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Inventions That Changed the World

What You Already KnowTechnology helps us solve problems and makes

our work easier and more efficient.It also helps us live healthier and safer lives.

Technology has helped make a sport such as in-line skating safer. In-line skates are made from materials that people have made from natural resources. Iron ore is a natural resource that is used to make the screws that hold an in-line skate’s wheels in place. The plastic found on an in-line skate is made from chemicals found in nature.

Technology has improved medical care. Optical fibers are thin tubes that allow light to pass. They help doctors see inside the body. X-ray machines take pictures of bones in the body. Another diagnostic tool is magnetic resonance imaging, also known as MRI. It also allows doctors to get a detailed look inside the body so they can identify problems.


Radio, TV, the telephone, the Internet, and e-mail help us communicate faster and across greater distances. Communication is any way of sending a message from one place to another. There are many ways to communicate.

Telecommunications are communications made electronically over a distance. We can communicate with people around the world, with astronauts, and with spacecraft in outer space.

Today’s transportation vehicles include cars, trucks, and airplanes. A vehicle carries people and goods. Transportation technology moves people and goods from place to place. Today through new technology, engineers make transportation safer and more efficient.

Science and technology have improved because many people have been curious about how things work and about ways to make them better. In this book you will read about inventors and their inventions that changed our world.


Changing the WorldTechnology of our modern age is due to the

discoveries and inventions of inventors of the past. Over the past two hundred years, the way we live and communicate with one another has changed so much! The inventions of the telephone and the computer have changed how we send and receive information. Today we can pick up the phone and speak to a friend living on the other side of the world. We can send an e-mail to our next-door neighbor or even to astronauts in space.

How to use electricity was a very important discovery. Think of how important electricity is to our everyday lives! Without electricity, we would not be able to do so many of the things we do each day.

The movies that entertained people in the early 1900s were just flickering black and-white images with no sound. Today we are thrilled with colorful animation and special effects.

Pioneers traveled across the country in wagons or on foot. The invention of powered flight and the airplane made big changes in how we travel. Now crossing the United States takes only a few hours instead of a few months. The credit for these advancements goes to amateur and professional scientists and inventors.


A Bright IdeaBefore Thomas Edison and his team of

inventors improved the light bulb, homes were lit with the flicker of gas lamps. Thomas Edison was a scientist and inventor who wanted the streets to be lit by electric bulbs. Edison and his team of scientists took a horseshoe-shaped filament, or wire, made of carbonized thread and heated it with an electric current. They found it would glow for several hours inside a glass globe. Edison had his assistants string up these new electric lights outside his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

The night of December 31, 1879 was Edison’s first public demonstration of these lights powered by electricity. A few dozen electric lamps glowed above the heads of three thousand spectators. The people had never seen anything quite like it.

Edison wanted a safe, affordable, practical system that would bring electricity to people’s homes. He invented the electric meter. He planned the Pearl Street Power Station in New York City, the first power plant to generate electricity. By the end of the 1880s, everyone in New York had access to Edison’s electricity. Pearl Street Power Station provided electricity to homes and businesses in New York. Many light bulbs still look much like Edison’s.

Neon LightsToday neon lights are often used in advertising

signs. Neon is a colorless, odorless gas. An electric current passing through tubes filled with neon causes the colored light.


The TelephoneAlexander Graham Bell invented the telephone

in 1876. He was interested in finding new ways to transmit sound. With Thomas Watson, Bell tried to make electric currents imitate sound waves so people could communicate over long distances. After many experiments, Bell was finally able to speak with Watson using the first telephone. The first words spoken on the telephone were, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” Bell’s invention had used an electric current to send the sound of a voice through wires. His first telephone combined the earpiece and the mouthpiece. It used a magnet to help transfer the sound.

In 1915 telephone lines crossing the country connected America’s East and West Coasts. After telephone cables were laid under oceans, people on different continents could talk to one another for the first time. Today many telephone systems use the technology of optical fibers to transmit telephone calls. Information is changed into light pulses that are carried by thin glass or plastic filaments.

Two technologies are combined to make today’s cellular phone. They are Bell’s invention of the telephone and Nikolai Tesla’s invention of the radio. The scientific principles of these two inventions led to the development of this form of wireless communication.


The Age Of FilmIn the late 1800s Thomas Edison invented a

movie camera that he called a Kinetoscope. It could record images and then reproduce them. French inventors Louis and Auguste Lumière first saw Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1894. The Lumière brothers had ideas about how to improve it.

Within a year, they invented a combination movie camera and movie projector. They called it the Cinématographe. The first public demonstration of this new technology was in Paris in December 1895. It was more portable than other cameras of the time. It projected images onto a screen using a lens and a light source.

The Lumière brothers’ first movie was titled Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. Can you tell from the title what the film was about?

In just a few months, the Cinématographe was in use all over Europe. Soon movies and moviemaking were gaining popularity all over the world. The first movies were black and white. By the 1930s the technology was available for movies to be made in color. Today films are more and more advanced with computer graphics and special effects that entertain and inform us.

Digital animation is a series of moving images made on a computer screen. It can be as simple as a moving shape or as detailed as the 3-D animation in full-length movies.


Taking To The SkyWilbur and Orville Wright worked in their

Ohio bicycle shop, picturing the day that people would fly. They used their knowledge of mathematics and mechanics to design a vehicle that would fly. From 1900 to 1903, they experimented with gliders and powered aircraft in the windy hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Then on December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers flew the first ever powered aircraft. Orville Wright was the pilot for the first flight, which lasted just twelve seconds.

Later that day, Wilbur Wright flew for fifty-nine seconds at a speed of thirty-one miles per hour. The U.S. Army, seeing a future use of this new technology, asked the Wright brothers to build a flying machine that could travel with a passenger at a speed of forty miles per hour.

Now, just over one hundred years later, commercial jet airplanes carry hundreds of passengers and cargo at a speed of six hundred miles per hour. What do you think the Wright brothers would say about today’s busy airports?

A helicopter with its rotary blades can be flown almost anywhere. It can do three things an airplane cannot do. It can fly backward, rotate in the air, and hover.


The Computer AgeCharles Babbage, a British mathematician,

was far ahead of his time. In 1834, he had an idea for a programmable computer that would solve math problems faster than humans could. Although his Analytical Engine was never completed, his idea helped lead to the development of the modern computer.

Many years later, in 1947, three scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories searched for a way to improve electronic machines. John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley built on the ideas of earlier scientists and invented a tiny device called a transistor. A transistor controls the flow of electricity in electronic equipment. One of the first uses of transistors was in hearing aids that were small enough to fit into the ear.

In 1955 scientists at Bell Labs designed the first computer that had a transistor. Until then, a computer took up an entire room. This new computer was faster and smaller than the room-sized computer it replaced. Today our computers and handheld devices are even smaller, yet faster and more powerful. The Internet is a global network that connects millions and millions of computers and computer users through wires, cables, and satellites. It allows people everywhere to gather and exchange information, news, and opinions.

What do you think the next important invention will be? Do you think it will change the world?


Glossarycarbonized changed into carbon by burning

device something invented for a particular use or purpose

filament threadlike wire that glowswhen electric current is passed through it

graphics drawings or pictures

hover to hang or float near the same place in the air

portable easily carried

projector a machine that sends out an image onto a screen

transistor a small device that controls the flow of electricity in electronic equipment

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