Patented: History of Inventions

If you can never connect to a printer, if furniture jumps out to stub your toe, if when you do the dishes the water jumps out the sink to soak you - then you are victim of the inanimate malice of things. The belief that all things are essentially out to get us us has a name - Resistentialism. This is a theory created by columnist Paul Jennings. On one level it's clearly a joke, on another level th...

400 years ago on the River Thames a mad genius showed off the world's first submarine. A crowd of thousands including King James watched as Cornelis Drebbel disappeared beneath the murky water, only reemerging after three whole hours had passed. The same genius also came up with perpetual motion machines, self-regulating ovens, chemical air conditioning for Westminster Cathedral, and a project to...

Fire is the unsung hero of human evolution. We could not have turned into the big-brained, deep-thinking animals we are on raw food alone. The moment two million years ago that our forebears first started using fire to cook, was the spark that started everything off. That's according to today's guest - Richard Wrangham one of the world's leading anthropologists and author of Catching Fire: How Coo...

For most of their history, High Heels were resolutely masculine. The most manly of manly footwear. How did they turn into burning icons of femininity? And now that the heyday of women's high heels is over, what lies ahead for them? Dallas's guest today is Elizabeth Semmelhack, Director and Senior Curator of the Bata Shoe Museum. Edited by Tom Delargy, Produced by Alex Carlon, Senior Producer is Ch...

What do all incredibly cool people have in common? They wear Sunglasses. Whether you're Miles Davis or Audrey Hepburn, James Dean or Bob Dylan, your sunglasses are never far away. Who invented sunglasses and who made them so cool? Was there a moment when sunglasses went from being just an instrument for protecting your eyes to becoming an iconic symbol of high fashion? Vanessa Brown, author of Coo...

The Titan submersible implosion was a tragic example of marine exploration going wrong. Today Dallas speaks to one of the world's leading marine archaeologists about Titan and the history of deep-sea submersibles leading up to it. Why and how did we begin exploring the ocean depths? What drives us on? And what lessons should be learned from Titan? Edited by Tomos Delargy, Produced by Alex Carlon,...

Why are men in charge? Who invented Patriarchy? Was it chest-thumping primate ancestors? Was it spear-wielding hunter gatherers? Was it at dawn of agriculture and the creation of property? Or was it something more subtle? These are the questions that Angela Saini has set out to answer in her new book The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule. She and Dallas talk through the mother of all origin stories...

In 1950, a new word ‘brainwashing’ entered the English language. From the paranoia of the Cold War a new type of Evil Scientist had emerged — the Mind Controller. But was there any truth to the fear? In the 1950s the CIA went to an eminent psychology Donald Hebb and asked him to investigate the possibility. His idea was to test what happened to the brain when it is starved of everything that ancho...

No invention conjures up the 'Old World' as much as the Sword. It's an utterly iconic object that whisks us back to knights in shining armour. But what were Medieval swords really like? Who owned them? And what did they mean at the time? Today we're bringing you an episode from another History Hit podcast we thought you'd love - Gone Medieval hosted by Matt Lewis and Eleanor Janega. This episode w...

In a leaky shed in Paris, Marie Curie turned two tons of pitchblende (aka special rocks) into a single test tube of radium chloride - its green glow lighting up the walls. It must have been a magic...if radioactive!...moment. Today on Patented we talk with Patricia Fara about Marie Curie. A giant in the history of science but a woman whose story has been twisted and mistold over the years. Edited...

Nanotechnology may seem like something from a sci-fi movie plot, but it’s a very real thing and has likely affected many areas of your life, whether you realise it, or not. Nanotechnology looks at dimension and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers. For context, hair follicles or a sheet of paper are 100,000 nanometers thick. So, pretty small…   But what is it? How are scientists changing ou...

Wernher von Braun launched America's space programme, and took Apollo 11 to the moon. He was also a Nazi member who served in the SS, and developed the lethal V-2 rocket bomb. He helped America progress in the Cold War, but he also helped Hitler attack his enemies, and as many as 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died assembling his missile invention. Von Braun was able to manipulate the Nazi re...

