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There are some inventions and inventors you just grow up knowing about – Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, Thomas Edison and the lightbulb (even though he really just improved upon it). But there are a lot of inventions lurking out there that you didn’t learn about in your elementary school history and science books – inventions from geniuses known for other creations and discoveries, and inventions from people you didn’t expect to be inventors at all. Here are a few of them.
Henry David Thoreau, of all people, invented raisin bread when he tossed a handful into the dough he was baking while at Walden Pond. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the addition of the shriveled little grapes is said to have just stunned and scandalized the housewives of Concord, Massachusetts, who were used to doing their baking in a very particular manner. I bet their minds would be blown by cinnamon raisin bread. Photo from Food Channel.
Marlon Brando: actor, icon… inventor? Yup. Toward the end of his life, Brando received several patents all related to a device that would help musicians tune drumheads. Why? Your guess is as good as mine – the patents all stemmed from 2002-2004, and when he died in 2004, he presumably took the idea with him.
Zeppo Marx owned a company that made industrial clamps and straps that were used quite heavily during WWII – the Marman Clamp was actually used to hold the atomic bombs carried by the Enola Gay. But Marx himself held three patents – one for a “Vapor Delivery Pad for Delivering Moist Heat” and two related to a device that monitored heart rates. And actually, Gummo Marx had a patent too – it was for a “Packaging Rack.”
Sir Isaac Newton was undoubtedly a genius with many discoveries and inventions to his name. Where do you think the cat flap ranks on his list of accomplishments? Rumor has it that Newton invented the cat flap when his beloved pet kept nudging the door to his lab open while he was working on light experiments, ruining hours of work. But he loved his cat and didn’t want to shut her out of his lab – or trap her inside. The solution? He cut a hole in the door, then installed a piece of felt at the stop so the least amount of light possible would seep through. Allegedly, when the cat had kittens, he cut a smaller door for them to go through even though they easily could have gone through the larger door. However, take this story with a grain of salt – at least two Newton biographers have done extensive research on the man’s life that turned up no trace of a pet of any kind. Photo from DIY Happy.
What’s a parent to do when their helpless infant is suffering after a terrible accident? Well, if you’re Roald Dahl, you team up with a couple of other guys to invent a brain shunt to ease the pain. Dahl’s son Theo was happily sitting in his baby carriage when it was hit by a taxi cab, severely injuring the infant and causing water to pool on his brain. The current device that helped drain the fluid was unreliable; it often jammed and was known to cause blindness. So Dahl partnered with a hydraulic engineer and a neurosurgeon to come up with a better solution – the Wade-Dahl-Till valve. His son had recovered by the time the valve was complete, but it served others well. The three men responsible for the valve all agreed that they would never accept payment for the invention.
Mark Twain has three patents to his name, but he was mostly a wannabe inventor. He was fascinated by inventions and gadgets and invested a lot of money in unknown inventors in hopes that his investments would make him quite rich. None of them ever panned out, though, and he eventually declared bankruptcy. But back to Twain’s patents – they were quite diverse. The first was granted in 1871 and was called “Improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments.” The strap tightened shirts up at the waist; the idea was to replace cumbersome suspenders. He also held a somewhat successful patent for a self-pasting scrapbook that ended up earning him about $50,000. And in 1885, he filed a patent for a history trivia game. It should come as no surprise that the author wrote about his ventures – you can read about the creation of the strap here.
Margaret Thatcher – yes, the ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – helped invent soft serve ice cream. I’m not sure if I should be thankful or not. After Maggie graduated from Oxford in 1950, she went to work for J. Lyons and Co., a British restaurant and food manufacturing company. The team she worked on developed a way to whip air into ice cream, leaving it lighter and creamier than existing ice cream. The result? Soft serve. Yum. Photo from Carvel Brentwood.
Hello, everybody! After writing about 100 articles for Neatorama in the past couple of years, I can't bear to write another Top 10 article - at least for a while (other Neatorama authors undoubtedly will pick up the slack). So, please let me try something new. In what I hope will be a regular feature, I'm going to take a regular object and try find the neatest nuggets of knowledge about it.
Let's start with the letter A ... say, apple. So without any further ado, here is Neatolicious Fun Facts: Apple.
1. The Wild Ancestor of All Apples: Malus sieversii
Today,
there are some 7,500 different cultivars of apples that are derived from
a single wild ancestor from Central Asia: Malus sieversii. In
fact, that species still grows in the mountains of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan and Xinjiang, China.
