Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
He gave us much more than the Mona Lisa. This Renaissance man drew up designs for an armored vehicle, a fixed-wing glider, a helicopter and a pyramid-shaped parachute.
Johannes Gutenberg (1452-1519)
He discarded wooden blocks in favor of individual letters made of metal, which enabled his movable-type printing press to produce thousands of copies of a single page. Literacy hit the masses, and no significant change was made in printing for 500 years.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895)
He showed that food spoils because of microorganisms and invented pasteurization, which was originally used to prevent wine and beer from souring. If that wasn't enough, he also came up with a rabies vaccine.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
He came up with the first thermometer and a pendulum clock and improved on the telescope, using a x20 magnification device to view the moon and stars, which got him into no end of trouble with the Inquisition.
Alessandro Volta (1745-1827)
He realized metals could produce a current and developed the first battery, or "voltic pile," a series of copper and zinc strips in salt water that gave off an electric current instead of static electricity.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
A titan of scientific thinking, he described the law of universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, paving the way for modern physics.
Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
The Croatian-born inventor headed to Menlo Park, N.J., where Thomas Edison hired him. But egos clashed, and Tesla quit to pursue his alternating-current induction motor, which brought electricity to the masses.
Ben Franklin (1706-1790)
Famous for his electrical experiments, this Founding Father invented the iron furnace (a.k.a. the Franklin stove), the lightning rod, bifocals and a carriage odometer, among other things. He never patented his projects, so others could build on his ideas.
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922)
Both his mother and his wife were deaf, hence his interest in acoustics. Others had created working phones, but Bell gave us the first commercially practical telephone, as well as the metal detector and the graphophone, an improved version of the phonograph.
Thomas Savery (1650-1715)
This English military engineer built one of the first steam-powered machines. Later, more elaborate versions contributed to Europe's Industrial Revolution.
Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833)
He made the first successful photograph — an image of his courtyard, seen from his house — by putting a pewter plate coated with bitumen (a light-sensitive material) in the back of a camera obscura, a black box with a pinhole.
Thomas Edison (1847-1931)
One of the greatest inventors who ever lived — and the most prolific, with 1,093 patents — Edison was not the first to create the incandescent lightbulb. Others earned that honor some 30 years before, but in 1880 Edison devised the first practical, long-lasting bulb, using a carbonized cotton-thread filament. By the turn of the century, 1 million people had electric light at home.
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974)
This MIT engineer developed the first modern analog computer to solve complex equations. It weighed 100 tons and incorporated 150 motors and some 200 miles (about 300 km) of wire.
Arthur Fry (1931- ) & Spencer Silver (1941- )
Silver stumbled on "unsticky" glue. Fry used it to make a bookmark, later marketing Post-it notes.
Percy Spencer (1894-1970)
When the Raytheon Corp. engineer tested a vacuum tube called a magnetron, the candy bar in his pocket melted. He realized exposure to low-density microwave energy cooked food quickly, and the microwave oven was born.
Henry Ford (1863-1947)
Karl Benz was the first to build a commercial auto, but Ford revolutionized the car business with the assembly line, which led to faster production and lower costs. In 1913 his plant produced a Model T every 93 min.
Martin Cooper (1926- )
While working for Motorola, he created the first personal cell phone, citing Captain Kirk's communicator on Star Trek as an inspiration. His first call on the 28-oz. (800 g) cordless cell phone — dubbed "the brick" — was to his rival at Bell Labs Research.
Robert Watson-Watt (1892-1973)
The British government asked him if radio waves could destroy enemy planes. Instead, he showed that they could determine the distance of aircraft, creating the first practical radar system.
Alexander Fleming (1881-1955)
He noticed that a fungus was inhibiting growth in his bacterial cultures. The reason? It contained penicillin.
Jack Kilby (1923-2005)
At Texas Instruments, he looked into miniaturizing electronics. Instead of trying to shrink individual components of a circuit, he made them all from the same semiconductor material. This led to the first microchip, which turned room-size machines into PCs.
Gregory Pincus (1903-1967)
Synthetic progesterone, the active ingredient in the birth control pill, was already around, but Pincus and John Rock proved it could be used to prevent pregnancy by stopping ovulation
Philo Farnsworth & Vladimir Zworykin
At 14, Farnsworth (left) had the idea for a television set, and by 21 he had a working prototype. The Russian-born Zworykin was working along parallel lines, but Farnsworth ultimately won the patent fight.
