100 Years Ago: The Amazing Technology of 1910

1910 brings new ways to clean, travel

The dawn of 2010 promises more amazing developments in the world of technology. Already, tourists can visit space, for a price, nearly everything and everyone is going digital, and medical science continues to test the boundaries of what makes us truly human.

One full century ago, the new technologies that had people talking were considered just as groundbreaking. Electricity led the charge of developments that were changing the way people lived every day, with transportation and chemistry not far behind.

As the clocks of 1909 ticked towards 1910, more exciting inventions were just around the corner.

The first decade of the 1900s was an exciting time to be alive, with inventors continuing to make major strides in all disciplines.
The early years of the century saw the general public finally able to enjoy the fruits of what was achieved in electrical engineering during the previous century. By 1910, many suburban homes had been wired up with power and new electric gadgets were being patented with fervor. Vacuum cleaners and washing machines had just become commercially available, though were still too expensive for many middle-class families.
The telephone was another hot new commodity in 1910, with millions of American homes already connected by manual switchboard. Those who did not have a phone to call their neighbor still had to rely on the paper for their news, however; though radio technology was in its infancy, regular broadcasts were still several years away.
In transportation, those first years of the 20th century began the age of the airship, marked by a craze for dirigibles such as the Zeppelin and the Wright Brothers' historic flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Henry Ford introduced his landmark Model T in 1908, making automobiles available and affordable to the masses for the first time.
Chemistry also charged full steam ahead in 1910. Advances in the use of gases chilled the world out with the release of the first electric refrigerators and air-conditioning units, while French inventor Georges Claude harnessed neon in glass tubes and debuted neon lighting in Paris, changing the face of seedy advertising forever.
Other new inventions, both influential and inane, that were making waves one century ago included:

• Bakelite plastic
• Escalators
• Teabags
• Cellophane
• Instant coffee
• Disposable razor blades

The best thing before sliced bread
The world was modernizing quickly by 1910, but some everyday things we take for granted now were then still just a glimmer in their inventors' eyes.
Men were still relying on buttons and women on painful corsets until 1913, for example, when clothing technology got a boost with the development of the zipper and modern brassiere. Unfortunate zipper accidents likely healed better with the invention of the modern Band-Aid, which came about seven years later.
Steel turned rusty until mid-decade, when the stainless variety ushered in a new era of efficient gun barrels and, later, shiny appliances.
Finally, though the pop-up toaster first hit the market in 1919, the public had to wait almost ten years for its practicality to be fully realized. The "greatest thing" of the modern age, the one invention against which all others are now compared—sliced bread—was born in Missouri in 1928.

Game-Changing Technology: Their Material Sucks — And That’s Good

Is this the magic bullet for water pollution?

On May 9, 2010, oil continued to flow from a damaged offshore oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite shows the slick on Sunday afternoon.

CREDIT: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team

Paul Edmiston, a chemistry professor at Wooster College in Northcentral Ohio, started out looking for a compound that would help detect explosives at airports. What he found instead was a material that hates water but loves hydrocarbons like oil with a passion.

He dubbed the new material Osorb because it can expand up to eight times it original volume like a sponge, lift 20,000 times its own weight and suck oil or other hydrocarbon pollutants out of water without leaving any trace of itself in the environment. It and the hydrocarbons it removes can also be reused.

The discovery and commercial development came just in time for it to get its baptism by fire when it was pilot-tested during the disastrous BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico last year. It worked. And a potential game-changing technology was born.

Edmiston knew it would. The Eureka moment came in 2005when Edmiston and his students were conducting research to develop an optical sensor for explosives under a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Colleen Burkett, one his students, was testing a batch of ground-up, nanoengineered glass made from a silicon and benzene polymer. When she added acetone, a solvent commonly used in fingernail polish remover, the glass immediately changed shape and swelled up as it absorbed the acetone, a hydrocarbon. She ran to Edmiston.

“Dr. Edmiston, you’ve got to come to see this,” she said.

When they looked at the results, she asked Edmiston, “Did I mess up?”

The answer was a resounding “No.”

“It was a sort of Eureka moment,” Edmiston recalled. “Like a lot of inventions it wasserendipitous. It’s halfway between window glass in your car and the caulk in your bathtub. It’s a mechanical process, not chemical. It’s a sponge that doesn’t give off anything of its self. It’s really a nanomachine.”

Two years of further research and commercial development followed, helped by additional funding from NSF, including a NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant.

 In 2008 Edmiston rolled the dice to form a company to manufacture and market Osorb, Absorbent Materials Co. (ABSMaterials). The company was profitable by its second year and now has 20 full-time employees and is exploring additional uses for this revolutionary new manufactured material.

“With patents in hand, the IP and a little bit of seed money from my own personal finances and money from the state of Ohio, I founded the company,” he said.” As an inventor and a scientist, you have to make a leap. It involved a phone to my parents to ask them if they could lend me money and looking at my mortgage to see how much money I could get out of it and form a company.”

