Daguerreotype camera
Joseph Nicephore Niepce was born in 1765 in Burgundy, France. Together with his older brother, Claude, Joseph was actively engaged in invention, for more than twenty years trying to create a prototype of an internal combustion engine, the so-called “pyreolophor” — “driven by a fiery wind”. The brothers used a mixture of asphalt and oil as fuel. In 1816, Claude…
Reitwagen: the world’s first motorcycle
In 1882 the Italian inventor Enrico Bernardi presented to the public a gasoline engine used to power a sewing machine. Two years later the engine was installed on a children’s tricycle and Motris Pia was born. In 1881 Lucius Copeland assembled the Copeland mechanism of the same name — a two-wheeled bicycle with a steam engine. Almost twenty years earlier…
The first artificial satellite Sputnik
Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century: “Humanity will not remain forever on Earth, but in pursuit of light and space it will first timidly advance beyond the atmosphere, and then conquer the entire near-solar space.” It was not the desire for light that helped to overcome human timidity, but on the contrary, the desire to…
Gutenberg’s printing press
Mirror image transfer has been known to mankind since ancient times: Sumerian cylinder seals, cartouches of Egyptian pharaohs, coinage, etc. Printing itself originated more than a thousand years ago. The first printed text is the Diamond Sutra, 868. In the 10th century Chinese craftsmen used wooden bars with carved hieroglyphs to transfer images to paper. In 1042, the Chinese blacksmith…