10 Lesser Known BRITISH Inventions that Changed the WORLD

Kind of want to cover my entire house in linoleum right now to be honest.

These days the British are generally good at inventing things but relatively hopeless at making money from them.

Sir Alec Jeffreys, has caught more criminals, saved thousands of lives on death row, brought criminals to justice decades after the crime, with his invention of DNA finger printing... a total hero IMHO.

There is much more to tell about cat's eyes. They had a self cleaning feature that when a vehicle ran over the rubber mounting it would compress and it would be wiped to clean it. Ingenious!!

It’s a good job the cat was facing towards Percy Shaw, otherwise he would have invented the furry pencil sharpener.

The most earth shattering British invention or discovery in 20th- 21st Century, is the element GRAPHENE which is still being adapted for hundreds of materials and uses including computer parts, motor vehicle coverings and aeroplane manufacture due its lightness, contactivity and micro strength.

Also the Hovercraft invented by Chris Cockerell an English Inventor.

I was once scrolling through YouTube, and a gentleman was talking about inventions. I was gobsmacked. Practically everything out there in the modern world was invented by the British . It’s too numerous to list. It’s incredible.

The world's first ATM cash machine...Enfield London 1967.

With Harrison actually invented something far less well known but even more important whilst developing the Nautical Chronometer, the Bi Metal Strip which was used to automatically adjust for temperature changes to maintain accuracy in the mechanism. It's used in a huge number of things today, but from a British point of of view is most important for allowing the electric kettle to turn itself off.

Harrison’s chronometer was the result of a giant set of shipwrecks involving the wonderfully named Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell

It's interesting that the first synthetic dye was purple, as this was a notoriously difficult colour to produce using natural sources: one reason why many ancient societies like the Romans restricted the wearing of purple to the elite class.

And the very first ATM customer, in 1967, was a UK comedy actor called Reg Varney, who was in the sitcom, 'The Rag Trade', & was later the star of 'On The Buses', a hugely popular sitcom set in a London bus garage!!

Never mind the hypodermic noodle. Did you know that though champagne is French, it took a Brit to invent the champagne bottle?

Lino is great. It is waterproof, slip resistant, antibacterial and biodegradable. An excellent choice for bathrooms and kitchens.

As a proud Englishman , I enjoyed your video immensely, thank you. Kindest Bob England

British achievements given to the world: England was the first modern democracy, the creator of the industrial revolution, mass-production, the first (manu)factories, discovered how to mass-produce iron, (Abraham Derby, at Ironbridge Gorge), then went on to mass-produce steel (and invent stainless steel) and then invent Portland cement, on which the modern world is built. Although slavery hadn’t really existed in England for centuries, England was the first country to formalise that slavery was impossible in England. In 1772, England carried out the greatest act of genuine altruism in the history of the world, with the fight against the slave trade, which cost billions in today’s money, but from which the British gained nothing. Most of the great nations of the world, including the USA, use English law, including common law, and English values, including free speech (from the 1690s), banning of torture (from the 1640s), no one above the law (1215), jury trials (1100s), innocent until proven guilty. England pioneered the introduction of mechanical machines into farming, the first understanding of electricity, reliable navigation at sea (John Harrison, who invented the first practical marine chronometer), time zones (prime meridian runs through London for a reason), discovery of anti-biotics, the first understanding and common use of vaccines, first use of statistics to discover cause of disease, plus England was the country that first used metal framed building (for skyscrapers). Railways: (Thomas Newcomen, Richard Trevithick, James Watt, and George Stephenson "Father of the Railways"), the electric motor (Michael Faraday), the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), the steam turbine (Charles Parsons), and industrial hydraulics (Joseph Bramah and William George Armstrong). Television: John Logie Baird. Modern radar: (the cavity magnetron, invented by Sir John Randall and Harry Boot.) In 1940 Winston Churchill offered the magnetron to the Americans in exchange for their financial and industrial help for the war effort. The jet engine (Sir Frank Whittle), then the first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, and the first supersonic airliner, the Concorde. England taught America about nuclear chain reaction, and thus the atomic bomb. (Sir James Chadwick was a British physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspired the U.S. government to begin serious atomic bomb research efforts. He was the head of the British team that worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was knighted in Britain in 1945 for his achievements in physics.) Some of the great British names that have had a positive influence on the world: Sir Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, Charles Darwin, Charles Babbage (“father of the computer”) and Alan Turing, Professor Stephen Hawking, Alexander Fleming, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Sir Winston Churchill, Robert Baden-Powell, Charles Dickens, Florence Nightingale, T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), Edward Jenner (inventor of the smallpox vaccine), Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), James Clerk Maxwell (Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, and the resulting equations, were recognised as the greatest advance in scientific knowledge since Newton’s Principia), Joseph Lister (founder of antiseptic medicine).

You have missed what is probably the most important British invention, the Jet Engine! Yes, the Germans had a jet fighter in WWII, but they were designed from drawings copied from the inventor Frank Whittle. Unfortunately he was in the RAF and unable to patent it. After the war the British gave designs to the US for FREE!

Percy Shaw was telling a tale - the cats eyes arose from a chevron sign at the bend on a road from Rose Linda's pub above Halifax. Cut glass spheres were embedded in the white chevrons reflecting headlights back to the driver. He immediately thought "we want them in t' road" and set about doing it. He kept the patent for his invention and, though wealthy, spent very little. A typical Yorkshireman and interesting character.

Cavity Magnetron ? Just about every kitchen has one.