More often than not we take the world around us for granted. We don’t think much about the things that form it.
So, when someone comes up with a weird idea, few people see the potential behind it. The normal response to that is “The world is already at the limit, we can’t make it even better”.
You’d be surprised to learn that this was the case for centuries. Some of the inventions that shaped the world as we know it were not taken up immediately. Here are 7 of them!
Turbinia
While Turbinia means little to the world of today, it brought up a major change back at the beginning of the 20th century.
The story of this ship is a stereotypical story about success. It didn’t start in a garage, but it was as close to it as it could.
The man behind it, Charles Algernon Parsons, designed a turbine boat from scratch. He had to learn naval engineering to do that.
The company he hired to produce the invention never built a boat before, but their collective work helped rebuild the UK navy.
In 1897, the year it was shown to the world, the UK fleet was made up of sailing ships. Sure, they had small coal-powered engines, but they were used for maneuvers. The navy still used wind power for long-distance travel.
The speed of these ships depended upon the wind, with a moderate breeze generating 14 knots or 25 km/h. Turbinia’s top speed was 34 knots or 62 km/h.
As many other innovations, a completely coal-powered ship that worked on turbines, not sails, was not viewed well by the navy. How did it get its chance?
The inventor took out his creation to the Spithead Navy Review, a naval parade of a sort, where the Admiralty and members of the royal family gathered to look at their fleet.
Parsons dashed past the sailing ships in Turbinia, impressing the attendants. In a couple of years, the navy was building these ships en masse.
Bicycles
You can’t imagine the world without bicycles. Despite the fact that we’re still very much car-oriented, bikes are becoming more popular because of the cost and global warming concerns.
In the early days of the invention, few people thought bicycles were any good. At best, they were considered a funny thing weird people do. John Keats named them “nothing of the day”.
While they did go out of fashion for some time, the work on them never stopped. In the 1850s, a new type of bicycle was developed, and that construction stuck for good.
Light bulb
A lightbulb is so simple that you rarely think about it as an invention. In the century where people used to kill whales to light their flats with their fat, the lightbulb was a big thing.
So big that when Thomas Edison announced he’d be showing his new invention to the world, many scientists arrived at his lab in New Jersey to…
Continue reading the article and discover more such inventions on Daisy Linden’s blog.