Cum a fost descoperita coca cola

Cum a fost descoperita coca cola...

http://www.askmen.ro/_-news664-i7741-l1.htmlNewton a fost lovit de un mar Dar nu numai in termeni religiosi marului i s-a facut reclama, de data asta buna insa. Se spune ca intr-o zi, cand Isaac Newton statea linistit sub un copac, un mar ar fi cazut din pom, lovindu-l. Si atunci se pare ca i-ar fi venit ideea care a dus la legea gravitatiei. Acum insa se credeca toata aceasta poveste nu a fost decat inventia nepoatei lui Newton, Catherine Conduitt, care este singura persoana care apovestit vreodata aceasta intamplare. Si asta dupa multi ani de la moartea lui Newton, iar istorioara a fost publicata pentru prima data intr-un eseu de-al lui Voltaire. Se crede astfel ca fie Voltaire, fie nepoata, au inventat aceasta poveste, care a prins insa la public si a ramas in istorie.

Columb a demonstrat ca Pamantul e rotund Primul care a scris despre exploratorul italian si despre expeditia sa in jurul lumii pentru a demonstra ca Pamantul e rotund a fost Washington Irving. Insa astazi cercetatorii nu mai sunt de acord cu aceasta varianta. Ei sustin ca la acea vreme, lumea deja era convinsa ca Pamantul nu este plat. Si chiar daca mai exista cineva care sa nu creada ca Pamantul e rotund, oricum scopul expeditiei lui Columb nu a fost acela de a demonstra acest lucru. De fapt, el nici nu credea in forma rotunda a pamantului, fiind de parere ca este mai degraba in forma de para. El a pornit la drum cu un alt scop: sa demonstreze ca Asia este mult mai aproape decat se credea.

http://www.timpultau.ro/liber/Mituri-celebre-ale-istoriei_398.html?&printPage=1&setWindowName=shEAPopUpWndchocolate chip cookies were first made by mistake. So were yellow sticky notes

Chocolate Chip Cookies

One of the most favorite cookies of all time was invented (accidentally) by Ruth Wakefield, an innkeeper. She was baking Butter Drop Do cookies one day, using a recipe that dated back to colonial times. Wanting chocolate cookies, she cut up a Nestl chocolate bar and put the chunks in the batter. When she took them out of the oven, she expected to find chocolate-flavored cookies. Instead, what she got were butter cookies with gooey chocolate chips. Aren't we glad that happened?

Fascinating facts about the invention of Toll House Cookies by Ruth Wakefield in 1930.TOLL HOUSE COOKIES

Back in 1930, Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield purchased a Cape Cod-style toll house located halfway between Boston and New Bedford, on the outskirts of Whitman, Massachusetts. Originally constructed in 1709, the house served as a haven for road-weary travelers..

Here, passengers paid tolls, changed horses, and ate much-welcomed home-cooked meals. It was also here, over 200 years later, that the Wakefield decided to open a lodge, calling it the Toll House Inn. In keeping with the tradition of creating delicious homemade meals, Ruth baked for guests who stayed at the Toll House Inn.

As she improved upon traditional Colonial recipes, Ruth's incredible desserts began attracting people from all over New England. One day, while preparing a batch of Butter Drop Do cookies, a favorite recipe dating back to Colonial days, Ruth cut a bar of our Nestl Semi-Sweet Chocolate into tiny bits and added them to her dough, expecting them to melt. Instead, the chocolate held its shape and softened to a delicately creamy texture. The resulting creation became very popular at the Inn. Soon, Ruth's recipe was published in a Boston newspaper, as well as other papers in the New England area. Regional sales of Nestl Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar skyrocketed.

Ruth eventually approached Nestl and together, they reached an agreement that allowed Nestle to print what would become the Toll House Cookie recipe on the wrapper of the Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar. Part of this agreement included supplying Ruth with all of the chocolate she could use to make her delicious cookies for the rest of her life.

As the popularity of the Toll House cookie continued to grow Nestle looked for ways to make it easier for people to bake. Soon, they began scoring the Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar, and packaged it with a special chopper for easily cutting it into small morsels. Shortly after, in 1939, they began offering tiny pieces of chocolate in convenient, ready-to-use packages and that is how the first Nestl Toll House Real Semi-Sweet Chocolate Morsels were introduced.

Erasers, Tires & Silly Putty

An English scientist named Joseph Priestley discovered that a wad of rubber was good for erasing (rubbing out) pencil marks on paper. But someone else discovered how to use it in boots, tires, and the like. There was a problem, though. Rubber would melt if it got too hot, and it would break if it got too cold.

Charles Goodyear worked for several years to find a solution to this problem. Then, one day, he accidentally dropped a some rubber and sulfur on a hot stove and found something that worked.

