When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity.
To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 C.
The Russians used a pencil.
Guglielmo MarconiDied 20 Jul 1937 at age 63 (born 25 Apr 1874). Marchese Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian electrical engineer and inventor who invented the wireless telegraph (1935) known today as radio. Nobel laureate (1909). In 1894, Marconi began experimenting on the “Hertzian Waves,” the radio waves Heinrich Hertz had first produced in his laboratory a few years earlier. Lacking support from the Italian Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs, Marconi turned to the British Post Office. Encouraging demonstrations in London and on Salisbury Plain followed. Marconi obtained the world's first patent for a system of wireless telegraphy, in 1897, and opened the world's first radio factory at Chelmsford, England in 1898. In 1900 he took out his famous patent No. 7777 for “tuned or syntonic telegraphy.” |