Stephanie Kwolek (1923- )
She stumbled on Kevlar while running experiments at DuPont. It's a synthetic fiber that's five times as strong as steel and prevents cracks from spreading, which makes it perfect for everything from bulletproof vests to bridge cables.
Tim Berners-Lee (1955- )
The British-born software engineer brought order to cyberspace by creating the World Wide Web.
Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) & Orville Wright (1871-1948)
The Dayton, Ohio, bicycle-shop owners were more obsessed with wings than wheels. Orville's first flight in their airplane lasted all of 12 sec.
Alec Jeffreys (1950- )
The British geneticist developed DNA fingerprinting, which uses variations in the genetic code to identify individuals, forever changing the criminal-justice system.
Patrick Christopher Steptoe (1913-1988)
Louise Brown became the first human conceived by in vitro fertilization, Steptoe's technique for uniting an egg and a sperm in a petri dish and implanting them in the mother's womb.
Ian Wilmut (1944- ) & Keith Campbell (1954- )
Wilmut (above) and Campbell created a sensation by cloning the first mammal from an adult somatic cell, a sheep named Dolly. She lived less than seven years.
Warren Buffett, Adjust My Bra
Dear Mr. Buffett,
The women of America need you. Badly. Have you ever been in the changing room of the lingerie section at a major department store? O.K., don't answer that. But I've been there, and I'll tell you, it ain't pretty. There's desperation. There's misery, fatigue and wild-eyed panic. Every single day across this great nation of ours, women have to force themselves into cruelly lit cubicles with ill-closing curtains to try to find a bra that fits. But only a pitiful few do. Warren, must this agony go on?
Ever since you bought Fruit of the Loom and its plus-size offspring Vanity Fair back in 2002, extending your empire to the firmament of the foundation garment universe, I have been waiting patiently, hoping that you'll turn out to be a revolutionary of the order of Herminie Cadolle. About 120 years ago, Mme. Cadolle figured out that it made more sense for women's breasts to be suspended from above than cantilevered from beneath. That is, she invented bra straps. So instead of walking around wearing the lingerie equivalent of the London Bridge, women could slide themselves into a Golden Gate. This was a huge relief—as anyone who has worn a strapless bra can tell you—because the London Bridge pretty much always falls down.
Getting Beyond the ABCs
Or you could be like Ida Rosenthal. She invented cup sizes back in the 1920s. Warners picked up her idea and decided that most women would fall somewhere between an A and a D. At the time it was a breakthrough. But Mr. Buffett, please, this is such old tech. Are you wearing 80-year-old underwear? Again, no need to answer. But how can it be that in the past eight decades we've gone from measuring by furlongs and pinches to microns and nanoseconds and gigabytes, but we're still sizing bras according to the first few letters of the alphabet? And I'm not discounting the seminal work of the Swiss anthropologist Rudolf Martin, who classified breasts into four types: flat, hemispheric, conical and goat-udder-shaped. It's just that, inexplicably, his nomenclature system failed to catch on.
The crazy thing is, we already have the technology. Only this year a bunch of Hong Kong researchers published a paper in the International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics—a publication that I imagine is on your bedside table right now—that used 3-D anthropometric measuring equipment to take a very close look at 456 young Chinese women's breasts. (I know, can you imagine writing the grant proposal for that?) Their conclusions make for some tough reading. They note that 70% of British women are wearing the wrong size bra, and that among bigger-breasted women the sizing is particularly inappropriate.
Instead of taking two measurements (under the bust and over the bust) to find a bra size, the Hong Kong researchers took 98. The key to building a better bra, they concluded, is to use a depth-width ratio rather than just volume to figure out the cup size. Warren, can you see what's happening here? Are you going to let Chinese women have better-fitting bras than we do? Where is your sense of patriotism? First it's superior bras, then it's superior weapons, and before long the fat lady in her too-snug undergarment has sung, and it's over.
As you know, W.B., bras carry a lot more freight than just the bosomy kind. When women stand in front of the mirror, they don't see a bra that doesn't fit. They see a woman who doesn't fit—whose cup runneth over, who is insufficiently endowed, who is goat-shaped.
About half the adult population wears bras. The other half strategizes about them. Building a better-fitting one is not just good for female self-esteem, it's good for business. And you are the guy to do it. Can't you see the ad campaigns? "The Buffett Bustier: because one size does not fit all." Or "Get yourself into a neBRAska. We've got room for everyone."
Warren, I beseech you, just spare one moment today to think about breasts. I know you can.
No comments:
Post a Comment