Inventions

The first endless chain drive powered a massive astronomical clock in 1092

Movable type printing was invented in China four centuries before Johannes Gutenberg

Fourteenth-century Chinese military manuals described the first functional multi-stage rockets

The first programmable computer was actually a loom that wove silk patterns

The first electric generator was a simple copper disk spinning between magnets

A Victorian-era mechanical calculator could solve complex equations using thousands of gears

The first permanent photograph required an eight-hour exposure on a pewter plate

Blaise Pascal invented the first mechanical calculator to help his father collect taxes

Ancient Greeks built a bronze computer to track the movement of the stars

A Greek engineer invented a functional steam turbine two millennia before the Industrial Revolution

The Archimedes screw can move water uphill using only gravity and rotation

The first self-propelled vehicle was a steam-powered tractor built in 1769

The first industrial steam engines used the weight of the atmosphere to pump water

The Wright brothers used a homemade wind tunnel to reinvent the shape of wings

The first hypodermic needles were fashioned from animal bladders and hollow bird quills