(However, some sources claim this tale is Victorian folklore, while others maintain the legend was created even later, during World War II.) In 1944, when he was 55, Midgley became entangled in the ropes and was strangled by them. After some initial attempts of short distance transmission, he improved the receiver range by simply using a vertical pole attached to a metal plate at the top and on the ground. In 1559, when Queen Mary passed away, Elizabeth came back to the Tower, this time for preparations for her coronation. Oops! To release the parachute, which had a surface area of 320 square feet and a height of 16 feet, Reichelt merely had to extend his arms out so his body was in a cross position. You won't find any live lions at the Tower of London today. Archeologists found two skeletons, an adult woman and a child, near the same spot where the headless body of Queen Anne was also laid to rest. A year later, he developed a system of language consisting of dots and dashes known today as the Morse code. In the year 105, Cai came up with the idea of making sheets of paper from a combination of natural ingredients including hemp waste, fishnets, old rags, and macerated bark from trees. When he contracted polio at age 51, he applied that inventor’s spirit to his impairment, creating a system of strings and pulleys that would make it easier for others to lift him out of bed. In 1939, Armstrong built his own FM station, which cost him more than $300,000 to prove how valuable the innovation was. He began his work on the accelerator in 1929, but it was actually one of his students named M. Stanley Livingston who undertook the project and finally built a device with the capability of accelerating protons to 13,000 electron volts (eV). Suffering from a learning disability, it’s reputed that Einstein did not learn to talk until age four and was often confronted by teachers for his inability to grasp concepts as fast as other students. While the kinescope was replaced by image orthicon tubes, Zworykin’s idea was the basis for television camera design. Isaac Newton admired him mainly for Huygens’ preference for synthetic methods of experimentations. Nicéphore Niépce probably wouldn’t have moved on to photography if Johann Nepomuk Franz Alois Senefelder of Germany hadn’t kept the method a secret. His greatest invention came about in 1887 when Berliner devised a flat recording disc on which a spiral recording groove was more effectively inscribed using a stylus that moved laterally. He made his own microscope using a high-quality lens with a short focal length. This created a carrier wave that static could not break into. On July 24, 1921, a group of Communists—including Abakovsky, revolutionary Fyodor Sergeyev, and four others—took the Aerocar out for a test run. HBO’s series Gunpowder depicts this prison break in the second episode. It was rigid and dirigible, allowing for a sustained flight of 12 hours at 45 miles per hour over Switzerland. Bessemer purchased the patent for it too.