Curated playlist
British inventions
- Electric motorIn 1821, Michael Faraday made a wire spin around a magnet in a pool of mercury.
- Cable televisionCable television began in 1948 as a fix for hills blocking TV signals. Towns built tall antennas and ran wires to homes.
- Hot blastHeating the air blown into a furnace cut coal use per ton of iron from 8.06 to 5.16 tons.
- IbuprofenStewart Adams, a researcher at Boots the Chemists in Nottingham, first tried the compound that became ibuprofen as a cure for his own hangover. A patent application followed in 1961. Ibuprofen is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug,…
- RadioOn November 11, 1886, Heinrich Hertz saw a spark jump a lab gap and confirmed invisible radio waves.
- Flush toiletAt the 1851 Great Exhibition, 827,280 visitors paid a penny each to use a novelty toilet.
- PodcastThe word podcast was coined in 2004 from iPod and broadcast.
- VX (nerve agent)VX is a nerve agent for which the estimated median lethal dose on the skin of a 70 kilogram man is only 5 to 10 milligrams. That figure is the exposure expected to kill half of a tested group. The margin is thin, because the potentially…
- TelevisionEarly television could not show a real face, so an inventor filmed a ventriloquist's dummy.
- Hedgehog (weapon)The Hedgehog mortar sank a submarine every 5.7 attacks, versus 60.5 for British depth charges.
- Operation PlutoEvery adviser said an oil pipeline under the English Channel was impossible, until one engineer disagreed.
- RadomeIce on a radar antenna can end up overheating its own transmitter. A radome keeps ice off the antenna from the start.