Stories of Useful Inventions

The most important uses of fire were taught by fire itself. As the primitive man stood near the flames of the burning tree and felt their pleasant glow, he learned that fire may...

Well, here was the Egyptian system of picture-signs consisting of several thousand pictures of birds, beasts, reptiles, insects, trees, flowers, and objects of almost every desc...

In this little book I have given the history of those inventions which are most useful to man in his daily life. I have told the story of the Match, the Stove, the Lamp, the For...

At first, when a man wanted to cross a deep stream, he was compelled to swim across. But man at his best is a poor swimmer, and it was not long before he invented a better metho...

[7] Light a short piece of candle and place it in a tumbler, and cover the top of the tumbler. The experiment teaches that a flame must have a constant supply of fresh air and w...

_When_ the sickle first began to be used is of course unknown. Among the remains of the "stone age" (p. 39) are implements of flint which resemble the sickle, while among the re...

Our story has now brought us to the early part of the eighteenth century. Everywhere men were now trying to make the most of the ideas of Worcester and Papin. The mines were gro...

During the thousand years of the Dark Ages (476-1453) the glories of the civilization of ancient Greece and Rome faded almost completely from human vision. Events of the sixteen...

Thus far we have traced the history of only one kind of message, the kind that has the form of a written document and that is conveyed by a human carrier over land and water fro...

The sun-dial can hardly be called an invention; it is rather an observation. There were, however, inventions for measuring time in the earliest period of man's history. Among th...

Basket weaving led to cloth weaving, and this led to the loom. In Figure 4 we see the simplest and oldest form of the loom. It consisted of a single stick (yarn beam) of wood ab...