A great list of 2007 inventions

The Time Magazine article on inventions got a lot of play recently because it named the iPhone the best invention of 2007. That’s nice and all, but it is the rest of the article that is fascinating, because it provides a catalog of about a hundred really interesting inventions in 2007. What you do is start at the beginning of the article and press the “Next” button, or use the category list at the top of the article for entry points into the list:

Time: The Best Inventions Of The Year

If you do that, you will discover inventions like this:

The return of steam

Which leads you to articles like this:

Inside Bruce Crower’s Six-Stroke Engine

The basic idea is simple. The metal in an engine has a mass that gets really hot while the engine is running. What if we use that heat to produce steam while the engine is running? You run a normal four-stroke process, but then after the exhaust stroke you inject water into the cyllinder, which turns to steam, which produces another power stroke. In the process, you might get 40% more power out of the engine, essentially for free because you are simply reusing all the parts already in the engine. As an added bonus, the engine runs a lot cooler. Simple and elegant.

If you go through the whole list of inventions in the Time article you will find lots of stuff like that, and it sparks a lot of ideas.

For more info see How Car Engines Work and How Steam Engines Work

[[[See previous invention]]]