A woman who plays cards one night a month with a group of friends was concerned that she always woke up her husband when she came home around 11:30.
So she decided to be considerate and not rouse him this time. She undressed in the living room and, purse over arm, tiptoed nude into the bedroom, only to find him sitting up in bed, reading.
"Oh No!" he exclaimed. "Did you lose EVERYTHING?!?"
Denis PapinBorn 22 Aug 1647; died c. 1712 .French-English physicist who invented the pressure cooker (1679). He assisted Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens with air-pump experiments, and went to London in 1675 to work with the English physicist Robert Boyle. A few years later, Papin invented his steam digester (pressure cooker), a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confined the steam at a higher pressure, considerably raising the boiling point of the water. A safety valve of his own invention prevented explosions. Observing that the enclosed steam in his cooker tended to raise the lid, Papin conceived of the use of steam to drive a piston in a cylinder, the basic design for early steam engines. He never built an engine of his own, but his idea was improved by others and led to the development of the steam engine, a major contribution to the Industrial Revolution. |
