Fantastic Welsh Inventors

To celebrate St David's day, we're taking a look at some of the most intriguing inventions to come out of Wales.

Philip Vaughan - Ball Bearings

If there's part of a machine that turns, chances are ball bearing will be involved. They are small balls that are placed in between a stationary and moving part of a machine. Because they rotate, they create less friction than if the two pieces were rubbing against each other. 

Ball bearings have actually been used since ancient times but they were first patented by Philip Vaughan in 1794 and were first used between the axle and wheel of a carriage to allow the wheel to move freely. In all that time, the design hasn't really changed at all!

Sir William Grove -  Fuel Cells

One of the alternatives to petrol and diesel powered cars is by using hydrogen fuel cells which combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. They were in fact invented over 100 years before we even knew we'd need them way back in 1842. This wasn't the only way that Sir William was ahead of his time though, he also showed that you could use electricity to make light - over 30 years before Edison used the same process to invent the lightbulb!

Isaac Roberts - Deep Space Photography

The big problem with taking photos of space was always that in order to take pictures of really faint stars, the camera needed a really long exposure - the length of time that the lens lets light in - up to an hour or more. Now this would be ok if you were just taking a normal photo (if you could sit that still) but when you are taking photos of space, you've also got to worry about the rotation of the Earth. If you have the shutter of a camera open for an hour, the bit of space you were looking at when you started won't be the same as the bit of space you are looking at an hour later. Roberts solved this in 1886 by putting his camera on a telescope that could be aimed at the same place for a long time. He managed to use this technique to take the first picture of Andromeda, showing that it was a spiral galaxy which was quite a surprise for astronomers at the time. 

Tom Parry Jones -  The Breathalyser

Tom Parry Jones built on knowledge about how to measure the amount of alcohol someone had consumed by testing their breath to develop the first electronic breathalyser in 1967 when the Road Safety Act 1967 came in to make it illegal to be in charge of a car with a certain amount of alcohol in your system. Over the years they improved the design and accuracy and gave their machines some pretty fun names like the Alcolyser, the Intoximeter and the Alcolmeter! 

Robert Recorde - The = sign

We've had maths for thousands of years but, believe it or not, we've only had an equals sign since 1557! Until then people just wrote the words 'is equal to' and apparently Recorde got so fed up of writing it, he invented a sign to represent it - he chose 2 parallel lines because 'no two things can be more equal'