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...continuously and thus provide the proper torque to move a car's wheels directly. Rotary engines are smaller, peppier and potentially cheaper to build than conventional reciprocating models, and have only six major points of wear, v. 100 in a conventional engine. The most persistent bug, ever since Inventor Felix Wankel (pronounced Van-kel) introduced his first complete model in 1957, has been a tendency for the rotor tips to wear down too quickly. That problem apparently has been solved with modern metal-coating processes, but the rotary engine still has at least one major disadvantage. It uses about...
Army Game. Chess probably began as a simple diversion. Its origins have been "traced" to everywhere from Ireland and Egypt to an Indian tribe in South America; its inventor was supposedly everyone from Aristotle and King Solomon to a Buddhist monk seeking a substitute for war. The facts seem to support Chess Historian H.J.R. Murray, who says that the game was the "conscious and deliberate invention of an inhabitant of northwest India." The generally accepted date of its origin: A.D. 600. The game, substantially
...most startling-and certainly the costliest-of the new generation of cameras is a box of magic from Polaroid, the developer of instant photography. Like all previous Polaroid Land cameras, the compact new camera will almost certainly bear the name of its inventor, Edwin Herbert Land, the founder, president, chairman and research director of Polaroid. Dark-eyed and quite youthful for his 63 years, Land looks every inch the scientific genius. A paradoxical person, he alternates between lives as laboratory recluse and businessman-philosopher. He can be intensely shy and awkwardly unsure in face-to-face conversation...
Fortunately for both inventor and company, Polaroid managed to market its idea in other forms. Polaroid nonglare sunglasses, introduced in 1937, fared well with consumers, and the company still sells 25 million pairs of lenses annually. Polaroid grew quickly during World War II, producing goggles, glasses and filters, but it sagged after the war ended. In 1947 the company lost $2,000,000; it sorely needed to develop new products. Naturally, Land was ready with an idea...
...mass market, Kodak's chiefs were finally toppled from their complacency by the success of the Polaroid Swinger in the mid-'60s, and they ordered a hurry-up research project into an alternate system of instant photography. Land was no longer simply an ingenious inventor and customer; he was an enlarging and possibly troublesome competitor. Kodak executives were surprised by the high quality of the color prints produced by Land's small new camera...