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Everyone knows Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. ๐Ÿ’ก Everyone is wrong. His name was Joseph Swan. Born in Pallion, Sunderland. Son of a failed entrepreneur. No university. No laboratory. No backing. Just a chemist's apprentice in his home town who couldn't stop thinking about light. He worked on it...

57,343 views โ€ข 4 months ago โ€ขvia X (Twitter)

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๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง The man who first lit a house died 7 years before Edison was even born. One house in Cornwall glowed after dark in 1792. No candles. No oil. Light, burning out of pipes. The first house on Earth lit this way. The man inside was a Scot. William Murdoch, a millwright's son from Ayrshire, walked more than 300 miles to Birmingham in 1777 to ask the great firm of Boulton and Watt for work. โš™๏ธ Matthew Boulton noticed his hat. It was wood, turned on a lathe the young Scot designed himself. The hat got him the job. The firm sent him to Cornwall to keep its mine engines running. But the nights were his own. In 1784 a model steam carriage ran across his living room floor, under its own power. The first machine in Britain recorded doing it. Then he sealed coal in iron, heated it, caught the gas that came off and piped it through his own house. He put a flame to the end of the pipe. ๐Ÿ”ฅ And the dark went out of his parlour. By 1805 he had lit a Salford cotton mill end to end: over 900 steady flames where candles had guttered and smoked. In 1807 the first gas lamps rose in Pall Mall. Murdoch did not put them there. A promoter called Frederick Winsor had run ahead with the idea. Companies were chartered and fortunes made, in pounds sterling. Murdoch had never patented gas light, and the fortune was never his. What he got instead was the Royal Society's Rumford Gold Medal in 1808, stamped in Latin: out of smoke, light. ๐Ÿ›๏ธ You were taught the man who beat the darkness was Edison. Murdoch was 7 years dead before Edison was even born. By 1839, gaslight stood over London, Manchester and Glasgow. Britain lit the night first, and the world followed. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Today he stands in gold in Birmingham beside Boulton and Watt, and every June the town of Redruth holds a festival in his name. โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ” His real monument comes on at dusk, in every British street. A gift from a millwright's son. Never signed. Still burning. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. If you can afford to support our mission: Be part of us. โ˜๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

96,013 views โ€ข 29 days ago

A Bristolman patented the moving picture camera in 1889. Two years BEFORE Edison. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง His name was William Friese-Greene. Son of a metalworker. Apprenticed to a photographer at 14. By 30 he owned studios across England. Then he saw a lantern that made pictures move. And it destroyed him. He poured every penny into building a camera that could capture real movement on strips of celluloid film. Patent 10131. June 1889. Edison didn't file his until 1891. But the camera was too slow to sell. Nobody would fund him. He sold the patent for ยฃ500. Bankrupt. 1891. They put him in a debtors' prison. He got out. Kept inventing. Bankrupt again. And again. His wife left. By 1921 he was living in one room. But here's what makes it unbearable. Cinema had become the biggest entertainment industry on EARTH. And nobody remembered who started it. On 5 May 1921, he walked into a meeting of the film industry in London. The room was full of rich men arguing about money. Nobody knew who he was. He stood up. Begged them to stop fighting. To work together for British film. He sat down. And collapsed. Dead. They searched his pockets to find out who he was. Inside was an old leather purse. One shilling and tenpence. Everything he owned in the world. The exact price of a CINEMA TICKET. The industry was horrified. They gave him the grandest funeral London had seen in years. On his coffin sat a model film projector. Cinemas across Britain held a two-minute silence. His grave at Highgate reads: "The Inventor of Kinematography." A Bristol photographer. Bankrupt three times. Jailed. Forgotten. And he gave the world cinema. Cinema made BILLIONS. He died with 1s 10d โ€” the price of a ticket to his own invention. Help us bring Britain's forgotten heroes home ๐Ÿ‘‡ Be part of us. Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

27,898 views โ€ข 5 months ago

The cold is British. They just never told you. โ„๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Every air conditioner, every fridge, every freezer on earth, the cold inside all of it was first made by a Scotsman. In 1756. โ„๏ธ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ His name was William Cullen, a doctor in Edinburgh. In a warm room, with no ice and no winter, he drew the air from a glass of ether until it boiled cold and drank the heat from the water around it, until the water froze. No one had ever done it before. Then he wrote it down and walked away. No machine, no patent, no fortune. Just the proof, on a bench. It sat there the better part of a century. A British bench built the first machine that worked, and a Scot carried it across the world to Australia, where it froze meat and cooled beer. But cold was only half the story. โ„๏ธ๐Ÿ“– To master the air itself took another Scot. When the Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, David Boswell Reid made the new building breathe, its gothic spires its lungs. At St George's Hall in Liverpool in 1851 he built what is often called the first air-conditioned building on earth. It should have made him. He died forgotten in America instead. 40 years on, Willis Carrier built the machine and earned his name as the father of modern air conditioning. He earned every bit of it. But he did not make the cold. The cold was British. America took that inheritance and cooled the world with it, and that is no theft. That is what an inheritance is for. We are the home of British heroes. Not built by ads, not by the government, built by us. There's a place for you with us. Be part of us. โ˜๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

