My Science School

            From the 1820s onwards, vehicles similar to buses were used by men. For example, horse drawn carriages were quite popular during those days. During the 1830s steam buses were introduced. Electric trolleybuses came into use from 1882. The first motor buses, using internal combustion engines, rather than steam power, entered service in 1895.

            The first mechanically propelled omnibus appeared on the streets of London on 22nd April, 1833. These vehicles were much less likely to overturn; they travelled faster than horse-drawn carriages. They were much cheaper to run, and caused much less damage to the road surface due to their wide tyres.

            Carl Benz had produced a motorized bus as early as 1895. In the same year, he started operating a regular line service on the 15 km route between Siegen and Deutz in Germany. Frank Searle designed the first mass-produced, double-decker bus. It was operated by the London General Omnibus Company. Contemporary buses began to evolve from the 1950s onwards.

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            Karl Benz, a German mechanical engineer, designed and built the first practical car (three wheeled) powered by an internal-combustion engine, in 1885. He is often known as the inventor of the modern car.

            During the next year, he conducted a public demonstration. Benz was the first to offer his vehicle for sale in 1887.

            One of the most important landmarks in engine design came from Nicolaus Otto who in 1876 invented an effective gas motor engine.

            In 1913, the Ford Model T, created by the Ford Motor Company, became the first automobile to be mass-produced on a moving assembly line. This was the car that launched the era of popular motoring and in 1920 it became the first car to sell a million.

            The first motor car in Europe was produced by the company Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau.

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            A steam boat was described and patented by English physician John Allen in 1729. It soon became popular. However, boats powered by a petrol engine were only introduced in the 19th century.

            This was achieved following the invention of the internal combustion engine. The earliest boat to be powered by a petrol engine was tested on the Neckar River by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1886.

            It is said that the first powerboat was designed and built by the Priestman Brothers in Hull, England. The company began trials of their first motorboat in 1888. Priestman’s boats were used to tow cargo along canals.

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               The idea of transporting things and people on rails has been around for a long time. Hero of Alexandria had experimented with steam in the 1st century AD. But only in 1698 was steam used for practical purpose. Thomas Newcomen designed the world’s first successful atmospheric steam engine in 1712. In the 1760s James Watt improved steam engine.

               By the 1780s both British and French pioneers were experimenting with the idea of using steam to drive heavy wheeled road engines. Richard Trevithick is credited with developing the first high-pressure engine, compact enough to operate on tramways. In 1813, William Hedley built the puffing billy, a locomotive. George Stephenson further developed it. His locomotive was used to pull the first engine-driven freight and passenger service along the 16 km route of the Stockton & Darlington railway.

               In 1879, the German engineer Werner von Siemens presented the world’s first electric train. Diesel power made its debut in 1912, in a locomotive built by the Swizz firm Sulzer.

               Many men got injured in their quest to take flight. One among them was Eilmer, who fixed wings to his hands and feet, and tried to take flight from a tower of Malmesbury Abbey in the 11th century.

               He broke his legs and was seriously injured after the attempt. It is said that many imaginary flying objects and machines were sketched by the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci.

               The brothers Joseph-Michael and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier, prosperous paper manufacturers, began experimenting with lighter-than-air devices after observing that heated air directed into a paper or fabric bag made the bag rise. In 1783, the brothers Etienne and Joseph Montgolfier demonstrated the first hot-air balloon. It flew about 2.5 km, before crashing and bursting into flames.

               Since 1899, Wilbur and Orville Wright had been scientifically experimenting with the concepts of flight. They made four flights on 17th December 1903, on their first powered aircraft, at Kitty Hawk.

               The longest lasted just under a minute and covered 259.6 m. Thus the first flight changed the history of mankind. Wright Brothers’ aeroplane was crude. Later, many changes were introduced in aeroplanes.

 

 

            Germany’s Deutsche Luft-Reederei established the world’s first passenger airline in February 1919. The next month, the French started a route from Paris to Brussels. In the same year, a British company, Air Transport and Travel, started the first daily international service linking London and Paris.

            Britain had five, Germany had seven and France has eight airlines by the end of a decade after the introduction of passenger aircraft. Earlier, converted bombers were used as passenger aircraft. The first purpose-built airliner was the British de Havilland DH 16 in 1919. The first jet airliner was the de Havilland Comet introduced in 1952.

            In 1958, Boeing 707 became the first long-haul airliner. It had 179 seats and a cruising speed of about 910 km/h. Jumbo jets such as Boeing 747 were introduced later in 1970.

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               In the 9th century, Arab astronomers became the first to notice the properties of photography. They found that a beam of light reflected from an illuminated object and entering a darkened room through a hole, would project the image upside down.

               In 1727, Johann Heinrich Schulze, a German professor of anatomy, discovered that silver nitrate turns dark when exposed to light. The unexposed side remained white. He captured cut-out letters on a bottle of light-sensitive slurry. He was amazed to find that the results were durable.

               Thomas Wedgwood, in the early development of photography, managed to produce impermanent images on cloth and white leather.

               In the 1820s, the French inventor Nicephore Niepce first managed to get an image that was captured by the first camera ever made. Louis Daguerre, an associate of Niepce, developed the first commercially viable photographic process called daguerreotype. Later, the paper-based calotype negative and salt print process was invented by William Henry Fox Talbot. It was in the 1990s that digital photography was first introduced.

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            The earliest recorded use of limb prosthesis is that of a Persian soldier named Hegesistratus. In 1579, the French army surgeon Ambroise Pare used artificial limbs on his amputees. Later, a noncorrosive metal-vitallium was discovered. It was widely used for making artificial ligaments. Gore – Tex, a porous form of Teflon was approved for making artificial body parts in the US in 1988.

            The first-ever artificial pacemaker was engineered by Dr. A. S. Hyman in 1932. It was an apparatus to deliver regular electrical stimulations to the heart. The first artificial heart to be successfully implanted in a human was the Jarvik-7 in 1982, designed by Willem Johan Kolff and Robert Jarvik. One of the earliest instances of plastic surgery can be found in the Sushruta Samhita, an important medical text from Ancient India.

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