Benjamin

Franklin
(17
January 1706 17 April 1790) was one
of the most important and influential
Founding Fathers of the United States
of America. A noted polymath, Franklin
was a leading author and printer,
satirist, political theorist, politician,
scientist,
inventor,
civic
activist,
statesman and diplomat. As a scientist
he was a major figure in the
Enlightenment and the history of physics for his
discoveries and theories regarding electricity.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin learnt
printing from his older brother and became a newspaper
editor, printer and merchant in Philadelphia, becoming
very wealthy.
Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his
many creations were the lightning rod, the glass
harmonica, the Franklin stove and bifocal glasses. His
inventions also included social innovations, such as
paying forward.
His discoveries included his investigations of
electricity. Franklin proposed that "vitreous" and
"resinous" electricity were not different types of
"electrical fluid", but the same electrical fluid under
different pressures. He was the first to label them as
positive and negative respectively, and he was the first
to discover the principle of conservation of charge.
In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin
received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1753 and in
1756 he became one of the few eighteenth century
Americans to be elected as a Fellow of the Society.

Franklin noted a principle of refrigeration by

observing that on a very hot day, he stayed cooler in a
wet shirt in a breeze than he did in a dry one. To
understand this phenomenon more clearly Franklin
conducted experiments. On one warm day in Cambridge,
England, in 1758, Franklin and fellow scientist John
Hadley experimented by continually wetting the ball of a
mercury thermometer with ether and using bellows to
evaporate the ether. With each subsequent evaporation,
the thermometer read a lower temperature, eventually
reaching 7 F (-14 C). Another thermometer showed the
room temperature to be constant at 65 F (18 C).
James Watt (19 January 1736 19 August
1819) was a Scottish inventor and engineer whose
improvements to the steam engine were fundamental
to the changes wrought by the Industrial
Revolution. His father was a shipwright, ship
owner and contractor, while his mother,
Agnus Muirhead, came from a distinguished family
and was well educated.
By the age of 29, Watt created a separated
condenser for steam engines. He determined the
properties of steam, especially the relation of its
density to its pressure and temperature. Having this in
mind, he designed a separate condensing chamber for
the steam engine, which seized great losses of steam in
the cylinder and improved the vacuum conditions. In
1767, he built an attachment that made telescopes
suitable for the measurement of distances.
Finally, in 1776, the first engines were installed
and working in commercial enterprises. These first
engines were used for pumps and produced only
reciprocating motion. Orders began to pour in and for
the next five years Watt was very busy installing more

engines, mostly in Cornwall for pumping water out of

mines.
In 1788, he invented the centrifugal or flyball
governor that regulated the speed of an engine
automatically and, in 1790, the pressure gauge. In the
19th century, he retired from the firm and dedicated
himself to his research work.
Because of the danger of exploding boilers and
the ongoing issues with leaks, Watt was opposed from
the first to the use of high pressure steam-all of his
engines used steam at very low pressure.
In 1794 the partners established Watt to
exclusively manufacture steam engines and this became
a large enterprise. By 1824 it had produced 1164 steam
engines having a total nominal horsepower of about
26,000. Boulton, his partner, proved to be an excellent
businessman and both men eventually made fortunes
Besides being an inventor and a mechanical
engineer, Watt was also a civil engineer and made
various surveys of canal routes.
He died on 19 August 1819 in Heathfield,
England.

John Moses Browning (21 January or 23

January 1855 26 November 1926), born in Ogden,
Utah, was an American firearms designer who developed
many varieties of firearms, cartridges, and gun
mechanisms, many of which are still in use around the
world. He is the most important figure in the
development of modern automatic and semi-automatic
firearms and is credited with 128 gun patents - his first
one (for a single shot rifle) was granted on 7 October
1879.
One significant contribution is the pistol slide
3

design, found on nearly every modern automatic

handgun,
developed in the 1890s and introduced on Colt and
Fabrique Nationale.
A handgun is a firearm designed to be held in the
hand when used. This characteristic differentiates
handguns as a general class of firearms from their larger
cousins: long guns such as rifles and shotguns, mounted
weapons such as machine guns and autocannons, and
larger weapons such as artillery.
Some handgun subtypes include single-shot
pistols, revolvers, semi-automatic pistols, and fully
automatic, or machine pistols.

A Browning 9 millimeter Hi-Power

Ordnance pistol of the French Navy

Derringers were small and easily hidden

John Logie Baird (13August 1888 14 June 1946)

was a Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first
4

working television system. His early successes

demonstrating working television broadcasts and his
work in the cinema domain earn a prominent place in
television's inventions.
Baird was born in Helensburgh, Argyll, Scotland.
He was educated at Larchfield School (now part of
Lomond School), Helensburgh; the Glasgow and West of
Scotland Technical College (which later became the
University of Strathclyde); and the University of Glasgow.
His degree course was interrupted by World War I and he
never returned to graduate.
Television (often abbreviated to TV) is a widely
used telecommunication system for broadcasting and
receiving moving pictures and sound over a distance.
The term may also be used to refer specifically to a
television set, programming or television transmission.
On 26 January 1926 Baird repeated the
transmission for members of the Royal Institution and a
reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith
Street in the Soho district of London. By this time he had
improved the scan rate to 12.5 pictures a second. It was
the world's first demonstration of a true television
system, one that could broadcast live moving images
with tone graduation.