Patented: History of Inventions

You can argue that plastics were invented to save nature from human depredation…that plan backfired a bit! Early plastics were designed as substitutes for scarce natural products like ivory and shellac or the shells of endangered snails. But it didn’t take long for things to get out of hand. In this episode we trace the story of plastic past, present and future by way of three inventions. The inve...

The Open Plan Office. A little bit of you might die inside every time you hear those words. But we promise you the history of how they came to be is worth hearing. Born at the same time as the counter cultural revolution of the 60s, Open Plan was supposed to create the offices that the egalitarian, free-thinking children of that revolution would want to work in. The Open Plan Office was supposed t...

Today we’re bringing you an episode from Dan Snow’s History Hit. Normal Patented service will resume in the New Year. Accurate timekeeping is at the very root of all of the technological advances in the modern world, but how did it all begin? From Roman sundials to mediaeval water-clocks, people of all cultures have made and used clocks for thousands of years. Dan speaks to horologist, historian a...

Ho ho ho! Come with us on a Christmas tale of invention as we talk to the world’s only Christmas Cracker historian, Peter Kimpton of Norwich. 🎄Hear about Tom Smith the inventor of the Christmas Cracker 🎁Discover the strangest Christmas Cracker ever made 🧑‍🎄Learn what makes the “CRACK”! Produced by Freddy Chick, senior producer is Charlotte Long For more History Hit content, subscribe to our ne...

There’s so many versions of Monopoly these days. Which one is the original? London? No. Atlantic City? Uh uh. The original had property names like ‘Poverty Place’ and ‘La Swell Hotel’ and was designed as an anti-Capitalist game. Our guest to tell the story of Lizzie Magie, the real inventor of the game we now know as Monopoly, is David Parlett a games historian and inventor. And don’t all rush off...

Today it’s a Tupperware party and you’re all invited! Tupperware epitomises the post-war suburban dream. But pop open the lid and peep inside and not all is as it seems. There was a battle for the soul of Tupperware. A battle fought between the inventor of the Tupperware box, Earl Tupper, and the woman who made it famous through her Tupperware parties, Brownie Wise. Helping Dallas uncover the true...

The hieroglyphs seem to hold a lot of secrets about Ancient Egyptians. What do emojis say about us? What on earth is their story? Emojis originate in the notebooks of 1970’s Japanese schoolgirls obsessed with adding cute illustrations between words. Their story ends in boardroom meetings in California where the emojis that we are all allowed, and the ones we aren’t, are decided. What a strange jou...

Why did the chicken cross the road? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Who invented the chicken anyway? We answer at least one of these questions on today’s show. We follow the chicken from the time of the dinosaurs (the chicken is the closest living relative to T-Rex) until today’s genetically engineered bird with today’s guest Sally Coulthard, author of Fowl Play: A History of the Chicken...

Who invented LEGO, the world's favourite toy? To find out we have to head to a Danish fishing village where a family of toy makers live. A family who over the course of three generations, created the LEGO world we know today. Dallas’s guest is Daniel Konstanski, a lifelong LEGO fanatic who builds breathtaking LEGO models and has recently published a book called The Secret Life of Lego . Produced b...

CROISSANTS WEREN’T INVENTED IN FRANCE. Mon dieu! C’est pas vrai! Today Dallas finds out about the person responsible for bringing the croissant to France. It wasn’t Marie Antoinette and it has nothing to do with the Turkish flag. The person we have to thank is an Austrian entrepreneur called August Zang who set up a wildly popular Viennese bakery in Paris in the early nineteenth century. In amongs...

Who invented aliens? We did. Each age invents its own. When we invented robots, aliens became robotic beings. In the Cold War, intergalactic peacemakers appear. Aliens came to abduct us in a decade when the news was full of kidnappings. In this episode Dallas discovers when we first started to think about alien life and explores how our ideas about aliens have evolved over time. And we hear three...

The world’s first Loop-the-Loop roller coaster gave so many people whiplash that they kept a medical team on the payroll. Find out where roller coasters began; why your hands sweat when you’re on them; and how long it takes the human brain to realise that it’s fallen to its death (perhaps). Dallas’s guest today is the world’s only thrill engineer Brendan Walker, the guy roller coaster designers tu...

