|
Section C
Great Ideas
Some of the most important inventions of the past 2,000 years may surprise you.
Want to get rich? Become famous? You don't have to be a film star or a basketball player or a musician. You can do it by becoming an inventor. Over the past 2,000 years inventors have created machines and articles that have changed the world.
And it's not just the big ideas like computers, printing presses and steam engines （蒸汽机） that become big things.
Just think how the past 2,000 years would be different without these "small" big ideas:
It's a clean sweep
In 1871, American inventor Ives McGaffey realized that if you turned an air pump （气泵）the opposite way, you would have a machine that could pick up dirt. He called his machine an aspirator（吸气器）. The huge device was powered by a steam engine.
Another American, James Murray Spangler, designed a much lighter machine in 1907 with an electric engine. He sold the idea, now called a vacuum cleaner（真空吸尘器），to a man named William H. Hoover. The company is still making Hoover vacuums and we're a little bit cleaner for it.
Stuck on you
Inventors get interested when they find out people don't like the way something works.
One day in 1923, young lab worker Richard Drew from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing（制造）Company heard workers in an automobile body shop complaining. It seems they could not find the right kind of tape to put on cars while they painted them. Either the tape stuck too much and ruined the paint job or it fell off too soon and the paint ran onto another part of the car.
Drew spent two years creating a tape that stuck just enough. We know it now as masking tape. But Drew wasn't done. In 1930, he created a see-through, water-proof（防水的）, cellophane（薄膜）adhesive（胶粘剂）. The company called it Scotch tape and started selling it by the ton.
Accidents can work wonders
In the late 1940s, engineer Percy L. Spencer of the Raytheon Company was experimenting with high-frequency（高频率）radio waves. These had been used to find enemy planes and ships in World War II. Spencer noticed the waves had made a chocolate bar（块）in his pocket soft. Could these waves be used to heat food?
Spencer soon invented the microwave oven（微波炉）, which made millions of dollars for Raytheon and millions of bags of popcorn（爆米花）for kids everywhere.
Geniuses need not apply（应用，努力）
Alexander Graham Bell was a teacher of the deaf. He did not know much about electricity. That was probably a good thing because most electricity masters did not think a voice could be sent over a wire. In three years of day and night effort, Bell figured out how to send sound over a changing electric current. He got his patent（专利）on the telephone on March 7, 1876. It is one of the most valuable patents ever given by the U.S.
Keep your trousers on
In 1907, engineer Gideon Sundback got interested in improving a "hookless（无钩的）fastener（扣件）" patented in 1893. It was supposed to do away with the tiring work of buttoning the many buttons on clothes of the day. But the fastener did not work well.
For years Sundback lay awake half the night trying to solve the problem. In 1913 he designed a hookless fastener that worked. But no one made much money on the invention until a Canadian businessman decided to call it a "zipper（拉链）". Soon millions were sold every year and trousers everywhere stopped falling down.
Now that's a tiny — yet BIG — idea.
Words: 626
|