Some Great Things Have Come Out Of Nottingham City Over The Years

Nottingham has been able to share a host of amazing things with the world, and below is a list of some of the brilliant things that the city has done.

Tarmac

A Nottingham surveyor by the name of Edgar Hooley passed by a tar works in 1901 where he noticed that a barrel of tar had been spilled and gravel had been piled on it to reduce the mess. 1 year later he would patent the process and the first road to use Tarmac was in West Bridgford.

Red, Amber & Green

Talking of roads, it pretty hard to imagine them without having any traffic lights, but there was a time that they didn’t and after thousands of deaths on British roads, a man named John Peake Knight from Nottingham took it upon himself to solve the issue in 1866. His solution was a gas powered revolving lantern which would have a red and a green light (no amber yet) and the first one would be set up close to the House of Commons.

Video recorder

Though it’s a pretty standard thing to be able to record your favourite shows today, this type of technology is less than 50 years old and was first invented in the city of Nottingham. In its day it was called the Telcan, was around £60 to buy and was able to record a total of 20 minutes of black and white video.

MRI

Another technological invention, though a bit further down the line than the video recorder, but definitely not any less significant. A professor from the University of Nottingham gave us the MRI machine, a revolution in the medical world. MRI is widely used in hospitals and clinics for medical diagnosis of disease without exposing the body to ionizing radiation.

Ibuprofen

Staying with medicine, in the 1960’s Boots Laboratories right here in Nottingham created ibuprofen and began selling it to the public in 1964 as a prescription medicine named Brufen. Its value to medicine is reflected by Its inclusion on the World Health organisation’s list of essential medications ,

Raleigh Bikes

The Raleigh bicycle manufacturer based in Nottingham, Founded in 1885 it is one of the oldest bicycle companies in the world. Raleigh employed thousands of people at their factories on Triumph Road, in 2006, the Raleigh Chopper was named in the list of “British Design Icons” in the Great British Design Quest organised by the BBC and the British Design Council. This list includes Concorde, Aston Martin, and the World Wide Web. The last bicycle produced with the ‘Made in Nottingham’ mark on it was in 2002; however there is still a prestigious design and distribution centre in Eastwood. Back To List