OT. Improvements and Inventions

So Crapper invented the Ball Cock, eh?

They missed the steam engine.

They might have considered it to have been disqualified for the "last thousand years"category, due to the much earlier invention of the aeolipile. Granted, that was a novelty and a research item, rather than something of real practical use, but it _was_ an engine capable of converting steam energy into rotary motion.

The computer is the predecessor to the Internet? I did not know that.

Neither did Charles Babbage. You could argue that you'd need several decent sized digital computers with a lots of mass memory before it would be wort h hooking them up up with something like the internet - packet switching ne tworks (and e-mail) preceded the internet by a decade or so, but the world wide web seems to be the necessary pre-condition for the internet we now kn ow.. Tim Berners-Lee

seems to have roughly known what he was setting up, but he says "Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later".

In that sense it was a local solution to a local problem that rapidly prove d to have wider utility.

The aeolipile was a toy that didn't change the world. Steam engines gave us farm machines, drainage, sewage, looms, running water, electricity, mass manufacturing, trains, and steamships.

This site has it plus the steam locomotive. Other things are the transistor, batteries, light bulbs, and the Arpanet. A different site also had the assembly line. Is it fair to call bikinis inventions?

Steam engines were the power source used - early on - to drive many of the machines that delivered some of these services.

Water mills and windmills powered looms before steam engines became a popular power source. The Dutch used windmills to pump water and grind corn before anybody had invented the steam engine.

The steam engine did change the world, but it was never the only power source around.

And they gave us thermodynamics, or made it necessary.

Once you seriously started trying to make steam engines more efficient, peo ple started thinking about the fundamentals in a way that lead them to dev elop thermodynamics.

The connection between the Carnot cycle and the stream engine is pretty dir ect, but some other technology could have motivated the development of usef ul theory. Thermodynamics is part of physics (though I got taught it in my chemistry course) and mathematical physics is probably a more essential pre condition for the development of thermodynamics than the steam engine.

Right.

To the extent that John Larkin and Tom Del Rosso understand what was going on. Neither of them has a particularly deep understanding of the processes involved, but that doesn't stand in the way of them being convinced that th ey know all they need to know. Since it may be all that they can know, ther e's an element of self-preservation involved.

Julie Newmar (the first Catwoman) had 2 patents on ladies underwear. So yeah.

Panties are useful for hanging onto your girl in an earthquake.

That must be a reference to the 1974 movie Earthquake in which there was a group stranded on a staircase that collapsed below them. Someone said thay needed to make a rope to lower people down. I immediately thought the men should take off their belts, but Lorne Greene said, "Barbara, take off your pantyhose, damnit! You too, c'mon, take off your pantyhose!" I still think belts would be stronger.

For the grab thing to work they have to leave them on.