🚦🧊 The traffic lights on our streets and the refrigerators in our kitchens exist thanks to the work of inventors like Garrett Morgan and John Standard.
The #Indianapolis Recorder looks at the history of American #infrastructure that highlights the Black innovators who designed the everyday tools we often take for granted.
Medieval Inventions We Still Can’t Fully Recreate Today
The Middle Ages were a time of remarkable innovation, when new technologies flourished. Yet the knowledge behind many of these inventions has been lost. Here are several medieval technologies that remain impossible to fully recreate, even with modern science.
Image from an illuminated manuscript, the Madrid Skylitzes, showing Greek fire in use against the fleet of the rebel Thomas the Slav.
"The Roman fleet burn the opposite fleet down" – An Eastern Roman / Byzantine war ship using their "secret weapon" Greek fire against a ship belonging to the rebel Thomas the Slav, AD 821. (12th century illustration from the "Madrid Skylitzes").
In 1998, Stanley Meyer claimed to invent a car that ran on water. Days later, he was dead—and his invention disappeared. But Meyer wasn't the only one. There’s a federal law, still active today, that allows the U.S. government to classify and bury private inventions deemed a “threat.” It's called the Invention Secrecy Act—and it's already been used over 6,000 times.
From Nikola Tesla’s wireless energy to Townsend Brown’s anti-gravity tech to Joseph Papp’s engine that ran on noble gases, history is littered with breakthrough inventors who vanished into obscurity... and whose technologies never made it to the public.
This episode uncovers the case studies, the hidden power of secrecy orders, and the chilling question: What else have they buried?
Last night, PBS showed an episode of American Experience featuring the story of Edwin Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera. Very interesting. You can watch the episode on YouTube: