Behind most inventions is a messier story than the legend. These tiles follow the people who made things and the accidents that made things for them: a president with a patent, a film star who helped invent frequency hopping, a book printed with metal type 78 years before the Gutenberg Bible, and a spring that fell off a shelf and kept walking. Some famous names turn out to have had help, rivals or no role at all.
Every tile in a Inventions and Inventors game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Inventors
nine stories
1A coin-operated machine for holy water
On the tile: Hero's machine1st century AD
In the first century AD, the engineer Hero of Alexandria described a machine that dispensed liquid for a coin. The coin dropped through a slot onto a lever, which tilted and lifted a plug to let the liquid flow until the coin slid off. Historian John Humphrey of the University of Calgary says it was devised for holy water at temples, because "people were taking more Holy Water than they were paying for." Like most ancient machines, it is known from written descriptions rather than surviving parts.
In 1206 the engineer al-Jazari, who worked for rulers in upper Mesopotamia, completed a book describing dozens of ingenious mechanical devices. One of the most elaborate was an elephant clock. Every half hour, a bird on its dome whistled, a figure dropped a ball into a dragon's mouth, and the driver seated on the elephant struck it with his goad. A richly painted page showing the clock, from a copy of the book made in 1315, now belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
In 1742 Benjamin Franklin invented an open stove that warmed rooms while saving fuel. Governor Thomas was so pleased that he offered Franklin a patent giving him the sole right to sell it for a term of years. Franklin declined, explaining in his autobiography that "as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours." A London ironmonger then patented a slightly altered version and, Franklin was told, made a little fortune.
Thomas Jennings, a free-born tailor in New York City, patented a method of "dry scouring" clothes in 1821, becoming the first Black American known to receive a U.S. patent. He framed the patent letter, signed by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, and hung it over his bed, and much of his earnings went to the fight against slavery. Nobody knows exactly how his process worked. His patent was among thousands destroyed in an 1836 fire where patents were being stored, and it has never been recovered.
Abraham Lincoln is the only U.S. president granted a patent. In 1848, traveling home to Illinois between sessions of Congress, he watched a crew free a boat stuck on a sandbar by forcing empty barrels and planks under its sides. Lincoln designed adjustable "buoyant air chambers" to lift boats over shallows, whittled part of the model himself, and received Patent No. 6469 on May 22, 1849. The device was never manufactured. His law partner, William Herndon, thought it impracticable but kept quiet.
In late December 1870, a laborer's wife in Reno, Nevada, asked tailor Jacob Davis to make sturdy pants for her husband. Davis added copper rivets to the seams for strength, and soon he was overwhelmed with orders. Needing a partner, he approached the San Francisco wholesaler who sold him his cloth: Levi Strauss. On May 20, 1873, Davis and Levi Strauss & Company received a patent for an "Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings." Davis then moved to San Francisco to supervise production.
Thomas Edison is often called the inventor of the light bulb, but scientists had worked on incandescent lamps for decades before his 1879 patent. In England, Joseph Swan demonstrated a working carbon lamp at a lecture in Newcastle in February 1879, months before Edison's team succeeded that October. Edison's real advances were a thin, high-resistance filament that made lamps practical and a whole system to power them. Swan's patents held up in British court, and in 1883 the rivals formed a joint company known as Ediswan.
Parker Brothers sold Monopoly with the story of Charles Darrow, a struggling salesman who created it in his basement during the Depression. Neither he nor the company mentioned The Landlord's Game, patented in 1904 by Lizzie Magie to teach the economic ideas of Henry George. Her board already had railroads, utilities, taxes and a corner that sent players to jail. Versions of her game spread among players for years before Monopoly. In 1935 she sold her patent rights to Parker Brothers for $500 and no royalties.
Nils Bohlin came to Volvo from the aerospace industry, where he had seen the stresses a body suffers in high-speed crashes. Hired in 1958 as the carmaker's first safety engineer, he spent a year testing before settling on a simple answer: one strap across the chest and one across the hips, buckled with one hand. The three-point belt became standard in Volvos, and the company let the rest of the industry use the design without payment. It has been credited with saving at least a million lives.
