Industrial
Air Conditioner
American engineer and inventor Willis Haviland Carrier developed the formulae and equipment that made air conditioning possible. The world's first spray type air conditioning equipment was Carrier's 'Apparatus for Treating Air,' which he correctly predicted would be used to enhance comfort as well as improve industrial processes and products. In 1911 Carrier disclosed his basic 'Rational Psychrometric Formulae' to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The formulae still stand as the basis for all fundamental calculations in the air conditioning industry. His development of the first safe, low pressure centrifugal refrigeration machine using nontoxic, nonflammable refrigerant marked the beginning of the era of comfort cooling.
Carrier's early work in developing centrifugal refrigeration machines led to new safe refrigerants for which he also received several patents. By controlling humidity as well as temperature, he invented air conditioning as we know it today.
Automatic Engine Lubricator
Elijah McCoy received his first patent for an automatic lubricating device in 1872. Previously, engines had to be stopped before necessary lubrication could be applied. McCoy's invention allowed engines to be lubricated while they ran, saving precious time and money.
Automobile
Transmission Mechanism
Pioneering automotive engineer Henry Ford held many patents on automotive mechanisms. He is best remembered, however, for helping devise the factory assembly approach to production that revolutionized the auto industry by greatly reducing the time required to assemble a car.
Engine Starting Device; Engine Starting, Lighting and Ignition System
Charles Franklin Kettering invented the first electrical ignition system and the self-starter for automobile engines and the first practical engine-driven generator.
Bromine Extraction
Herbert Henry Dow, founder of the Dow Chemical Company, was one of the creators of the modem American chemical industry. His inventions included such diverse items as electric light carbons, steam and internal combustion engines, automatic furnace controls, and water seals, but most of his inventions were chemical in nature.
Most of his chemical patents were for truly "pioneer" inventions. The remainder were practical improvements which took halogen science from theory to reality, creating employment and an environment which encouraged a healthy combination of basic and applied research. The combined effect of his inventions was to improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world.
Dynamite
Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, was also a great industrialist. In 1863, Nobel developed the Nobel patent detonator, which detonated nitroglycerin using a strong shock rather than heat. In 1865, the Nobel Company built the first factory for producing nitroglycerin. This led to the establishment of many factories around the world.
Nitroglycerin in its fluid state is very volatile. Nobel recognized this, and eventually patented dynamite, a combination of nitroglycerin absorbed by a porous substance. This gave him an easily handled, solid yet malleable explosive.
Mining, railroad building, and other construction became safer, more efficient, and cheaper.
Electrostatic Precipitator
As industrial smokestacks became a common sight at the turn of the century, Frederick Cottrell realized that pollution might be controlled and that valuable raw materials were vanishing into the atmosphere with the unwanted gases. In 1907 he applied for a patent for a device that passed high-voltage direct current to a discharge electrode which leaked the charge onto particles passing by in the fumes. These charged particles were then electrically attracted to an electrode with an opposite charge, where they could be collected and retrieved as valuable minerals or chemical compounds.
Cottrell's electrostatic precipitator, which became known simply as a 'Cottrell,' removed from 90 to 98 percent of all particles from escaping smoke and gases. The term 'cottrell' can still be found in the unabridged dictionary.
Magnetron
Asymmetrically Conductive Device and Method of Making the Same
Robert Hall invented the version of the magnetron that operates most microwave ovens, the semiconductor laser found in compact disk players, and power rectifiers that greatly improved power transmission efficiency.
His basic rectifier structure, with silicon replacing the germanium, is used today for AC-to-DC power conversion in electric locomotives and high-voltage DC electrical transmission. In 1962 Hall invented the semiconductor injection laser, a device now used in all compact disk players and laser printers, and most optical fiber communications systems.
High Efficiency Magnetron
Percy Spencer, while working for the Raytheon Company, discovered a more efficient way to manufacture magnetrons. In 1941, magnetrons were being produced at a rate of 17 per day. Spencer set out to create a simpler magnetron that could be mass produced. The result was a magnetron that replaced precision copper bars with lamina and replaced soldered internal wires with a simple solid ring. These improvements and others allowed for the faster production of 2,600 magnetrons per day.
In 1945, Spencer created a device to cook food using microwave radiation. Raytheon saw the possibilities of this, and after acquiring Amana Refrigeration in 1965, was able to sell microwave ovens on a large scale. The first microwave oven was called the Radarange, and today, there are over 200 million in use throughout the world.
Numerical Control
John Parsons changed the control of machines and industrial processes from an imprecise craft to an exact science, spawning a second industrial revolution. He brought computers to aircraft design, manufacturing, and real-time management reporting. He developed Numerical Control-produced evaporative patterns to replace weldments with streamlined castings, which revolutionized the production of automobile body dies.
Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)
In 1926 Waldo Semon, newly employed in the research department at The BFGoodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, decided to pursue a dubious project. Instead of digging into his assigned work, he began trying to dissolve an undesirable material called polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to create an adhesive for bonding rubber to metal.
'People then thought of PVC as worthless back then,' Semon recalled. 'They'd throw it in the trash.'
Semon never succeeded in creating the adhesive, but by heating PVC in a solvent at a high boiling point he discovered a substance that was both flexible and elastic. At first no one literally knew what to make of Semon's newfangled substance, but decades later PVC has become the world's second-best-selling plastic, generating billions of dollars in sales each year.
Punch Card Tabulator
Herman Hollerith invented and developed a punch-card tabulation machine system that revolutionized statistical computation.
Hollerith began working on the tabulating system during his days at MIT, filing for the first patent in 1884. He developed a hand-fed 'press' that sensed the holes in punched cards; a wire would pass through the holes into a cup of mercury beneath the card closing the electrical circuit. This process triggered mechanical counters and sorter bins and tabulated the appropriate data.
Hollerith's system-including punch, tabulator, and sorter-allowed the official 1890 population count to be tallied in six months, and in another two years all the census data was completed and defined; the cost was $5 million below the forecasts and saved more than two years' time.
His later machines mechanized the card-feeding process, added numbers, and sorted cards, in addition to merely counting data.
In 1896 Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company, forerunner of Computer Tabulating Recording Company (CTR). He served as a consulting engineer with CTR until retiring in 1921.
In 1924 CTR changed its name to IBM - the International Business Machines Corporation.
Steam Generator
George H. Babcock and Stephen Wilcox invented an improved water tube steamboiler, which provided a safer and more efficient production of steam.
Tapered Roller Bearings
Henry Timken invented the Timken® tapered roller bearing. He found that conventional bearings of the 19th century worked well at reducing friction, but ran into problems when the wheels had to bear heavy loads from the sides, as when vehicles turn. So, in 1895, with the help of his two sons and a nephew, he began experiments to make a better bearing. He developed Timken tapered roller bearings to bear the heavy side loads.
In the 1920s, The Timken Company was making 90 percent of the country's bearings. By the early 1990s, they supplied nearly a third of the world's tapered roller bearings.