Inventions

Dyes have been used for thousands of years. Cave paintings from the Upper Palaeolithic period (35,000 to 10,000 years ago) show that people already knew how to reproduce colours. But whereas cave artists used...

  Few inventions have transformed office life as much as ‘Xerography’. Before photocopiers came on the market, if you wanted a copy of a document you had three alternates: copy it out on a...

Sometimes an invention is made many years before there is any demand for it. This is what happened with the fax machine. The basic idea came to German inventor Arthur Korn in the early...

Today, it is difficult for most people in Europe and America to imagine life without a washing machine. But for thousands of years, people washed their clothes by hand. In many places, people still...

The first windmills were built in western Asia, probably in Syria, in the seventh century AD. In this part of the world, there are strong winds that almost always blow in the same direction....

Concrete may seem like a very modern building material, but it was actually invented by the Romans. They made it by mixing fragments of stone with a mixture of lime and sand. The sand...

The Italian scientist Galileo (see pages 31 and 33) came very close to inventing the thermometer in 1592. He made an instrument called a ‘thermoscope’. In it, an open-ended tube was held over a...

Today, there is iron or steel almost everywhere you look. Cars, buildings and appliance in the home all contain large amounts of iron. It is a material that can be found in many places...

The idea of the lock probably appeared independently in different parts of the world. The ancient Chinese had simple locks that could be undone with a sickle-shaped or hook-like key. Locks like this existed...

The first boats were simple dugout canoes or craft made of skin stretched over a wooden frame.  They were propelled with paddles or oars. But sailing boats have a big advantage, because much bigger...