Meanwhile, on the global scale, contraceptives are helping the human population gradually level off our number will probably stabilize by the end of the century. With fewer mouths to feed, modern families have achieved higher standards of living and can provide better for each child.

Not only have birth control pills, condoms and other forms of contraception sparked a sexual revolution in the developed world by allowing men and women to have sex for leisure rather than procreation, they have also drastically reduced the average number of offspring per woman in countries where they are used. (Image credit: Photo by SSPL/Getty Images) When Bell died on August 2, 1922, all telephone service in the United States and Canada was stopped for one minute to honor him. The invention quickly took off and revolutionized global business and communication. His father taught speech elocution and specialized in teaching the deaf speak, his mother - an accomplished musician - lost her hearing in later life and his wife Mabel, who he married in 1877, had been deaf since the age of five, according to Evenson.

Edward Evenson in his book, “ The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray-Alexander Bell Controversy and Its Many Players” (McFarland, 2015).īell’s inspiration for the telephone was influenced by his family. Three days later, Bell made the first telephone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson, saying 'Mr Watson, come here - I want to see you,' according to author A. Several inventors did pioneering work on electronic voice transmission - many of whom later filed intellectual property lawsuits when telephone use exploded - but it was Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell who was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone on Ma(his patent drawing is pictured above). This poster attached to a curbside mailbox advised World War II servicemen to take the drug to rid themselves of venereal disease.Ībout 1 in 10 people have an allergic reaction to the antibiotic, according to a study published in 2003 in the journal Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology even so, most of those people go on to be able to tolerate the drug, researchers said.

Penicillin was being mass-produced and advertised by 1944. That antibiotic mold turned out to be the fungus Penicillium, and over the next two decades, chemists purified it and developed the drug penicillin, which fights a huge number of bacterial infections in humans without harming the humans themselves. The sample had become contaminated with a mold, and everywhere the mold was, the bacteria was dead. In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-filled Petri dish in his laboratory with its lid accidentally ajar. It's one of the most famous discovery stories in history. Alexander Fleming pictured in his laboratory (Image credit: Bettmann / Contributor)

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