Discoveries

Microscope
The most remarkable of all the seventeenth- century microscopists was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who held the position of janitor at the Delft City Hall for all of his adult life (it was a sinecure). Building his own microscopes, he was the first to describe spermatozoa- reporting the discovery rather nervously, fearing it might be considered obscene. He was the first to describe structure that could only be bacteria. No one else was to see bacteria again for over a century, that is, until microscopes were devised that could magnify as well and as clearly as Leeuwenhoek's tiny lenses.

Porcelain
How to manufacture porcelain, or "china," was a mystery known only to the Chinese until around 1700. Although imitation porcelain was made earlier in Italy, it was Johann Friedrich Böttger, of saxony, who made true porcelain (the Dresden china) for the first time in the Western world.

Rubber
Until the 1830s, rubber was not a very useful material. It grew stiff and hard in cold weather and soft and sticky in warm weather. Charles Goodyear, no chemist, a business failure, and once imprisoned for debt, decided to recoup his fortunes by finding a way to improve rubber. He first experimented by adding sulfur and failed. But one day he spilled his mixture on the stove by accident and found when he picked up the hot rubber-sulfur mixture that he had something that was dry and flexible at all temperatures. He patented this discovery of "vulcanized rubber" in 1844. It was the first important advance in what is now called "polymer chemistry". Goodyear's process was too simple, however, and many people infringed on the patent.When he died in 1860, Goodyear was more in debt than ever. He owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Safety Pins
Long before William Hunt invented the safety pin in 1849, a kind of safety pin made of gold was used by the Etruscans, in the seventh century
B.C.