From loo roll to TV & coming up with the toothbrush in prison, how everyday items were invented revealed in new book
TAKE a look around you. What can you see? Did you ever wonder where all the stuff next to you came from?
No, not from Amazon.
I mean, who was the first person to have the amazing idea of making a mobile phone or the annoying idea of building a school?
Everything around you that doesn’t twinkle in the sky or grow or woof or fart was invented by someone – and in my new book, I tell you how they came to do it.
Here are a few of my favourites.
- Kay’s Incredible Inventions, by Adam Kay and Henry Paker, will be published by Puffin on November 2 (available for pre-order).
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LOO ROLL
LOO roll has only been in use in the Western world for about 130 years, and I’m fairly sure you’ll agree that people have been pooing for longer than that.
So what was everyone using until then?
Well, the Ancient Romans had big public toilets where they would sit on a long bench with holes cut into it and poo into a pit underneath, while they chatted to each other about where they were going on their holidays and where they bought their togas.
When they finished, they would grab a sponge on a stick and clean themselves up.
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And then the next person would take the same sponge on a stick and use it.
And so would the next person . . . and the next person . . .
Now is probably a good time to let out an enormous sigh of relief that we don’t live in Ancient Rome.
And in Ancient Greece, if there was someone you really didn’t like, you could get their name written on a dinner plate and then use that every time you went to the bathroom.
When pottery went out of fashion, people would use pretty much anything they could get their hands on – leaves, grass, animal skins and even corn on the cob, which doesn’t sound like it would be particularly comfortable.
In China, they sussed out the whole toilet paper idea about 700 years ago, but it took a lot longer for it to reach Europe or America.
Back then, the Chinese would use sheets of paper in a box, a bit like printer paper. I just hope nobody got a paper cut . . .
The first actual loo roll arrived in 1857 in America.
In 1952, companies started making coloured toilet paper – the brown option didn’t sell very well, for some reason.
TRAINERS
UNTIL the 1870s, if you wanted to play sports you’d do it either in bare feet or in the uncomfortable leather shoes you wore to school or work.
Finally, people realised that shoes made of cloth with a nice rubber sole might mean you could run a bit faster without your feet turning into mincemeat.
In 1917, a man called Marquis Converse invented shoes specially for basketball players, called . . . you guessed it – Nike. Sorry, Converse.
Talking of Nike, they owe their success to a waffle-making machine.
Bill Bowerman, one of the founders of Nike, was looking for a way to make his trainers grip better, and eventually poured some liquid rubber on to his wife’s waffle-maker.
The rubber set firm to give a criss-cross pattern, which he used on the soles of his trainers.
The company’s slogan “Just do it” came from Mrs Bowerman’s reply to Bill when he refused to go to the shop and buy her a new waffle-maker (only joking!).
TOOTHBRUSH
THE first toothbrush that you’d recognise today was made by an English bloke called William Addis.
He had been sent to prison in 1770 for starting a riot, and one night he sneaked a bone from his dinner into his cell, then stuck a load of bristles from a pig into one end of it, and used it to clean his teeth.
Nope, I’ve got no idea why there was a pig hanging around in prison either.
When Wills got out, he opened a toothbrush factory – and that company, Wisdom, is still producing millions of toothbrushes more than 250 years later.
I’m pretty sure they don’t make them out of bones and pig-bum bristles any more.
TRAMPOLINE
TRAMPOLINES are so much fun – it makes sense that they weren’t invented by a boring boffin in a lab.
Instead, it was all down to 16-year-old George Nissen. (He was 16 then – he’s not 16 now. That was in 1930, so currently he’s a bit dead.)
George loved going to the circus and watching daredevil athletes on the high wire and trapeze.
But his favourite bit of all was when they lost their balance and tumbled down into the safety net at the bottom – which was a bit mean.
One day he thought that it might be fun to just bounce on the safety net . . . and the trampoline was born!
VELCRO
In 1941, a man called George de Mestral was pulling a prickly flower head out of the hair of his dog Milka when he thought to himself, Oh! This could be a new way of doing up clothes!
He realised that if he had one strip of material with loads of tiny hooks on it (like the flower head) and one strip of material with loads of tiny loops on it (like the dog hair), then they would stick together.
He named it Velcro - from the words ‘veloure’ and ‘crochet’, meaning velvet hook - and this weird scratchy sticky stuff became popular in clothes everywhere from ski slopes to space!
I used to have a lot of Velcro shoes, because I couldn’t tie my shoelaces until I was nine.
WI-FI
YOU might not have heard of Hedy Lamarr, but in the 1940s she was one of the most famous people in the world, starring in all the biggest films.
She found acting a bit boring, so she’d go home every day and invent things.
During World War Two, the American army was having trouble shooting its missiles, because the Germans were blocking the radio waves that guided them.
Hedy came up with an invention called “frequency hopping”, which meant that the radio signals would change all the time, which made it impossible for them to get blocked.
And this system is still used today in wi-fi, which also uses radio waves to send information.
Without Hedy, our computers would still be plugged into the wall.
QUIZ: Which of these facts about Hedy is a lie?
- Hedy invented a tablet that you could drop in your orange juice to turn it fizzy.
- She invented a new type of traffic light.
- A small planet is named after her.
- She invented a glow-in-the-dark dog collar.
- Hedy married six times. The last time was to her divorce lawyer
Answer: 3. Ms Lamarr has an asteroid named after her, but no planets as yet.
TELEVISION
IN 1923 John Logie Baird built the world’s first television.
I have no idea how he managed it, because he made it from a box that used to have a hat in it, some lights from a bicycle, a pair of scissors and a load of wax.
It’s no good having a telly if there’s nothing to watch, so the next thing he did was work out how to transmit TV signals.
But what did he choose for the first-ever TV transmission?
A) A child singing Happy Birthday.
B) A large Spanish ham.
C) A creepy ventriloquist doll’s head called Stooky Bill.
If you chose C – congratulations!
John proudly demonstrated his extraordinary new invention in 1926 to a theatre full of people.
And what did they think about this amazing technology that was about to change the world forever?
Well, a reporter wrote in The Times that “the image was faint and blurred”. Tough crowd.
Right, it’s time for a science bit.
Go up really close to a TV. You can see that the picture is made up of hundreds of thousands of absolutely tiny dots, called pixels.
These little pixels change quickly, up to 120 times a second, and that’s what you’re watching when you switch on the TV – all the pixels moving and changing.
What a TV camera has to do is convert real-life pictures into all these pixels, then send them down a wire or through the air.
This is called the TV signal. And then the TV’s job is to read this signal and put all the pixels in the right places at the right time.
Very old televisions did this by firing the pictures at the screen through a big long tube, and this meant that TVs were as deep as they were wide – they weren’t flat screens that you could put on the wall.
They were fat screens that barely fitted on your table.
Johnnie Logie Baird’s first telly didn’t have any sound either.
Also, the picture was black and white, with only a few hundred pixels and it only refreshed the picture about five times a second.
But luckily inventors didn’t stop there, otherwise TV these days would be absolutely awful.
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Televisions got sound in 1934 and colour in 1944, then flat screens appeared about 30 years ago.
But the best thing about TV these days is that there are loads of different shows you can watch, instead of just staring at the head of a spooky ventriloquist’s doll.