Comments on: Things That Were Demonstrated

Question: Things That Were Demonstrated

mermaidcafe — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 06:26:12 -0800

You know how in the old days people would demonstrate their new inventions or technologies (like Galvani "reanimating" dead frogs or Edison's electricity experiments )? For poetry research, I want to find out other things that were famously demonstrated. I think I am set with ones related to electricity, but anything else would be awesome.

By: saucysault

saucysault — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 06:43:32 -0800

Look back at the exhibits of the World Fairs (Smell-O-Vision!) or the Ferris Wheel. Also Agricultual Fairs often exhibited the latest practical technologies.

Also, somewhat of a tangent, but circus sideshows often showed amazing human talents/abilities.

By: bondcliff

bondcliff — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 06:50:01 -0800

After initially refusing to demonstrate their Flyer in public without a contract to sell it, The Wright Brothers eventually went around demonstrating their flying machines to the Army and to the general public, including traveling to to Europe.

By: Ragged Richard

Ragged Richard — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 06:53:30 -0800

Elisha Otis demonstrated his elevator brake at the 1854 Worlds Fair.

By: Alterscape

Alterscape — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 06:56:11 -0800

The Mother of All Demos, Douglas Engelbart, 1968. Working prototype of a bunch of computer interaction techniques we take for granted today. In 1968.

By: firechicago

firechicago — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 07:00:11 -0800

Henry Jacob Bigelow famously demonstrated the use of ether for painless surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846.

By: jclarkin

jclarkin — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 07:01:33 -0800

Edison famously demonstrated the dangers of AC electricity.

By: JoeZydeco

JoeZydeco — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 07:40:13 -0800

Robert Gibbon Johnson stood on the steps of the Salem County (New Jersey) Courthouse to demonstrate to his fellow Americans that tomatoes were not poisonous (even though everyone in Europe and Central America had been eating them for centuries).

The crowd numbered over 2,000 people. One woman screamed and fainted as Johnson took his first bite.

By: Huffy Puffy

Huffy Puffy — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 07:40:48 -0800

Galileo may or may not have dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but other people subsequently did drop cannonballs off a church.

By: JoeZydeco

JoeZydeco — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 07:49:33 -0800

On April 11, 1956, the AMPEX corporation chose to introduce their brand new invention, the videotape recorder, to the employees and affiliates of CBS visiting the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB) Convention in Chicago.

Bill Lodge, head of television affairs, delivered a prepared speech and addressed the rumors that videotape technology was indeed in the labs and CBS was helping fund development. AMPEX engineers secretly videotaped the entire presentation.

After Lodge's remarks, AMPEX engineer Fred Pfost pulled back the curtains and played back the entire speech the crowd had just seen:

"That was Fred's cue to press play: when the audience saw the replay on the same monitors as the original presentation, they went wild with shouting, screaming, and whistling. When the curtains were opened to show the Ampex videotape recorder, some stood on their chairs to get a glimpse of it.

By: bondcliff

bondcliff — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:18:22 -0800

I really think Steve Jobs was the modern day version of this. Think about his famous demonstrations of the iPhone and iPad.

By: ubiquity

ubiquity — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:18:44 -0800

Foucault's Pendulum demonstrates the rotation of the earth. This has the advantage that you can still see it, as there are hundreds of these operating around the world.

By: showbiz_liz

showbiz_liz — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:41:16 -0800

Incubators!

After inventing the baby incubator, Dr. Couney faced skepticism from other medical professionals who did not believe his methods would work. Banks were unwilling to finance production of his incubators, believing that no hospital would want the devices. Couney set out to prove them all wrong.

Dr. Couney's first exhibit of premature infants in incubators was at the 1896 Berlin Exposition. A German hospital loaned him several premature babies, all of whom the hospital had determined would die. Couney, utilizing his baby incubator technology was able to rehabilitate each of the infants' lives. While Couney's intention was to demonstrate scientific advancements in the treatment of premature babies and to create a way to finance this technology by charging admission fees to see the babies, the small hospital drew big crowds. Visitors could watch the tiny patients as they received treatments, recuperated and grew.

Hospitals around the United States began to refer parents of preemies to Dr. Couney. Couney accepted patients at no charge to the parents and the infants were placed in the incubators and monitored by trained nurses and fed by wet nurses. By some estimates, Couney was able to rehabilitate 90% of the premature infants placed in his care.

Couney's baby incubator attractions were featured at prominent expos and amusement parks. The babies were also featured at Coney Island's Luna Park, and at a number of the World's Fair expositions including New York City's World Fair, the Omaha Trans-Mississippi Exposition, the Buffalo Exposition and the Chicago World's Fair.

