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Air conditioning
The history of an invention that makes life more pleasant
Willis Carrier designed the first air-conditioning unit in 1902, just a year after graduating from Cornell University with a Masters in Engineering. At a Brooklyn printing plant, fluctuations in heat and moisture were causing the size of the printing paper to keep changing slightly, making it hard to align different colours. Carrier’s invention made it possible to control temperature and humidity levels and so align the colours. The invention also allowed industries such as film, processed food, textiles and pharmaceuticals to improve the quality of their products.
In 1914, the first air-conditioning device was installed in a private house. However, its size, similar to that of an early computer, meant it took up too much space to come into widespread use, and later models, such as the Weathermaker, which Carrier brought out in the 1920s, cost too much for most people. Cooling for human comfort, rather than industrial need, really took off when three air conditioners were installed in the J.L. Hudson Department Store in Detroit, Michigan.
People crowded into the shop to experience the new invention. The fashion spread from department stores to cinemas, whose income rose steeply as a result of the comfort they provided.
To start with, money-conscious employers regarded air conditioning as a luxury. They considered that if they were paying people to work. they should not. So in the 1940s and ’50s, the industry started putting out a different message about its product: according to their research, installing air conditioning increased productivity amongst employees. They found that typists increased their output by 244b when transferred from a regular office to a cooled one.
Another study into office working conditions, which was carried out in the late ’50s, showed that the majority of companies cited air conditioning as the single most important contributor to efficiency in offices.
However. air conditioning has its critics. Jed Brown, an environmentalist, complains that air conditioning is a factor in global warming. Unfortunately. he adds, because air
conditioning leads to higher temperatures, people have to use it even more. However, he admits that it provides a healthier environment for many people in the heat of summer.
Rubik’s Cube
How the puzzle achieved success
Emo Rubik first studied sculpture and then later architecture in Budapest, where he went on to become a teacher of interior design. It was while he was working as a teacher that he began the preliminary work on an invention that he called the ‘Magic Cube’. Rubik was inspired by geometric puzzles such as the Chinese tangram, a puzzle consisting of various triangles, a square and a parallelogram which can be combined to create different shapes and figures. However, unlike the tangram, which is dimensional. Rubik was more interested in investigating how three dimensional forms, such as the could be moved and combined to produce other forms. His design consisted of a made up of layers of individual smaller cubes, and each smaller cube could be turned in any direction except
diagonally, To ensure that the cubes could move independently, without falling apart, Rubik first attempted to join them together using elastic bands. However, this to impossible, so Rubik then solved the problem by assembling them 2
using a rounded interior. This permitted them to move smoothly and easily.
He with different ways of marking the smaller cubes, but ended up with the simple solution of giving a different colour to each side. The object was to twist the layers of small so that each side of the large cube was an identical colour Rubik out a patent for the Cube in 1977 and started manufacturing it in the same year. The came to the attention of a Hungarian businessman Tibor Laczi, who then demonstrated it at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. When British toy expert Tom Kremer saw it, he thought it was amazing and he persuaded a manufacturer, Ideal Toys, to produce 1 million of them in 1979. Ideal Toys renamed the Cube after the toy’s inventor, and in 1980, Rubik’s Cube was shown at toy fairs all over the world, It won that year’s prize in Germany for Best Puzzle. Rubik’s is believed to the world’s best-selling puzzle; since its invention, more than 300 million have been sold worldwide.
The ballpoint pen
Most of us have at least one, but how did this popular item evolve? One morning in 1945, a crowd of 5,000 people jammed the entrance of Gimbels Department Store in New York. The day before, Gimbels had placed a full-page advertisement in the New York Times for a wonderful new invention, the ballpoint pen. The advertisement described the pen as ‘fantastic’ and ‘miraculous’. Although they were expensive, $12.50 each, all 10,000 pens in stock were sold on the first day. In fact, this ‘new’ pen was not new dt all. In 1888, John Loud, a leather manufacturer, had invented a pen with a reservoir of ink and a rolling ball. However, his pen was never produced, and efforts by other people to produce a commercially successful one failed too. The main problem was with the ink. If it was too thin, the ink leaked out of the pen. If it was too thick, it didn’t come out of the pen at all.
Almost fifty years later, in 1935, a newspaper editor in Hungary thought he spent too much time filling his pens with ink, He decided to invent a better kind of pen, With the help of his brother, who was a chemist, he produced a ballpoint pen that didn’t leak when the pen wasn’t being used. The editor was called Ladislas Biro, and it was
his name that people would associate more than any other with the ballpoint pen.
By chance, Biro met Augustine Justo, the Argentinian president. Justo was so impressed with Biro’s invention that he invited him to set up a factory in Argentina. In 1943, the first Biro pens were produced.
Unfortunately, they were not popular, since the pen needed to be held in a vertical position for the ink to come out. Biro redesigned the pen with a better ball, and in 1944 the new product was on sale throughout Argentina. It was a North American, Milton Reynolds, who introduced the ballpoint pen to the USA. Copying Biro’s design, he produced the version that sold so well at Gimbels. Another American, Patrick Frawley, improved the design and in 1950 began producing a pen he called the Papermote. It was an immediate success, and within a few years, Papermotes were selling in their millions around the world.
MARCEL BICH
The man who turned a luxury item into an everyday object
Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer of traditional ink pens, was the man who turned the ballpoint pen into an item that today almost anyone can afford. Bich was appalled at the poor quality of the ballpoint pens that were available, and was also shocked at their high cost. However, he recognised that the ballpoint was a firmly established
invention, and he decided to design a cheap pen that worked well and would be
commercially successful. Bich went to the Biro brothers and asked them if he could use the design of their original invention in one of his own pens. In return, he offered to pay them every time he sold a pen. Then, for two years, Bich studied the detailed construction of every ballpoint pen that was being sold, often working with a microscope.
By 1950, he was ready to introduce his new wonder: a plastic pen with a clear barrel that wrote smoothly, did not leak and only cost a few cents. He called it the ‘Bic Cristat’. The
ballpoint pen had finally become a practical writing instrument. The public liked it
immediately, and today it is as common as the pencil, In Britain they are still called Biros, and many Bic models also say ‘Biro’ on the side of the pen, to remind people of their original inventors. Bich became
extremely weaithy thanks to his invention, which had worldwide appeal. Over the next 60 years his company, Société Bic, opened factories all over the world and expanded its range of inexpensive products. Today, Bic is as famous for its lighters and razors as it is 4
for its pens, and you can even buy a Bic mobile pnone.
