Carl Sorenson wrote: >We are the ones who invented
I enjoy investigating things like this... >airplanes, Cayley (English) is attributed with the invention of a 'modern' aircraft in 1853. The Wright brothers (American) were aware of his work are attributed with the invention of a powered aircraft in 1903. >TV's, [begin quote] Who Invented Television? The issue of 'who invented television?' will probably never be answered to everyone's satisfaction. Each country believed they have their own televison pioneer(s). People in the US believe it was Jenkins or Farnsworth. The Japanese believe it was Takayanagi. In Russia it was Boris Rosing. In France it was Belin and Barthelemy. Eastern Europe, von Mihaly. Germany, Karolus. In the UK we have the choice of Campbell-Swinton for concept and Baird for practical demonstration. A few current authors (Burns and Abramson) have taken a less provincial and more global view and correctly cited almost parallel developments in thinking and experiment around the world. Television had been thought out on paper for some time and had been waiting for developments in electronics to catch up. It did catch up part-way in the early 1920's with the availability of fast, sensitive photo-cells and valve amplifiers. At that time, scanning the picture could not yet be done electronically. Paul Nipkow [a German] had invented a method of mechanical scanning for television back in 1884. This was basically a disc with a single spiral of lenses or apertures on it. Each lens corresponded to a line of the television picture. One rotation would give one television frame. Not only was it simple to build (for a small number of lines), it could be used for both camera-scanning and display scanning. The Nipkow disc was used by several of these TV pioneers as the basis for their Television system. [end quote] >microwaves The word 'invent' does not really apply to microwaves unless you are referring to a microwave oven. They were discovered or predicted by James Clerk Maxwell (a Scot) in 1864. >transistors, integrated circuits, PC's, and nuclear >bombs and reactors. There are some things that we can wish were not invented. Creative work for the 'invention' of the nuclear bomb is attributed to many people including: Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, Edward Teller (Hungarian). Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Rudolph Peierls, Albert Einstein (German). Enrico Fermi (Italian). Lord Rutherford (New Zealand). Robert Oppenheimer (American).
