Inventors and inventions

Great and very important inventions have changed the life of people completely, they make our life easier and more com­fortable. Many things didn't just appear, they were invented.

Modern man appeared about 70,000 years ago. It took man thousands of years to learn how to control fire. Thousands of years passed before he invented the wheel. This great invention, which revolutionized traveling, transport and industry, is not more than 5,000 years old. Only 200 years ago man invented electricity, the steam engine and a lot of other clever machines. These inventions have completely changed our way of life. Here are the names of some of them:

Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was an English physicist. He discovered gravitational force. The famous (probably untrue) story about him is that he was sitting under a tree when an apple fell on his head. In fact, he conducted a series of experiments with falling objects including apples. He noticed that the speed of a falling object depended on the distance that it fell. He concluded that the Earth had a gravitational force.

Archimedes (287-212 ВС) was a Greek mathematician. His famous principle is about what happens to an object when you put it in water — and what happens to the water. The famous (probably untrue) story about Archimedes is that he discovered his principle while he was sitting in the bath. In fact it took him many years to prove it. One day, he was trying to explain to Hiero, the king of Syracuse, that his gold crown was not all gold. When Archimedes put the crown in a bowl of water, it didn't displace enough water; it was not heavy enough to be gold. Hiero was furious. The man who made the crown went to prison.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) invented the telephone, one of the most important inventions of the 19th century. In fact, Bell didn't plan to invent a means of communication. He was trying to invent something to help deaf people when he discovered that people in different rooms could communicate with each other using the same equipment.

Rudolf Diesel. Only a few inventors design a new machine or a product that becomes so well-known that the invention, named after its creator, becomes a household word. The German engineer who invented the Diesel engine in 1897 and so began a transport revolution in cars, lorries and trains.

Hans Wilhelm Geiger. The German physicist who designed a counter for detecting radioactivity in 1908-1909. This was the beginning of modern Geigers counters.

In 1895 a well-known German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays which we usually call Roentgen rays. He named them in such a way because of their mysterious nature. X-rays are widely used in medicine, different branches of science and technology.