Consumer Technology

Nearly 4,000 years ago, the Egyptians were using hide glue for their furniture adhesive. This is proven by hairs found in Pharaoh's tombs and by stone carvings depicting the process of gluing different woods. Hide glue is still in use today for wood gluing and over the years much has been written about the manufacture and use of hide glue for hundreds of other adhesive applications. With the evolution of synthetic (ready to use) adhesives, hide glue has taken a lesser role in industry but has maintained a major role in repair and restoration of antique furniture, reproduction of period furniture, restoration, production and repair of musical instruments as well as numerous other applications.

Until recently modern thinkers believed rubber originated in 19th century Europe. According to a Tech Talk article published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday, July 14, 1999, Professor Dorothy Hosler, Assistant Professor Sandra Burkett and an undergraduate named Michael Tarkanian learned that the Mayan people in ancient Mesoamerica made and used rubber as long ago as 1600 BCE.

WELCOME
To the History of Home Video Games homepage!
NOTE: This page is dedicated to Home Videogames. Are you into Arcade Games? Don't fret! There's plenty of info out there. Click here if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Until the invention of cameras and photographs, followed by the development of a practical way to print photographs in newspapers, the reading public pictured an event with the aid of an artist's rendering. In the 1860s, photographers recorded some events in American history for the first time. When photographer Matthew Brady exhibited photographs of corpses on the battlefield in 1862 at his New York City gallery, the public saw the gruesome realism of broken bodies for the first time. (See below.)

Watch History
Welcomes to watchfinder.co.uk history of watches.
Please select a brand you are interested in or select the general Watch History.

In 1949, a young engineer named Ralph Baer was given an assignment to build a television set. He wasn't supposed to build just any television set, but one that would be the absolute best of all televisions. This was not a problem for Baer, but he wanted to go beyond his original assignment and incorporate some kind of game into the set. He didn't know exactly what kind of game he had in mind, but it didn't really matter because his managers nixed the idea. It would take another 18 years for his idea to become a reality, and by that time there would be other people to share in the glory, like Willy Higinbotham, who designed an interactive tennis game played on an oscilloscope, and Steve Russell, who programmed a rudimentary space game on a DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer. And then there was also Nolan Bushnell, who played that space game and dreamed of a time when fairground midways would be filled with games powered by computers.

There is disagreement over who was the inventor of the modern flush toilet, and flushing out the truth is not easy. Many give credit to THOMAS CRAPPER (1837-1910), an English sanitary engineer, for inventing the valve~and~siphon arangement that made our modern toilet possible. Then there are others who maintain that our hero was a nameless MINOAN (a native of ancient Crete) who lived some 4,000 years ago. And then there are those who give the credit to ALEXANDER CUMMING who patented a flushing device in 1775.

Typewriter patents date back to 1713, and the first typewriter proven to have worked was built by Pellegrino Turri in 1808 for his blind friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzono. Commercial production, however, began only with the "writing ball" of Danish pastor Malling Hansen (1870). This device looked rather like a pincushion. Nietzsche's mother and sister once gave him one for Christmas. He hated it.

Heinrich Hertz - first to detect radio waves in 1887 by causing a spark to leap across a gap that generated electromagnetic waves - built oscillator and resonator by 1893
Oliver Lodge in Britain, Alexander Popov in Russia, Edward Brauley in France - filled a glass tube with metal filings that would cohere under electromagnetic waves and when the tube was tapped, the filings would collapse to break the circuit - built coherer to detect radio waves by 1894