During World War II, there was a severe shortage of rubber, so the U.S. government was looking for a way to make synthetic rubber out of something plentiful. They decided on silicone. An inventor at General Electric, Peter Hodgson, added boric acid to silicone oil and developed a gooey, bouncy substance, unsuitable as a substitute for rubber. He began selling it in 1950 as a fun toy known as Silly Putty. Later, astronauts began to use it to stabilize their tools in space. They carried the putty in silver eggs. The toy version is sold in plastic eggs today.

It was an event that would shake the world--literally. In 1846 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, paving the way for such modern marvels as the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, and Mt. Rushmore.

Accidental Inventions examines the stories behind 10 extraordinary inventions, using historical photographs, 3D graphics, and interviews with professors and professionals from the FBI to the U.S. Air Force.

Loads of fun facts and interesting info.

See how a cocklebur became Velcro, or how a mysterious laboratory accident created Teflon.

Did you know Cellophane was a failed tablecloth? Or that stainless steel was literally discovered in a scientist's junk pile?

Accidental Inventions will delight and entertain as it explores these and other inventions, teaching us that sometimes the most important things are curiosity and an open mind.

Covers: Microwave Ovens, Matches, Post-It Notes, Velcro, Teflon, Cellophane, Ether Anesthesia, Superglue Fingerprint Fuming, Dynamite, and Stainless steel.

Post-it Notes

Yellow sticky notes (Post-it Notes) were about to be invented in 1968 when a 3M researcher tried to improve adhesive tape. He came up with a semi-sticky adhesive - not suitable for tape, but he thought it could have a use for something else, he just didn't know what.

A few years later, another 3M scientist was needing a way to keep his bookmarks from falling out of his hymnal while he sang with his church choir. He needed something that would stick without being permanent. He remembered the weak glue his colleague had accidentally created 4 years before. In 1980 the Post-it Note was created.

Roy plunkett was only 27 years old and had been working as a chemist at the Jackson Laboratory at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company for just two years when, in the spring of 1988, he made a discovery that brought him lasting fame. He had been trying to invent a new type of Freon, a class of compounds that in the 1930s, were proving to be immensely useful as the principal gases in refrigerators and air conditioners. Today we call them chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, and know them to be a major culprit in depleting the atmosphere's ozone layer, but back then they were miracle substance - safe, non-flammable substitutes for toxic and even explosive refrigerants.

On an April morning 58 years ago, the young chemist could not have suspected that he was about to discover a material with such strange and unexpected properties that they had hardly even been dreamed of, a material that would eventually become an indispensable part of everything from space capsules to heart valves to frying pans - and one that had absolutely nothing to do with refrigeration. Roy Plunkett was about to discover Teflon.

The importance of Plunkett's story, however, lies not so much in the triumph of invention and commercialization as in what it suggests about the nature of invention itself. invention is often though of as systematic problem, solving, the kind that supposedly goes on at the well-manicured campuses of corporate research laboratories. In fact, many important inventions arose, and continue to arise, from die creative use of an accident or mistake. This is a unique and somewhat neglected form of creativity, every, bit as ingenious and awesome as the more deliberate sort.

Much of the act of invention is shrouded in mystery, to be sure. Even when people set out to act purposefully and rationally, they wind up doing things they did not intend. in principle, the accident or the unexpected obstacle that gives rise to a creative invention is not all that different from the unexpected traffic jam that forces us to drive through a new and interesting neighborhood, the pesky weed that turns out to enhance our garden's variety, or the empty shelf at the supermarket that spurs us to improvise a new recipe. But in practice, events like Plunkett's are far fewer, and we cannot help asking ourselves: What makes it possible to turn the unlooked-for-chance into novel fortune? Not surprisingly, we surroundings: a mind supple enough to turn a screwup into a creative opportunity, and an environment that makes such creativity possible.

By the time plunkett started working at Du Pont, the most widely used form of Freon was tetraflorodichloroethane, also known as refrigerant 114. This was manufactured bv a joint Du Pont-General Motors company called Kinetic Chemicals, which supplied it exclusively to the Frigidaire divisions of GM. Despite the Du Pont-GM link, the chemists at the Jackson Laboratory, were responding to the requests of other refrigerator manufacturers for an equally effective refrigerant that could be sold more widely. Plunkett and his colleagues were thus attempting to manufacture a Freon variant that would get around Frigidaire's patent control of refrigerant 114.

Plunkett hypothesized (correctly) that he could start with a compound called tetrafluoroethylene, or TFE., and cause t to react with hydrochloric acid to yield the desired alternative. To test this idea, he decided to make a large quantity of TFE, hitherto a rare and little studied compound. Following suggestions in the chemical literature, Plunkett set up an apparatus to make a hundred pounds of the gas. When asked later "Why a hundred pounds?" Plunkett replied that he needed a good bit, of the gas not only to test for refrigerant properties but also to conduct toxicological tests on animals, and a hundred pounds just seemed like a round number."

