Inventor of Heelys dies at 71
IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser. Skip to Content news Alerts There are no new alerts at this time 00:19 Inventor of Heelys dies at 71 00:0000:00 Source link
All posts tagged: Inventor
The invisibility cloak inventor now has better tricks up his sleeve
Mike Finn-Kelcey/Imperial College London John Pendry’s kitchen is dominated by a huge photograph of what looks like the view through a kaleidoscope: dizzying shards of purple, green, yellow and white. Given that Pendry is famous above all else for inventing an invisibility cloak – a device that can bend light around objects – I wonder if I am looking at something related to that. But no, he tells me, the image simply shows crystals of vitamin C magnified many times. All that invisibility-cloak stuff is in the past, he says, and he has moved on to “more exciting things”. It is a throwaway remark, but it reveals something of why I have always found Pendry, who is based at Imperial College London, so interesting. This is someone who invented a device 20 years ago that sounds like magic, but his true legacy is barely appreciated. If engineers get their way, Pendry’s ideas will soon shape everything from earthquake protection to self-driving cars. Yet he seems to give the applications of his famous breakthrough barely a thought, …
Inventor Beulah Louise Henry’s unstoppable rise to becoming ‘Lady Edison’
Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Beulah Louise Henry was just nine years old when she came up with her first invention in 1896, a device that allowed a man to tip his hat without ever putting down his newspaper. By her death in 1973, at the age of 85, she’d come up with so many more—a doll with eyes that changed color with the press of a button, a sewing machine without a bobbin (a threaded spool that slowed down work because it had to be frequently refilled), a clock designed to help kids learn to tell time, and others—that the press even dubbed Henry “Lady Edison.” Her ideas, she once told a reporter, were “messages from a guiding spirit.” Beulah Louise Henry’s early life Henry grew up a daughter of fortune in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her father Walter was a prominent lawyer and orator. Her mother, who was also named Beulah—a common tradition in the late 19th century—was a homemaker and the daughter …
Windshield wipers’ overlooked female inventor
Sign Up For Goods 🛍️ Product news, reviews, and must-have deals. Before cars and buses became ubiquitous features of the modern cityscape, many cities installed streetcars to shuttle residents from neighborhood to neighborhood. In the summer months, the journey was a sweltering one, with dozens of sticky, sweaty passengers crammed together in the heat. But winters were worse. The biggest problem wasn’t that trolleys were unheated—that advancement came with their electrification in the 1890s—it was that sleet and snow made it impossible for streetcar drivers to see. They had no choice but to either hang their heads out an open window or to stop completely every few blocks to manually clean the glass from the outside. The frigid air rushed in either way. Businesswoman Mary Anderson had never experienced public transportation’s seasonal struggle back home in Birmingham, Alabama. But shivering in a streetcar during a winter visit to New York City in 1902 gave her an idea. What if the operator could clear his windshield from inside the trolley without opening either a window or door? …
Grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor is in pieces over missing milk chocolate
For the grandson of the inventor of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, all it took was one bite of a Valentine’s Day Reese’s Mini Hearts to leave him, well, heartbroken. “It didn’t taste like milk chocolate,” Brad Reese told NBC News. “It tasted cheap.” Reese said he looked at the front of the package and saw the words “peanut butter,” but not the words “milk chocolate.” And when he flipped the bag over and read the list of ingredients he was, as he put it, “horrified.” Hershey’s, which makes the beloved butter cups and seasonal spin-offs like mini-hearts, had replaced the milk chocolate with a chocolate-flavored coating “that definitely was not chocolate,” according to Reese. Make Reese’s Great Again “For most of my life I ate at least one Reese’s Butter Cup per day, and sometimes something seasonal like a Reese’s heart or a Reese’s Christmas tree,” Reese, 70, said. “But this was inedible. I threw it in the garbage.” Then Reese, who is so enthralled with his grandfather’s sweet creation that he often ventures …
Inventor Building AI-Powered Suicide Chamber
The inventor of a controversial suicide pod is making sure his device keeps up with the times by augmenting it with AI tech — which, we regret to inform you, is not merely some sort of dark joke. “One of the parts to the device which hadn’t been finished, but is now finished, is the artificial intelligence,” the inventor, Philip Nitschke, told the Daily Mail in a new interview. Named the Sarco pod after the ancient sarcophagus, the euthanasia chamber, first built in 2019, has been championed by the pro-assisted dying organization The Last Resort. In 2024, it was used to facilitate the suicide of a 64-year-old woman in Switzerland. The 3D-printed pod is activated when the person seeking to take their own life presses a button, filling the sealed, futuristic-looking coffin with nitrogen that causes the user to lose consciousness and “peacefully” pass away within a few minutes. To date, the woman’s death in Switzerland is the only case of the Sarco pod seeing real-world action. Soon after she died, Swiss authorities showed up …