- Cat’s eyes:
- Cat’s eyes are the little reflectors set in the road which make driving at night easier.
- Possibly inspired by real cat’s eyes, British engineer Percy Shaw from Yorkshire invented them in 1934, but they were not used until the following year.
- Their secret was in the rubber that housed the reflectors.
- Whenever a car ran over a cat’s eye, a flexible ‘eyelid’ wiped the reflectors clean, ready for the next driver.
- Shaw became a millionaire, but never left his home town in Yorkshire.
- Ballpoint pen:
- Hungarian artist Ladislao Biro and his brother Georg, a chemist, thought they were making a totally new writing instrument.
- In fact, US inventor John Loud had invented something similar in 1888.
- New or not, Ladislao’s ball-tip rolled on, lubricated by Georg’s greasy, smudge-proof ink.
- The Biro pen was patented in
- Later, the brothers met British entrepreneur Henry Martin.
- He noticed that ballpoints didn’t leak at high altitude, and sold them to the Royal Air Force.
- Biros reached British shops in 1945-in time for Christmas.
- Richter scale:
- News reports usually rate earthquakes on the Richter scale.
- Devised in 1935 by US seismologists Charles Francis Richter and Beno Guttenberg, the scale relates to the energy released by an earthquake at its center, with each step representing ten times the energy of the previous one.
- So an earthquake measuring 8 on the Richter scale, which would usually be catastrophic, releases a million times as much energy as one rated at 2, which wouldn’t be noticed.
