Inventions trivia

Inventions

» There were 15,700,003 Model T Ford's manufactured, all in black.

» The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

» Thomas Edison held more than 1,300 U.S. and foreign patents.

» The father of the pink flamingo (the plastic lawn ornament) was Don Featherstone of Massachusetts. Featherstone graduated from art school and went to work as a designer for Union Products, a Leominster, Massachusetts company that manufactured flat plastic lawn ornaments. He designed the pink flamingo in 1957 as a follow-up project to his plastic duck. Today, Featherstone is president and part owner of the company that sells an average of 250,000 to 500,000 plastic pink flamingos a year.

» Thomas Edison, "the Wizard of Menlo Park," established an "invention factory," the first industrial research laboratory, with the hope of producing a new invention every ten days. In one 4-year period, he obtained 300 patents, or one every five days.

» The film for the first Kodak camera was 2¾ inches wide, or 70 millimeters. Kodak has been manufacturing 70-millimeter film continuously since 1888.

» The first "braces" were constructed by Pierre Fauchard in 1728. Fauchard's "braces" consisted of a flat strip of metal, which was connected to teeth by pieces of thread.

» Thomas Edison’s first major invention was the quadruplex telegraph. Unlike other telegraphs at the time, it could send four messages at the same time over one wire.