var fact = new Array();
fact[0] = "In 1765, while working for the University of Glasgow, Scottish inventor James Watt was assigned the task of repairing a Newcomen engine. That started the inventor to work on several improvements to Newcomen's design. Most notable was Watt's 1769 patent for a separate condenser connected to a cylinder by a valve. Unlike Newcomen's engine, Watt's design had a condenser that could be cool while the cylinder was hot. Watt's engine soon became the dominant design for all modern steam engines and helped bring about the Industrial Revolution.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[1] = "While serving as the Director of Agriculture at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, George Washington Carver developed his crop rotation method, which revolutionized southern agriculture. He educated southern farmers to alternate the soil-depleting cotton crops with soil-enriching crops such as peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potato, and pecans.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[2] = "In 1971, Ford built a fleet equipped with experimental airbags. General Motors tested airbags on a 1973 Chevrolet that was sold for government use only. The 1973 Oldsmobile Toronado was the first car intended for sale to the public that came with a passenger airbag. General Motors later offered the general public the option of driver-side airbags in full-sized Oldsmobiles and Buicks in 1975 and 1976, respectively.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[3] = "In 1927, Philo Farnsworth of Beaver County, Utah, was the first inventor to transmit a television image comprised of 60 horizontal lines. The image was a dollar sign. Farnsworth developed the dissector tube, the basis of all current electronic televisions. He filed for his first television patent in 1927. \"There's nothing on it worthwhile, and we're not going to watch it in this household, and I don't want it in your intellectual diet.\" - Philo Farnsworth's feelings about watching television.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[4] = "In 1963, Philips Electronics designed a new sound recording medium - the cassette tape. Philips patented the new technology in 1965 and made it available free of charge to manufacturers all over the world. Sony and other companies began designing new compact and portable tape recorders and players to take advantage of the cassette tape's smaller size. By 1995, total production of Sony's Walkman cassette players reached 150 million.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[5] = "Alfred Ely Beach was an inventor and the editor and co-owner of \"Scientific American.\" In the first issue of \"Scientific American,\" it was announced that the magazine would help secure patents for U.S. inventors. Beach was awarded patents for an improvement he made to the typewriter (1857), for a cable traction railway system (1864), and for a pneumatic transit system (pneumatic tube) for mail and passengers (1865).
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[6] = "Invented in 1871, the first \"ordinary\" bicycle was invented by British engineer James Starley. Known as the Penny Farthing, it was the first really efficient bicycle, consisting of a small rear wheel and large front wheel pivoting on a simple tubular frame with tires of rubber.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[7] = "An immigrant from Belgium in 1889, Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented Velox, a photographic printing paper that could be developed under artificial light. Baekeland sold the rights to Velox to George Eastman and Kodak for one million dollars in 1899. He then started his own laboratory in Yonkers, New York, where he invented Bakelite in 1907, a synthetic substitute for the shellac used in electronic insulation.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[8] = "Originally developed from the harpsichord around 1720, the piano was first known as the pianoforte. Invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy, the instrument was already over a hundred years old by the time Beethoven was writing his last sonatas, around the time when it ousted the harpsichord as the standard keyboard instrument.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[9] = "The oldest known lock was found by archeologists in the Khorsabad palace ruins near Nineveh. The lock was estimated to be 4,000 years old. It was a forerunner to a pin tumbler type of lock, and a common Egyptian lock for the time. The lock worked using a large wooden bolt to secure a door, which had a slot with several holes in its upper surface. The holes were filled with wooden pegs that prevented the bolt from being opened.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[10] = "In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell invented his Photophone, which transmitted a voice signal on a beam of light. Bell focused sunlight with a mirror and then talked into a mechanism that vibrated the mirror. At the receiving end, a detector picked up the vibrating beam and decoded it back into a voice the same way a phone did with electrical signals. Many things—like cloud cover—could interfere with the Photophone, causing Bell to stop any further research with this invention.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[11] = "In 2000, adventurer Doug Stoup became the first American to ski from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole. But there was something wrong with the trip: it was too darn slow. So, working with bike designer and aerospace engineer Dan Hanebrink, Stoup came up with an alternative to skis: a bike that he could ride in Antarctica. The ice bike has no plastic parts (which would freeze and shatter in the extreme conditions), and the superfat, lowpressure tires provide traction in situations that would make a mountain bike weep.