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But, hang on, didn’t Thomas Edison invent the light bulb? Yes, he did. But so did Marcellin Jobard in Belgium; and so did William Grove, Fredrick de Moleyns and Warren de la Rue (and Swan) in England. So too did Alexander Lodygin in Russia, Heinrich Göbel in Germany, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin in France, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans in Canada, H... See more

Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

His mechanical engineering work included close to a hundred devices for moving and diverting water.

Walter Isaacson • Leonardo da Vinci

expanded the domestic production of fossil fuels by tying policy and…

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Bill Gates • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need

By far the most important concatenation of these fundamental advances took place between 1867 and 1914, when electricity generation, steam and water turbines, internal combustion engines, inexpensive steel, aluminum, explosives, synthetic fertilizers, and electronic components created the technical foundations of the twentieth century

Vaclav Smil • Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years

on February 21, 1804, in the presence of Homfray, Crawshay, and a government engineer who had come to observe. Trevithick wrote to a friend the next day, “We carried ten tons of iron in five wagons, and seventy men riding on them the whole of the journey … The gentleman that bet 500 guineas against it rode the whole of the journey with us, and is s

Tom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

Watt lies beneath - Works in Progress

Tom Ough worksinprogress.co

Sodium fast reactors (SFR): In SFRs, liquid sodium acts as the coolant instead of water. Liquid sodium, compared to water, can handle higher temperatures at lower pressures, which improves the efficiency and safety of the reactor.

Bessemer Venture Partners • Investing in a world powered by nuclear fission

But it was Papin who first began to dream of harnessing this power for practical purposes rather than entertainment, Savery who turned a similar dream into a machine, albeit one that proved impractical, and Newcomen who made a practical machine that actually made a difference.

Matt Ridley • How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

We can pump water at high pressure down into the rocks, where it absorbs the heat and then comes out another hole, where it turns a turbine or…

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