Greatest Invention Since Sliced Bread

Tacoma Mud Flats

Tacoma Mud Flats

Have star, will steer by
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Tacoma Mud Flats
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My invention consists of a roll of connected sheets of paper for toilet use, said roll having incisions at intervals extending from the side of the web toward the center, but not meeting, and terminating in an angular out, whereby the slight connection left may be separated without injury to the connected sheets. A difficulty with rolls of this character as heretofore manufactured has been due to the width of the bond uniting the sheets, which it has been necessary to make of considerable strength to Withstand the tension of winding, but which it is desirable should be as trail as may be when the roll is unwound, otherwise the sheets do not separate with certainty and many of them are torn. Attempts have been made to remedy this by incisions in the bond that should not weaken it longitudinally; but such incisions avail little unless the sheets are pulled in a certain direction, a condition the user seldom considers or is aware of. In my improved roll I overcome this wholly by reducing the bond and terminating the lateral incisions in an angular cut, removing all liability of injury to the sheets in separating them. With this construction, one sheet may be separated from the next without liability of the incisions turning in a direction parallel with the web and tearing off a considerable part of the contiguous sheet. At the same time, I wind rolls containing any desired number of sheets.​

US465588A granted to Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York

Thanks Seth, you made eating corn on the cobb fun again.
 
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sailingk8

sailingk8

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Tacoma Mud Flats said:
View attachment 564862

My invention consists of a roll of connected sheets of paper for toilet use, said roll having incisions at intervals extending from the side of the web toward the center, but not meeting, and terminating in an angular out, whereby the slight connection left may be separated without injury to the connected sheets. A difficulty with rolls of this character as heretofore manufactured has been due to the width of the bond uniting the sheets, which it has been necessary to make of considerable strength to Withstand the tension of winding, but which it is desirable should be as trail as may be when the roll is unwound, otherwise the sheets do not separate with certainty and many of them are torn. Attempts have been made to remedy this by incisions in the bond that should not weaken it longitudinally; but such incisions avail little unless the sheets are pulled in a certain direction, a condition the user seldom considers or is aware of. In my improved roll I overcome this wholly by reducing the bond and terminating the lateral incisions in an angular cut, removing all liability of injury to the sheets in separating them. With this construction, one sheet may be separated from the next without liability of the incisions turning in a direction parallel with the web and tearing off a considerable part of the contiguous sheet. At the same time, I wind rolls containing any desired number of sheets.​

US465588A granted to Seth Wheeler of Albany, New York

Thanks Seth, you made eating corn on the cob fun again.
Click to expand...
Everyone please note direction it’s facing…

just sayin..
 
boomer

boomer

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After the wheel - Writing is pretty amazing - stored information, circulation of concepts. No other invention has such wide reaching implications as the ability to pass learned info down to future generations. Others say that beer was the greatest invention after the wheel, and responsible for so many other early inventions, including writing.

Over the years, I've came across a number of articles citing farming as the direct precursor of writing. With the sudden concept of excess and storage people had to find a way to keep records of what they had. Initially they formed small clay markers with say a cone representing a sheaf of wheat for example. Then instead of just keeping a bag with all these little cones in it they'd start pressing the cone into a tablet of wax leaving a triangle imprint. Then they figured out you could just draw a triangle and people would know 1 triangle=1 sheaf of wheat. And that was the birth of protowriting.

Generating electricity and having a control over it is really one massive achievement of humanity. Opening doors for almost everything we have today. The whole idea of constant accessible energy really changed the world.

In the modern world - Transistors are one of the greatest inventions - The building block of miniaturization. We've been thinking we'd hit non-reducible barriers for a number of years. Moore's law and its implications are just crazy. Every time we get near them we have some new breakthrough. It's possible that at some point we'll hit a hard barrier but I wouldn't say we can see where that will be yet. Eventually we'll hit a barrier. Transistors can only become so small, and at some point we'll be down at the size of a single molecule (or a few molecules at most), and I can't see how it'll get any smaller than that. Even if we do hit the barrier on transistor size there's a good chance Moore's law will continue.

Research has shifted from smaller transistors towards making new architectures for computers. While transistors have gotten much smaller (I think we have 7nm in research right now) we are still using old computer architecture models. It'll probably become cheaper to try to increase speed by changing architecture. Modern processors have hardly anything in common with their predecessors, even just 10 years ago. A better architecture than x86 would help things, but internally they already are doing most of the optimizations that another architecture would allow and they do have extended instruction sets far beyond just the basics required by x86/x86_64.

And as power consumption decreases, problems with waste heat diminish and stacking circuits up in 3 dimensions becomes viable too. You know we're into the future when you start measuring processor capacity in cubic millimeters. There is a physical limit on how much information processing can happen in a finite amount of space regardless of computing substrate due to heat production and entropy, but we aren't at the limits for silicon yet and even when we get there we will likely have a different substrate to work with. The question isn't if - but when we will find a replacing technology.

How beer saved the world.
 
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