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[12] = "VisiCalc, invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in 1979, was the first computer spreadsheet program. VisiCalc was released in 1979 and ran on an Apple II computer. While most early microprocessor computers had been quickly supported by BASIC and a few games, VisiCalc introduced a new level in application software. Bricklin and Frankston invented VisiCalc while master's students at Harvard Business School. \"VisiCalc took 20 hours of work per week for some people and turned it out in 15 minutes,\" said Bricklin.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[13] = "On August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its new revolution in a box, the \"Personal Computer,\" complete with a brand new operating system from Microsoft and a 16-bit computer operating system called MS-DOS 1.0. \"I don't think it's that significant,\" said Tandy president John Roach on IBM's entry into the microcomputer field.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[14] = "In 1733, John Kay invented the flying shuttle, an improvement to looms that enabled weavers to weave faster. Kay's invention paved the way for mechanical power looms, however, the technology would have to wait another thirty years before a power loom was invented by Edmund Cartwright in 1787.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[15] = "The first lamp was invented around 70,000 B.C. A hollow rock, shell or other natural found object was filled with moss or a similar material that was soaked with animal fat and ignited. Humans began imitating the natural shapes with manmade pottery, alabaster, and metal lamps. Wicks were later added to control the rate of burning.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[16] = "Bayer came up with the name aspirin. It comes from the \"a\" in acetyl chloride, the \"spir\" in spiraea ulmaria, and the \"in\" was a then familiar name ending for medicines. In 1915, the first aspirin tablets were made. Interestingly, Aspirin® and Heroin® were once trademarks belonging to Bayer. After Germany lost World War I, Bayer was forced to give up both trademarks.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[17] = "Crayola brand crayons were the first kids' crayons ever made, invented by cousins Edwin Binney and C. Harold Smith. The brand's first box of eight Crayola crayons made its debut in 1903. The word Crayola was created by Alice Stead Binney (wife of Edwin Binney), who took the French words for chalk (craie) and oily (oleaginous) and combined them.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[18] = "Humans have been drinking beer for thousands of years. Historians theorize that humankind's fondness for beer was a factor in our evolution away from a society of nomadic hunters and gatherers into an agrarian society that would settle down to grow crops (and apparently drink). It wasn't until 1935 that the first canned beer, \"Krueger Cream Ale,\" was produced.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[19] = "The first mass-produced and widely used metal foil was made from tin. Tin foil was replaced by aluminum foil in 1910. Charles Martin Hall discovered the electrolytic method of producing aluminum cheaply and brought the metal into wide commercial use.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[20] = "In 1893, Charles Proteus Steinmetz joined the newly organized General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. Steinmetz's first important research was on the phenomenon of hysteresis, by which power is lost because of magnetic resistance. This research led him directly to a study of alternating current. Without this research, the expansion of the electric power industry in the U.S. in the early 20th century would have been impossible, or at least greatly delayed.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[21] = "The microwave oven was a byproduct of another technology. During a radar-related research project around 1946, Dr. Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer with the Raytheon Corporation, noticed something very unusual. He was testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron when he discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted. This intrigued Dr. Spencer, so he placed some popcorn kernels near the tube, and he watched as the popcorn sputtered, cracked and popped all over his lab.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[22] = "The most popular beverage in the world, tea was first drunk under the Chinese emperor Shen-Nung around 2737 B.C. An unknown Chinese inventor invented the tea shredder, a small device that shredded tea leaves in preparation for drinking. The tea shredder used a sharp wheel in the center of a ceramic or wooden pot that would slice the leaves into thin strips. The first tea bags were made from hand-sewn silk muslin bags, with patents for this type dating back as early as 1903.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[23] = "Canadian John Hopps invented the first cardiac pacemaker. Hopps was trained as an electrical engineer at the University of Manitoba and joined the National Research Council in 1941, where he conducted research on hypothermia. While experimenting with radio frequency heating to restore body temperature, Hopps made an unexpected discovery: if a heart stopped beating due to cooling, it could be started again by artificial stimulation using mechanical or electric means. This led to Hopps' invention of the world's first cardiac pacemaker in 1950.