Spurred on by frequent shortages of coins, banks issued paper notes as a promise against future payments of precious metals.
By the late 19th century many nations had begun issuing government-backed legal tender that could no longer be converted into gold or silver.
The switch to paper money not only bailed out struggling governments during times of crisis—as it did for the United States during the Civil War —but it also ushered in a new era of international monetary regulation that changed the face of global economics. Perhaps even more importantly, paper currency was the vital first step in a new monetary system that led to the birth of credit cards and electronic banking.
While early human societies made extensive use of stone, bronze and iron, it was steel that fueled the Industrial Revolution and built modern cities. Evidence of steel tools dates back 4, years, but the alloy was not mass-produced until the invention of the Bessemer Process, a technique for creating steel using molten pig iron, in the s. Steel then exploded into one of the biggest industries on the planet and was used in the creation of everything from bridges and railroads to skyscrapers and engines.
Thomas Edison showing the incandescent lamps he created in his lab, circa While they are easy to take for granted, all it takes is a short power outage to remind us of the importance of artificial lights. Pioneered in the early 19th century by Humphry Davy and his carbon arc lamp, electric lights developed throughout the s thanks to the efforts of inventors like Warren de la Rue, Joseph Wilson Swan and Thomas Alva Edison. It was Edison and Swan who patented the first long-lasting light bulbs in and , liberating society from a near-total reliance on daylight.
Electric lights went on to be used in everything from home lighting and street lamps to flashlights and car headlights. The complex networks of wires erected to power early light bulbs also helped lead to the first domestic electrical wiring, paving the way for countless other in-home appliances.
Greek pottery, dating back to B. Since their domestication some 5, years ago, horses have been inextricably tied to human development. They enabled people to travel great distances and gave different cultures the chance to trade and exchange ideas and technology.
Equine strength and agility meant that horses could also carry cargo, plow farmland and even clear forests. Perhaps most influential of all, horses changed the nature of war. Nothing was more feared than a horse-drawn chariot or a mounted warrior, and societies that mastered the use of cavalry typically prevailed in battle.
A criminally under-appreciated innovation, the transistor is an essential component in nearly every modern electronic gadget. We have already seen a number of relatively new and successful companies that have benefited from online intangible business models.
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The light we use today in our homes and offices comes from a bright idea from more than years ago. Electric lights were pioneered in the early 19th century by Humphry Davy, who experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery.
When he connected wires between his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. His invention was known as the e lectric arc lamp. But without a good vacuum, his bulb had too short a lifetime for commercial use. Thomas A. Edison improved on Swan's design by using metal filaments and in and he filed patents for electric lights using different materials for the filament.
He eventually discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over hours. Battery electricity has become the basic need for our day to day life, another essential invention. Of course, electricity itself has been here around all along, but the practical applications to effectively use it was invented. Although many use electricity, how many of you know the history of electricity? Alessandro Volta is generally credited with discovering the first practical battery. He invented his battery in , it consisted of discs of two different metals, such as copper and zinc, separated by cardboard soaked in brine.
In , British scientist Michael Faraday discovered the basic principles of electricity generation. The electromagnetic induction discovery revolutionized energy usage. Street lights were some of the earliest attention gaining equipment. With the rise in electricity usability, now it stands as a backbone of modern industrial society. The prehistoric battery may date back to the Parthian empire, which is around 2, years old. The ancient battery consisted of a clay jar filled with a vinegar solution, into which an iron rod surrounded by a copper cylinder was inserted.
These batteries might have been used to electroplate silver. But, as mentioned in the previous entry, the inventor of the first electric battery is Alessandro Volta, who developed the pile battery.
After that, in , William Cruickshank invented the Trough battery , an improvement on Alessandro Volta's voltaic pile. Did you know that new sodium-ion batteries could pave the way for sustainable battery production? Before the Internet's ability to spread information, the printing press helped information travel around the globe.
German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around , although he was far from the first to automate the book-printing process. Woodblock printing in China dates back to the 9th century and Korean bookmakers were printing with moveable metal type a century before Gutenberg.
By , Gutenberg presses were operating throughout Western Europe with a production of 20 million materials, from individual pages, to pamphlets, and books. The telegraph was developed around - by Samuel Morse and other inventors, which revolutionized long-distance communication. The electrical signals were transmitted by a wire laid between stations.
