In about 1607, Galileo invented an instrument that could measure the rise of water in a glass tube with the rise in temperature. This instrument is called a thermoscope. Later, scientists modified it to add a scale to mark the rise of water. Subsequently, water was replaced with alcohol and mercury.
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born American inventor famous for the invention of the telephone. He died on August 2, 1922. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried, millions of phones in America and Canada went dead for one minute as a mark of respect for the inventor.
The fourth of July is celebrated as the Independence Day in the US. Coincidentally, three US Presidents died on the fourth of July. They were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who died on the same day in 1826, and James Monroe, who died in 1831.
Prof. Henrich Focke, a German inventor, devised the first practical helicopter called the Focke-Wulf Fw 16, which was successfully flown in 1936. By 1938 it set many world records for altitude, speed and flight duration. It could be flown by a pilot after only one hour of pilot briefing.
The original word for chess is the Sanskrit chaturanga, meaning four members of an army, which were most likely elephants, horses, chariots and foot soldiers. According to a German Indologist researching on the origin of chess, in the 6th century, the Maukhari rulers of Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, used to play chaturanga with 16 cabinet terracotta before venturing into military …
Rocketgrams are mail delivered by firing crude rockets towards their destinations. Stephen Hector Taylor-Smith, an Indian aerospace engineer, launched the first rocketgram in the 1930s. In the ten-year span of his experiments he made around 270 launches. The first successful livestock dispatch was of a cock and a hen, Adam and Eve, across the Damodar River …
