Montshire Minute: Contraptions

Originally aired during the week of January 24, 2000

Monday

In his book The Evolution of Useful Things, Henry Petroski says the primary motivation for inventors is not visions of untold wealth, or a desire to make the world a better place to live. Dissatisfaction with existing technology, he says, is the mother of all invention. Sometimes inventions, however ingenious they may be, turn out to be completely impractical. We tend to call them contraptions. One Victorian farmer created a tiny dinner table railway to bring in various courses of a meal. He wanted to avoid the constant interruption of servants bustling in and out of the dining room. That one never caught on. But we can still admire the ingenuity of some of these machines. Contraptions A-Z, a new exhibit at the Museum, features 26 inventions that do a lot of important work-like helping frogs flip flapjacks faultlessly! Future inventors, prepare to be inspired!

Tuesday

Debate raged in the late 1800s over this question: Does a galloping horse have all four legs off the ground at any one time? Former California Governor Leland Stanford argued that it did. To prove it, he hired photographer Edward Muybridge, who placed several cameras around a race track with trip wires attached to the shutters. A running horse activated the cameras, resulting in a series of photos recording the animal's motion. He put together a zootrope - a succession of pictures placed to next to each other on a drum. When spun around quickly, the viewer saw a sort of primitive motion picture of a moving horse! Years later, Thomas Edison unveiled his Kinetoscope, a viewing device in which a person could see about 15 seconds of action on film frames. He didn't think it was worth patenting abroad, though. It was the Lumiere brothers who presented the first moving picture show in Paris in 1895.

Wednesday

The bicycle is no longer a primary means of transport. But besides being a popular recreational vehicle, it is also an ingenious contraption. We can see how inventors throughout the years tinkered with its design to improve its performance. In 1816 a German nobleman created a two-wheeled vehicle with handlebars that pivoted. You could steer it OK. But you had to push yourself along with your feet. In 1839, a Scottish blacksmith added pedals which drove the rear wheel through a system of cranks. This enabled the rider to actually propel the machine with her feet. Then a Frenchman, Pierre Michaux, attached pedals and cranks to the front wheel. It was a pretty hot machine in the late 1850s. But the wheels were wood, the tires were iron. The machine was called the "boneshaker" in some quarters. In England, solid rubber tires mounted on steel rims were introduced, and the modern bike was born.

Thursday

While Earl Dickson was working for Johnson & Johnson in the early 1900s, his wife often cut or burned herself in the kitchen. Dickson worried about how she would be able to dress a wound on her hand if there wasn't anyone else around to help. He also went hungry a lot. So he put on his thinking cap. Why not make a ready-made bandage? After attaching a piece of gauze to a strip of surgical tape, Dickson backed the exposed sticky surface with a piece of material to prevent the adhesive from drying out. Voila! Mrs. Dickson had a supply of pre-made bandages. We may never know if her culinary skills improved. We do know that executives at Johnson & Johnson liked Dickson's invention so much that they began marketing it. Later in 1920, the company began selling adhesive bandages as "Band-Aids" ("band" as in BAND-age and "aid" as in "first-AID").

Friday

Accurately measuring time has been a challenge throughout human history for scientists and tinkerers alike. Among the first time measuring devices were sundials. Of course, you were stuck if you wanted to know what time it was after the sun went down. A water clock was used by the ancient Egyptians to get around this problem. They measured water as it slowly dripped from a hole in the bottom of a bowl. Lines etched around the inside of the bowl indicated the hour of day or night. As glassmaking techniques improved, medieval Europe began using sand-filled hourglasses. It is not certain who invented the first mechanical clock, but large tower clocks were fixtures in European cathedrals by the 1300s. Stop by Montshire to see the "watchdog," one of several intriguing exhibits in Contraptions From A-Z, a new touring exhibit at the Museum.