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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

26.  The Man Who Kept His Eye on the Ball


    To the infant photographic industry celluloid opened up an entirely new field and the roll film was born. A little later, because of this same quality of flexibility, it made the motion picture industry possible and, as another outgrowth, symphonic music and the voices of the world's great artists could be recorded on flexible discs or records.

    Eventually, cellulose, that is the basis of celluloid, found its way into lacquers, solving the problem of automobile finishing, and cutting the time from days to hours.

Pool Ball    I don't believe Hyatt ever collected the ten thousand dollar prize. But he kept right on after the billiard ball and many, many years later, as the result of the joint efforts of Hyatt, Doctor Baekeland and the Bliss Company, a successful billiard ball was made. I have some of them in a case in my home in Dayton.

    In the wake of his search for the billiard balls, Hyatt left at least four new industries - employing thousands of people: the bearing industry, the celluloid industry, the photographic business and motion pictures.

    But each one of these industries is a story in itself. To me the work of Hyatt with celluloid is important because it is an example of a man who made an outstanding development with a minimum of laboratory equipment, but with a large amount of intelligent curiosity and acute powers of observation - two of the most important requirements in a search for any new thing.


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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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