In addition, Samuel Morse developed a code, called Morse code , for the simple transmission of messages across telegraph lines. Based on the frequency of usage, the code assigned a set of dots short marks and dashes long marks to the English alphabet and numbers.
The telegraph laid major foundations for modern conveniences like telephones and, according to some scholars, computer code. Bronze was the first metal forged for use by humans. However, bronze is relatively weak.
Around 1, BC, a people along the Black Sea called the Chalybes began using iron ore to create sturdy wrought iron weapons with around 0. Cast iron, which was about percent carbon, was first made in ancient China beginning around BC. The Chinese metalworkers built seven-foot-tall furnaces to smelt iron ore into a liquid and poured this into carved molds.
Around BC, Indian metalworkers invented a smelting method that used a clay receptacle called a crucible to hold the molten metal. The workers put bars of wrought iron and pieces of charcoal into the crucibles, then sealed the containers and inserted them into a furnace.
The wrought iron melted and absorbed the carbon in the charcoal. When the crucibles cooled, they contained ingots of pure steel - a much stronger, less brittle metal than iron. The later development of the blast furnace led to even stronger steel. After British engineer Henry Bessemer developed a process that blasted air through molten pig iron to create carbon-free, pure iron in The famous invention of the Bessemer Process paved the way for the mass production of steel, making it one of the biggest industries on the planet.
Now steel is used in the creation of everything from bridges to skyscrapers. In , Julius Lilienfeld patented a field-effect transistor, but the working device was not feasible.
Transistors have since become a fundamental piece of the circuitry in countless electronic devices including televisions, cellphones, and computers, making a remarkable impact on technology. Antibiotics have saved millions of lives by killing and inhibiting the growth of harmful bacteria. Throughout the 20th century, antibiotics spread rapidly and proved to be a major living improvement, fighting nearly every known form of infection and protecting peoples' health.
The history of contraceptives dates back at least to B. C, where records indicate that ancient Egyptian women would mix honey, sodium carbonate, and crocodile dung into a thick, solid paste called pessary and insert it into their vaginas before intercourse. However, many researchers believe that old world birth control methods like there are not effective, and indeed, possibly life threatening.
In Charles Goodyear patented the vulcanization of rubber, which led to the mass production of rubber condoms. The Pill launched an international revolution that allowed women to determine when they would have children, and freed them from unplanned pregnancy, which could derail their careers.
Of course, x-rays are a phenomenon of the natural world, and thus can't be invented. But they were discovered accidentally. The invisible was made visible in X-ray is undoubtedly one of the epoch-making advancements in the field of medicine.
While testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass, he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. Because of the unknown nature of the rays, he named them X-rays. Through his observation, he learned that X-rays can be photographed when they penetrate into human flesh. In , during the Balkan war, X-rays were first used to find bullets and broken bones inside patients.
In , he received the Nobel prize in physics for his work. Over the last years, refrigeration has offered us ways to preserve food, medicines, and other perishable substances. Before its conception, people cooled their food with ice and snow. James Harrison built the first practical vapor compression refrigeration system. While it helped to rev up industrial processes initially, it became an industry itself later on.
A small box with the ability to convey enormous information and which has changed entertainment and communications forever. The invention of television was the work of many individuals. Although TV plays an important part in our everyday lives, it rapidly developed during the 19 th and the 20 th century as a result of the work of a number of people. In , a year-old German university student, Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow patented the image rasterizer, a spinning disk with a spiral pattern of holes in it, so each hole scanned a line of an image.
The first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of images was by Georges Rignoux and A. Fournier in Paris in In , Boris Rosing and his student Vladimir Zworykin created a system that used a mechanical mirror-drum scanner to transmit crude images over wires to a cathode ray tube or in a receiver. But the system was not sensitive enough to allow moving images. In the s, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird used the N ipkow disk to create a prototype video system.
On March 25, , Baird gave the first public demonstration of televised images in motion. On January 26, , he demonstrated the transmission of an image of a face in motion using radio. This is widely regarded as being the world's first public television demonstration. The camera is undoubtedly one of the most cherished creations. With technological advancements, Digital cameras were introduced to save pictures on memory cards rather than using films. The history of the digital camera began with Eugene F.
Lally's idea to take pictures of the planets and stars. Later, Kodak engineer Steven Sasson invented and built the first digital camera in It was built using parts of kits that were lying around the Kodak factory.
The camera was about the size of a breadbox and it took 23 seconds to capture a single image. Freeze the great moments from your life in the form of photographs with better quality and superior handling digital camera.
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