56,349 views โ€ข 1 month ago

๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง There is something in most kitchens around the world. ๐Ÿซ– You have probably used one today. A Scottish scientist invented it in London in 1892. And almost nobody knows who he was. His name was James Dewar. ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ Born in Kincardine, Scotland. 1842. Chemist. Physicist. One of the finest scientific minds Britain had ever produced. ๐Ÿ… Nominated for the Nobel Prize eight times. โŒ Never won. In 1892 he was trying to store liquid hydrogen. Not make a flask for your tea. โ˜• He built a vessel with two glass walls and pumped the air out of the gap between them. A vacuum. No air. No heat transfer. โ„๏ธ It worked perfectly. โœ… He didn't patent it. He just didn't. He was a scientist. Not a businessman. The science was enough. A German glassblower named Reinhold Burger had been watching. ๐Ÿ‘€ He took the design. Made it sturdier. Patented it. Named it Thermos. In 1904 it went on sale. It made a fortune. ๐Ÿ’ฐ Dewar sued. โš–๏ธ The court agreed he was the inventor. But because he hadn't patented it there was nothing they could do. He got nothing. The word Thermos eventually became so common it lost its trademark entirely. Just a word now. For something a Scottish scientist invented in a London laboratory. ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Every flask you've ever owned. Every cup of tea kept warm on a cold morning. โ˜• Every building site. Every school trip. Every football pitch. โšฝ James Dewar. Did they teach you his name? ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง These islands have thousands of stories the world has forgotten. We find them. We tell them. We put them in front of millions. You help us make that possible. Be Part Of Us. ๐Ÿ‘‰ Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

45,116 views โ€ข 4 months ago

Thomas Edison paid neighborhood kids 25 cents to help him run a killing campaign against his biggest competitor. He was trying to stop America from building a shared electrical grid. But he lost that fight in 1890, and this month the richest companies on Earth started finishing the job for him: By 1888 Edison had wired his entire empire to direct current. His rival George Westinghouse was selling alternating current, and the gap between them decided what the country would look like. Direct current could not travel. Edison's system needed a generating station roughly every mile, so power had to be made where it got burned. Meanwhile alternating current could move long distances along a wire. One of those systems gives you a national grid that everybody shares. The other gives you thousands of private power islands owned by whoever paid for the station. Edison was losing on the engineering and he knew it. So he stopped arguing about engineering and started proving that his competitor's electricity killed things. Proving that required bodies, and bodies had to be bought... That is what the 25 cents was for. Neighborhood boys brought stray dogs to his laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, where an engineer named Harold Brown killed them with Westinghouse current in front of anyone who would watch. On July 30, 1888, Brown took the act to a lecture room at Columbia College and showed a crowd of electricians and journalists that 1,000 volts of Edison's current left a dog alive while 300 volts of Westinghouse's killed it. Brown told the room that alternating current was fit only for "the dog pound, the slaughterhouse, and the state prison." And that last one was the actual plan: New York had legalized execution by electricity on June 4, 1888, without specifying which current the state would use, so Edison went straight at it. He staged a demonstration for the state committee at his own laboratory, where calves and a horse were wired to electrodes and killed with alternating current. The animals did not die quickly but the committee was impressed anyway. Westinghouse saw the trap and refused to sell his generators for executions. So Edison's company and Brown went through a third rival, Thomson-Houston, and secretly acquired three Westinghouse generators anyway. Edison then pushed a new word for being executed. He wanted people to say the condemned man had been "Westinghoused." On August 6, 1890, William Kemmler became the first man to die in an electric chair, powered by a generator Westinghouse had refused to sell for the purpose. But the first jolt failed and the current had to be built back up while Kemmler was still alive in the chair. Witnesses fainted and vomited. Westinghouse had paid for Kemmler's legal defense, which argued that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment. Edison was actually opposing the death penalty the whole time. He pushed for the chair anyway, because a chair running on Westinghouse current would brand his competitor as the man who sold death to the state. But it did not work. Utilities kept buying alternating current because it was the only system that could move power across a state, and by the early 1890s Edison's OWN subsidiaries were installing it. He had lost control of his company by then, and the grid got built on top of the current he spent two years calling a killer. That brings us back to this month: 46 planned data centers with a combined 56 gigawatts intend to skip the grid completely and generate their own power on site, according to the energy data firm Cleanview. The Department of Energy says one data center can pull 10 to 50x more electricity per square foot than a normal office building. Meta and BlackRock announced a 1 gigawatt campus in El Paso yesterday at roughly $14 billion. This morning the FCC moved to bar Chinese made grid inverters from the country on national security grounds. The shared grid is the thing that beat Thomas Edison. Big Tech is now walking away from it and rebuilding exactly what he wanted in 1888, because the public system cannot deliver power fast enough for them. Edison lost the argument about how electricity should reach people. But 136 years late, he's winning it, and nobody finishing the job for him is going to be regulated as a utility.

