Curated category
British inventions
- Electric motorOn the 3rd of September 1821, in the basement of the Royal Institution, Michael Faraday dipped a free-hanging wire into a pool of mercury.
- Cable televisionCable television begins, in a sense, on a mountaintop. In 1948, communities in the United States and Switzerland found themselves cut off from the television…
- Hot blastJames Beaumont Neilson stood at the Wilsontown Ironworks in Scotland during 1828. He had previously worked as a foreman at Glasgow gas works before turning…
- RadioOn the 11th of November 1886, a German physicist named Heinrich Hertz watched a tiny spark jump across a gap in his laboratory, and in doing so confirmed…
- Flush toiletThe flush toilet is one of the most quietly consequential inventions in human history, and yet most people give it almost no thought at all.
- PodcastA podcast is a program episode made available in digital format for download over the Internet. The word itself is a portmanteau, fusing "iPod" and…
- TelevisionIn 2013-79% of the world's households owned a television set. This was a medium that began as a spinning disk with holes punched into it, a contraption that…
- Hedgehog (weapon)In 1941, a secret test aboard the destroyer HMS Starling revealed a fatal flaw in existing anti-submarine tactics. The Fairlie Mortar had failed to deliver…
- Operation PlutoIn early April 1942, Lord Louis Mountbatten approached Geoffrey Lloyd with a desperate question. Could an oil pipeline be laid across the English Channel?
- RadomeThe word radome emerged in 1941 as a portmanteau of radar and dome. It describes a structural enclosure that shields a radar antenna from weather while…