Scientific Innovations With History Beyond What you Think

Today, we have the iPhone even though we started our modern invention from scratching two stones together. We have improved a lot when it comes to inventions although our speed increased in the last 1000 to 100 years but then we have done exceedingly but as you would expect that some inventions came sooner than their time and we still use them till today.

We would attribute a lot of technological advancement to the steam engine, but what if I were to tell you that there was a steam engine invention far before the famous steam engine which was discovered by Heron of Alexandria known as the Aeolipile (Wind ball). It was a steam turbine that could turn heat to motion. For the engine to move, water would be placed into the Cauldron and heated from the buttom to release steam from the open pairs causing the turbine to move in the opposite direction the steam is coming out from. The Aeolipile wasn't used to power anything but if was tried on anything to make it move, it would have been inefficient but it gave a simple explanation of how heat energy can be turned into motion.

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I was at a friend's home and he was complaining that his ice-making refrigerator was faulty. I could tell the pain in his eyes but then I laughed saying before this, what were you using? The ice making refrigerator has become a part of every household and some of the referigerators are able to dispense although those are quite expensive than the regular ice making refrigerator but the history of ice making refrigerator goes as far back as 4th century BCE and this was the time of Yakhchals, the cone-shaped ice houses used to store ice. You might be forced to say that refrigerators now make ices and not store them, well improved versions of the Yakhchals from the 17th century were able to make ices on their own and they did this through passive cooling unlike our modern refrigerator that uses electricity.

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Lenses has been something that we have been doing for a very long time to sharpen our visions and this has been for as long as the 12th century but today starting from the 1800s, scientists began to look at contact lenses. This began in 1801 when Thomas Young decided to craft the first contact lens. He used a double lens from a microscope, filled it with water, and then put it in his eyes directly. This changed the way his eyes focused light but he was unable to blink his eyes. In the year 1880, Adolf Fick was able to create another contact lens made of glass but that was stuck to cover the entire eye. In 1947, we began to improve on them creating plastic lenses and they became smaller.

We have innovated a lot with so many technological wonders but we cannot deny the fact that some of these advancements were ideas far long before the came into existence or in some cases, there were prototypes that spoke to the current innovations that we enjoy.

Read More

^{https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226680721_Heron_of_Alexandria_c_10-85_AD
https://www.egr.msu.edu/~lira/supp/steam/
https://undisciplinedenvironments.org/2023/01/24/about-refrigerators/
http://www.historyofrefrigeration.com/refrigeration-history/yakhchal-ancient-refrigerator/
https://issuu.com/fidel_funk/docs/ice_houses_of_iran_final1
https://www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1984/8409/840904.PDF
https://ota.fas.org/reports/8409.pdf
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1801.0004}