoa beans many are predicting chocolate will become a luxury again in about twenty years and will be sold like caviar. It is said chocolate will become so expensive the average person will never be able to afford it. I guess if we were asked the question which was the most important invention ever conceived, it would probably have to be fire. Before fire there wasn’t much and people were eating raw food which many times was contaminated and didn’t last very long. After fire, I think the next most important invention was the wheel. Not only does the wheel allow people to travel long distances, but wheels are included in all sorts of device. Without wheels, there is just so much we wouldn’t have. There is a lot of difference of opinion after these two inventions as to which ones come next in order of importance. I think if we are talking about technology we might have to say the steam engine. One of the most amazing things is the fact we are probably inventing more inventions now than ever before and that is because many of them are based on what came before them. One only has to look at how many patents are being applied for and they can see there is more than ever. In the year 1900 39,673 patents were applied for. In the year 1950 67,264 patents were applied for. In 2000 295,926 patents were applied for and in 2015 589,410 patents were applied for. These figures are only for the US patent office and don’t take into consideration the rest of the world. It is obvious we are coming up with inventions at an incredible rate. The problem with these figures however is not everyone agrees with them and there are other figures available, but they all indicate a substantial increase. It seems the United States leads the world total in patents by about roughly 25% and more inventions and patents come from California than anywhere else in the country. Some inventions we have been told about which sounded promising, we no longer hear about. When this happens, it seems to me they may have become part of a secret project. It has been claimed the United States is much further along in aviation, but has decided to keep this a secret, so other countries don’t have the opportunity to try and build defenses against new unknown aircraft or spacecraft. In other words, we really don’t know how many thousands of inventions there are out there which have been kept secret. It is said the amount of inventions which have been declared secret numbers more than six thousand. I think it numbers far more than that amount. I know there are a lot of very unhappy inventors who have had their inventions taken from them. |
