Patented: History of Inventions

Get ready for the coming of our robot overlords by listening to this episode all about the history of AI. Who was Shakey the robot? Why did we spend thousands of hours trying to tell a machine the basic facts of life (like that the hot tap is coloured red)? What was King Charles’ grey goo theory all about? The first half of the show is with Matthew Sparkes of the New Scientist. Matthew spends his...

When does spaghetti grow on trees? When can you milk a duck? When does Google read your brainwaves? On April Fool’s Day! Come with us into the chaotic world of April 1st as we explore where the tradition originated and how many kinds of hilarious pranks there are. Dallas’s guest today is Moira Marsh, a folklorist at Indiana University and author of Practically Joking . Edited and Produced by Fredd...

Early aquariums didn't have much more in them than some sorry looking trout. Yet such was the excitement at being able to see this underwater world for the first time people queued for hours to get a peak. Taking Dallas through the surprising history of fish tanks and aquariums is the world's only fish tank historian (that we know of) Samantha Muka, author of Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft & Scien...

The Ouija Board was patented in 1890. But in did not appear out of thin air. It was only one in a long, long line of devices attempting to pierce the veil between this world and the next. Come with us, if you dare, on a journey through the Spiritualism that rocked America in the 19th century and the wild world of inventions the movement spawned. Dallas’s guest today is the wonderful Brandon Hodge,...

In 1890, the Governor of New York called for a new method of capital punishment. A more modern, efficient, scientific method was being sought. There was still a buzz around the recently harnessed power of electricity, which, when delivered. at high voltage to a prisoner strapped to a chair, would do the job (though not quite, at least the first time). The terrifying prospect of the Electric Chair...

Every bottle of Tabasco sauce on earth comes from one place - Avery Island, deep down in Louisiana. The same place where the sauce was invented by one Edmund McIlhenny in 1868. Joining Dallas to uncover the origin story of the world’s favourite spicy sauce is the official Tabasco historian Shane Bernard. Edited by Joseph Knight, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long For more...

Concrete is the second most used material on earth after only water. There are more than half a trillion tons of it weighing down the earth. Which is a problem. Where did concrete come from? And why are we so addicted to it? To get into the nitty gritty with Dallas is Barnabas Calder who is Head of the Architectural and Urban History Research Group at the University of Liverpool and the author of...

The war in Ukraine is being fought with tanks designed in the Cold War. The US Abrams. The German Leopard. The British Challenger. All have been sent to fight Russia’s soviet era machines. T-72s, T-62s, T-80s. One year into the war in Ukraine we explore the origins of the tanks being used to fight the battle with David Willey of the Tank Museum. Produced and edited by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer...

This is the story of the first modern computer program and the extraordinary woman who wrote it, Klara von Neumann. The program Klara wrote was a list of numbers eight hundred odd lines long. Gibberish to look at now but to the room-sized computer she was working with, it translated into a sophisticated set of instructions telling it how to map out the path neutrons would take inside nuclear bombs...

The keyboard on the first ever commercially successful typewriter and the keyboard on your smartphone are separated by a gulf of time and technology. Yet their layout is essentially the same (plus or minus a few new buttons along the way). Who invented the QWERTY keyboard layout and why hasn’t it been updated? What is the Shift button all about? Who else remembers the weird way it felt to type on...

It’s perhaps the most overlooked invention of all time. Consigned to a forgotten corner in the basement of history. The Filing Cabinet. Yet the humble Filing Cabinet was at the centre of an information revolution and became critical to the infrastructure of 20th century nation states and businesses. One sign of the deep mark it has left on us are the names we give things on our computers - Files,...

In the year 2000 Japan was asked what its greatest invention of the twentieth century was. They had a LOT to choose from. The Walkman. The bullet train. Digital Cameras. Pokemon. But the winner was Instant Noodles. Today Dallas learns about Momofuku Ando, the inventor-cum-tax-evader who invented instant noodles. Listen to Dallas’s chat with Barak Kushner, author of “Slurp! A Social and Culinary Hi...

