Especially here in America, we have a lot to be thankful for the British for. For starters, we wouldn’t exist as the country we are today without the British. On a smaller scale though, British inventors have been responsible for creating some very useful things. A new book from Gilly Pickup details some pretty surprising British inventions.
Today, we take pencils for granted. However, these handy little sticks of graphite encased in wood haven’t always been around. The predecessor to modern pencils would never have been invented without the ingenuity of the British people and the large graphite deposit discovered in the year 1565 in Cumbria, England.
Pencil Revolution
Vacuum cleaners
Today, nearly every home has a vacuum cleaner in it. They are considered a necessary cleaning tool. We owe all these vacuums to Hubert Booth. Hubert Booth was a British engineer who invented the first vacuum cleaner in 1901. He was inspired after watching a railway car be cleaned by a machine which blew air and debris away and decided to reverse the process to create his invention.
Lawnmowers
Edward Budding was considered to be somewhat insane by the other inhabitants of Stroud, Gloucestershire for the invention of the lawnmower. He faced so much ridicule for the strange contraption that he resorted to testing it at night. Anyone who owns a decently-sized lawn is grateful for his perseverance, however, as without it there would be no lawnmowers today.
Text messaging
A more recent invention, but perhaps the one on this list that most strongly affects people today, text messages are also a British invention. Specifically, the first text message was sent by British engineer Neil Papworth. This first text message was sent from a computer, but it is still the starting place for the text messaging we all do daily from our phones.
Purple
That’s right, we owe an entire color to the British. Well, sort of. Before a British chemist, William Perkins, accidentally created a purple dye in 1856 during experiments to create a malaria treatment, we had no way of producing the color purple artificially. This first purple dye was so expensive that only nobles could afford it, making purple the color of royalty.