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[24] = "Leon Foucault (1819-1868), a 19th-century French scientist and physicist, is responsible for giving the name gyroscope to a wheel or rotor mounted in gimbal rings—i.e., a set of rings that permit it to turn freely in any direction. Foucault named his gyroscope in 1852. The gyroscope was used by Foucault to study the Earth's rotation. Foucault also invented the Foucault pendulum, which he used to measure the Earth's rotation. Among his other achievements, in 1850 Foucault proved that light traveled more slowly in water than in air.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[25] = "In 1853, Levi Strauss, a 24-year-old German immigrant, left New York for San Francisco with a small supply of dry goods. A prospector wanted to know what Mr. Strauss was selling. When Strauss told him he had rough canvas to use for tents and wagon covers, the prospector said, \"You should have brought pants!\" Strauss had the canvas made into waist overalls. Miners liked the pants, but complained that they tended to chafe. Levi Strauss substituted a twilled cotton cloth from France called \"serge de Nimes.\" The fabric later became known as denim, and the pants were nicknamed blue jeans.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[26] = "Chester Greenwood, born in Farmington, Maine in 1858, invented earmuffs at the age of 15. While testing a new pair of ice skates, he grew frustrated at trying to protect his ears from the bitter cold. After wrapping his head in a scarf, which was too bulky and itchy, he made two ear-shaped loops from wire and asked his grandmother to sew fur on them. He patented an improved model with a steel band which held them in place, and with Greenwood's Champion Ear Protectors, he established Greenwood's Ear Protector Factory. He made a fortune supplying Ear Protectors to U.S. soldiers during World War I.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[27] = "Albert J. Parkhouse, an employee of Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company in Jackson, Michigan, created a coat hanger in 1903 in response to coworkers' complaints of too few coat hooks. He bent a piece of wire into two ovals with the ends twisted together to form a hook. Parkhouse patented his invention, but it is not known if he profited from it. Schuyler C. Hulett received a patent in 1932 for an improvement that involved cardboard tubes screwed onto the upper and lower portions to prevent wrinkles in freshly laundered clothes. Three years later, Elmer D. Rogers created a hanger with a tube on the lower bar that is still used today.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[28] = "The first U.S. patent for automobile seat belts was issued to Edward J. Claghorn of New York, N.Y., on February 10, 1885. Claghorn's patent was for a Safety-Belt for tourists, described in the patent as \"designed to be applied to the person, and provided with hooks and other attachments for securing the person to a fixed object.\" Swedish inventor Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seat belt—not the first but the modern seatbelt—now a standard safety device in most cars. Nils Bohlin's lap-andshoulder belt was introduced by Volvo in 1959.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[29] = "History changed on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world's first artificial satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighed only 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth on its elliptical path. On January 31, 1958, the United States successfully launched Explorer I. This satellite carried a small scientific payload that eventually discovered the magnetic radiation belts around the Earth.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[30] = "Thomas Jennings, born in 1791, is believed to have been the first Black inventor to receive a patent for an invention. He was 30 years old when he was granted a patent for a dry cleaning process. Jennings was a free tradesman and operated a dry cleaning business in New York City. His income went mostly to his abolitionist activities. In 1831, he became assistant secretary for the First Annual Convention of the People of Color in Philadelphia, Pa.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[31] = "PTFE, or polytetrafl uoroethylene, was discovered on April 6, 1938, by Dr. Roy Plunkett at the DuPont research laboratories (Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey). Plunkett was working with gases related to Freon® refrigerants when, upon checking a frozen, compressed sample of tetrafl uoroethylene, he and his associates discovered that the sample had polymerized spontaneously into a white, waxy solid to form polytetrafl uoroethylene or PTFE.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[32] = "In 1971, the first "touch sensor" was developed by Dr. Sam Hurst (founder of Elographics) while he was an instructor at the University of Kentucky. This sensor, called the "Elograph," was patented by the University of Kentucky Research Foundation. The "Elograph" was not transparent like modern touch screens; however, it was a significant milestone in touch screen technology. In 1977, Elographics developed and patented five-wire resistive technology, the most popular touch screen technology in use today.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[33] = "In 1850, when Joel Houghton patented a wooden machine with a hand-turned wheel that splashed water on dishes, it was hardly a workable machine, but it was the first patent. In 1886, Josephine Cochran proclaimed in disgust, \"If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'll do it myself.\" And she did. Cochran invented the first practical (did the job) dishwasher. She founded a company to manufacture these dishwashers, which eventually became KitchenAid.