What did humans do before calculators? How big was the very first electronic calculator? And what do monkey bones have to do with the history? Dallas Campbell is joined by Keith Houston to talk about the rise and reign of the pocket calculator. You can find out more about Keith’s book here. Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented...

Robert Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb - a weapon of unprecedented power, which, when dropped on Japan, would end WWII and would change the course of history.    While some perceived the bomb as inhumane and other’s perceived it as necessary to end the war, we did manage to come to the conclusion that a ban on nuclear weapons was necessary due to the unacceptable humanitari...

Was Coca Cola originally made with Cocaine? Did Coca Cola invent Santa? Who knows the Coca Cola recipe? Dallas is joined by Bart Elmore, an award-winning Professor and Writer who investigates the impact of big business on our environment to answer all of the questions which bubble in our minds about Coca Cola. In 1864 Pharmacist, John Pemberton is injured in the American Civil War, finding himself...

Fritz Haber is an undisputed genius and is considered one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th Century. He’s an incredibly complex person, who has given so much to the world, but whether his inventions and intentions are good or evil are up for debate.  Dalllas is joined by Dan Charles, Author of Master Mind: The Rise and Fall of Fritz Haber, the Nobel Laureate Who Launched the Age of Chem...

She’s the most famous cat’s in the world. She’s definitely the most expensive. She’s worth a cool $84.5 Billion. She’s none other than Hello Kitty!  In the final episode of our mini series on Japanese Inventions, Dallas is once again joined by Matt Alt, Author of Pure Invention . There’s an entire chapter in his book designated to Hello Kitty called “Cult of Cute” explaining why she became a...

Isn’t it mind-blowing that a thermos flask can keep your drink hot or cold for 8 hours, despite what’s happening in the climate around you? A real sip of relief really/  But who invented this incredibly helpful concept of keeping hot things hot and cold things cold? Enter the troubled and quick-tempered Scottish Chemist and Physicist, James Dewar who invents the vacuum flask. But how did...

Think about how intimate our relationship with technology is. In today’s day and age, it’s almost impossible to function in the modern world without it.  Believe or not, this intimate relationship with technology actually starts with the Sony Walkman. For the first time in history, we’d put on our headphones and unplug from the world around us.  Matt Alt, author of Pure Invention joins D...

Spearmint, peppermint, double-bubble. You may think that chewing gum is a modern invention, when in fact we've been chewing the stuff since the year 200. Both the product and the flavour have improved immensely over almost 2000 years. Jennifer Mathews joins Dallas on Patented today. She is a Professor of anthropology in sociology and knows everything there is to know about chewing gum. Starting fr...

When you think about it, the Karaoke machine is a simple invention. Basically two existing inventions, the tape deck and the microphone, were stuck together, add some lyrics on a screen and BOOM, you have Karaoke.  Anyone could have thought of it. And indeed Karaoke machines were independently invented five times in a row between 1967 and 1972… But the funny thing is that ALL FIVE times are i...

Communicating with the dead has a long and winding history. The rise of seances and the showmanship of paranormal activity rose to prominence in the late 19th century.  Spiritualism was entering a new wave, and communicating with the spirit world was now making itself physically evident through bodily manifestations of Mystics. Enter Ectoplasm.  For some of us, our first introduction to...

Fish and Chips. About 382 million portions of the iconic national dish are consumed every year. That works out to around 6 servings per person, per year!  But who invented it?  Panikos Panayi, the Author of Fish and Chips: A History and will be serving up a steaming portion of deep-friend facts today. Get ready to tuck into a delicious history of one of Britain’s most iconic dishes.&nbsp...

They can survive in lava for half an hour and accelerations of 3,400 Gs. Their beacons can be detected 20,000 feet beneath the waves. Most shocking of all - they aren't actually black! (They're bright orange = the least common colour in nature.) Today it's the invention of the iconic Black Box (or Flight Recorder). We'll meet David Warren, the Australian who invented them. We'll learn how they wor...

What was the first cinema? When were the heydays of cinema-going and where are we now? How has the experience of going to the cinema changed? Today’s show is about the rise and fall of cinema. Or should that be the rise and fall and rise again of the cinema. Dallas's guest is Trevor Griffiths, historian at the University of Edinburgh who studied the history of cinemas and cinema-going in Scotland...