Patented: History of Inventions

From talking sponges to voices frozen in ice, the history of recorded sound is not what you expect. People fantasised about being able to record sound long before it was possible. We begin by hearing a few of the most remarkable ways that were dreamt up. Then we meet the first person ever to record sound. *Spoiler alert* it wasn’t Thomas Edison. Our guests for this episode are Will Sutton, author...

What does Wonder Woman have to do with the invention of the lie detector? Does refusing to yank a donkey’s tail make you a liar? Is it folly to believe that a machine can ever peer inside the human mind? The invention of the lie detector is a strange story full of eccentric characters, fascinating true crime, and some incomplete science at its heart. These days there are lie detectors based on art...

If humans travel to Mars then by the time they come home all the food they eat will be five years old. Want a bite? Food often gets overlooked in stories about space flight. Yet space food has a fascinating history and will become an ever-increasing challenge the further we journey into space. Our guest today is Vickie Kloeris who worked in the NASA food program for 34 years and was head of food s...

We hear from London’s most inaccessible museum, the Met police’s Crime Museum, and take you back to India in the time of the British Raj. We hear about the first murder case ever to hinge on fingerprint evidence. No one had to invent fingerprints. They’ve been around for ages…But to be able to use fingerprints in fighting crime required an obsessive colonial administrator, hard science and the inv...

First Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel shocked the world’s eyeballs with her fashion designs. Then she shocked its nostrils with a new smell - Chanel No. 5.  “It’s punk rock but with feather boas and fragrance”. That’s how today’s guest, Suzy Nightingale, describes the impact that Coco Chanel had on society. Coco was at the heart of a revolution that was overthrowing the old world’s traditions and ide...

Death by tiger bites. Death by prodding. Death from sexual excess. Deaths from over-eating and over-drinking. The opening of graves. These are a few of the chapter headings in a 13th century Chinese book called ‘The Washing Away of Wrongs’. It is a compendium of grizzly, gory, bizarre murders and deaths. Its author was Song Ci, a Confucian trained bureaucrat who, like his fellow officials all over...

We take PowerPoint for granted. It's as much a fact of life as concrete. Or rainy afternoons. But it hasn’t always been here. It has a story. And once you’ve heard it, you’ll never look at PowerPoint the same way again. Those old enough can remember the world before PowerPoint. A world where presentations were done on overhead projectors or 35mm slideshow carousels. In 1985, in the US alone, peopl...

We talk to the real life Siri in this episode. Susan Bennett was the original voice of Siri back in 2011, although she didn't know it at the time... But before that it's a conversation with Dallas's friend Ali Maggs (from Chaos Created) about the history of virtual assistants - everything from a mechanical dog that jumps out of its kennel, to that helpful digital paperclip Clippy, to the incredibl...

The Contact Lens. The humble Contact Lens. Oh boy, do we have a rip-roaring episode for you about the humble contact lens. Nazi villains, arrests by secret police, chance encounters on trains and fear of Soviet invasion. And in the middle of it all, an unlikely hero: a Czech chemist called Otto Wichterle. On Christmas Eve 1961, Otto Wichterle created the world’s first soft contact lens at his kitc...

REAL LIFE INVENTOR ALERT!!! Two jockstraps cleverly sewn together. That was how the very first sports bra was made in 1977. The product built out from this prototype, the “Jog Bra”, went on to change women’s athletics forever. Today we’re talking to Lisa Lindhal who, together with her friends Polly and Hinda, unleashed the sports bra on the world.  The episode was produced by Freddy Chick. Th...

If you feel confused and left behind by cryptocurrency then this is for you. We're taking you on a journey through the strange history of cryptocurrency. Why and how does it exist? It turns out this history isn’t so much about clever codes as good old-fashioned politics. Our guide is Finn Brunton, author of Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Create...

The patent for the Ring doorbell cites this as the starting point. A Heath Robinson looking design with peep holes, sliding cameras and radio controlled alarms. An invention, and an inventor, ahead of their time. Marie van Brittan Brown was an African American nurse living in Queens in New York in the 1960s. In 1969 she and her husband received a patent for what is the first modern home security s...