Because making this much TFE was a complex operation, Plunkett decided to get it out of the way first. A hundred pounds was a lot of TFE, and to store it he needed to round up ill the storage canisters he could get his hands on. The most convenient ones to obtain were metal cans, similar to the cans now used for hair sprays, insect poison, and other products in which CFCS serve as a propellant. He set his canisters on top of dry ice so that the TFE inside would liquefy and the pressure inside the cans would be kept low. Precisely these steps set the stage for Plunketts surprising discovery.1. ViagraMen being treated for erectile dysfunction should salute the working stiffs of Merthyr Tydfil, the Welsh hamlet where, in 1992 trials, the gravity-defying side effects of a new angina drug first popped up. Previously, the blue-collar town was known for producing a different kind of iron.

2. LSDSwiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the world's first acid hit in 1943, when he touched a smidge of lysergic acid diethylamide, a chemical he had researched for inducing childbirth. He later tried a bigger dose and made another discovery: the bad trip.

3. X-raysSeveral 19th-century scientists toyed with the penetrating rays emitted when electrons strike a metal target. But the x-ray wasn't discovered until 1895, when German egghead Wilhelm Rntgen tried sticking various objects in front of the radiation - and saw the bones of his hand projected on a wall.

4. PenicillinScottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his petri dishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. All hail sloppy lab work!

5. Artificial sweetenersSpeaking of botched lab jobs, three leading pseudo-sugars reached human lips only because scientists forgot to wash their hands. Cyclamate (1937) and aspartame (1965) are byproducts of medical research, and saccharin (1879) appeared during a project on coal tar derivatives. Yummy.

6. Microwave ovensMicrowave emitters (or magnetrons) powered Allied radar in WWII. The leap from detecting Nazis to nuking nachos came in 1946, after a magnetron melted a candy bar in Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer's pocket.

7. BrandyMedieval wine merchants used to boil the H20 out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul - our money's on a sailor - decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born. Pass the Courvoisier!

8. Vulcanized rubberRubber rots badly and smells worse, unless it's vulcanized. Ancient Mesoamericans had their own version of the process, but Charles Goodyear rediscovered it in 1839 when he unintentionally (well, at least according to most accounts) dropped a rubber-sulfur compound onto a hot stove.

9. Silly PuttyIn the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn't come any sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime.

10. Potato chipsChef George Crum concocted the perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when - to spite a customer who complained that his fries were cut too thick - he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp. Needless to say, the diner couldn't eat just one.

10. The PopsicleFrank Epperson was but a young lad of eleven, when he accidentally came up with what some would later describe as the most important invention of the twentieth century. Who would say that exactly I'm not sure, but Lady Luck was surely smiling the day Frank, mixed himself a drink of soda water powder and water- a popular drink back in 1905. For some reason he never got round to drinking it and left it on the back porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. Of course, when the temperature dropped overnight, the mixture froze and Frank had a stick of frozen soda water to show his friends at school. Eighteen years later, Frank remembered the incident and started producing what he called 'Epsicles' in seven fruit flavors. The name never took off, but today over three million 'Popsicles' are sold every year.

9. VelcroIn the early 1940's, Swiss inventor George de Mestral was walking his dog. When he got home, he noticed his dog's coat and his pants were covered with cockleburrs. When he took a closer look under the microscope he discovered their natural hook-like shape. He recognized the potential for a new fastener, but it took him eight years to perfect the invention. Eventually he developed two strips of nylon fabric, one containing thousands of small hooks, just like the burrs, and the other with soft loops, just like the fabric of his pants. When the two strips were pressed together, they formed a strong bond, but one that's easily separated, lightweight, durable, and washable. Voila Velcro!

8. SuperglueSuperglue, or Krazy Glue, is actually a substance called 'cyanoacrylate'. Dr. Harry Coover accidentally discovered it twice, the first time in 1942, when he was trying to develop an optically clear plastic for gun sights and the second time nine years later, when he was trying to develop a heat-resistant polymer for jet canopies. On both occasions his new product proved to be too sticky for the job, in fact he got into trouble when he stuck together and ruined a very expensive pair of glass lenses. Finally he realized his super sticking glue might have a use and in 1958 it was marketed as Superglue.

In fact Superglue turned out to be more than just useful. It saved the lives of countless soldiers in Vietnam when it was used in to seal battlefield wounds before the injured could be transported to a hospital.

