Famous London Inventors

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Here are my top 10 London inventors. My list includes some celebrities but some who really deserve a bit more of the limelight. There are so many to choose from we should not really stop at 10. How many of these have you heard of?
  1.     Alexander Cumming invented the U-Bend water trap to keep toilets from smelling.

  2.     Humphry Davy’s miners’ safety lamp allowed deep coal seams to be exploited giving a kick start to the industrial revolution.

  3.     Michael Faraday’s experiments yielded not just the electric motor, but also the generator and transformer - and thus our electricity-based way of life.

  4.     Antibiotics were developed by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain from Alexander Fleming’s chance observation that mould prevented the growth of bacterial cultures.

  5.     John Harrison’s lifesaving clocks for navigators and his ideas from the 18th century have led to a new super accurate mechanical clock in the 21st century.

  6.     Body Scanners first developed by Godfrey Hounsfield have revolutionised medicine.

  7.     The achromatic microscope lens invented by Joseph Jackson Lister spurred a new understanding of biology and particularly microbiology.

  8.     Christopher Merret combined glass making knowledge with secondary fermentation and has a claim to be the father of Champagne.

  9.     Aniline Dye discovered accidentally by William Perkin started a chemical industry.

  10.     William Playfair invented the pie chart and other popular forms of graph
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