Find out what Play-Doh has to do with sooty walls. And how we have a nursery teacher called Kay Zufall and a TV presenter called Captain Kangaroo to thank for it. Our guest is Chris Bensch from the Strong Museum of Play, surely the world’s funnest museum. Chris takes us for a jaunt down memory. Along the way we sniff deeply from a tub of everyone's favourite modelling compound. If you could spritz...

Pyres on the Appalachian mountains. Planes spraying chemicals into clouds. Mirrors in space. “I can make it rain, I can make it rain, I can make it rain…by waggling my stick”. For more than a century, scientists, soldiers and charlatans have tried to manipulate the weather, wildly exaggerating what is possible. Does any of it actually work? And even if we could control the climate, should we? Whos...

!!!REAL LIFE INVENTOR ALERT!!! Usually we talk about dead people on this podcast. It is history after all. But this week we’ve got living, breathing Ben Jen on talking about his invention Vantablack. Vantablack is so dark, so black, that all details of the objects it covers dissolves. 99.965% of light that hits it is absorbed. It is no longer possible to tell what you are looking at. All you see i...

The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest building in the world for nearly four thousand years…until it was beaten by Lincoln Cathedral. This week Dallas is joined by Egyptologist and friend Chris Naunton for a crash course in pyramid construction and the mysteries that surround them. Discover where pharaohs were buried before pyramids came along; find out who is believed to have designed the very...

The transistor; solar panels; the first telecommunications satellite; cell phone networks; UNIX code; information theory. All these and more were invented in one place: Bell Labs. Bell Labs was where the future, which is what we now happen to call the present, was conceived and designed. It was the research and development arm of AT&T, which had monopoly control of the American phone system for mu...

90% of everything you own arrived by sea. And there’s one invention to thank above all else – the humble shipping container. Today on Patented we’re joined by Rose George - journalist and author of the book Deep Sea and Foreign Going about her experience of spending five weeks on board a container ship. Who do we have to thank for the modern shipping container? Which country provides a quarter of...

Barbie. What is it about Barbie? Love her or loathe her this 11 ½ inch doll gets a big reaction. Which is strange in a way because she’s over sixty years old. Few things have managed to stay relevant so long, surviving seismic cultural change. This week it’s the story of how the doll that changed childhood for millions came to be. Our guest is Tanya Stone author of The Good, the Bad and the Barbie...

*tap* *tap* *tap* That’s the sound of physical cash being consigned to the dustbin of history by us tapping cards/phones/watches instead. Contactless payments are growing so rapidly that it seems a safe prediction that a cashless future is not far away. In the UK contactless payments rose 52% between 2019 and 2021. Some shops already don’t take cash. And it’s a similar picture in countries across...

No summer blockbuster. No Las Vegas and no skyscrapers in Dubai. No chocolate bars when the weather gets hot. Air conditioning is one of those things we take for granted but that has transformed the world around us, for good and for bad. There are 1.6 billion air conditioners in the world today and they consume an estimated 10% of all electricity. Both these figures are likely to rise dramatically...

The United States has been suffering from a baby formula shortage for months now. It’s shown how reliant we are on this one commodity. People need it to feed their babies. It doesn’t get much bigger than that. But we managed without baby formula for a very, very long time. So when did the United States along with large swathes of the rest of the world become so dependent on baby formula? Learn the...

A pint might be Britain’s most beloved measurement. But what’s the name for the distance a reindeer can walk before it needs to pee? The way we measure things changes the way we see the world. Measurements have shaped our history and are bound up in ideas of statehood, power and control. “Measurement is as important to human civilization as language or mathematics.” That’s the view of today’s gues...

Imagine knowing no language at all… *wordlessness* …and then giving birth to one. This is what happened amongst the children at a school for the deaf in Nicaragua in the 1980s.  And my guest today was there to witness and document it. Judy Shepard Kegl is a linguist who specialises in sign languages. Back in 1985 she had recently completed her PhD when out of the blue she was invited down to...

When the ancient Egyptians mummified their dead they were trying to stop time, to preserve the body so well that it would last throughout eternity. They succeeded (sometimes). There are mummies that when we look at their faces today it’s as if they’re about to wake up and say hello. How did they do it? What chemicals were involved? How many mummies even are there? We speak to Egyptologist Salima I...