will invent a vessel designed to make research into gases at extreme low temperatures easier, and it does. But the Dewar Flask also becomes the thermos bottle we use to this day, and — in a cruel twist of fate — its inventor doesn’t earn a penny from what would prove to be a billion-dollar idea.

Dewar came into this world in Kincardine-on-Forth, a still very small town the shores of the Firth of Forth, in Fife, Scotland. The youngest of six boys, he lost his parents at 15. But from an early age he knew his calling was science.

Like other prominent thinkers in the late 1800s Dewar dabbled in and contributed to the world’s knowledge in more than one branch of science, in his case chemistry and physics. It was during Dewar’s work with gases cooled to temperatures approaching absolute zero that it dawned on him there had to be a way to keep them as really, really cold as they needed to be long enough to study them in ways that were otherwise impossible.

Dewar built a machine in the early 1890s that could manufacture industrial quantities of liquid oxygen. But there was no effective way to store it, to keep heat out for extended periods. Liquids are kept in bottles, of course, but bottles have no thermal-retention properties per se — they just keep your floors dry.

It occurred to Dewar that putting a bottle within a bottle — and having the interior bottle barely touch anything in the outside world — would slow heat transfer by conduction. Creating a vacuum between the two bottles would stop heat transfer by convection: no gas molecules available to move the heat. And applying reflective material to the interior bottle would stop heat transfer by radiation. Stop (or greatly reduce) all three forms of heat transfer and you’ve done the trick.

So well, indeed, that a German company was formed to market it commercially. Thermos GmBH began selling its eponymous product in 1904, without any input from — or remuneration to — Dewar.

The absent-minded professor had failed to patent his invention. He did sue to try to get a piece of the action, but lost.

So successful was the idea of keeping cold things cold and hot things hot that Thermos itself in 1963 lost the right to use the name exclusively to describe its product, joining a rather large number of other “genericized” trademarks — including aspirin, cellophane, linoleum and even e-mail.

Dewar recovered from his misstep — perhaps with the aid of some Scotch whiskey that bears his name but was manufactured by a family to which he was unrelated. He marshaled on to have an impressive career, academically speaking.

Dewar’s research into high vacuums were used in later experiments in atomic physics. He was knighted. He won a smattering of awards. There is even a lunar crater named for him. When he died in 1923, Dewar still occupied the Fullerian Professor of Chemistry Chair at the Royal Institution of Great Britain he had assumed 46 years before.

Oh, yeah — the man who is responsible for but did not profit from the Thermos, and who wasn’t a member of the whiskey-making family, was nominated several times for a Nobel Prize in chemistry and … well, you get the idea.

Pass the Scotch, please.

Source: Various

Images: Wikipedia

See Also:

• Nov. 30: A St. Andrew’s Day Salute to Scottish Inventors
• June 1, 1495: King James Will Have a Scotch, Good Sir
• Disposable Hip Flask for The Determined Alcoholic
• An Emptied Flask Makes for Empty Promises
• March 13, 1842: Henry Shrapnel Dies, But His Name Lives On
• March 30, 1842: It’s Lights Out, Thanks to Ether
• Dec. 21, 1842: Birth of an Anarchist, and Darwin’s Detractor
• Sept. 20, 1952: Kitchen Blender Pegs DNA as Stuff of Life

Authors: John C Abell

to know more click here