A Brief History On February 26, 1903, Michael Joseph Owens was granted a patent for a glass blowing machine, one of five inventions he patented for the mass production of glass objects such as light bulbs and bottles. Digging Deeper Owens made the production of glass bottles 80% cheaper and glass bulbs 90% cheaper than hand made objects. His inventions revolutionized the glass industry and helped spur the rapid development of the 20th Century industrial modernization. Owens worked for glass pioneer, Edward Libbey, in Ohio, making light bulbs for Edison General Electric. In 1919, Owens joined Libbey in creating the Owens…
Browsing: Inventions
A Brief History On February 18, 2023, the USA celebrates another National Battery Day! We would like to take this opportunity to briefly talk about batteries. Digging Deeper An electro-chemical device used to power any sort of electrical gizmo, we use batteries to start out cars, power our cell phones, light our flashlights, run our radios, power medical devices such as hearing aids and pacemakers, and they keep our computer data from being lost when the lights go out. Batteries were first invented way back between 150 BC and 650 AD, although we are not sure, the first known example…
A Brief History On February 15, 1996, the Chinese space program took a tragic turn when a Long March 3B rocket malfunctioned and crashed into a Chinese village, killing between 6 and 100 people on the ground. Digging Deeper The rocket was carrying an Intelsat 708 communications satellite into space, but veered off course shortly after lift off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. While the highly publicized American Space Shuttle disasters come to mind when discussing fatal space incidents, there have been many failures of space launches that have resulted in the expensive loss of equipment and in some…
A Brief History On February 14, 2000, the American spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker orbited asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit an asteroid. Digging Deeper NEAR Shoemaker had been designed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and was launched in 1996. Not only did the spacecraft make history with its orbit, a year later it made space history again by being the first spacecraft to touch down on an asteroid, the same 433 Eros. The spacecraft was named after Eugene Shoemaker, an American geologist that studied impact craters on the Earth, but also studied…
A Brief History On February 7, 1984, two astronauts from the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-41-B made space exploration history by taking the first untethered space walk outside of their space ship. Digging Deeper Not being attached by any sort of lifeline had to be a terrifying prospect, but astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart, both on their first space flight, operated outside the Challenger free of any safety line for over 5 hours. In 1972, President Richard Nixon announced the NASA Space Shuttle program, an ambitious program sadly remembered for the Challenger and Columbia disasters, but…
