Who kept the first weather records, and who invented the tin opener?

We explore the curious questions that science can answer

Drops of 13th century BC Chinese wisdom (Getty/iStock)

Who kept the first weather records?

Our Eurocentric view of science and technology sometimes fails to credit the debt we owe early scientists and inventors in the east. The study of oracle bones from the Shang dynasty capital in Anyang shows that systematic meteorological records were being kept as long ago as the 13th century BC. The Anyang oracle bones also refer to rainbows, which were thought to be visible rain dragons. In the Song period, in 1070 AD, a double rainbow was described as being due to the reflection of sunlight from suspended water droplets. This was two centuries before Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, a Persian, first satisfactorily explained that, in a rainbow, light is refracted twice and reflected once through a water drop. In Europe, the use of such a simple instrument as the rain gauge only started in 1639 AD, but there were rain gauges in Korea two centuries earlier and in China in the 13th century.

Where were dinosaurs discovered?

Dinosaurs were first found in the western world in Britain in 1817, when quarrymen in the village of Stonesfield, in north Oxfordshire, discovered some megalosaurus bones. It was eight years before another dinosaur was found, in 1825, by Dr Gideon Mantell who called the animal iguanodon.

Those bones were unearthed near Cuckfield in Sussex.

Where does the word “atom” come from, and who first thought of it?

The word atom comes from the Greek for “not cut”. The first person to think that atoms existed – that is, that everything was made up of combinations of indivisible objects – was a man called Democritus who lived in Greece in 400 BC. He thought that atoms were the smallest things that could exist, and this was generally believed until the early part of this century.

Where did (urban) Victorians get their ice?

They had ships bring it down from icebergs, glaciers, and so on, and then they brought large blocks of it to their homes. They kept it in cool rooms in their houses and chipped off bits as necessary. Needless to say, this was very wasteful and made the ice very expensive, so only the rich could afford it.

 Who invented the tin opener, and when?

There are three different dates involved. The first is 1858 when Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut, invented the tin opener – nearly 20 years after US canners switched from jars to tin cans and almost 50 years after the tin can was invented (1810). Previously, tin cans were opened with general-purpose tools – such as a hammer and chisel! In 1870, William Lyman of W Meridan (also in Connecticut) patented a tin opener that used a wheel for continuous operation, improving on the lever-and-chisel variety. A drawback was that the tin had to be pierced in the centre of the lid and the tin opener adjusted to fit each size of tin. In 1925 a wheel-type tin opener was patented (we don’t know by whom), which rode around the rim of the tin on a serrated wheel and was similar to the common type of tin opener that we know today. This was also a predecessor of the electric tin opener as regards its mode of operation. So tin cans were around for a good 50 years before anyone came up with tin openers.