Ricardo

19,465 views โ€ข 4 days ago

Every pane of glass around you. ๐ŸชŸ Every window. Every phone screen. Every car windscreen. Every skyscraper.๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง All made the same way. All using the same process. Invented in a kitchen sink in Lancashire. His name was Sir Alastair Pilkington. He wasn't even related to the glass company. He just happened to share the name and married into the family. In 1952 he was doing the washing up at home. He watched the grease float on the water. Perfectly flat. Undisturbed. And thought: what if molten glass could do that? Before this moment, flat glass had been made the same way for three hundred years. ๐Ÿ˜ฐ You melted sand. You poured it into sheets. Then you ground it. And polished it. By hand. For hours. A third of every sheet was wasted in the process. The work was brutal. The results were inconsistent. Nobody questioned it. That was just how glass was made. Pilkington went to his bosses at Pilkington Brothers in St Helens with his idea. They backed him. It took seven years. It cost ยฃ7 million. An enormous sum in the 1950s. There were years where nothing worked. The company nearly went bankrupt. His idea: pour molten glass at 1,100ยฐC onto a bath of molten tin. Glass is less dense than tin. It floats. It spreads. Both surfaces fire-polished perfectly flat by the heat. No grinding. No polishing. No waste. ๐Ÿ”ฅ In January 1959, it worked. The float glass process was licensed to manufacturers across the world. Over 40 companies. Over 30 countries. Today it accounts for over 90% of all flat glass production on Earth. Every window you have ever looked through in your entire life was almost certainly made using this single British process. Sir Alastair Pilkington was knighted in 1970. Elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969. Made a life peer in 1995. Baron Pilkington of St Helens. He died the same year. Before he could take his seat in the House of Lords. A British man with an idea who changed every building on Earth. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Be part of us - Be proud of us. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

130,749 views โ€ข 4 months ago

His lighthouse stood for 123 years. And in the end it was not the tower that failed. It was the rock underneath it. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Two lighthouses stood on the Eddystone Rocks before him, 14 miles south of Plymouth, and the sea destroyed them both. The first, built of wood, vanished without trace in the Great Storm of 1703, taking its builder and 5 other men with it. The second stood for 47 years, then burned one December night in 1755, down to the rock it stood on. ๐Ÿ”ฅ So Britain faced a question: how do you build on a rock the sea owns? The Royal Society's answer was not a lighthouse man. It was John Smeaton, an Englishman from Austhorpe near Leeds, a maker of scientific instruments who had turned his mind to engineering. He started with a question nobody had thought to ask. Why does an oak tree survive a storm? Wide at the root, narrow at the top. So he shaped his tower like the trunk of an oak. Wood had washed away and wood had burned, so he built in granite, every block dovetailed into its neighbours like a carpenter's joint in stone, pinned with dowels of marble. For the mortar he ran experiment after experiment until he proved which limestone sets hard even underwater, a lime the Romans had used whose science had been lost. He worked out why and brought it back. 3 years, 1756 to 1759, 14 miles out in the open sea. Then the lamp was lit, and the sea came to test it, winter after winter. It did not move. He went on to build bridges, harbours, canals and mills across Britain, and because the only engineers Britain named were soldiers, he called himself a civil engineer, the first man in Britain to do it. In 1771 he and 6 others met in a London tavern and founded the first engineering society anywhere in the world. It still exists. ๐Ÿ›๏ธ His light burned for 123 years. When engineers finally found a fault in 1877, it was in the reef, not the tower. The sea was wearing away the rock beneath it. His tower had outlasted the rock it stood on. In 1882 the lamp went out for the last time. But nobody scrapped his tower. The top came down stone by stone and went back up on Plymouth Hoe, where it stands today in its red and white bands. You can climb it. โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ”โ” Look at any lighthouse standing on a British rock. That curve is his oak, still holding. We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it. ๐Ÿ‘‰ ๐Ÿ‘ˆ Be part of us. โ˜๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

