Wilbur and Orville Wright weren’t just lucky to make the first flight. They played with flying paper models in their youth, and by 1901 they had made hundreds of wind tunnel tests. In 1902, their glider was the biggest flying machine ever built. Orville Wright wrote, “We now hold all the records! The largest machine…the [...]
Category: vehicles
When Ferdinand Magellan led the first circumnavigation of earth in the 16th century, his 5 ships were about 100 feet (33 metres) long each and reached 10 knots. Today, cruise liners exceed 1,000 ft (300m) in length and reach 30 knots. The Queen Elizabeth was the longest cruise liner when she was launched in 1938, [...]
In 1897, Austrian businessman Emil Jellinek, traveled from his home in Nice, France to purchase a car from the Daimler factory in Cannstatt, Germany. On his return to the French Riviera, his sporting Daimler Phoenix caused such a sensation that he decided to enter it into a local touring competition, under the name of “Mercedes” [...]
Traffic lights were used before the advent of the motorcar. In 1868, British railroad signal engineer J P Knight invented the first traffic light, a lantern with red and green signals. It was installed at the intersection of George and Bridge Streets in front of the the British House of Commons to control the flow [...]
The amount of time that people spend on travel has been consistent at 1,1 hours per person per day in all societies. The average distance traveled is 7400 miles (12 000 km) per year. In total, the world population travels more than 16.6 trillion miles (23 trillion km) per year, 53% of which is by [...]
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) made sketches of a submarine and William Bourne, a British mathematician, drew plans for a submarine in 1578. But it was only in 1620 that Cornelius van Drebbel, a Dutch inventor, managed to build a submarine. He wrapped a wooden rowboat tightly in waterproofed leather and had air tubes with floats [...]
Earth is getting hotter. The 2000s was the warmest decade in a thousand years. Global temperature, in general, keeps increasing, creating conditions that intensify wildfire danger, by warming and drying out vegetation and by stirring the winds that spread fires. Fast fires are hard to contain and likely to expand into residential areas. Already about [...]
There are about a billion bicycles in the world, twice as many as motorcars. Almost 400 million bicycles are in China. Every year some 50 million bicycles – and 20 million cars – are produced. Although Leonardo da Vinci drew some rough sketches of a contraption that looked like a bicycle, the Frenchman De Sivrac [...]
The guy who invented the wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was a genius! So the saying goes. What shall we call the three-wheelers, then? There is no written record of the first mention of the wheel, but an illustration of a wheel was found in the Sindh Province [...]
When English inventor Richard Trevithick introduced the steam locomotive on 21 February 1804 in Wales, it achieved a speed of 8 km/h (5 mph). In 1815, Englishman George Stephenson built the world’s first workable steam locomotive, commissioned by the Killingworth colliery. In 1825, he introduced the first passenger train, which steamed along at 25 km/h [...]