At its peak, the BlackBerry was the world’s most popular smartphone with almost 50% of the US market. They were called the ‘CrackBerry’ so many people wanted one. Now they have a 0% share of the market. This is the story of their rise-and-fall. Today on Patented we’re handing over the mic to a podcast we think you’ll like called ‘Today In History…with The Retrospectors’. A podcast where hosts Ario...

If God invented Heaven and Earth, then who invented God? To explain how gods ‘are invented’, how they evolve and why so many seem to have vanished, Dallas is joined by Francesca Stavrakopoulou, author of ‘God: An Anatomy’. They explore the human instinct to create deities and the origins of the God of Abraham, of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Who, it turns out, was once a lowly storm deity...

It’s the most famous bath of all time. But what exactly was Archimedes so excited about? We discover the truth behind the legend of Archimedes, and find out about the industrial revolution that almost happened in Ancient Greece, with today’s guest Armand D’Angour. He’s a Professor of Classics at Oxford University and author of  How To Innovate: An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking . Edited b...

It turns out that all those times you played Snakes and Ladders (Chutes and Ladders) as a child you were playing a game that once symbolised the whole universe and our place in it. Instead of crying when you landed on a snake you should really have been reflecting upon the nature of reality. Get ready for a story that takes us back through Victorian England, to an India where boardgames were steep...

Exactly when, where, how, why our ancient ancestors ‘invented’ farming is one of the great questions of archaeology. Surely if we can answer it we will understand something profound about humanity and the journey we are on. But like all good invention stories, this one isn’t straightforward. Dallas’s guest today is Robert Spengler, director of the Paleoethnobotany Laboratories at the Max Planck In...

Spam Spam Spam, glorious Spam! Who invented Spam Emails? Just how much Spam activity is there online? And how will we survive once Spam AI gets going? Spam has been the nemesis of the internet since its earliest days. And soon AI-powered spambots will force us to radically change our online behaviour if we don’t want to be perpetually duped. Taking us on a tour of the murky world of spammers is Fi...

Fonts are usually invisible to us; we absorb the written word without noticing the medium (unless someone sends you an email in  comic sans  and then you can’t see past the choice of font!) But every font is a piece of design, created for a specific purpose at a specific point in time. Laden with meanings, some of which we subconsciously absorb when we see it. Today’s guest is Sarah Hynd...

How would you feel if you found out you had a very high or a very low IQ? Would it change you? The IQ test has an awful allure to it. A single number that ranks your mental ability against everyone else’s, for better or for worse. Helping Dallas explore the origins of this blasted test is John Carson, historian and author of  The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the...

It’s time to talk about the toilet, or crapper, or bog, or the john, head, the comfort station, khazi, dunny, can, throne, pissoir. Join Dallas and his guest, Rose George - author of  The Big Necessity , on a trip down the toilet bowl of history as they uncover the origins of the flush toilet. Listen in to find out how Queen Elizabeth’s naughty cousin tried to win back her favour, why sewers...

A hundred years ago next to no one was born via Caesarean Section. Today, one in five new arrivals on planet earth come via a Caesarean. Its meteoric rise is down to an invention most people won’t know. The Foetal Heart Monitor. This is a story about how the law of unintended consequences led to Caesarean Section becoming the world’s most common major surgery. Our guest today is Jackie Wolf, is a...

When this trick was first performed, ushers poured buckets of blood down the gutter outside the theatre to entice people into the macabre spectacle. Today Dallas is joined by Jim Steinmeyer to talk about the invention and development of the most iconic magic trick of all - Sawing Someone In Half. It turns out that Dallas is something of a magician himself and has been fascinated by the history of...

150 years ago a patent was lodged for the first ever pair of jeans (what we’d think of as jeans today at least). There were two names on it. One was the inventor Jacob Davis. The other was the company he was going into business with: Levi Strauss & Co. How did Levi’s jeans come to be? Why are there a pair of horses on the label? What’s with the tiny rivets on all the pockets? And why are they call...

250 million years ago the armour-plated Placoderm fish invented the act of sex as we know it. Hubba Hubba. Dive in the historical sack as we go in search of the origins of nature’s greatest ever invention. Dallas’s guest on this episode is Australian palaeontologist John Long, author of The Dawn of the Deed. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior producer is Charlotte Long. Hosted on Acast. See acast.co...