Twentieth Century
- 1909, the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes develops the concept of enthalpy for the measure of the "useful" work that can be obtained from a closed thermodynamic system at a constant pressure.
- 1913 - Nikola Tesla patents the Tesla turbine based on the Boundary layer effect.
- 1926 - Robert Goddard of the USA launches the first liquid fuel rocket.
- 1929 - Felix Wankel patents the Wankel rotary engine (U.S. Patent 2,988,008)
- 1933 - French physicist Georges J. Ranque invents the Vortex tube, a fluid flow device without moving parts, that can separate a compressed gas into hot and cold streams.
- 1937 - Hans von Ohain builds a gas turbine
- 1940 - Hungarian Bela Karlovitz working for the Westinghouse company in the USA files the first patent for a magnetohydrodynamic generator, which can generate electricity directly from a hot moving gas
- 1942 - R.S. Gaugler of General Motors patents the idea of the Heat pipe, a heat transfer mechanism that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity and phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces.
- 1950s - The Philips company develop the Stirling-cycle Stirling Cryocooler which converts mechanical energy to a temperature difference.
- 1962 - William J. Buehler and Frederick Wang discover the Nickel titanium alloy known as Nitinol which has a shape memory dependent on its temperature.
- 1992 - The first practical magnetohydrodynamic generators are built in Serbia and the USA.
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Heat Engine Technology
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“... the nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Not.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Doubt, it seems to me, is the central condition of a human being in the twentieth century.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1947)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)