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[34] = "The first electric toaster was invented in 1893 in Great Britain by Crompton and Co. and reinvented in 1909 in the United States. It only toasted one side of the bread at a time, and it required a person to stand by and turn it off manually when the toast looked done. Charles Strite invented the modern timer, pop-up toaster in 1919. Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the bread slicer, which he started working on in 1912.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[35] = "Beginning in 1987, Rudolf Gunnerman researched and developed water-based fuels. Gunnerman invented an emulsifier additive that allowed for the creation of fuel mixtures of alcohol and water, gasoline and water, diesel fuel and water, and water and naphtha. He trademarked his fuels under the name of A-55 Clean Fuels. He is the founder CEO of SulphCo, Inc., a trustee of the DRI Research Foundation, and sponsor of the $25,000 Gunnerman Silver State Award for Excellence in Science and Technology.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[36] = "Alfred Carlton Gilbert invented and introduced the toy Erector Set in 1913. First named Mysto Erector Structural Steel Builder, Erector Sets had evenly spaced holes for bolts to pass through, and used screws, bolts, pulleys, and gears similiar to those used during real construction. At the time, Erector Sets were in direct competition with the Meccano building toy. However, Meccano Toys, Ltd. bought the rights to the Erector Set in 1962.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[37] = "Josephine Cochran invented the first practical dishwasher. She had expected the public to welcome the new invention, which she unveiled at the 1893 World's Fair, but only the hotels and large restaurants were buying her ideas. It was not until the 1950s that dishwashers caught on with the general public. Josephine Cochran's machine was a hand-operated mechanical dishwasher. She founded a company to manufacture these dishwashers, which eventually became KitchenAid.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[38] = "The first Ferris Wheel was designed by George W. Ferris, a bridge-builder from Pittsburgh, Pa. Ferris began his career in the railroad industry and then pursued an interest in bridge building. Understanding the growing need for structural steel, Ferris founded G.W.G. Ferris & Co., a firm that tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders. He built the Ferris Wheel for the 1893 World's Fair, which was held in Chicago to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus landing in America.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[39] = "In 1865, Jackson Haines, a famous American skater, developed the two-plate, all metal blade. The blade was attached directly to Haines' boots. The skater became famous for his new dance moves, jumps and spins. Haines added the first toe pick to skates in the 1870s, making toe pick jumps possible.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[40] = "Since their invention, plastic garbage bags have been filling our landfills, and most plastics take up to 1,000 years to decompose. In 1971, University of Toronto chemist Dr. James Guillet invented a plastic that decomposed in a reasonable time when left in direct sunlight. James Guillet patented his invention, which turned out to be the millionth Canadian patent to be issued.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[41] = "The Philips Company of the Netherlands invented and released the first compact audio-cassette in 1962. It used high-quality polyester, 1/8-inch tape produced by BASF. Recording and playback was at a speed of 1.7/8 inches per second. In 1963 the U.S. began sales of the Norelco Carry-Corder dictation machine that used the new cassette tape.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[42] = "In 1997, GM's Hybrid III crash test dummies officially became the industry standard for testing to comply with government frontal impact regulations and air bag safety. GM developed this test device nearly 20 years ago, in 1977, to provide a biofidelic measurement tool—crash test dummies that behave very similarly to human beings.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[43] = "In 1922, Stephen Poplawski invented the blender. For those of you who have never been in a kitchen or a bar, a blender is a small electric appliance that has a tall container and blades that chop, grind and puree food and beverages. Poplawski was the first to put a spinning blade at the bottom of a container. He used his appliance to make soda fountain drinks.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[44] = "DuPont developed Kevlar brand fiber in 1965, which was the first material identified for use in the modern generation of concealable body armor. Kevlar is a manmade organic fiber, with a combination of properties allowing for high strength with low weight, high chemical resistance, and high cut resistance. Kevlar is also flame resistant; does not melt, soften, or flow; and the fiber is unaffected by immersion in water.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
fact[45] = "In 1902, only one year after Willis Haviland Carrier graduated from Cornell University with a master's in engineering, the first air conditioning (temperature and humidity) was in operation in a Brooklyn printing plant. Fluctuations in heat and humidity in the plant had caused the printing paper to keep altering slightly, enough to misalign the colored inks. The new air conditioning machine created a stable environment and aligned four-color printing became possible.
-Mary Bellis, About.com";
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