Adjectives and inventions

The fame from being the first to do something drives many people to great achievements. History and hindsight are increasingly the tools that are needed in order to understand the often complex web of incremental inventions that lead to a major new technology. The internet is a good example of something which was the result of the effort of a number of people over many years, each working on different parts: Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's definition of the 'Internet Protocol', or Tim Berners-Lee's 'World Wide Web, are just two of these parts. The idea of putting data into packets, and then switching these packets around a network so that they could utilise different routes through the network, and so avoid congestion, is another of these parts, but not many people know the name behind this. To find out, visit this page.

I'm also fascinated by what I think of as the 'adjective explosion' that accompanies inventions. For example, the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air, controlled, photographed flight seems to have been made by the Wright Brothers in 1903. The adjectives used: 'manned, powered, heavier-than-air, controlled and photographed' are significant here, because it seems that others had flown first, but with less adjectives. For example, in 1890 Clément Ader reportedly flew for 50 m in a bat-winged monoplane that he designed and built - in the first manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight. Note that 'control' and 'photographs' are not mentioned. There are also photographs of Otto Lilienthal's flights in the 1890s, but he used gliders, and so lacked the 'powered' adjective.

It seems that the more you try to discover the reality behind the simple lists of inventors or 'firsts', then the more you uncover uncertainty. For example, it seems that Alexander Graham Bell was the first person to 'patent' the telephone, although even the story of the obtaining of the patent is far from straight-forward - and certainly not the stuff of a 'TV Quiz show' answer. The electric light bulb seems to have been independently invented more or less simultaneously by two people in two different places, and I'm sure there are long sequences of adjectives to describe those inventions too!