David Contorno of Lemont, Ill., has had the same mobile telephone number for 24 years.
He bought an Ameritech AC140 from Ameritech Mobile Communications on Aug. 2, 1985, and he’s kept the same mobile operator and telephone number ever since.
Technology
“Dust Cover for Dog”
Well, maybe you’ll need one someday.
Seroun Kesh’s 1964 invention has a bonus application: You can attach a hair dryer to tube 21 “so that the same may be used to dry the dog after a bath.”
Disappointed
Sir George Sitwell (1860-1943) did not keep up with new technology — including the telephone.
When an acquaintance promised to “give him a ring on Thursday,” Sir George waited for hours, then complained to his son about the man’s lack of consideration: “Such a pity to promise people things and then forget about them.”
He had been expecting a piece of jewelry.
The Blitz Previewed
E. Douglas Fawcett’s 1893 story “Hartmann the Anarchist” described an aerial bombardment of London — 47 years before World War II:
With eyes riveted now to the massacre, I saw frantic women trodden down by men; huge clearings made by the shells and instantly filled up; house-fronts crushing horses and vehicles as they fell; fires bursting out on all sides, to devour what they listed, and terrified police struggling wildly and helplessly in the heart of the press.
Hartmann rains dynamite bombs, shells, and blazing petroleum from his airship before a mutiny brings him down. “It has not been my aim to write history,” writes the narrator. “I have sought to throw light only on one of its more romantic corners.”
See also Wreck of the Titan and A Blindfold Bullseye.
Marketing Challenge #194782
Okay, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that we’ve found a safe source of fresh air for people trapped in high-rise hotel fires. The bad news is that they have to feed a breathing tube into a vent pipe in the sewer line.
William Holmes’ 1981 brainstorm probably would have saved many lives, but even a guest surrounded by toxic smoke has some natural squeamishness.
Please Stand By
On Oct. 15, 1910, the airship America took off from Atlantic City in a bid to cross the Atlantic. The six crewmembers took along a cat, Kiddo, for luck.
The frightened tabby was still underfoot when chief engineer Melvin Vaniman tried to send a historic wireless message back to shore. So officially the first radio communication ever made from an airship in flight was:
“Roy, come and get this goddamn cat.”
Try, Try Again
Inventions submitted to the U.K. Patent Office by Arthur Paul Pedrick, 1962-1976:
- “Reducing the Tendency of a Golf Ball to Slice or Hook by Electrostatic Forces”
- “Speed-of-Light-Regulated Clock”
- “Internally Explosive Nail”
- “Automobiles Driven From the Back Seat”
- “Using Warning Lights to Prevent Motorists Bashing Into and Killing Each Other, Particularly on High-Speed Motorways in Fog”
- “Improvements in the Irrigation of ‘Deserts’ by Snow Piped From Polar Regions for the Purpose of Minimising the Impending World Famine”
In all, Pedrick filed 162 patents in that period. The man himself is a bit of a mystery, but it appears that his principal colleague at “One Man Think Tank Nuclear Fusion Research Laboratories” was a cat. We know this because “Ginger” is credited in Pedrick’s crowning achievement, “Photon Push-Pull Radiation Detector for Use in Chromatically Selective Cat Flap Control and 1000-Megaton Earth-Orbital Peace-Keeping Bomb” (above), submitted shortly before his death in 1976. The sensor would distinguish Ginger from the black cat next door — and also detect a nuclear attack and launch a reprisal from orbit.
It’s not clear whether Pedrick actually built one. Let’s hope not.
The Human Paperweight
Thanks to Joseph Karwowski, you’ll never have to say goodbye to your Uncle Julius. Patented in 1903, Karwowski’s “method of preserving the dead” hermetically encases the corpse in a block of transparent glass to prevent decay and maintain a lifelike appearance.
Bonus: “In Fig. 3 I have shown the head only of the corpse as incased within the transparent block of glass, it being at once evident that the head alone may be preserved in this manner, if preferred.”
Future Tense
When he wasn’t inventing logarithms, John Napier took a keen interest in military affairs. In 1596 he composed a list of war machines that “by the grace of God and worke of expert craftsmen” he hoped to produce “for defence of this Iland.” These included a piece of artillery that could “clear a field of four miles circumference of all living creatures exceeding a foot of height,” a chariot like “a moving mouth of mettle” that would “scatter destruction on all sides,” and “devises of sayling under water, with divers and other strategems for harming of the enemyes.”
No one knows whether Napier built his machines, but by World War I they were certainly realities — he had foreseen the machine gun, the tank, and the submarine.
Unquote
“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”
— John von Neumann, 1949