Immortal tracks

Immortal tracks

An early example of washing by machine is the practice of fulling. In a fulling mill, cloth was beaten with wooden hammers, known as fulling stocks or fulling hammers.The first English patent under the category of washing machines was issued in 1691.A drawing of an early washing machine appeared in the January 1752 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine, a British publication. Jacob Christian Schäffer's washing machine design was published 1767 in Germany. One of the first innovations in washing machine technology was the use of enclosed containers or basins that had grooves, fingers, or paddles to help with the scrubbing and rubbing of the clothes. The person using the washer would use a stick to press and rotate the clothes along the textured sides of the basin or container, agitating the clothes to remove dirt and mud.This crude agitator technology was hand-powered, but still more effective than actually hand-washing the clothes.
The end of the 19th century saw the introduction of powered cleaners, although early types used some variation of blowing air to clean instead of suction.One appeared in 1898 when John S. Thurman of St. Louis, Missouri submitted a patent (U.S. No. 634,042) for a "pneumatic carpet renovator" which blew dust into a receptacle.Thurman's system, powered by an internal combustion engine, traveled to the customers residence on a horse-drawn wagon as part of a door to door cleaning service. In 1901 powered vacuum cleaners using suction were invented independently by British engineer Hubert Cecil Booth and American inventor David T. Kenney. Booth also may have coined the word "vacuum cleaner". Booth's horse drawn combustion engine powered "Puffing Billy",maybe derived from Thurman's blown air design," relied upon just suction with air pumped through a cloth filter and was offered as part of his cleaning services. Kenney's was a stationary 4,000 lb. steam engine powered system with pipes and hoses reaching into all parts of the building.
A handheld mobile radio telephone service was envisioned in the early stages of radio engineering. In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a "pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone". Early predecessors of cellular phones included analog radio communications from ships and trains. The race to create truly portable telephone devices began after World War II, with developments taking place in many countries. The advances in mobile telephony have been traced in successive "generations", starting with the early zeroth-generation services, such as Bell System's Mobile Telephone Service and its successor, the Improved Mobile Telephone Service. These 0G systems were not cellular, supported few simultaneous calls, and were very expensive.
The development of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) large-scale integration (LSI) technology, information theory and cellular networking led to the development of affordable mobile communications, and devices such as the car phone. The first handheld cellular mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing 2 kilograms (4.4 lb). The first commercial automated cellular network (1G) analog was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 1979. This was followed in 1981 by the simultaneous launch of the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.[9] Several other countries then followed in the early to mid-1980s. These first-generation (1G) systems could support far more simultaneous calls but still used analog cellular technology. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone.
In 1947, Raytheon built the "Radarange", the first commercially available microwave oven.It was almost 1.8 metres (5 ft 11 in) tall, weighed 340 kilograms (750 lb) and cost about US$5,000 ($61,000 in 2021 dollars) each. It consumed 3 kilowatts, about three times as much as today's microwave ovens, and was water-cooled. The name was the winning entry in an employee contest. An early Radarange was installed (and remains) in the galley of the nuclear-powered passenger/cargo ship NS Savannah. An early commercial model introduced in 1954 consumed 1.6 kilowatts and sold for US$2,000 to US$3,000 ($20,000 to $30,000 in 2021 dollars). Raytheon licensed its technology to the Tappan Stove company of Mansfield, Ohio in 1952.Under contract to Whirlpool, Westinghouse, and other major appliance manufacturers looking to add matching microwave ovens to their conventional oven line, Tappan produced several variations of their built-in model from roughly 1955 to 1960. Due to maintenance (some units were water cooled), in-built requirement, and cost (US$1,295 ($13,000 in 2021 dollars)), sales were limited.
While uncommon today, combination microwave-ranges were offered by major appliance manufacturers through much of the 1970's as a natural progression of the technology. Both Tappan and General Electric offered units that appeared to be conventional stove top/oven ranges, but included microwave capability in the conventional oven cavity. Such ranges were attractive to consumers since both microwave energy and conventional heating elements could be used simultaneously to speed cooking, and there was no loss of countertop space. The proposition was also attractive to manufacturers as the additional component cost could better be absorbed compared with countertop units where pricing was increasingly market-sensitive.
By 1972, Litton (Litton Atherton Division, Minneapolis) introduced two new microwave ovens, priced at $349 and $399, to tap into the market estimated at $750 million by 1976, according to Robert I Bruder, president of the division.[21] While prices remained high, new features continued to be added to home models. Amana introduced automatic defrost in 1974 on their RR-4D model, and was the first to offer a microprocessor controlled digital control panel in 1975 with their RR-6 model.
1974 Radarange RR-4. By the late 1970s, technological advances led to rapidly falling prices. Often called "electronic ovens" in the 1960s, the name "microwave oven" later gained currency, and they are now informally called "microwaves".