HOW BRILLIANT
Bubble wrap was originally designed by engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes in 1957 for a completely different purpose – as 3D wallpaper.
Adam says: “They were looking at tonnes of this stuff they’d made and
A scientist called Percy Spencer created the microwave oven by accident while working in a lab looking at a new type of radar wave to spot submarines – radar being a way of firing energy to get signals back and find out where your enemy is.
“Clearly, he had his waves set to the wrong frequency because he noticed that for no good reason the chocolate bar in his pocket, that he’d brought in for lunch, had been melted to liquid. ” And so an idea went “ping” in his head. no one wanted it because, realistically, who would want their home covered in bubble wrap? Then one thought: ‘Actually, that might be handy for wrapping up the picture frame I’ve got to send my aunt’.” “One winter’s day an 11-year-old called Frank Epperson in San Francisco had made himself a glass of lemonade using water and lemonade powder,” says Adam.
“He was mixing it up with a little wooden stick in the garden when he got distracted and went inside. Next morning he found the whole thing had frozen and the stick was still poking out. And so Frank discovered he’d invented ice lollies.
“They’re one of the most important inventions in the book. Where would we be without ice lollies?”
Adam says there are a surprising number of people whose inventions killed them – such as American William Bullock, who dreamed up the printing press in 1843.
“He pioneered the invention of the fastest way to print newspapers, using these enormous machines and huge rolls of paper, printed on both sides and folded up,” say Adam.
“But he got too close to them one day and rather than the big rolls of paper, it was him who got sucked in and squished.” “The first toothbrush you’d recognise today was made by an English bloke called William Addis,” Adam says. “He’d been jailed over a riot in London, and one night he sneaked a bone from his dinner into his cell and stuck some bristles from a pig into one end of it, using it to clean his teeth. “When he got out, he opened a toothbrush factory and his firm, called Wisdom, is still producing millions of toothbrushes more than 200 years later.”