Matt Gillingham's List: 19th century inventions

• However, it would not be until the mid-19th century that successful machine-gun designs came into existence. The key characteristic of modern machine guns, their relatively high rate of fire and more importantly machine (automatic) loading, came with the Model 1862 Gatling gun, which was adopted by the United States Navy. These weapons were still powered by hand; however, this changed with Hiram Maxim's idea of harnessing recoil energy to power reloading in his Maxim machine gun. Dr. Gatling also experimented with electric-motor-powered models; this externally powered machine reloading has seen use in modern weapons as well. The Vandenburg and Miltrailleuse volley (organ) gun concepts have been revived partially in the early 21st century in the form of electronically controlled, multibarreled volley guns. It is important to note that what exactly constitutes a machine gun, and whether volley guns are a type of machine gun, and to what extent some earlier types of devices are considered to be like machine guns, is a matter of debate in many cases and can vary depending which language and exact definition is used.

• A revolver works by having several firing chambers arranged in a circle in a cylindrical block that are brought into alignment with the firing mechanism and barrel one at a time. In contrast, other repeating firearms, such as lever-action, pump-action, and semi-automatic, have a single firing chamber and a mechanism to load and extract cartridges into it. A single action revolver requires the hammer to be pulled back by hand before each shot. In contrast, in a double action revolver, squeezing the trigger can pull back the hammer to cock the gun as well as serving to release the hammer.
• In a single action revolver, the hammer is manually cocked, usually with the thumb of the firing or supporting hand. This action advances the cylinder to the next round and locks the cylinder in place with the chamber aligned with the barrel. The trigger, when pulled, releases the hammer, which fires the round in the chamber. To fire again, the hammer must be manually cocked again. This is called "single action" because the trigger only performs a single action, of releasing the hammer. Because only a single action is performed and trigger pull is lightened, firing a revolver in this way allows most shooters to achieve greater accuracy. Additionally, the need to cock the hammer manually acts as a safety.
• In the development of firearms, an important limiting factor was the time it took to reload the weapon after it was fired. While the user was reloading, the weapon was nearly useless, and an adversary might be able to take advantage of the situation and kill or wound the user. Several approaches to the problem of increasing the rate of fire were developed, the earliest being multi-barreled weapons which allowed two or more shots without reloading. The first revolvers were partly an attempt to improve on pepper-box type weapons, which used a revolving cylinder with one set of firing mechanisms, but which had multiple barrels as well. Firing through a single barrel saved the expense and weight of having the multiple barrels of the pepper-box.
• In 1836, Samuel Colt patented a revolver mechanism that led to the widespread use of the revolver. According to Samuel Colt, he came up with the idea for the revolver while at sea, inspired by the capstan winch, which had a ratchet and pawl mechanism on it, a version of which was used in his guns to rotate the cylinder. Revolvers proliferated largely due to Colt's ability as a salesman. Revolvers have remained popular to the present day in many areas

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• The soda fountain was made with attempts to replicate mineral waters that bubbled up from the Earth's crust. Many civilizations believed that drinking and/or bathing in these mineral waters cured diseases, and large, profitable industries often sprang up around hot springs, such as Bath in England or the many onsen of Japan.
• The soda fountain began in Europe but achieved its greatest success in the United States. Benjamin Silliman, a Yale chemistry professor, was among the first to introduce soda water to America.
• n 1832 John Matthews of NYC and John Lippincott of Philadelphia began manufacturing soda fountains.
• Before mechanical refrigeration, soda fountains used natural ice to cool drinks and ice cream. Ice harvesters cut frozen lakes and ponds into large blocks of ice in the winter and stored the blocks for use in the summer.
• In their heyday, soda fountains flourished in drugstores, ice cream parlors, candy stores, dime stores, department stores, and train stations. They served an important function as a public space where neighbors could socialize and exchange community news

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• In 1865, Rev. Rasmus Malling-Hansen of Denmark invented the Hansen Writing Ball, which went into commercial production in 1870 and was the first commercially sold typewriter. It was a success in Europe and was reported as being used in offices in London as late as 1909.^[6] In addition, Malling-Hansen used a solenoid escapement to return the carriage on some of his models and was a responsible candidate for the first "electric" typewriter. From the book Hvem er Skrivekuglens Opfinder?, written by Malling-Hansen's daughter, Johanne Agerskov, we know that, in 1865, Malling-Hansen made a porcelain model of the keyboard of his writing ball and experimented with different placements of the letters to achieve the fastest writing speed. Malling-Hansen placed the letters on short pistons that went directly through the ball and down to the paper. This, together with placement of the letters so that the fastest writing fingers struck the most frequently used letters, made the Hansen Writing Ball the first typewriter to produce text substantially faster than a person could write by hand.

   

  Malling-Hansen developed his typewriter further through the 1870s and 1880s and made many improvements, but the writing head remained the same. On the first model of the writing ball from 1870, the paper was attached to a cylinder inside a wooden box. In 1874, the cylinder was replaced by a carriage, moving beneath the writing head. Then, in 1875, the well-known tall model was patented and it was the first of the writing balls that worked without electricity. Malling-Hansen attended the world exhibitions in Vienna in 1873 and Paris in 1878. At both exhibitions, he received the first-prize medals for his invention.^[7][8][9]
• The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1867 by Christopher Sholes,^[1] Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sholes soon disowned the machine and refused to use or even to recommend it.^[1] The patent (US 79,265) was sold for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost, who made an agreement with E. Remington and Sons (then famous as a manufacturer of sewing machines) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, which was the origin of the term typewriter. Remington started production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in Ilion, New York. It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which because of the machine's success slowly was adopted by other typewriter manufacturers.