Top 5 Famous Romanian Inventions That You Probably Didn't Know About

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I was planning on writing a blog about new year resolutions and what have I, or have I not, accomplished in 2019, but I thought it would be too boring, since many of us are sharing such thoughts and facts during this time around. I realized though that sometimes I am too hard against my people and I should probably change my attitude and see the positive in our history as well.

The simplest way that I can think about, at least from a blogging point of view, would be to share with you some things, ideas, and products that came out of Romanian hands and brains, that you have probably used, or at least heard of, but didn't know a Romanian invented them.

We have plenty of such products that I could share, but I don't want to make this post too long so I will mention and give you a few details about the most important ones. The most important ones in my opinion, of course.

The Ejection Seat

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Now, from what I know, none of my followers is a pilot and there are very very low chances you won't be using such a chair in your lifetime. For the sake of dropping some knowledge and bragging a bit about my people I am mentioning the ejection seat as the first Romanian invention, for this post.

Anastase Dragomir was the young man that, at the beginning of the 20th century, was more preoccupied about getting pilots out of a plane safe, in case of a disaster, rather than how are they going to fly, or working in improving flying. Hence on November 3rd 1928, he registered his patent application at “Nouveau systeme de montage des parachutes dans les appareils de locomotion aerienne”, in France, and at the beginning of April in 1930 he got it. The rest is history...

The Insulin

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Frederick Banting and Charles Best got the Nobel Prize for discovering the treatment for diabetes in 1922, but it was the Romaninan Nicolae Paulescu that actually did it. Although he was a psychologist, he invented what he named pancreine, not insulin, an artificial hormone that proved to lover hyperglycemia, but when he finished his studies, Bucharest was already occupied by the Germans and he couldn't stance it as his own invention.

The Canadians took the laurels for inventing the insulin, thanks to Paulescu's mistake of publishing, in 1916, a report in a Belgian magazine regarding his research. The psychology professor of the Medical and Pharmaceutical University of Bucharest, might not be mentioned and remembered by the world as the father of insulin, but in reality he actually is.

The Ink Pen

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Chances are that you probably haven't used any of those ever, and I will admit that I only used them for a few years, in school, but I hated such pens. However, as you will discover in the following paragraph, such a historic writing tool was invented by a Romanian, Petrache Poenaru.

As a profession he was a mathematician, physicist, and an engineer, but being the secretary of one of Romania's famous leaders in history, he had to write a lot... using the quill pen, and I suppose it wasn't too fun and practical to do that. Hence he worked on and invented the tool that we now know about as the ink pen. In 1827 he got the French patent for what the French called "plume portable sans fin, qui s'alimente elle-même avec de l'encre", which is actually the ink pen that never runs out of juice and doesn't leaves stains on paper, and made writing easier for his inventor.

The Jet Engine

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If by chance you flew at least once with a jet plane, then you have to be thankful to Henri Coanda for inventing the jet engine and making that possible. Champs-Elisee, Paris, hosted in 1910, the first airplane using a jet engine, that wears the name of his inventor. Coanda, at the same event, accidentally flew the plane without being an airplane pilot, by simply turning on the motor to show off and check it up. Everybody got stoned when the weird plane that had double wings and no propeller lift off the ground and flew...for a while.

The jet engine, first invented and built by Henri Coanda, was composed of a four-cylinder, water-cooled piston engine and developed 50 horsepower at 1000 rotations per minute. This piston engine was connected to a rod that rotated the rotary multiplier; the movement was transmitted to the compressor, which gained a rotation of 4000 rotations per minute. The propulsion force was 220 kgf, much higher than if the piston engine was connected to a propeller.
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The Perpetuum Mobile

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Last, but not least, on my top five Romanian inventions is one that actually has no purpose or use case, in my opinion, but is a hell lot of an interesting one. A device created by a Romanian scientist called Nicolae Vasilescu-Karpen, that still works, by itself with no external power source, and now, even after sixty years, is something really worth mentioning and pondering on. What this device will prove at some point in the future, if it will, is beyond my understanding, but I look at such inventions as I look at Tesla's, that we haven't yet managed to make them a reality in our lives, but the gems are definitely there waiting to be implemented.

The concept of mobile perpetuum implies that a device is capable of operating endlessly without receiving energy from outside. For now, Karpen is still right and has created something like this. The "Karpen Pile" was patented in 1922. "Inside it has a gold electrode, another one of platinum gold, enclosed in two glass cylinders, blown in pure sulfuric acid and a small electric motor (in fact, a kind of oscilloscope) that shows me that the battery is working".
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The list could have gone further and I would easily do a top ten of such kind, but I believe that's more than enough to make me proud of my origins and for a hell of a post. Something that I haven't worked for in quite a while. Hope you enjoyed reading and found the article interesting, to say the least.

Sources in Romanian Language:
https://www.descopera.ro/stiinta/4622348-cele-mai-importante-inventii-romanesti
https://playtech.ro/2015/10-inventii-despre-care-nu-stiai-ca-sunt-facute-de-romani/

Thanks for attention,
Adrian



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12 comments
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Countries are arbitrary divisions of ground. You should be proud of those people being Romanians, not the fact that the inventions or discoveries took place in Romania.

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They took place in Romania and invented by Romanians and that's what I am proud of. I believe that any country/place on earth has its vibe, or should I say soul, and sometimes, in rare cases I have to admit, I search for the good in our own.

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