Thomas Crapper was real, but he did not invent the flushing toilet. Sir John Harington built one in 1596, and Crapper was not born until 1836. He was a Victorian plumber with several patents who supplied lavatories for royal homes, including Sandringham, though he was never knighted. His boldest idea was in selling: in 1866 he opened what is described as the world's first bathroom showroom, in Chelsea, displaying toilet bowls behind large plate glass windows. Some passersby were reportedly shocked.
When Josephine Cochran's husband died in 1883, he left her with debts and little cash, and a dishwashing machine she had long imagined became a necessity. Her design held plates, cups and saucers in fitted wire compartments and cleaned them with hot soapy water under pressure instead of scrubbers. Patented in 1886, her largest model could wash and dry 240 dishes in two minutes. Hotels, restaurants, hospitals and colleges bought it, but homes lacked enough hot water, and household dishwashers did not catch on until the 1950s.
Hubert Cecil Booth got his idea watching a demonstration of an American machine that blew dust out of carpets with compressed air. Booth reversed it: suck the dust in and trap it behind a filter. His patented machine, nicknamed "Puffing Billy," ran on gasoline and was not built for home use. Instead, his British Vacuum Cleaner Company, founded in 1901, sold cleaning as a service, parking the machine outside a building and running suction pipes inside.
Modern air conditioning was born to rescue color printing, not to cool people. In 1902 the Sackett & Wilhelms printing company in Brooklyn had a humidity problem: its paper swelled and shrank, so colors printed one at a time would not line up. Willis Carrier, a 25-year-old engineer at the Buffalo Forge Company, designed a system of chilled coils to control the moisture in the air. His drawings were dated July 17, 1902, and the system was designed to hold humidity at 55 percent all year.
Walter Hunt, a New York mechanic, owed a man $15 and set to work on an invention that would pay it off. Twisting a piece of wire, he made a "dress pin" with a spring at one end and a clasp that kept the point covered. He patented it on April 10, 1849, and sold the rights for just $400. Others made fortunes from it, and Hunt never earned another penny. Years earlier he had built one of the first sewing machines with an eye-pointed needle, and that invention he never patented at all.
Earl Tupper's sealed plastic Wonder Bowl won praise from designers in 1946 but did not sell in stores, where shoppers could not figure out its lid. Brownie Wise, a Florida saleswoman, found the answer: sell it at parties in people's homes, where a dealer could show off the seal, sometimes by tossing a sealed bowl of grape juice across the room. In 1951 Tupper hired her as vice president of marketing, and she became the first woman on the cover of Business Week. He fired her in 1958.
In 1790 Joseph Bramah, helped by the young engineer Henry Maudslay, finished a padlock so intricate that he put it in his London shop window with a sign promising 200 guineas to anyone who could pick or open it. It sat there unpicked for decades, long after Bramah's death. Then, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the American locksmith Alfred Hobbs took up the challenge. Using tiny specialized tools, he opened it after 51 hours of work spread over 16 days, and he collected the prize.
The first tin cans came with no easy way in. Made of wrought iron lined with tin, some were 3/16 of an inch thick, and a hammer and chisel was the manufacturer's suggested method. The first U.S. can opener was patented by Ezra Warner of Connecticut on January 5, 1858, about 50 years after cans went into production, just as thinner steel cans were arriving. Its blade sawed around the lid and left a jagged rim. It served the U.S. Army in the Civil War, and grocery clerks used it to open cans for customers.
In 1957 Momofuku Ando lost nearly all his property when a credit union he helped direct went bankrupt. In a shed behind his home in Ikeda, near Osaka, he spent a year trying to make ramen that needed only hot water, sleeping about four hours a night. The breakthrough came while his wife fried tempura: hot oil drove the moisture out of the batter. Fried the same way, noodles dried out, kept for a long time and softened again in hot water. Chicken Ramen went on sale on August 25, 1958.
