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Short Stories of Science and Invention

A Collection of Radio Talks by
Charles F. Kettering

INDEX

46.   George Washington, Patriot, Statesman and Scientist


Submarine     Washington had financially aided the inventor, David Bushnell, in developing the weapon. The pilot of the submarine was to come along side of the" Eagle," attach the time-bomb and then escape. But its discovery by the British soldiers had frustrated the plan. Later Washington in writing to Jefferson said "One accident or another always intervened. I then thought, and still think, that it was an effort of genius." Washington did not have sufficient experience in developing new ideas to know that Bushnell's submarine was just going through the usual troubles incident to the development of any new device. Recently, the pictures of the British two-man torpedo brought to mind Bushnell and his submarine of 168 years ago.

Patent     While we all regard Washington as one of our most outstanding patriots and statesmen, the Father of our Country was a far sighted man in many ways. He realized that that growth of his new country depended not only on building cities and carving farms out of a wilderness, but also on the pioneering of new ideas, which would ultimately produce new tools for the great task that lay ahead. He accordingly advocated and signed the first patent law framed by Congress to protect the ideas of American inventors.



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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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