Innovations
Touch screens are now everywhere
The Samsung Omnia smartphone uses a touch screen
The technology for touch screens comes in a variety of different forms. There is resistive, surface acoustic wave, capacitive which includes surface capacitance and projected capacitance touch (PCT), infrared, strain gauge, optical imaging, dispersive signal technology, and acoustic pulse recognition. PCT touchscreen technology is used in a wide range of applications including smart phones, kiosk, and point-of-sale systems.
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Toshiba to start selling portable hard drives
Toshiba 200GB Portable HDD
Toshiba is going to start selling portable hard drives in addition to laptops and DVD players. The USB 2.0 external hard disk will be available in capacities ranging from 100 GB to 200 GB – the largest capacity yet available in a portable, compact form factor.
The device itself is less than 2.5 cm thick and smaller than a 10×15cm photo. It is designed to be used as a back up for computer documents, photos, videos, and music files. With its size, it is also rugged enough to be able to carry on business or leisure trips.
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6 Inventions That Changed The World – And What You Can Learn From Them
Young inventor Thomas Edison lost in thought
Throughout history, people have made inventions that changed the world. Some got lucky and stumbled on something, some actually set out to make something, and still others improved upon existing technology to create something revolutionary. We’re going to show what we consider the top 6 world changing inventions, from how they were found, to how they ended up being used.
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Google Developing Its Own Phone?
Google Phone
In what is sure to affect their stock ratings, Google has admitted to having a “phone project” in the works. Now, in typical google fashion, they are rather tight lipped about the details, and speculation has people guessing that they’re introducing their own phone to compete with Apple’s upcoming iPhone. However, there is a pretty good chance that the phone project has nothing to do with hardware, and will instead focus on what has already made Google billions – advertising.
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Ancient India Inventions
Ancient India is not typically a civilization that receives a lot of publicity about inventions. However, as with any civilization that last for an extended period of time and flourishes, it has made some notable innovations.
Along with the ancient Mayans, the ancient Indians are thought to be one of the earliest civilizations that thought in terms of billions of years. While most ancient civilizations had thought thousands of years into the future, the Hindus have scriptures dealing with events spanning billions of years.
Relating to this is a Hindu concept of the creation of the world. A 9th century Hindu scripture, The Mahapurana by Jinasena claims that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. And it is based on principles.
Amazingly, they even had theories regarding the sun and Earth. Aryabhata, it so happens, was apparently quite sceptical of the widely held doctrines about eclipses and also about the belief that the Sun goes round the Earth. As early as the sixth century, he talked of the diurnal motion of the earth and the appearance of the Sun going round it.
A Mathematician named Pingala also developed a numbering system similar to what we refer to as the binary system. They were also the first to use 0 as a placeholder in numbers such as 809 and 89. While the Babylonians had a concept that was similar to zero, it was merely used as a placeholder and was often just a blank space.
While the Indians had many more innovations than the ones above, these were a few that are notable.
Amazing Inventions – Samuel Morse and the History of the Telegraph
The invention of the Telegraph was not an isolated idea in history – rather, it was the eventual outcome of a number of scientific developments. To see where it began, we have to go back to 1825.
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Chinese Inventions – Zhou Inventions & Innovations
The Zhou Dynasty of Ancient China lasted from 1122 BC to 256 BC, followed the Shang (Yin) Dynasty, and preceded the Qin Dynasty. The Dynasty itself was the longest running in Chinese history – though the Zhou control of China lasted for a much shorter period than the dynasty itself. Through the dynasty, there were many impressive inventions in innovations, ranging from the development of writing to the introduction of iron to Chinese Society.
During the Zhou reign, Chinese territory nearly doubled, in large part due to the introduction of iron weapons to the Chinese military. They were also the first to use horsemen and chariots for war – as such, warfare progressed from a more respectful upper class fight to brutal foot soldier war. They also started building clay walls around their cities to protect from barbarian invasions.
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Mayan Inventions
Amazing architecture of a Mayan Temple
Mayan inventions include a calander and a complex heiroglyphics system. While it cannot be said that they were the sole inventors of such advancements, they did invent them independently in the Western Hemisphere, and their calendar and wrintings differed from that of the Egyptions and Chinese.
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Ben Franklins Inventions – Bifocals
Bifocal Lens
As most people know, Benjamin Franklin had numerous inventions that ranged from small convienences to incredible things that changed how people lived. The bifocals didn’t necassarily change how people lived, but they were more than a small improvement for anyone who had multiple sets of glasses to wear.
He is credited with the invention somewhere in the 1960’s, with the first evidence of them coming in a 1964 political cartoon. His first reference to his double spectacles came in a letter in 1984, quite a few years after the original invention.
His original design had the more convex lens placed on the bottom of the glasses (close viewing), while the lesser convex lens was placed on the upper half. Originally the lens’s were actually 2 seperate ones put into the same frame – it wasn’t until the 20th century that lenses were fused together to create bifocals.
While the bifocals are a great convienence for many, they are known to cause dizziness and headaches because of the differing perspectives. This is similar to how you may feel after wearing glasses that aren’t your prescription for an extended period of time.
By their very nature, bifocals offer a limited field of vision for the differeing distances. This can cause wearers to move reading material instead of their heads when reading, to make sure that what they are reading stays in the correct perspective.
This is just one of the examples of how Ben Franklin took a problem that people had, and found a solution.
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