Distillations magazine

Unexpected Stories from Science’s Past

Inventions & Discoveries

The tools and technology that help us understand and change the world

Inventions & Discoveries

Wild Ice

For more than 100 years scientists have been discovering and creating bizarre, exotic ices. Ices that can even burn a hole in you!

Inventions & Discoveries

An Element of Order

Many scientists devised periodic systems in the 1860s, but Dmitri Mendeleev is today recognized as the father of the periodic table. How did this Russian provincial come to possess one of the most famous names in science?

Illustration depicting an early 19th-century London street scene with citizens commenting on the recent invention of gas-lighting.
Inventions & Discoveries

Bright Light

Coal fueled the cities of the Industrial Revolution. But coal did far more than power steam engines and heat homes.

Inventions & Discoveries

Dirty Business

Wars are often fought over resources, but as far as we know only one war has ever been fought over fertilizer.

Inventions & Discoveries

Positive Effect

Meet J. J. Thomson, who disproved Einstein’s dictum that the man “who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so.”

Inventions & Discoveries

Cellophane Comes to Buffalo

Jacques Brandenberger spent years perfecting a transparent, moisture-repellent film he named cellophane.

Inventions & Discoveries

Let It Bleed

Joseph E. Snodgrass’s poetry memorably reflected the public faith in bloodletting as medical treatment.

Old photograph of a worn cabin in arid mountains
Inventions & Discoveries

The Rocks at the Top of the World

Vanadium was a rare metal, but for 100 years after its first discovery in 1801 no one cared—until a chemist discovered it strengthened steel.

Leyden Jar Battery
Inventions & Discoveries

Leyden Jar Battery

Electricity and Enlightenment go together like Benjamin Franklin and 100-dollar bills.

Inventions & Discoveries

On the Scent: The Discovery of PKU

A mother’s dogged search for the cause of her babies’ mental decline led to the discovery of a new disease.

Inventions & Discoveries

Making the Process

By 1790 chemistry was the up-and-coming science. The products of chemistry—industrially useful salts, acids, and alkalis—would soon be measured not by the ounce (or the gram) but by the ton.

Joseph Black
Inventions & Discoveries

That Beautiful Theory

Joseph Black, one of the first to realize that air was composed of many gases, isolated carbon dioxide, and discovered latent heat.

Inventions & Discoveries

The Thin Green Line

The feud between William Crookes and Claude-Auguste Lamy over the newly discovered element thallium rested on the very definition of discovery.

Inventions & Discoveries

Cracking Down on Crude Oil

Faced with the prospect of a world without oil, French engineer Eugene Jules Houdry turned low-grade coal into gasoline.

Inventions & Discoveries

Breaking the Code

Two years after getting his PhD, future Nobel Prize winner Marshall Nirenberg set out to probe the genetic code despite having no experience in the fields at the forefront of this work.

Inventions & Discoveries

Communicating Underwater

Gutta percha, a natural plastic found in tree sap, allowed the expansion of the 19th century’s global communications network.

Inventions & Discoveries

Setting the Table

In the 19th century a young Italian outside the chemistry mainstream played a part in the creation of the first periodic table.

David Sarnoff
Inventions & Discoveries

The General

David Sarnoff wanted to be a journalist; instead he created commercial broadcasting and helped kick off the color revolution in television.