Thomas Edison filed 1,093 patents, including those for the light bulb, electric railways and the movie camera. When he died in 1931, he held 34 patents for the telephone, 141 for batteries, 150 for the telegraph and 389 patents for electric light and power.
January 29, 2008
Blood Classification
Prof. MUDr. Jan Janský (April 3, 1873, Prague – September 8, 1921) was a Czech serologist, neurologist and psychiatrist. He is recognized and credited with the first classification of blood into A, B, AB and O of the ABO blood group system.
Janský studied medicine at Charles University in Prague. From 1899 he worked in a psychiatric clinic in Prague. In 1914 he was named professor. During World War I Janský served two years as a doctor at the front until a heart attack disabled him. After the war he worked as a neuropsychiatrist in a military Hospital (Vojenská nemocnice). He had angina pectoralis and died of ischaemic heart disease.
Janský was also a proponent of voluntary blood donations.
Goalkeeper
Soccer goalkeeper didn’t have to wear different coloured shirts from their teammates until 1913.
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell never phoned his wife or mother because they were deaf.
When Alexander Graham Bell passed away in 1922, every telephone served by the Bell system in the USA and Canada was silent for one minute.
The first electronic mail, or “email”, was sent in 1972 by Ray Tomlinson. It was also his idea to use the @ sign to separate the name of the user from the name of the computer.
Crossword
Arthur Wynne (1871 – 1945), born Liverpool, England, was a British editor and puzzle constructor in his home country and the United States of America. He invented the crossword puzzle in 1913.
He worked for the New York World, then one day was asked to invent a new game for the paper. Wynne thought of a game he had played in his childhood called “Magic Squares” and soon came up with the crossword Puzzle, which was first issued in the December 21st, 1913 issue of the World.
It was originally called a Word-Cross Puzzle and was diamond shaped and had no black spaces.
Soon, it became cross-word then crossword, and had black spaces. Arthur came out with his first crossword puzzle book in 1924.
Paper
Cai Lun, was a Chinese eunuch, who is conventionally regarded as the inventor of paper and the papermaking process, in forms recognizable in modern times as paper (as opposed to Egyptian papyrus). Although paper existed in China before Cai Lun (since the 2nd century BC), he was responsible for the first significant improvement and standardization of papermaking by adding essential new materials into its composition.
