Tag: history

2019-10-15 21.10.01

Posted on by Khürt Williams
The most important cameras of the last 135 years (Amateur Photographer)

This may look out of place on a list of iconic cameras, but just as the Kodak Brownie was instrumental in the democratisation of photography in the early 20th century, so the iPhone drove its own, entirely digital revolution. Indeed it’s arguably the most important camera of this century so far. Where the Brownie allowed anyone to take photographs, the iPhone opened up the process to a hitherto unimagined degree. Freed from the need to print, it enabled users to share photographs instantly with anyone else in the world, thanks to social media apps such as Facebook and Instagram. But this could be achieved using a small, slim device that slipped easily into a shirt pocket or handbag. It decimated the point-and- shoot camera market in a matter of years.

My first smartphone was the iPhone 4. I still have it.

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Re-Discovering Your Family

Posted on by Khürt Williams
Re-Discovering Your Family (Facebook)

As anyone can see, the vast majority of names on this list are still commonplace in St Vincent and the Grenadines today.

The information is in a format which would enable Vincentians whose surname appears on the list to be able to search forward from 1829 to the present, hopefully, in order to discover, a little bit of their family history and the role their family may have played in the progression of the nation. For most individuals they will quickly become frustrated by this undertaking in that the place to do this type of research is the Registry in Kingstown.

As the historian Anatol Leopold Scott has pointed out -

Unfortunately, there you will be confronted with mostly insurmountable roadblocks in terms of incomplete or unavailable information or a demonstration of lack of interested service by many so­called civil servants

As anyone can see, the vast majority of names on this list are still commonplace in St Vincent and the Grenadines today. The information is in a format which would enable Vincentians whose surname appears on the list to be able to search forward from 1829 to the present, hopefully, in order to discover, a…

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How Many Inventors Does it Take To Invent a Light Bulb

Posted on by Khürt Williams
How Many Inventors Does it Take To Invent a Light Bulb by Steven Dufresne (Hackaday)

Our story starts in 1761 with Ebenezer Kinnersley. In a letter to Benjamin Franklin he described experiments he did for testing if heat was produced by electricity. His power sources were electrostatically charged capacitors made with a case of bottles, or Leyden jars, batteries not having been invented yet. To get sufficient current to detect a change in temperature he needed to release all the stored charge at once through a spark gap. In one experiment (Expt. 11 in the letter) the current was sufficient to make a brass wire turn red.

Today we say that the wire became incandescent, it emitted electromagnetic radiation in the form of visible light as a result of the heat. He also arranged the experiment such that the wire was suspended with a weight at its bottom and found that it elongated by an inch when it got red-hot, the first indication that such heating can be destructive to the wire. He experimented with different diameter wires all of the same material and found that the larger ones showed no noticeable heating effect and concluded that this was due to the lower resistance of the larger ones.

TLDR; Edison did not invent the incandescent lightbulb.

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