Unlike the chemical dispersants that are spread on oil spills, Osorb is not a toxic chemical that remains in the water; it works better when the oil-contaminated water is brought to it and processed in a contained environment. For the Gulf spill pilot test. Edmiston and his crew mounted two funnel-shaped vortex tanks on a trailer.

Osorb and the crude-contaminated oil were mixed in the first tank and the resulting filtered water was returned to the environment. The oil-soaked Osorb was then transferred to the second tank where it was treated to separate the petroleum for reuse or disposal. The Osorb was then rinsed and ready for reuse.

“It’s a sponge that doesn’t give off anything of itself,” Edmiston said. “You reuse the Osorb over and over again. The original stuff that Colleen synthesized is still fine today.”

• Today, Osorb is being used in a number of advanced water treatment systems, including a Superfundsite where Osorb is being used to treat groundwater contamination around an Ohio plant that manufactured ammunition during World War II.
• A catalytic version of Osorb combined with iron is being injected into the ground where it breaks down trichloroethylene(TCE), an industrial solvent that is a significant cause of groundwater pollution, and dechlorinatesit to produce ethane gas — colorless, odorless, nontoxic, but flammable.

But the largest opportunity for Osorb is produced water, Edmiston believes. Produced water is the water that is co-extracted from wells with petroleum and natural gas and is estimated to be 800 billion gallons in volume per year. Often saturated with hydrocarbons, produced water is one of the most vexing pollution problems because effective treatment is difficult.

With onshore wells, the produced water is injected into the ground; offshore, it is returned to the ocean.

“Oil and gas wells are a major source of contaminated water,” said Edmiston. “One of the largest waste streams in the world is produced water.”

Osorb can change that calculus, Edmiston believes, and become the game-changer in water remediation that an environmentally challenged planet needs.

How Games Are Driving a Mobile Graphics Revolution

How Games Are Driving a Mobile Graphics Revolution

The needs of players are helping to push advances from chip makers like Qualcomm and Nvidia.

Since Apple opened its App Store in 2008, catering to the needs of gamers has been increasingly important for mobile-device makers. While the iPhone was not designed primarily for games, they soon dominated the best-selling app charts, a pattern that was duplicated on Android devices and looks set to repeat with Windows phones. Qualcomm, a major manufacturer of chipsets for mobile devices, estimates that 60 percent of smart-phone users regularly play games on the devices.

Consequently, chip makers have been competing to provide mobile-device manufacturers with better and better graphics capabilities by means of dedicated processors that are now among the devices' most complex and powerful subsystems. Painting hundreds of thousands of pixels at a time, these graphics processors don't just display two-dimensional icons, pictures, and video but can render the complex 3-D environments of many modern video games—calculating, for example, how a sunbeam will reflect off a tattered flag as it flutters in a breeze.

Qualcomm spent $65 million in 2009 to buy the handset graphics operations of Advanced Micro Devices, which were originally part of ATI Technologies, an early leader in graphics processors for personal computers. ARM, which designs the general-purpose processor cores that power most of the world's smart phones, has been placing increasing emphasis on its Mali family of graphics processors, the first versions of which were announced in 2007. The overarching importance of graphics has even allowed Nvidia, which created the first commercial graphics processing unit in 1999 for the personal-computer games market, to enter the market with an eight-core graphics processor and a dual-core general-purpose processor bundled on the same chip. "The catalyst was Apple's iPhone," says Matt Wuebbling, director of product marketing for Nvidia. "It showcased a mobile device that is purely display based." That is, it relies on a graphical interface for all interactions with the user.

One of the biggest challenges companies like Qualcomm and Nvidia faced as they developed graphics processors for mobile devices was to provide advanced processing without draining a battery within 20 minutes. While graphics cards for personal computers often required beefed-up power supplies and cooling fans, Qualcomm calculates that its latest chips render a scene nearly as complex as those found in desktop computer games but use less than 1 percent as much energy as a desktop graphics processor.

Because the mobile market is so huge, chip makers can make investments that they couldn't afford for smaller targets. Market researcher iSuppli says that last year 295 million smart-phone handsets were shipped, compared with 27.2 million dedicated handheld gaming devices such as the Nintendo DS. The result has been a positive feedback loop: better hardware leads to more advanced games, which in turn stoke the demand for better hardware. Progress has been so rapid that mobile devices are moving toward the kind of graphic performance normally associated with video-game consoles and high-end PC systems. For example, last spring Sony Ericcson introduced the Xperia Play phone, which is capable of playing games designed for the original PlayStation console, and Apple says the iPhone4S contains a graphics processor from Imagination Technologies that is seven times faster than that of the iPhone 4.

Indeed, as mobile graphics power increases, growing numbers of users are likely to play some of their favorite mobile games on their big-screen TVs, by hooking up the handsets through a cable. In terms of the graphic capabilities available, says Wuebbling, "on the mobile side, for gaming, we're where PCs were 10 years ago."