Inventors 18th century
Rudolph Ackermann the Elder was a German and British inventor and publisher, founder of Ackermann & Co.
He was the son of a master saddler, learned the craft and in time achieved a high art in carriage making, designing carriages and coaches. In 1794 Ackermann opened a printing and picture store in London, which quickly became popular. The following year he opened a printing shop at 96 Strand - thus began the printing business of the Ackermann dynasty, which lasted for over two hundred years.
Between 1808 and 1810. Ackermann published the first of his sumptuous plate books, The Microcosm of London, with beautiful hand-colored aquatints. This work established his reputation as a book publisher, and he subsequently published many more elaborate illustrated books. Ackermann also gained widespread fame for the periodical he founded in 1809, the Repository of Art, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashion, and Politics. This popular journal, published monthly until 1828, contained articles and illustrations of various kinds, especially on fashion, social and literary news.
Ackermann's business flourished, and by the end of 1820 he had established offices in Central and South America. Continuators of the Ackermann dynasty were in the printing business until the end of the twentieth centur
Louis Carrogis, better known as Carmontelle was a French artist, garden designer, architect, playwright and inventor.
Carmontelle was of simple origins but versatilely gifted. He wrote several plays and three novels, and created portraits of historical figures. He became famous for his painting of little Mozart at the clavier. In the service of Louis-Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, he was responsible for the theatrical performances for the family as stage designer and stage director.
Carmontelle is the planner and designer of one of the earliest examples of a French landscape garden in Paris, now known as Parc Monceau. In designing the garden, Carmontel rejected many of the fashionable trends in landscape design at the time, drawing inspiration from Japanese pleasure gardens and insisting on incorporating illusion and fantasy.
Carmontelle is also credited as the inventor of animated images. Translucent tape with landscapes depicted on it was slowly rolled from one roll to another against a backdrop of daylight, thus creating the illusion of walking through a garden.
Martin Engelbrecht was a German Baroque painter and engraver, publisher, and inventor of the first miniature dioramas.
Martin and his brother Christian were skilled printers and engravers in Augsburg, Germany in the 18th century. Martin's works include illustrations for Ovid's Metamorphoses, The War of the Spanish Succession, P. Dekker's Les Architectes Princiers, 92 views of Venice, and the Assemblage Nouveau Des Manouvries Habilles, a series of engravings depicting laborers and their clothing, published in Augsburg around 1730.
Also around 1730. Martin Engelbrecht created maps for miniature theaters, which, inserted into a display box, showed religious scenes and pictures of everyday life in three-dimensional perspective. He devoted an entire series to Italian theater. These miniature theaters or Engelbrecht dioramas are considered the earliest paper theaters in history, and they became very popular in the 18th century as a means of home entertainment. Engelbrecht is known to have created at least forty-one sets of miniature theater dioramas.
Jacob Christian Schäffer was a German inventor, naturalist, entomologist and mycologist.
Schäffer was a very versatile scientist. He is best known for his work in mycology (the study of fungi), but his most important publication was undoubtedly a book on daphnia or water fleas.
Schäffer also published reference books on pharmaceuticals and medicinal herbs. He conducted experiments on electricity, colors, and optics, and invented the manufacture of prisms and lenses. He invented the washing machine, designs for which he published in 1767, and studied ways to improve paper production.
Schäffer was a professor at the Universities of Wittenberg and Tübingen, a member of the Royal Society of London, and a correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences.
Samuel Thomas von Soemmering was a German physician, anatomist, anthropologist, paleontologist, physiologist and inventor.
He studied medicine at Göttingen, where he received his doctorate, and in the same year became professor of anatomy at Kassel, then at Mainz. Among Soemmering's contributions to biology are the discovery of the macula in the retina of the human eye, studies of the brain, lungs, nervous system, and embryonic malformations, and he published many papers in the fields of neuroanatomy, anthropology, and paleontology. He was the first to give a reasonably accurate account of the structure of the female skeleton.
Soemmering also worked on fossil crocodiles and pterodactyls, which at the time were called ornithocephalians. In addition, Soemmering dabbled in chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, and various other fields of science. Among other things, he investigated the refinement of wines and sunspots, and designed a telescope for astronomical observations. In 1809, Soemmering developed a sophisticated telegraph system based on electrochemical current, which is now preserved in the German Science Museum in Munich.
Johann Zahn (German: Johann or Johannes Zahn) was a German scientist and philosopher, optician and astronomer, mathematician and inventor.
Zahn studied mathematics and physics at the University of Würzburg, was professor of mathematics at the University of Würzburg, and served as a canon of the Order of Regular Canon Premonstratensians. His other activities were optics as well as astronomical observations.
In 1686 Johann Zahn invented and designed a portable camera obscura with fixed lenses and an adjustable mirror, which is the prototype of the camera. In his treatise on optics, Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus (1702), Zahn gives a complete picture of the state of optical science of his time. He begins with basic information about the eye and then moves on to optical instruments. The book is aimed at eighteenth-century microscope and telescope enthusiasts and includes all the necessary details of construction, from lens grinding to drawings.