Patent Pending Blog - Patents and the History of Technology

Lake Moeris of Ancient Egypt

An ancient example of flood control, irrigation, and the use of hydraulic locks is seen in the ancient Egyptian management of water in the Faiyum (Fayum, Fayoum) region, called Lake Kunis or Lake Moeris by later Greeks. 

The Fayum area is lower than the nearby Nile river, and a canal between the river and the  depression was dug before 2900 BC.  King Amenembat improved the canal and built a diversion dam on the Nile. The Ha-Uar dam allowed Nile water at flood stage to be diverted to fill the  Fayum and form Lake Moeris, estimated to be about 17,000 acres in size.  Gates at both ends of the canal were used to control the flow of water, and at flood stage the water flowed from the Nile to the lake, and at other times the water flowed from the lake to the Nile.  This provided flood control, provided water to the Nile system during the dry season, and sustained irrigation around the lake.  From the book the Hydraulics of Open Channel Flow, by Hubert Chanson. 

The Greek historian Herodotus of the fifth century B.C. described it thus:

This lake has a circuit of three thousand six hundred furlongs, or sixty schoeni, which is as much as the whole seaboard of Egypt. Its length is from north to south; the deepest part has a depth of fifty fathoms. That it was dug out and made by men's hands the lake shows for itself; for almost in the middle of it stand two pyramids, so built that fifty fathoms of each are below and fifty above the water. . . The water of the lake is not natural (for the country is exceeding waterless) but brought by a channel from the Nile; six months it flows into the lake, and six back into the river.

The Lake Moeris project and its control dams and canal was abondoned in about 230 BC because the branch of the Nile it was connected to had decreased in size.

Rear Suspension Bike, 1891

Here is a rear suspension bike from 1891 which used springs in a tube to give some give to the rear wheel. 

 

Other front and rear suspension systems from this period are found in the Bicycle Technology section of the blog.

The Inventor of Crampons

Crampons in some form have been around for many centuries.  A page on the history of crampons by Grivel shows one type of crampon carved on the Arch of Constantine of Rome, built in 315 AD. 

Crampon design took a major step forward in at the beginning of the twentieth century.   At that time purists advocated against the use of crampons as making climbing the glaciers of the Alps too easy.  In 1908 the British inventor and climber Oscar Eckenstein designed a pair of crampons with ten points and a hinge between a front frame and a rear frame.  With Echenstein as an advocate the purists quickly lost the fight to ban crampon use. 

Eckenstein's design was turned into reality by the Italian blacksmith Henry Grivel.  Grivel made the Eckenstein design crampons, and they were so well received that many more were made.  Grivel used the hardest steel he could find, and thus used railroad rails in the early years of crampon production.   In 1929 Henry's son Laurent designed the 12 point crampon, with two points extending horizontally forward from the front of the boot, a design which proved tremendously popular.  The photo below is a Grivel 12 point crampon which is essentially the Eckenstein design.

            

Inventor of the Gas Powered Automobile: Siegfreid Marcus

Austria has its own claim to the first inventor of the automobile in Siegfreid Marcus.   In 1870 Marcus  built a simple cart with a gasoline engine directly linked to the rear wheels.  This prototype had no steering, brakes, gearing, clutch or seat.  Marcus followed up the first prototype with a design for a second car, which was built years later in 1889.  The papers of Marcus were destroyed by the Nazis, who did not want to draw attention to the invention of an early automobile by a Jew.  The figures below are of the first and second Marcus autos, from the informative site "Siegfried Marcus - The Inventor of the First Motorcar?"

These early designs are contempories of other early automobile designs found in the Automobile Technology section of this blog.

George A. Long Automobile, 1880

The first automobile in the U.S. was Oliver Evans' steam powered Amphibolos. But what about the first gasoline powered automobile?  That was an automobile built by George A. Long.  The surprise is that this automobile had a steam engine, and used gasoline as the fuel type. 

Long had first built a 5 wheeled vehicle powered by steam in 1875, which burned charcoal and could travel at 30 mph. 

Long built the steam engine for a second version, a tricycle, in 1879.  Shortly he built the body to go with the engine, with the use of Colonel Albert Pope's bicycle manufacturing facility.  Long's patent on the device issued in 1883 and as far as I know is the second U.S. patent on an automobile, Oliver Evans' being the first in 1803.

The steam engine of the tricycle was a V2 (two cylinders in V configuration), and delivered power to the rear wheel by a pulley that contacted the driving wheel.  Two different pulleys were available, for two different speeds: slow and really slow. 

The tricycle used wheels similar to those on the velocipedes of the day, with wooden rims and metal spokes.  The two side by side wheels preceded the automobile, and the third wheel was the driving wheel. The controls require two operators to steer, brake,  and control the power.

