What Are the Ten Greatest Inventions of Our Time?

Invention Contest - First Prize Article

"Five-and-twenty years ago is a hundred years off - so much has our social life changed in those five lusters." - Thackeray in "The Newcomes."

No single invention of the last twenty-five years initiated an industrial epoch in the sense that the locomotive or Bessemer converter did, yet no former period has been so rich in developments of striking importance or so productive of improvements whose aggregate so vitally affected our economic and social life. In this short space of time the dreams of ages have come true - man has been able to fly, opaque bodies rendered transparent, and intelligence transmitted between distant points without material communicating means.

This short quarter century has seen the world-wide acceptance of electrical transportation, the introduction of high-power generation and transmission of electricity, the radical changes in construction due to the use of steel and re-enforced concrete, and innumerable valuable improvements in chemical and allied arts. Perfected during this period were such epoch-making inventions as smokeless powder, high-speed steel, contact method of making sulphuric acid, electrolytic refining of copper, the quick-acting brake, automatic telephone exchange, centrifugal cream-separator, tungsten lamp. Diesel oil-motor, and Harveyized armor-plate, which changed existing practices so radically or induced economies of such vast degree as to make it difficult to exclude them from any list except by the adoption of a standard so high as to be unthought of at any other time.

In making a selection from the bewilderingly opulent array of creative activities of the period, only such inventions were included as were most revolutionary in character in the broadest fields, which affected most our mode of living, or which opened up the largest new sources of wealth. So weighing the merits of the different inventions, it is concluded that the ten greatest and their approximate date of successful commercial introduction are: (1) Electric furnace, 1889; (2) steam turbine, 1894; (3) gasoline automobile, 1890; (4) moving pictures, 1893; (5) wireless telegraphy, 1900; (6) aeroplane, 1906; (7) cyanide process, 1890; (8) linotype machine, 1890; (9) induction motor, 1890; (10) electric welding, 1889.

Although it weighed only a little over 20 pounds, it developed ¼ horse power at a speed of 1,800 revolutions, a performance considered remarkable at the time.

The Induction Motor of Nikola Tesla and How it Revolutionized Power Transmission

Ninety per cent of electric current generated is alternating because larger generating units can be utilized and the current more easily transmitted. The induction motor, constructed by Tesla in 1888, and independently suggested in principle by Ferrari, was the first satisfactory medium to transform this current into power.

This epoch-making invention is mainly responsible for the present large and increasing use of electricity in the industries. It is working a revolution for economy and comfort, in the mill, factory and workshop. In making the motor an individual power unit, it has made power arrangement elastic, drawing upon energy only when needed and applying it directly only where wanted, and has abolished line shafting and belting. It conserves thirty to sixty per cent of the energy formerly wasted in uselessly whirling line shafting. It saves overhead space and increases productivity by making the shop lighter, safer, cleaner and less noisy. And so well recognized are these advantages that establishments in every big industry are installing these motors as a measure of economic self-defense.