David Alter - Inventions

Inventions

Dr. David Alter is credited with having invented:

  • 1836 - the electric telegraph, predating the Morse telegraph in 1837.
  • 1840 - his electric buggy - the forerunner of the automobile.
  • 1845 - a patented method to manufacture and purify bromine from salt wells, highly useful in the iron industry and displayed in the World's Fair of 1853 (see: Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York City).
  • 1854 - spectrum analysis, the idea that every element has its own emission spectrum: a breakthrough development in spectroscopy. The published article was: On Certain Physical Properties of Light Produced by the Combustion of Different Metals in an Electric Spark Refracted by a Prism. He included a chart of the colored lines or bands of twelve metals and paved the way by showing the spectral lines of brass corresponded to copper and zinc.
  • 1855 - an expansion of spectrum analysis to include the optical properties of gas. These discoveries were later implemented and included by Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen in the Three Laws of Spectroscopy.
  • 1858 - a patented method to extract oil from coal and shale, along with a partner Samuel Hill. Their invention sped manufacturing, but was replaced by technology in a few years.
  • An electric clock.
  • A short range type of telephone - forerunner of the Graham Bell telephone.

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Famous quotes containing the word inventions:

    “I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer cycling costumes, but they make a horrid racket, and are particularly objectionable. So are the Bloomers. Nothing more abominable has ever been invented. Perhaps the automobile tricycles may succeed better, but I abjure all these works of the devil.”
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)

    “In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not; the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”
    —Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, Baron of Saltwood (1903–1983)