The Gutenberg Bible was not the first book printed with movable metal type. In 1377, at Heungdeok temple in Cheongju, in what is now South Korea, a collection of Zen Buddhist teachings called Jikji was printed with movable cast metal characters. It is the oldest known book made that way, 78 years older than Gutenberg's Bible. The surviving volume took a long route: a French diplomat brought it from Korea, a collector left it to France's national library in 1950, and it is still kept in Paris.
A popular story says braille grew out of a code that let soldiers read orders silently in the dark. Researcher Philippa Campsie, studying Charles Barbier's own papers and publications, found that his raised-dot writing, which inspired Louis Braille, was designed for blind people and never meant for the military. Barbier's brief army career ended in 1792, when he resigned his artillery commission and left France during the Revolution. The soldier tale took shape in biographies from the 1950s. Braille himself, introducing his six-dot system in 1829, called Barbier's method one "invented by Mr. Barbier especially for the blind."
Decades before the electric telegraph, France sent messages across the country by sight. Claude Chappe, who had once planned to join the clergy, developed signaling towers with his brothers: a long pivoting beam with two smaller arms, worked by ropes and pulleys. Stations stood 10 to 15 kilometers apart, each run by two operators, and a code book allowed 8,464 signs. The first telegram on the line from Paris to Lille, sent on August 15, 1794, reported the recapture of the town of Le Quesnoy.
4A voice recording no one could play for 148 years
On the tile: Phonautograph1860
About 20 years before Edison's phonograph, the Frenchman Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville built a machine to write sound down. His phonautograph caught sound on a membrane and traced its vibrations with a stylus onto soot-blackened paper on a turning cylinder, so the patterns could be studied by eye. Neither he nor anyone of his time thought of playing the tracings back. On April 9, 1860, he recorded the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune." In 2008 researchers used modern technology to turn those wavy lines into sound.
In 1880 and 1881, Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Laboratory delivered three sealed tin boxes to the Smithsonian for safekeeping, as evidence in case of patent fights. The first two held papers on the photophone, a device that carried sound on a beam of light. The third held a new recording machine, an altered Edison phonograph with a wax-coated cylinder. The boxes stayed in a Smithsonian vault until 1937. On the wax recording, Bell's father declares: "I am a graphophone, and my mother was a phonograph."
Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil became friends in 1940 and got to talking about torpedoes. Their idea was a radio control signal that jumped among frequencies in step between sender and receiver, so to anyone else it would sound like noise and be hard to jam. Antheil worked out how to keep the jumps synchronized among 88 frequencies, based on the 88 keys of a piano. Their 1942 patent lists her as Hedy Kiesler Markey. The Navy initially shunned it, but U.S. ships used the concept by 1962.
In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, sent a message between two computers sitting side by side, connected through ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. No one had asked him to; it was a side project. To separate a person's name from the computer where they received mail, he chose the @ sign, meaning the user was "at" another machine. As for the message itself, Tomlinson said the tests were "entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them."
On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper of Motorola stood on Sixth Avenue in New York, next to the Hilton Hotel, holding a phone that weighed 2 1/2 pounds and stood about 10 inches tall. Rival Bell Labs saw car phones as the future, but Cooper believed a phone should go everywhere with a person. For the first call, he dialed his counterpart at Bell Labs and told him he was calling from a real handheld cellphone. "I was not averse to rubbing his nose in our achievement," Cooper recalled.
The first text message was not tapped out on a phone. On December 3, 1992, Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old British programmer building a Short Message Service for his client Vodafone, typed it on a computer and sent it to his colleague Richard Jarvis. It read "Merry Christmas." Early texts were limited to 160 characters, and it was 1999 before texts could be exchanged across different networks. Twenty-five years on, Papworth said, "In 1992, I had no idea just how popular texting would become."
