Word: inventor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such famous figures as the scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla and Physicist Michael Pupin come to our memory. So do the names of the violinist and philanthropist Zlatko Balokovic, one of the founders and chairman of the Society of Friends of New Yugoslavia in the U.S.; of Louis Adamic, the author and publicist; Ivan Mestrovic, great genius of sculpture; and many others...
...success of group invention does not mean that the lone tinkerer is extinct. Enormous obstacles-financial, administrative, legal-face the inventor who wants to set up a laboratory in a closet and create new concepts and gadgets. Still, the classic garret inventor has managed to survive. Edwin Link, inventor of the famed "Link trainer" for instrument flight, has managed to move out of aviation and into oceanography, and now explores the underwater world in a clear, bubble-shaped plastic submarine of his own design. William Lear, who has invented radios, airplanes and steam-powered vehicles, is now working with...
...anyone can drive away the 100-odd British ships blockading New York Harbor, it might be a shy Connecticut inventor who has devised a strange new weapon of maritime warfare. David Bushnell, 35, calls it a "submarine vessel," also known as the Turtle. Like that creature, it can dive under water and attack its enemies by surprise. It strikes them with an explosive device that its creator has named, after the electric ray, a torpedo...
Bushnell has had little training as an inventor. Reared on a farm near Saybrook, he was 30 before he could raise the money to enter Yale. He enrolled as a divinity student, but his chief interest was in natural philosophy and mechanics. He learned that Dutch Engineer Cornelius van Drebbel had devised a "sinkable boat" in the 1620s, and after his graduation last year, he finished building a similar craft on secluded Poverty Island in the Connecticut River...
...would this machine actually work? The inventor could find out only by risking his own life inside it. One moonlit night last summer, Bushnell and his younger brother Ezra stealthily took the Turtle out into Long Island Sound for its maiden cruise. Squeezing himself through the hatch (the oaken vessel is only 7½ feet high), Bushnell seated himself on a horizontal beam, seized the tiller with one arm, let in water through a valve at his feet and slowly sank beneath the surface. He then maneuvered the ship forward by turning a crank that spins a two-bladed propeller...