Inventions

FranklinUses lightnin'To generate electricityWith a kite and a key Hargreaves Arkwright and Watt Lightning spins Jenny’s frame Steam in a pot Lesarge at large With electric charge Extends the telegraph’s reach Perrier takes the waters Aboard his steam ship As Bushnell’s sub docks In a bush by the beach Compton’s spinning mule Gervinus’s new tool (His circular saw is a peach) Montgolfiers take their daughters On a balloon trip As Bramah safely locks Up Berthollet’s bleach Eli Whitney Cottons on to gin Murdock eats burdock And gets gas lighting Nicky Appert extols Preserving it in jars Senefelder in oil on tile And Louis Robert rolls Paper sheets onto bars To wrap up the 18th Century in style Volta’s battery Sometimes goes flat, but he Is available on retainer To unstick Bramah’s wood planer Dick Trevithick’s a tartar They say he goes loco When Evan’s stops the conveyor And goes for a smoko Appert’s now got a canning boom Wollaston with his lens takes a pic While Willie Horrocks new power loom Is moving frightfully quick Macintosh’s waterproof Keeps Aspdin’s cement looking purty But Billy Burt engineers a spoof A typewriter using QWERTY Lack-a-day Farraday Generates a jolt McCormick harvests wheat and hay Gunslingers go for a Colt When offered cabbage Babbage Computes the hike In Talbot’s paper photo price Mcmillan jumps onto his bike And pedals off in a trice Pearson’s subway moves along On rails laid down beneath the earth Goodyear working for a song Proves vulcanisation’s worth Hydraulic cranes have Arms (so) strong Giving rise to much prolong- ed hilarity and mirth Ho! Ho! Howe’s sew- ing machine goes round And so Does the printing press Of Hoe Young while entwining Tries synthetic lubrication Harrison and Twining Creatively combining Give us refrigeration This lengthens life upon the shelf Which Otis keeps on lifting While Parkes with plenty of private pelf Earns gratitude by gifting Celluloid to a beseeching nation Bessemer sternly steels himself To Perkin dyeing of synthesisation Maxwell takes a colour photograph Thompson (Lord Kelvin) takes the telegraph Right underneath the Atlantic Pasteur has a name with mass appeal Mushet (with nerves of tungsten steel) Doesn’t, which drives him frantic And Mr J.P.Knight After a roadside fright Quickly invents the traffic light Ingersoll’s pneumatic drill Makes Tom Edison feel quite ill Till he with windows shut much tighter Electrifies his old typewriter Which is carefully hidden From Joseph Glidden Who likes putting barbs on wire Which doesn’t sit well With Alexander Bell Who has telephones and microphones for hire Electricity truly comes into its own Elisha Thomson’s welding Edison’s gramophone von Siemens sparks up the urban train And the globes are lit, that’s Edison again To Messrs Ewing, Milne and Gray A seismographic pendulum Is the ideal gift for their Mum On her birthday Though it’s not as half as useful really As the electric iron of Harry Seeley Steely Maxim machines a gun Which relies on belt and braces Waterman fills his pen from a fountain And many other unusual places The most exotic that he can claim Is the font of Notre Dame Daimler’s car has combustion internal The adding machine lets Burroughs star Daimler gets his engine to run on petrol A much cleaner fuel by far Allowing smooth running of his own motorcycle And his friend Karl Benz’s car Bend ze knees to honour Goodwin Celluloid film was his desire And sick of feeling on the road each bump in Dunlop inflates his tyre Tesla’s A/C motor makes quite a din But ramps up the voltage higher Berliner spins a record on the gramophone Eastman’s photographic film sets the tone Brandenburger wraps in cellophane The airship von Zeppelin parks in the lane Marconi switches on the radio He wants the News but he’s out of luck And Booth makes the vacuum cleaner blow (I’m sorry that should read suck) Windscreen wipers carve a path Thanks to Mary Anderson * And we owe the cardiograph To Herr Wilhelm Einthoven Wilbur and Orville take up flying D’Arsonval and Bordas start freeze-drying Hurley hurls All his smalls Into his brand new washer Corny Korn Faxes St Paul’s To say it isn’t kosher And though he is tight Nearly every night Baekeland Has a hand In Bakelite Claude twists tubes of neon light Brearley gets stainless steel nearly right Rice-Kellog makes his Snap, Crackle, Pop Louder with a speaker on the top Baird puts pictures in our living rooms Goddard’s liquid-fuelled rocket really zooms Knoll and Ruska Roll and risk a Microscopic electron beam Percy Shaw Is pretty sure Car lights will make his cat’s eyes gleam Carlton Magee metres our parking Whittle’s turbo jet sets all the dogs barking Meanwhile in the marking game Georg and Laslo write their name With their own Biro in the book of fame Carrothers clothes us in nylon Carson kits out the xerograph Mr Sikorsky’s helicopter Makes everybody laugh But the smiles soon vanish And so does our aplomb When Bohr, Peierls and Frisch Produce the atom bomb Whinfield and Dixon could be Ocker They name their offspring Terylene Mueller nearly falls off his rocker When he fills his turbo-prop with kerosene And blows up Cal Tech’s staff canteen At Harvard U they’re counting on their digits Le Baron Spencer microwaves his lunch Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley Take out all the big bits And uncover a transistor Following a hunch Rover hits the freeway With a gas-turbine motor car Ma Bell Births the solar cell Ampex want to pay To record it on their VCR And hover craftily round Cockerell But Robert and Kilby Noyce Say the microchip is a better choice Townes bequeaths the laser to posterity Cincinnati uses it for surgery Britain and France in a fit of laissez-faire Get the Concorde into the air Edwards and Steptoe make a son In a test-tube, just for fun Hawker Siddley survive the slump And make the Harrier really jump Boeing Gets going With the Jumbo Hoff Takes the day off When his pro- cessor goes micro Now we don’t need A large room with no view To succeed At 2 times 2 There’s a calculator in our pocket Robots for industry NASA shuttles space-wards On the back of a rocket And in France the TGV Gets us home in time for tea Sony tees off with the Walkman An aid to walking briskly And then in concert with Phillips Obsoletes it compact discly IBM claims the PC But Steve Jobs doesn’t care He knows he was first with the Apple So there! But the battery powered vehicle Belongs wholly to Clive Sinclair After that it gets blurry So many new products about Most of them garish and furry And as expensive as all get-out We take them up in a hurry And as quickly turf them out * The only woman in this list