In 1826 John Walker, a chemist in Stockton, England, scraped a wooden stick he had used to stir chemicals against his hearth at home, and it caught fire. He perfected the chemical mix and sold his first box of friction matches from his shop on April 7, 1827. The scientist Michael Faraday urged him to patent it, but Walker never did, so others were free to make their own. He still earned enough to retire comfortably, and when he died in 1859 he had never been publicly credited.
Charles Goodyear sank into debt, and in and out of jail for it, trying to make rubber that would not turn brittle in the cold or gooey in the heat. The story goes that in 1839, in Woburn, Massachusetts, a piece of fabric coated with his mix of rubber, sulfur and white lead was left on a hot stove, and it charred without melting. Heating rubber with sulfur, later named vulcanization, was the answer. Goodyear still died deep in debt in 1860. The tire company bearing his name was founded in 1898 and named in his honor.
In 1856, during his Easter vacation, 18-year-old William Henry Perkin tried to make quinine, the malaria drug then obtained only from the bark of the cinchona tree. Instead his experiment with chemicals from coal tar produced mauve, which became the first commercialized synthetic dye. Against the advice of his teacher and with money from his father, a builder, Perkin opened a factory in 1857. At 36 he sold the business to devote himself to research, and in 1906 he received the first Perkin Medal, named for him.
Around 1879 Constantin Fahlberg was working with a coal tar derivative in Ira Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins University when he noticed a sweet taste on his hands. He traced it to the compound and named it saccharin. Another version of the story says a cigarette he had set on his lab bench tasted sweet. In 1884, without notifying Remsen, Fahlberg applied for patents, and he went on to manufacture saccharin in Germany. When saccharin later came under attack, President Theodore Roosevelt, whose doctor gave it to him daily, declared that anyone who called it injurious to health was an idiot.
5Penicillin took more than a decade and some bedpans
On the tile: Penicillin1928
Back from vacation on September 3, 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed mold on a dish of Staphylococcus bacteria, surrounded by a clear zone where the bacteria had not grown. His "mold juice" killed many harmful bacteria, but it proved unstable, and his 1929 paper only briefly mentioned its medical promise. Turning it into a drug fell to Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their Oxford colleagues, who began in earnest in 1939. With wartime making research hard, they grew the mold in baths, bedpans, milk churns and food tins.
In 1938 Roy Plunkett, a DuPont chemist working on refrigerants, stored tetrafluoroethylene gas in small cylinders. When he and his helper went to use one, no gas came out, yet the cylinder weighed the same as before. Inside they found a white powder: the gas had polymerized into a heat-resistant substance that almost nothing would stick to, later named Teflon. Its first use was in the Manhattan Project, and nonstick pans came years later. At a 1951 banquet honoring Plunkett, every guest went home with a Teflon-coated muffin tin.
In 1943 Richard James, a naval engineer at a Philadelphia shipyard, was working with springs to steady sensitive equipment at sea when he knocked one off a shelf. It stepped down to a stack of books, then a tabletop, then the floor, where it recoiled and stood upright. His wife, Betty, found the name Slinky with help from a dictionary. At Christmas 1945, at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia, their first 400 Slinkys sold out in 90 minutes at a dollar each. Betty later ran the company for nearly four decades.
Percy Spencer left school at 12 to help support his family and learned radio in the Navy. By 1945 he was a longtime expert on magnetrons, the tubes that generate microwaves for radar, at the Raytheon company. One day at work he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Instead of tossing it, he wanted to know why. His early experiments popped popcorn; an egg blew up and made a mess. His 1950 patent described using electromagnetic energy to cook food.
In 1956 Wilson Greatbatch, an engineering professor in Buffalo, New York, reached into a box for a resistor and grabbed one with 100 times the resistance he wanted. Once installed, it made his circuit pulse in a steady rhythm, and Greatbatch saw a way to keep a failing heart beating. Nearly two years later he took the idea to surgeon William Chardack. Greatbatch built early implantable pacemakers by hand in his barn, and his wife, Eleanor, tested them by tapping on them with a pencil. Their first patient received one in 1960. A Swedish team had implanted the world's first in 1958.