List: English inventions

by likeorhate

•  Analytical engine

  The analytical engine, an important step in the history of computers, was the design of a mechanical general-purpose computer by the British mathematician Charles Babbage. In its logical design the machine was essentially modern, anticipating the first completed general-purpose computers by about 100 years. It was first described in 1837. Babbage continued to refine the design until his death in 1871.

  

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•  Colossus computer

  The Colossus machines were electronic computing devices used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German messages during World War II. These were the world's first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. They used vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) to perform the calculations.

  

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•  Difference engine

  The Difference Engine was an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. Both logarithmic and trigonometric functions can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful sets of numbers.

  

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•  Davy lamp

  The Davy lamp is a safety lamp with a wick and oil vessel burning originally a heavy vegetable oil, devised in 1815 by Sir Humphry Davy. It was created for use in coal mines, allowing deep seams to be mined despite the presence of methane and other flammable gases, called firedamp or minedamp. Davy had discovered that a flame enclosed inside a mesh of a certain fineness cannot ignite firedamp.

  

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•  Jet engine

  A jet engine is a reaction engine that discharges a fast moving jet of fluid to generate thrust in accordance with Newton's laws of motion. This broad definition of jet engines includes turbojets, turbofans, rockets, ramjets, pulse jets and pump-jets. In general, most jet engines are internal combustion engines but non-combusting forms also exist. In some common parlance, the term 'jet engine' loosely refers to an internal combustion .

  

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•  Stainless steel

  In metallurgy stainless steel, also known as inox steel or inox from French "inoxydable", is defined as a steel alloy with a minimum of 10.5 or 11% chromium content by mass. Stainless steel does not stain, corrode, or rust as easily as ordinary steel (it stains less, but it is not stain-proof). It is also called corrosion-resistant steel or CRES when the alloy type and grade are not detailed, particularly in the aviation industry.

  

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•  Slide rule

  The slide rule, also known colloquially as a slipstick, is a mechanical analog computer. The slide rule is used primarily for multiplication and division, and also for "scientific" functions such as roots, logarithms and trigonometry, but is not normally used for addition or subtraction. Slide rules come in a diverse range of styles and generally appear in a linear or circular form with a standardized set of markings (scales) essential to performing mathematical computations.

  

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•  Steam turbine

  A steam turbine is a mechanical device that extracts thermal energy from pressurized steam, and converts it into rotary motion. Its modern manifestation was invented by Sir Charles Parsons in 1884. It has almost completely replaced the reciprocating piston steam engine primarily because of its greater thermal efficiency and higher power-to-weight ratio.

  

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•  Tank

  A tank is a tracked, armoured fighting vehicle designed for front-line combat which combines operational mobility and tactical offensive and defensive capabilities. Firepower is normally provided by a large-calibre main gun in a rotating turret and secondary machine guns, while heavy armour and all-terrain mobility provide protection for the tank and its crew, allowing it to perform all primary tasks of the armoured troops on the battlefield.

  

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•  Turing machine

  A Turing machine is a theoretical device that manipulates symbols contained on a strip of tape. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside of a computer. The "Turing" machine was described by Alan Turing in 1937, who called it an "a(utomatic)-machine".

  

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•  World Wide Web

  The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as The Web, is a system of interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by using hyperlinks.

  

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•  Wheatstone bridge

  A Wheatstone bridge is a measuring instrument invented by Samuel Hunter Christie in 1833 and improved and popularized by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1843 . It is used to measure an unknown electrical resistance by balancing two legs of a bridge circuit, one leg of which includes the unknown component. Its operation is similar to the original potentiometer.

  

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•  Sinclair ZX80

  

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•  Sinclair ZX Spectrum

  

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•  Shrapnel shell

  Shrapnel shells were anti-personnel artillery munitions which carried a large number of individual bullets close to the target and then ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually. They relied almost entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality. The munition has been obsolete since the end of World War I for anti-personnel use, when it was superseded by high-explosive shells for that role.

  

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•  Bessemer process

  The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron. The process is named after its inventor, Henry Bessemer, who took out a patent on the process in 1855. The process was independently discovered in 1851 by William Kelly. The process had also been used outside of Europe for hundreds of years, but not on an industrial scale.

  

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•  Portland cement

  Portland cement (often referred to as OPC, from Ordinary Portland Cement) is the most common type of cement in general use around the world because it is a basic ingredient of concrete, mortar, stucco and most non-specialty grout. It is a fine powder produced by Portland cement clinker (more than 90%), a limited amount of calcium sulfate (which controls the set time) and up to 5% minor constituents (as allowed by various standards).

  

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•  Adjustable spanner

  An adjustable spanner or adjustable wrench is a spanner (wrench) with a "jaw" of adjustable width, allowing it to be used with different sizes of fastener head. Compare to an ordinary spanner, which is of fixed size, and requires a different spanner for each fastener size. An adjustable spanner may also be called a shifting spanner, shifter, fit-all, crescent wrench or adjustable-angle head wrench. In many European countries (e.g.

  

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•  Linear motor

  A linear motor or linear induction motor is an alternating current (AC) electric motor that has had its stator "unrolled" so that instead of producing a torque it produces a linear force along its length. The most common mode of operation is as a Lorentz-type actuator, in which the applied force is linearly proportional to the current and the magnetic field (F = qv × B).

  

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•  Incandescent light bulb

  The incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe is a source of electric light that works by incandescence (a general term for heat-driven light emissions, which includes the simple case of black body radiation). An electric current passes through a thin filament, heating it to a temperature that produces light. The enclosing glass bulb contains either a vacuum or an inert gas to prevent oxidation of the hot filament.

  

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•  Vacuum cleaner

  A vacuum cleaner (also simply vacuum or hoover in colloquial British English and a sweeper in eastern US dialects such as Pittsburgh English) is a device that uses an air pump to create a partial vacuum to suck up dust and dirt, usually from floors. The dirt is collected by either a dustbag or a cyclone for later disposal.

  

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•  Prime Meridian

  The Prime Meridian is the meridian at which the longitude is defined to be 0°. The Prime Meridian and its opposite the 180th meridian (at 180° longitude), which the International Date Line generally follows, form a great circle that divides the Earth into the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

  

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•  Seat belt

  A seat belt, sometimes called a safety belt, is a safety harness designed to secure the occupant of a vehicle against harmful movement that may result from a collision or a sudden stop. As part of an overall automobile passive safety system, seat belts are intended to reduce injuries by stopping the wearer from hitting hard interior elements of the vehicle, or other passengers, are in the correct position for the airbag to deploy and prevent the passenger from being thrown from the vehicle.

  

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•  Concertina

  A concertina is a free-reed musical instrument, like the various accordions and the harmonica. It has a bellows and buttons typically on both ends of it. When pressed, the buttons travel in the same direction as the bellows, unlike accordion buttons which travel perpendicularly to it. Also, each button produces one note, while accordions typically can produce chords with a single button. The concertina was developed in England and Germany, most likely independently.

  

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•  Stephenson's Rocket

  Stephenson's Rocket was an early steam locomotive of 0-2-2 wheel arrangement, built in Newcastle at the Forth Street Works of Robert Stephenson and Company in 1829.

  

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