37,085 views โ€ข 19 days ago

Today, weโ€™re pushing a major update to Edison Analysis, our data analysis agent, which is tuned for scientific research and SOTA across data analysis benchmarks. In contrast to Kosmos, which runs for 6-12 hours and produces tens of thousands of lines of code, Edison Analysis runs for seconds to minutes and is best for specific, well-defined computational tasks. It is available both on our platform under the Analysis tab, and via API, and costs only one credit per run, so it is available to users on both free and paid tiers. Edison Analysis is a modified version of the data analysis agent Kosmos uses in its trajectories. Try it out! One of the most important improvements over our previous data analysis agents has been the addition of a specialized data retrieval tool. Edison Analysis can either use this tool to access data, or can pull data down directly via API. To evaluate this tool, we ranked the most commonly used public data repositories across recent papers from BioRxiv, and created a new benchmark that measures the ability of a language agent system to retrieve raw data from those sources. Edison Analysis gets 71% on this benchmark, and weโ€™ll be working to increase this over time. You can read more about our benchmarks in the our blog post, link below. Some features worth highlighting: 1. Edison Analysis produces a report on the analysis it runs, along with a Jupyter notebook that you can download to reproduce the analysis yourself. Every figure it produces is linked back to the specific lines of code used to produce the figure, to make it easy to reproduce. 2. It works well with both Python and R. 3. One of the best uses for Edison Analysis is to use it to retrieve datasets that you can then analyze with Kosmos. We have a bunch of major improvements to Edison Analysis coming in the next few months that weโ€™re excited to share. In the meantime, congratulations to the team, especially Ludovico Mitchener, Jon Laurent, Conor Igoe , Alex Andonian, and many more.

Sam Rodriques

61,895 views โ€ข 8 months ago

๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง๐Ÿ”ฌ Open your kitchen drawer. Pick up a knife. The metal you are holding was invented by a Sheffield steelworker's son. His name was Harry Brearley. He was born in Sheffield in 1871. He left school at 12 and went to work in the same steelworks as his father. โš™๏ธ He educated himself in chemistry at night, by candlelight, in evening classes. By his early forties, he was running the Brown-Firth Research Laboratory. In 1912, the British military gave him a problem. Their rifle barrels were wearing out too quickly from the heat of repeated firing. They needed a steel that could survive higher temperatures. He was solving a different problem. On 13 August 1913, Brearley cast an alloy with 12.8% chromium. He took a polished sample. He left it on a workbench. Weeks later, he came back. ๐Ÿ”ฅ Every other sample had rusted. His one had not. A steel that would never rust. He took it to his employers. They were not interested. He took it to the Sheffield cutlers. They told him it could not be sharpened. The talk of the town was that Harry Brearley had invented a knife that would not cut. He persisted. โš–๏ธ He found a cutler called Ernest Stuart at the Portland Works who tested the steel with vinegar and lemon juice. The blade did not stain. Stuart suggested a new name for it. Not rustless steel. Stainless steel. Within a decade, Sheffield was the stainless steel capital of the world. Within a century, stainless steel was in every kitchen, every hospital, every operating theatre, every kitchen sink, every skyscraper, every spacecraft. ๐Ÿš€ Harry Brearley never grew rich from his invention. He did not invent for money. He invented for the country. He died in 1948, still in Sheffield, still working class. โœ๏ธ Every modern thing that does not rust began in a Sheffield laboratory. By accident. In the hands of a steelworker's son. ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง The British write their own history. They always have. Help us remember who we are. Help us remember every British achievement. ๐Ÿ‘‡๐Ÿ™ ๐Ÿ‘‰ ๐Ÿ‘ˆ Be part of us. โ˜๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

49,135 views โ€ข 2 months ago

In Wales, boats cross the sky. ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง The man who built it was born with nothing. At Pontcysyllte, narrowboats cross a trough of iron 38 metres above the River Dee. They have done it for over 200 years. The man who built it began as a shepherd's son on a Scottish hill farm, his father dead within months of his birth, the family poor. Thomas Telford was apprenticed to a stonemason at 14 and taught himself the rest. Then he built on a scale Britain had never seen. A road 260 miles from London to Holyhead, the first great road in Britain since the Romans. Over 1,000 bridges. The great docks of London. 32 churches through the Highland glens. A canal clear across Scotland, coast to coast. ๐Ÿ›๏ธ In 1826 he threw the Menai Bridge across the sea to Anglesey, the longest span on earth. ๐ŸŒ They called him the Colossus of Roads, and when Britain's engineers founded their institution, they made the shepherd's son their first president. You were told this country was built by its lords. It was spanned by a boy who began with nothing. ๐Ÿ‘‘ He died in 1834 and lies in Westminster Abbey. A town still carries his name. You have crossed his bridges without ever knowing him. He left it all to you, unsigned. We are putting his name back where it belongs. That is what we do here. We are the people writing Britain back up, one forgotten name at a time. There is a place for you in it. ๐Ÿ‘‡ ๐Ÿ‘‰ Be part of us. โ˜๏ธ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง Be Proud Of Us. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ง

Proudofus.uk

22,992 views โ€ข 1 month ago