The vehicle weights 350 pounds, and operates at about 100 psi steam pressure. This vehicle was built before the Benz and Daimler vehicles, but they were internal combustion and this was steam. This vehicle was well ahead of the Serpollet steam vehicle of 1888, and after the 5 ton Bollee steam vehicle of 1873. The rebuilt vehicle is in the Smithsonian Museum.

 

The First Front Suspension Bicycle

Here is a very early version of front suspension on a bike.  In this patent from 1891 there is a spring in the headset, and the fork assembly can move back and forth to absorb road shock.   

The First Snowmobile?

Here is an early (1913) snow machine or snowmobile which predates the Eliason and Bombardier early snomobiles.  I don't know if this was ever commercially manufactured.  This machine is basically a motorized horse drawn sleigh, with runners like a sleigh.  The body is very sleigh-like, and the occupants would basically freeze their ass off.  Other early snow machines are here.

The Inventor of the Snowmobile

There seem to have been two paths to the invention and development of the modern snowmobile (snow machine, skidoo, snow mobile).  Carl Eliason has to be listed as inventor of the snowmobile, since his patent is 30 years earlier than the other contender for that honor, Joseph Armand Bombardier.  Carl Eliason of Sayner Wisconsin built what is basically a motorized toboggan in 1924, which was patented in 1927.  The other path to development started when Joseph Armand Bomdardier of Valcourt Quebec built his first snow coach in the 1930s.

From the first motorized tobogan, Eliason began to make his machine larger and less like a toboggan and more like a modern snowmobile.  The Eliason's motorized toboggan started out with a 2.5 hp motor, and by 1937 used a 25 hp motor.

Meanwhile, in Quebec Bombardier built a propeller driven snow buggy in 1922.  Not entirely successful, his father made him take the propeller off so it would not decapitate any of his siblings.   

More development led to a 1927 snow vehicle which resembled a Model T on skiis.  Many other inventors converted Model T Fords and other cars to ski and track drive.

His next effort led to the successful B-7 model in 1937, which was more of a car on tracks and skis.  This was the first model that Bombardier patented.  Bombardier then made a number of tracked snow vehicles, including a school bus version, and other larger industrial vehicles.

In 1953 the Eliason machine was the K-12, which was the last production model.  Eliason went out of business in 1963, but a number of other companies like Polaris made snow machines based on the expired Eliason patents.

It wasn't until 1959 that Bombardier marketed the Ski-doo.  Bombardier had started with larger snow vehicles and worked down to the smaller snow machines.  It would be an interesting marketing study to figure out why Bomdardier was successful in this field and Eliason wasn't.  A good part of it could have been timing, but an insider to this industry could fill in some history here.

Bombardier became a huge company, with activities in aerospace and transportation, with subsidiaries like Challenger and Global. Bombardier bought the Lear Company, of Lear Jet fame, and also Rotax, makers of small powerful engines.  In general, in anything to do with transportation, a Bombardier subsidiary is involved.

 

The First Rear Suspension Bike, 1891

Here is another candidate for the first rear suspension bicycle design, from 1891. Its modern counterpart is shown below.

Other early suspension systems on bikes are at:

Full Suspension, 1891

Rear suspension, 1892

Front suspension, 1889

Front suspension, 1889

Full suspension, 1890

Telescoping forks, 1922

The First Electric Motor

Thomas Davenport was a blacksmith in Brandon Vermont.  He was fascinated by the newest scientific device at the time, the electromagnet.  These were horseshoe shaped pieces of iron, wound with insulated wire, and charged by a battery.  A small one could lift a horseshoe, and a large one could lift an anvil. This was the first time that it was shown that magnetism and electricy were related, and electricity could produce magnetism.

Davenport purchased an electromagnet, and at home carefully unwound and dismantled the device.  His wife Emily took notes as to its construction as Davenport took it apart.  Then using wire insulated with the silk of his wife's wedding dress, he built his own electromagnets.  It was then that he went beyond the existing technology of electromagnets.  He attached one of his electromagnets to a wheel, and fixed another to a stationary frame.  The attraction of these magnets caused the wheel to rotate one half revolution.  He learned that he could reverse the wiring to one magnet, and get the wheel to complete another half revolution, for one complete revolution.

Then he designed a segmented conductor that supplied current to the wheel mounted electromagnet, and the sections reversed the current at the right time to cause the polarity to reverse automatically, and caused the wheel not only to complete one revolution, but also to rotate continuously.  He had invented the electric motor.   

He applied for a patent, but his application was rejected because turning a wheel by electricity was totally unknown and unbelievable.  He submitted a working model, but it was destroyed in a fire.  He submitted a second working model, with review and analyis by scientists of the day, and his patent was approved in 1837. 

The technology that was required to fully realize the potential of the electric motor was that a spinning motor could also generate electricity.  That piece of the puzzle was supplied by the invention of the dynamo.