The Frozen Food industry was invented by the Birdseye company. And that company was started by a living breathing Birdseye; Clarence Birdseye. Clarence Birdseye was a small, bespectacled New Yorker who lived a life somewhere between Buffalo Bill and Thomas Edison. He came up with the idea for frozen food while starting a family in the barren wastes of North Eastern Canada, where he ate polar bears...

***Real life inventor alert*** We speak to Rick Priestley the co-creator of the weird world of Warhammer where valiant humans, noble elves, savage orcs and a variety of monstrous creatures battle eternally. How on earth do you invent something like this? If you have no idea what Warhammer is then don't worry; neither did Dallas before this! In his chat with Rick, Dallas tries to work out where War...

Hold onto your fishing rods guys. We’re tracking down the origins of batteries and it turns out it has a lot to do with a fish with a nasty sting in its tail. Zzzaaap!! Human’s have known that an electrical force existed for thousands of years. But it wasn’t until the turn of the nineteenth century that we were able to harness it for the first time in a battery. It opened the doors for a whole new...

Hope you’re hungry because today we’re opening a can of historical worms as we discover the origins of canned food.  How did canned food go from something only explorers would consider eating to the centrepiece of kitchen cupboards? What does a competition run by Napoleon have to do with things? And is it true that the can opener wasn't invented until decades after the can was? Our guest toda...

They were cigars the size of ocean liners that floated through the clouds. Cow intestines filled with hydrogen held them up. The world’s first flight attendant served champagne and caviar. Zeppelins seem almost too strange to have been real now. But they once carried paying passengers across the Atlantic in style. People foresaw a time when Zeppelins would dock at the top of the Empire State Build...

What was the first ever internet ad? When was the last time someone actually clicked on one? What happened to all the proper ads with catchy jingles? Today Dallas investigates one of the most infuriating aspects of modern life, online advertising. We discover how they started and the mind-boggling ways they work. Is it possible that online advertising is a bubble that will one day burst? A world w...

Welcome to Patented-Gone-Paranormal !! Thomas Edison tried to make a telephone that called the spirit world. One of the pioneers of radio believed he could talk with his dead son through the 'Ether'. Technology might seem the antithesis of the spirit world. But just at that point in our history when technology began to dominate our way of life, it also sprouted supernatural arms and legs. Spiritua...

For almost a century we’ve been trying to build a star on earth. Not easy with temperatures reaching 150,000,000℃. Today on Patented it’s the story of our efforts to make a nuclear fusion reactor with Arthur Turrell author of The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet . Find out what people used to believe the sun was made out of; just how powerful the world’s biggest laser...

Linoleum, or “lino”, once ruled the world (of flooring). It appeared everywhere from the Titanic to your gran’s kitchen. But where did it come from? We hear the story of the Victorian inventor, Frederick Walton, who came up with lino whilst trying to find an alternative to rubber. And we discover the Scottish town that was at the epicentre of world lino production during the golden years. Our gues...

If a Victorian met Elon Musk they would completely get him. The world’s richest man, determined to use technology that doesn’t yet exist to colonise Mars. Classic Victorian thinking. The Victorians didn’t really take us to the moon. But what they did do was give us a way of thinking about the future that helped us to. Before the Victorians, people assumed the future would look a lot like the prese...

George Washington Carver is well known to Americans as the Peanut Man. It’s been written of him that ‘peanuts were like paintbrushes: They were tools to express his imagination’. If that sounds a bit ridiculous, it’s because it is. George Washington Carver was far more radical and innovative than ‘the guy who did stuff with peanuts’. At a time when the scientific consensus was pushing farmers to u...

The birth of DNA fingerprinting will forever be tied to Leicester, England. It was invented in a lab in the city’s university by Alec Jeffreys in 1984. And it was in the outskirts of the city that it was first used to catch a murderer – Colin Pitchfork who raped and killed the young girls Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth. It has gone on to revolutionise policing. Our guest to tell this story is Turi K...

Have you ever heard the story of how punk began? “They are Dickensian-like urchins who with ragged clothes and pockmarked faces roam the streets of foggy gaslit London…Some of these ragamuffin gangs jump up on tables amidst the charred debris and with burning torches play rock and roll…One of these gangs call themselves the Sex Pistols.” Those are the words of Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex P...