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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

14.   The Turning Wheel
    
Stone Age    But the time interval between the prehistoric rolling log and the Egyp­tian chariot wheel must have been thousands of years. With the coming of the new method of moving things, various types of problems put in their appearance. The discs wore badly on the edges so some ingenious man split a sapling and wrapped the thin, flexible strips around the rim - ­this was the first tire. The axle shaft would wear, so the development of lubricants and bearings started. And when people began to ride in the carts, the question of comfort arose and the spring was born. All of these inventions improved the various pieces of apparatus and great prog­ress started, particularly when the railroad and automobile came along. But, up to the time of the bicycle and the pneumatic tire, the Egyp­tian chariot and the wagon wheel of today were basically the same.

     But the use of rolling vehicles had a powerful influence on civilization - ­distances were shortened - commerce and communication moved ahead. The people gave up walking and began to ride. Whether it was a Roman cart rolling into Gaul or a prairie schooner crossing our western plains, they both did their share in expanding the frontiers.


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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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