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October 9, 2015
Q. Are there products in your household that trace all the way back to the 1880s?
A. Probably better to ask how many of them, since that inventive and creative period has been termed “The Miraculous 1880s” by Vaclav Smil of IEEE Spectrum magazine. From this decade came electricity and the internal combustion engine, two epochal discoveries that shaped the modern world. “Today's microchip-governed e-world is utterly dependent on an electricity supply whose fundamental design remains beholden to thermal- and hydropowered-generation systems, both reaching the commercial market in 1882.” And building on successful work with gasoline-fueled engines, just 10 years later Rudolph Diesel had designs for the gas turbine — ”the most efficient of all internal-combustion engines.”
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