Name: The Truth About 10 Famous Inventions
Uploaded: 2016-11-02T09:57:46.000Z
Duration: 11 min 6 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Inventors. People with messy hair sitting alone in their garages, tinkering and being

Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. That’s

what we learn in school: that a great genius invented a thing, because it’s a sound bite

that’s easy to teach and easy to remember.

But the truth is, it’s almost never that simple. Every great, world-changing invention

is the culmination of efforts by dozens or hundreds of people.

The last person to come along is usually the one who gets the credit, but they have all

of history on their side as collaborators.

So here are ten inventors who didn’t invent the things they’re known for inventing.

Or rather, ten people who put the exclamation point on a decades- or centuries-long process

to finally bring that thing into the light.

The late 1500s was a pretty good time to be in the glass business. Techniques for making

glass and lenses were getting much better, and the telescope was practically inevitable.

With all those lenses lying around, sooner or later someone was bound to pick up a pair

and go, “Haha! This makes your head look bigger!”

The first person we know for sure to have done this was a Dutch man named Hans Lippershey.

These magnification devices were massively popular in the Netherlands, so when Galileo

heard about them, he wanted one for himself.

No big deal--he just built his own. Without ever having seen one in person. And he made

So, that was pretty clever of Galileo. He was a smart person - not trying to take anything

The other thing he did was to use it as a scientific instrument, making observations

of the solar system. Nobody else had thought to do this yet, that we know of.

But Galileo certainly benefited from the work of Lippershey and all the recent improvements

James Watt’s name is practically synonymous with the steam engine, but it predates his

English inventor Thomas Savery created the first steam engine -- which he patented in

1698 -- to solve a very specific problem:

Coal mines tended to fill up with water, which wasn’t great for the miners. Using steam

power to haul it out was much better than buckets.

A few years later, another English inventor named Thomas Newcomen tweaked the machine

so it would work at close to atmospheric pressure -- earning it the name “atmospheric engine.”

The Newcomen engine stuck around for about fifty years, and while it was better than

buckets, it wasn’t great. It had to be heated and cooled constantly and was hideously inefficient.

James Watt’s key innovation -- which he developed in the 1760s and 70s -- was to create

This made the device much more energy-efficient, enough for Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton

to commercialize the steam engine and revolutionize the world. Industrially speaking.

If you went to school in the United States, you can probably recite by rote the fact that

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793.

The way cotton grows, it has a bunch of seeds stuck in the fibers that we actually want

Those seeds used to have to be picked out by hand.

There were cotton-separating devices made from simple rollers that worked pretty well,

except when they didn’t. Sometimes they squashed the seeds and made a mess. And they

really only worked for cotton with long fibers.

The cotton in most of Georgia -- which was often grown by slaves -- had short fibers.

So the state of Georgia was very eager for someone to come along and invent a better

As part of a massive state-sponsored engineering push, Whitney was commissioned to make a better

roller gin. And he did, replacing the solid rollers with wire teeth. It worked great -- but

also led to a much higher demand for slaves.

So Whitney’s gin drew on earlier innovations, and it also changed American history -- probably

Human-powered lifting devices date back to antiquity. The Ancient Greeks and Romans documented

So Elisha Otis can hardly be credited with inventing the elevator in 1853.

But the Industrial Revolution made it possible to power these elevators by steam or electricity

rather than some dudes pulling on a rope. And with buildings in the United States getting

taller and taller, people were getting pretty tired of taking the stairs.

There was just one problem. Early electric elevators were still held up by ropes, and

ropes have an unfortunate tendency to break.

Otis developed an unlikely but crucial safety innovation. He invented the safety brake,

otherwise known as the thing that will grab hold of your elevator if the cable snaps and

And I do say grab, present tense, because we still use pretty similar safety gear.

Without Otis’ invention, we probably wouldn’t have skyscrapers. Lots of people contributed

to the idea of elevators, but Otis made them practical.

Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light-giving electrical device. He didn’t even invent

glass bulbs with glowy filaments in them.

He did, however, start selling a practical light bulb in 1880.

The first electric light, called an arc lamp, was created by Humphry Davy 78 years earlier.

But it didn’t last long and was way too bright.

People tried making filaments out of platinum for a while, but platinum is, uh, pricey.

In 1850, Joseph Swan realized that carbonized paper was a better and more plentiful material

for filaments, and started making light bulbs.

But he had trouble making them efficient and long-lasting.

Swan eventually landed on cellulose filaments in the early 1880s, which lasted a good long

And around the same time, Edison found that carbonized bamboo could last for 1200 hours.

In 1883, Swan’s company merged with Edison’s, and the rest was mostly marketing.

The invention of the radio in the 1890s was a bare-knuckle death match between Marconi

Tesla received many of the early patents for radio devices and invented the crucial technology

Marconi, on the other hand, had more success developing them as a commercial product and

transmitting signals over long distances.

But these milestones were only possible thanks to the work of another man.

A decade earlier, German scientist Heinrich Hertz was the very first person to conclusively

prove that electromagnetic radiation was a thing.

He was able to both transmit and receive radio waves in his lab.

But when asked about practical applications of his discovery, Hertz drew a total blank.

It was up to more engineering-minded folk like Tesla and Marconi to make radio actually

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The Truth About 10 Famous Inventions

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