7. Post-it NotesIn 1970, Spencer Silver was working at the 3M research labs trying to develop a strong adhesive. What he actually came up with, was weaker than what had already been developed. It stuck, but then it easily unstuck.

That seemed like a pretty useless invention, until 4 years later when a colleague was singing in the church choir. He used markers to keep place in the hymn book but they kept falling out. So he coated them with Spencer's glue. They stayed in place but came off easily without damaging the pages. The 'Post-it note" was born and today they are a nuisance in just about every office around the world. 6. ScotchgardAnother 3M invention makes it into the Top Ten at No 6. Back in 1953, Patsy Sherman was trying to develop a rubber material that didn't deteriorate when it came into contact with aircraft fuel. An assistant spilled one of the experimental compounds on her new tennis shoes. She was none too happy when it refused to budge even with soap or alcohol, but Sherman was inspired. She set to work improving the compound's liquid repellency and just 3 years later Scotchgard hit the market, on a mission to protect the world's suede shoes.

5. Safety GlassSafety glass, the kind that doesn't splinter on impact, is everywhere these days, but when Edouard Benedictus, a French scientist was working in his lab at the turn of the last century there was no such thing. But one day in 1903 he accidentally knocked a glass flask to the floor, heard it break, but was amazed to see that all the broken pieces still hung together. Turns out the flask had been full of a liquid plastic. It had evaporated, but a thin coat of the stuff got left behind and this is what was holding the flask together.

Around that time there was a rash of car accidents in Paris as the French got to grips with traveling faster than horses, and the most common form of injury were cuts from shattered windshields. Edouard saw an immediate use for his discovery, but setting a precedent rigorously followed for most of the rest of the century, the car industry rejected this life-saving safety feature on the grounds of expense. It wasn't until WW 1, when his invention proved a great success for lenses in gas masks, that the automobile industry reversed its position and safety glass's major application became car windshields.4. CellophaneBack in 1908 Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist working for a French textile firm, was trying to make his fortune with a stain proof tablecloth. He got the stain proof part right by coating the cloth with a thin layer of viscose, but the fortune never came. Apparently people liked stains on their tablecloths. Fortunately Jacques had a bit of a eureka moment and realized the potential of his product to package food- after all it was airtight and waterproof. But it was another ten years before he perfected the machine to produce his cellophane and its delights became available to the public.

3. Vulcanized RubberIn 1496 Christopher Columbus brought back the first rubber balls from the West Indies. This seemed like a magical discovery except that rubber rotted, it smelled terrible, got too sticky when warm and too rigid when cold, and in the end people pretty much gave up trying to think of a way to make it useful. Some three hundred years later Charles Goodyear would not be defeated by rubber and resolved to solve these problems. In 1839 he tried boiling it with magnesia, lime, bronze powder and nitric acid, but to no avail. Finally he tried sulphur but that didn't work either until he accidentally dropped the mixture onto a hot stove. Vulcanization, the process of treating rubber with sulphur at great heat, named after the Roman god of fire was born! In a matter of seconds Charlie had improved rubber's strength and resilience, reduced its stickiness and stopped it smelling.

This should have been a great day for Charlie, after all vulcanized rubber is now used in everything from rubber bands to hockey pucks, but even though his discovery made millions for others, Charlie died a pauper.

2. X- RaysX-Rays were discovered in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rntgen. He was actually studying cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs.

Willie wanted to know if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. He couldn't, but by chance he did notice a glow appearing in his darkened laboratory several feet away. At first he thought there was a tear in the cardboard allowing light from the high-voltage coil inside the tube to escape, but he soon realized rays of light were right passing through the cardboard.

He named these penetrated rays, X-rays and found that as well as penetrating solids they were pretty handy at recording images of human skeletons on photographic negatives. Doctors soon adopted X-rays as a standard medical tool and in 1901 Rntgen took home one of the first Nobel prizes.

1. PenicillinAlexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Of course he wasn't actually looking for it at the time- he was researching the 'flu. He noticed that one of his petri dishes had become contaminated with mould. Other scientists may have recoiled in horror at this result of shoddy work practice, but not Alexander. He chose to investigate.

Whatever this intruder was, it was killing off the Staphylococcus bug - a bug causing everything from boils to toxic shock syndrome. Eventually he identified it as the fungus Penicillium notatum and it put the knife into Staph by means of a chemical that destroyed its ability to build cell walls. Being a scientist, he thought long and hard about what to call this new chemical, a chemical released from the fungus Penicillium notatum. That's right he called it penicillin. Nice one Alex. Unfortunately naturally occurring penicillin isn't very stable and thus not very useful. Fleming had found a wonder drug, but couldn't do much with it. Luckily just three years later two Oxford researchers created a stable form and today it's one of our most important tools in the fight against disease.

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