By: Thorzdad

Thorzdad — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:45:27 -0800

Galileo's theory on falling objects is confirmed.

By: agatha_magatha

agatha_magatha — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 09:22:30 -0800

X-ray technology was demonstrated/used a lot at carnivals, etc. before it was realized that the radiation was harmful.

By: agatha_magatha

agatha_magatha — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 09:27:00 -0800

If you are looking at modern demos, look no farther than all the infomercials of fabulous inventions. For that matter, Home Shopping Network and QVC regularly introduce "new" inventions.

By: jamjam

jamjam — Fri, 15 Dec 2017 16:48:49 -0800

The idea that diamond might be combustible is attributed to Newton (though his reasons, that it was dense, had a high index of refraction, and was "an unctuous substance coagulated", seem absurd to us now), and that was demonstrated in Florence in 1694, in front of the Grand Duke, using an enormous burning glass.

In the next century, Lavoisier also used a burning glass, focused on a diamond in a sealed glass jar, to prove that diamonds were made of pure carbon.

By: brism

brism — Mon, 22 Jan 2018 22:52:45 -0800

It had a darker outcome, but the ill-fated demonstration of a plutonium mass at Los Alamos famously earned it the name Demon Core. By just the width of a screwdriver!

By: eruonna

eruonna — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 13:42:16 -0800

The Magdeburg hemispheres

By: bq

bq — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 18:52:08 -0800

the Montgolfier Brothers

By: Merus

Merus — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 06:31:11 -0800

A couple that may not be of use to you: the icepick labotomy was toured around America.

And this isn't quite the definition of 'demonstrated' you give, but the evidence of the Big Bang remains one of the most emphatically confirmed discoveries in science. If the Big Bang happened, measuring the echoes should give a particular kind of graph, and when they measured it, it lined up exactly. No noise, no fudging, none of that messy reality getting in the way - just a pure moment of truth.

By: Westringia F.

Westringia F. — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 15:09:08 -0800

Would the first ever cardiac catheterization count? Forssman did it on himself in 1929, threading a catheter up through the vein of his arm straight to his heart and then taking an x-ray of himself to prove it was possible. Wikipedia has the story (including his tricking his nurse into letting him do it); here's his x-ray. Cardiac cath has since become an important diagnostic tool.

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 21:18:52 -0800

Barry Marshall famously dosed himself with germs to prove that ulcers were caused by bacteria.

Edison and the electric chair?

By: nat

nat — Wed, 24 Jan 2018 23:33:52 -0800

The 1919 eclipse demonstrated the bending of light by matter predicted by Einstein.

By: ArgentCorvid

ArgentCorvid — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 11:53:35 -0800

The first Kevlar bulletproof vests were initially sold by live demonstration.

By: BWA

BWA — Sun, 28 Jan 2018 15:55:50 -0800

Wikipedia has you covered for medicine

By: ChuraChura

ChuraChura — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 06:00:07 -0800

In the 1880s, August Weismann demonstrated that Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics did not explain inheritance or variation by cutting the tails off of white mice over 5 generations and confirming that tailless mice's offspring did not have shorter tails. He was specifically interested in disproving the inheritance of acquired mutilations.

By: Deece BJ Pancake

Deece BJ Pancake — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 08:22:29 -0800

This is also quite an infamous one:
"This was the first time that an effective medical therapy for erectile dysfunction (ED) was described, and was a historic development in the management of ED. The way in which this information was first reported was completely unique and memorable, and provides an interesting context for the development of therapies for ED. I was present at this extraordinary lecture, and the details are worth sharing. Although this lecture was given more than 20 years ago, the details have remained fresh in my mind, for reasons which will become obvious."
How (not) to communicate new scientific information: a memoir of the famous brindley lecture

By: tirutiru

tirutiru — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 09:56:10 -0800

Solutions of optically active compounds rotate the plane of polarized light as it passes through them. Pasteur discovered that their crystals could be separated into left and right handed forms that would rotate light in opposite directions.

He demonstrated this using a microscope and special tweezers, for Biot (of the Biot-Savart law), much to the latter's delight.

My dear child, I have all my life so loved the sciences that this makes my heart throb with joy!

By: vogon_poet

vogon_poet — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 19:19:44 -0800

how modern do you want to get? The initial success of AlphaGo was definitely a spectacular demonstration, and very unexpected.

By: TedW

TedW — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 11:39:27 -0800

Lots of medical ones (and lots of backstory to the discovery of anesthesia mentioned above), but Edward Jenner and the invention/discovery of the smalllpox vaccine is a good one. In the same vein is Louis Pasteur's demonstration of the rabies vaccine he developed.