Photo: Malus sieversii, as collected by the 1996 Kazakhstan Apple Collection Mission of the USDA Agricultural Research Service
2. Apple: The Forbidden Fruit?
From The Fall of Man by Titian (c. 1570)
In the Bible, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. When they eat the fruit anyway, Adam and Even are expelled from the Garden of Eden.
But why apple? The Book of Genesis never mentioned the fruit as apple - in fact, early interpretations pointed to fig, grapes, citron (a lemonlike fruit), carob, and pomegranate (the most likely culprit), but never apple.
The bad rap for apple began when Christians translated the Bible into Latin. Malus, the Latin word for bad or evil is very similar to the word for apple (malum). It seems like the assignation of apple as the forbidden fruit was the result of a pun. Source
3. "An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away"
The first version of the proverb is actually from Pembrokeshire, Wales. The first recorded use was in the February 1866 edition of Notes and Queries magazine: "Eat an apple on going to bed, and you'll keep the doctor from earning his bread." (Source)
It became popular, however, when fruit specialist J.T. Stinson used it in his speech at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.
Apples do have a lot of good nutrients and pythochemicals that may help reduce the risk of heart disease, colon cancer, prostate cancer, lung cancer, and even tooth decay. But don't eat the seeds; they are mildly poisonous.
4. The Big Apple
Why
is New York City called The Big Apple? Parking ticket judge by day and
amateur etymologist by night Barry
Popik tracked down the first use of the term "The Big Apple"
back to the 1920s by journalist John J. Fitz Gerald, a horse racing reporter
for the New York Morning Telegraph.
Fitz Gerald overheard stable hands in New Orleans racetrack talk about the "Big Apple" racing circuit, meaning "the big time" where a lot of money could be won (Horses love apples, by the way). He liked the term, and wrote a column called "Around the Big Apple" on February 18, 1924:
The Big Apple. The dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big Apple. That's New York. (Source)
5. Bobbing for Apples
The
game bobbing for apples comes from Celtic festival of Samhain, the precursor
of Halloween. As apple is associated with love or fertility, the winner
of the game - the person who catch an apple with his or her teeth first
- is supposed to be the first to marry. (Photo: calebdzahnd
[Flickr])
On February 19, 2008, Ahrita Furman of Brooklyn, New York - who has set 216 official Guinness records - set the world record for bobbing for apples: He bobbed 33 apples in a minute.
Oh, and remember that tradition of throwing rice at weddings? Well, that came from the tradition of throwing apples at newlyweds (yikes!)
6. Record-Breaking Apples
In
2005, Chisato Iwasaki of Hirosaki City, Japan, grew the world's
heaviest apple. At 4 lb 1 oz (1.849 kg), it's the size of a small
pumpkin!
The world's longest single continuous apple peel was created in 1976 by Kathy Wafler Madison at the tender age of 16. It measured 172 feet, 4 inches long. Kathy grew up to run her own apple tree nursery!
7. Newton's Apple
Legend has it that Isaac Newton was inspired to formulate his theory of universal gravitation when an apple fell on his head. Though that was apocryphal, the part that the physicist was inspired by the apple was actually real. Newton himself wrote that he witnessed the falling apple while staring out the window of his house at Woolsthorpe Manor.
Purported offspring of the Newton’s Apple Tree in Woolsthorpe Manor (Image Source: Mathematical Association of America)
What happened to the apple tree? Various places claim that they have the tree. The King's School in Grantham claims that they bought the tree, uprooted it and transported it to the headmaster's garden. The staff of Woolsthorpe Manor, of course, disagreed: they claim that the tree is still present in their garden. Trinity College in Cambridge claimed that they have a descendant of the original tree growing outside the room Newton lived when he studied there.
Oh, and what kind of apple was it? It's a green cooking apple called the Flower of Kent: a pear-shaped, mealy, and generally of poor quality of an apple by today's standard.
See also: Neatorama's 10 Strange Facts About Newton
8. How Did Apple the Computer Company Get Its Name?
Steve Jobs worked summer jobs at an apple farm and liked the Beatles' record label, Apple. So, when he and Steve Wozniak was trying to figure out a name for their new computer company, they decided that if they couldn't think of a better name, they'd name it Apple. Apparently, they couldn't! (Source)
... and talking about Newton, would you know it that Apple's first logo was of Sir Isaac sitting underneath an apple tree?
See also: Neatorama's Evolution of Tech Logos
Do you know more apple fun facts? Please add them to the comment ... and while you're at it, what should we do for "B"?
