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Russell was an avid music listener.

Russell envisioned a system that would record and replay sounds without physical contact between its parts; and he saw that the best way to achieve such a system was to use light.

Science has been a part of my life from the time I was four years old... just knowing how things work, having a curiosity. And my curiosity has been limitless and that’s quite a handicap because there are times in your life when you have to specialize. But I literally want to know everything and only in recent years have I finally realized that I’m never going to know everything. In fact, the older I get, and the more stupid I find out that I am. But science, the understanding of how things work, what things are, has been crucially important to me. So, I started out with fantasy; I’ve always loved science fiction. I’ve always known that I was going to be an engineer, so I went to a technical high school so that I could take every kind of shop and learn how to work with my hands, learned about materials, and I always knew that I was going to go to an engineering school and get an engineering degree. 

Science can be interesting. Science can be fun. If, in fact, teachers learn how to present science in that way and learn how to make people curious and make it enjoyable, I think more people will get involved. But it’s not important that everybody become a scientist. Everybody doesn’t have to be a mathematician. Make it interesting enough so the people that have that interest, that have that talent do latch onto the wonderful world that will open up if they dig into science and mathematics. The teaching of science, mathematics, of anything—there really is no difference from a game. If you make a game dull, if you make it uninteresting, if you don’t have something that grabs people... then they won’t get interested and they’ll go do something else. So, I don’t see why teaching should be any different than creating games. Creating a curriculum ought to be the same as creating a game. Make it interesting, make it fun, make it a challenge; all of those things. All of the attributes of playing a game are the things that draw people into learning and I think that’s what we ought to do. We ought to somehow coalesce the concept of teaching with the concept of game playing, and we’re going to find that a lot more of our youngsters are going to get interested in learning and specifically about science, mathematics, technology.

Fry then suggested to Nicholson and Silver that they were using the adhesive backwards.  Instead of sticking the adhesive to the bulletin board, they should “put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything.”

This initially proved easier said than done, in terms of practical application.  It was easy enough to get the adhesive on the paper, but the early prototypes had the problem that the adhesive would often detach from the paper and stay on the object the paper was stuck to, or, at least, leave some of the adhesive behind in this way.  There was no such problem with the bulletin boards Silver had made because he had specifically made them so that the adhesive would bond better with the board than the paper. Two other 3M employees now entered the scene, Roger Merrill and Henry Courtney.  The two were tasked with coming up with a coating that could be put on the paper to make the adhesive stay bonded to it and not be left behind on whatever the paper was stuck to when it was removed, a task at which they were ultimately successful at achieving. Interestingly, because management at 3M still didn’t think the product would be commercially successful, they more or less shelved it for three years, even though the Post-It notes were extremely popular internally at 3M labs during that span.    Finally, in 1977, 3M began running test sale runs of the Post-It note, then called “Press ‘n Peel”, in a certain areas in four different cities to see if people would buy and use the product.  It turned out, no one much did, which confirmed in the minds of the executives that it wasn’t a good commercial product.

This time, the re-order rate went from almost nothing, in the previous attempt, to 90% of the people and businesses that had received the free samples.  For reference, this was double the best initial rate 3M had ever seen for any other product they’d introduced.  Two years later, the Post-It note was released throughout the United States.

So after 5 years of constant rejection for the adhesive and another seven years in development and initial rejection, Post-It notes were finally a hit and have since become a mainstay in offices the world over, today being one of the top five best selling office supply products in the world.

Another obstacle in the initial launch of Post-It notes was that, because it was a completely new type of product, it required the construction of new machinery to mass produce the Post-It note pads, which was initially prohibitively expensive for a product seen by many within 3M as destined for commercial failure.

Post-It notes received an upgrade in 2003 when 3M launched a new version of the Post-It note with super sticky glue that has better adhesion to vertical surfaces.

 Post-It notes are occasionally used in art-work.  One such famous example was in 2008 when Shay Hovell used 12,000 Post-It notes to create a replica of the Mona Lisa.  The most expensive Post-It note art piece was done by R.B. Kitaj and sold for £640 (about $1000) in 2000.

This disc was taken over by nearly all markets across the globe, especially the Europe and the United States consumer market. The first successful CD to be launched was Brothers in Arms in 1985.A compact disc (CD) is a popular form of digital storage media used for computer files, pictures, and music. The plastic platter is read and written to by a laser in a CD drive. It comes in several varieties including CD-ROM, CD-R, and CD-RW.  As with most new technologies, one reason for the slow spread of CDs was their steep price tags. The Sony CDP-101 player sold for the equivalent of $730 when it first hit Japanese shelves in 1982. Accounting for inflation, that's about $1,750 today. The audio CDs themselves were $15, which is $35 in 2012 dollars.

After graduating from Reed College with a degree in physics in 1953, Russell took a job with General Electric in the Hanford Nuclear Plant doing experimental work.

Battelle took over the Hanford Laboratories in 1965 and gave Russell a lab and time to work on some of his imaginings, including the crazy idea that sound could be converted to strings of numbers and reproduced using light.

