Fable

326 years ago a Berkshire farmer’s son invented this: It started a revolution in agriculture Moral: The urge to automate beats strong in the human breast    

There was once a prodigious scientist, a President of the Royal Society who was  created a baronet  and who, in the year 1808, discovered  five elements including calcium and boron. He created the first incandescent light, discovered the properties of nitrous oxide, invented electrochemistry, was friends with Coleridge and Southey, wrote over 160 poems and painted pictures. Late in his ...

This house belonged to a famous inventor: The inventor did not enjoy socialising but his wife would invite people to formal dinner parties. Fortunately the house was large enough for him to keep an upstairs room for himself  and his daughter recalls that, when these dinner parties occurred, “He would feign indigestion and skip dinner, being the only man to ...

That was once a seven-year-old girl so full of curiosity that she dismantled seven alarm clocks to find out how they worked. Later on, she was on the teams which created the Harvard Mark 1 and Univac 1 computers.  She had a Navy ship, a supercomputer and a leading-edge IC named after her.  She became a Rear-Admiral. Moral: Curiosity opens ...

135 years ago the candidate with the highest marks in the Cambridge Maths Tripos scored 13% better than the next best candidate but was denied the traditional title of Senior Wrangler because she was female. The lead story in next day’s Telegraph opened: “Once again has woman demonstrated her superiority in the face of an incredulous and somewhat unsympathetic world.”  ...

A Chief Engineer to the City of Liverpool, later to become President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, was in the Anfield crowd on 26 October 1889 when Everton drew 2-2 with Accrington in a League match. Everton should have won. The engineer saw the ref wrongly disallow Alex Latta’s shot from an acute angle – the ref wasn’t convinced ...

87 years ago, the first job given to a new scientist at Dupont was researching refrigerants. After storing a gas at dry ice temperatures he found that the gas disappeared leaving a white powder which was heat resistant, corrosion resistant, chemically inert, with such low surface friction that most other substances would not stick to it.  Today it is found ...

80 years ago a self-taught electrical engineer was building magnetrons when he noticed a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. The observation spawned an invention that was to become ubiquitous in kitchens around the world and helped grow his company, where he was employee No.3, to last year’s revenues of $80 billion. Moral: There’s a message in many unexpected ...

Dreams can be more important than you think. “When I was 23, I suddenly woke up,” an entrepreneur said at a university Conmencement address, “I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and I grabbed a pen and started writing. I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and ...

  Moral: Genius is always remembered