So Now You Know

Early Aeroplanes George Cayley was the first person to move from designs involving flapping like birds to a “fixed wing” design. Another engineer called Otto Lilienthal then used a lot of these ideas to create gliders with fixed wings. Information and data obtained from testing them produced the basis that helped the Wright brothers to develop their own designs and build prototypes. Additionally, the Wright brothers were able to use another recent invention from the same time; the internal combustion engine used in automobiles. They were around at just the right time when these became available. Their true innovation was their design which allowed the plane to be steered and controlled that was previously impossible to do.

Grand Pianos The inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), came from Padua, Italy. He was an expert harpsichord maker and was very familiar with creating stringed keyboard instruments. Three pianos of his survive today and they all date from the 1720s. The invention of the piano was able to combine the loudness of the harpischord with the dynamics of the softer clavichord. Gottfried Silbermann was an organ builder and copied Cristofori’s except that he invented the forerunner of the modern damper pedal that lifts all the dampers from the strings at once, giving a sustained sound. The English John Broadwood company brought out a larger and powerful “grand” piano in a horizontal harpsichord case in 1777.

Elisha Otis Devices capable of lifting people in tall buildings have existed since the ancient Egyptians. As the industrial revolution and the growth of cities led to taller buildings being constructed, people became tired of having to climb multiple flights of stairs. Lifts or elevators were invented, using steam or electric motors which pulled them up with ropes. Because ropes have a tendency to break, being in a lift only a few storeys high would result in at least a severe injury, if not death, if the rope snapped. Elisha Otis invented the safety break, a device which stopped the lift from crashing down if a rope failed. This removed a major risk of death from buildings taller than a few storeys, and spurred o n t h e b u i l d i n g o f t h e f i r s t s k y s c r a p e r s .

The Origins of Coffee Legends tell us that about the 9th century, on the Ethiopian plains, the goat herder Kaldi first discovered the potential of coffee beans. Kaldi noticed that after eating the berries from a certain tree, his goats became so energetic that they did not want to sleep at night. Kaldi reported his findings to the abbot of the local monastery, who made a drink with the berries and found he had increased vitality. Coffee was exported out of Ethiopia to Yemen and by the 15th century it was cultivated in the Yemeni district. In the 16th century it was known in Persia, Egypt, Syria, and Turkey and enjoyed in homes and public coffee houses - called 'qahveh khaneh', which began to appear in cities across the Near East.

The Tallest Man Robert Pershing Wadlow (February 22th 1918 - July 15th 1940), also known as the Alton Giant and the Giant of Illinois, was an American man who is the tallest person in recorded history for whom there is irrefutable evidence. He was born and raised in Alton, Illinois, a small city near St. Louis, Missouri. Wadlow reached 8 ft 11ins (2.72 m) in height and weighed 439 lb (199 kg) at his death at age 22. His great size and his continued growth in adulthood were due to hyperplasia of his pituitary gland. He had to wear leg braces and had hardly any feeling in his legs or feet. Wadlow became a celebrity after his 1936 US tour with the Ringling Brothers Circus, appearing at Madison Square Garden and the Boston Garden centres.

Computer Operating Systems Many people credit Microsof t Windows with introducing the world to the Graphical User Interface (GUI), where you use a mouse to click on screen symbols to tell it what to do. However, a lot of the progress in GUI development happened much earlier. A pioneer was Douglas Engelbart, who demonstrated an operating system with a mouse pointer in 1968. This idea was taken up by Xerox, who released their Alto computers, the first with a mouse and GUI. Steve Jobs saw an Alto while visiting Xerox’s PARC research centre which inspired him to make the Apple Macintosh, the first mass-market GUI computer. This then paved the way for the Microsoft Windows Operating System, which took the idea mainstream.