He had come up with a way of using a laser to read digital bits of information, which later became the most widely-used way to read just about everything. By using a light to read the data, the record would never wear out. The data are encoded as microscopic pit marks on the surface of the disk, which, when spun, can be read to reproduce high-quality sound.

The original goal was to record television shows, not music, because adding visuals would be more difficult. If television couldn't be recorded digitally, Russell and his backers decided they would at least know where they stood. In 1973, they were successful, but they were ahead of their time. Amazingly, no one wanted to buy a license for the precursor to the DVD.

By 1991, about 25 years after he came up with the idea, CDs were outselling their predecessors, audio tapes, in record stores nationwide.

But all he can do is shrug ruefully, "I didn't invent the CD, I invented the technology.”

Today, Russell has more than 50 patents to his name. He continues his work from the basement of his Bellevue home where he and Barbara have lived for more than a decade.

The first devices were called Optical Digital Data Storage –the term CD is actually a trademark of Philips. The original storage units were made of glass plates, about the size of large index cards, which could be read as a laser scanned over them.

Now, sales of the mirror-like plastic discs are in the billions every year, but the man behind it all has gotten neither fame nor riches. The company that held the patents sold the rights for a song. Now, Russell has a few artifacts from the early days, a scrapbook full of pictures, and a handful of plaques and trophies to show for all his

Coover was attempting to make clear plastic gun sights to be put on guns used by Allied soldiers in WWII.  One particular formulation he came up with didn’t work well for gun sights, but worked fantastically as an extremely quick bonding adhesive.  Surprisingly, despite the commercial potential of such a product, Coover abandoned that formulation completely as it obviously wasn’t suitable for his current project, being too sticky.

canopies

for jet canopies

Dr. Coover was the supervisor of a project looking at developing a heat resistant acrylate polymer for jet canopies.

Fred Joyner was working on that project and at one point used the rediscovered Super Glue and tested it by spreading ethyl cyanoacrylate between a pair of refractometer prisms.  To his surprise, the prisms became stuck very solidly together.  This time, Coover did not abandoned the cyanoacrylate (Super Glue), rather,  he realized the great potential of a product that would quickly bond to a variety of materials and only needed a little water to activate, which generally is provided in the materials to be bonded themselves.

Super Glue was finally put on the market in 1958 by Eastman Kodak and was called the slightly less catchy name of “Eastman #910″, though they later re-named it “Super Glue”.

Note: It should be noted here that while Super Glue was originally invented by accident thanks to WWII, it was not, as a popular urban legend tells, accidentally discovered by soldiers in WWII who then subsequently began using it to seal up battle wounds.  Rather, it was discovered as described above and didn’t hit the public market until well after WWII had ended

Interestingly though, according to its creator, Dr. Harry Coover, Super Glue actually was used  in the Vietnam War to help close up wounds on soldiers while they were being transported to hospitals to then receive stitches.  Today, a form of cyanoacrylate is often used in place of or in conjunction with traditional sutures.

he was in charge of the development of ejection seats

ired as a safety engineer for AB Volvo in Gothenburg, Sweden.

. Safety belts were in use at the time, but the most prevalent design used a single strap with a buckle over the stomach. This design risked injury to body organs in high-speed crashes.

Bohlin aimed to find an alternative design that would not only protect both the upper and lower body, but would also be comfortable and simple to use.

The design held both the upper and lower body in place, and was simple enough that the driver could buckle up with one hand.

In 1958, Bohlin was h

by 1963 all Volvos came equipped with front seat belts, and the company decided to make the design free for use by all car makers.

In 1959, Volvo became the first auto maker to introduce Bohlin’s three-point safety belt design.

The report claimed that the belt had already saved thousands of lives, reducing the risk of injury or death in car accidents by as much as 75 percent.

It persuaded a number of other national governments to do the same

Since its introduction, the three-point shoulder/lap safety belt has changed very little in its overall design.

As of today, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates the belts reduce the risk of deaths in car crashes by at least 45 percent.

Bohlin retired from Volvo in 1985.

In 1974 Bohlin was awarded The Ralph H. Isbrandt Automotive Safety Engineering Award.

honored in 1979 and in 1985 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington, D.C. In 1995, he received a medal from the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. In 2002, he was inducted into the (U.S.) National Inventors Hall of Fame. On the day he was to be honored for this achievement, Bohlin died at age 82.

The First Cellphone (1973)Name: Motorola Dyna-TacSize: 9 x 5 x 1.75 inches Weight: 2.5 pounds Display: None Number of Circuit Boards: 30Talk time: 35 minutes Recharge Time: 10 hours Features: Talk, listen, dial

Who is he?Cooper grew up in Chicago and earned a degree in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After four years in the navy serving on destroyers and a submarine, he worked for a year at a telecommunications company. Hired by Motorola in 1954, Mr. Cooper worked on developing portable products, including the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967. He then led Motorola's cellular research.