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Colt

Oct 1, 2025

Portland Cement, Electromagnet, Passenger Rail, and Matches

This week I learned about Portland cement, electromagnets, the passenger rail, and matches. These inventions were aiming to improve on their predecessors, and to make things convenient.

Electromagnets are devices that discharge electricity to attract iron, gold, copper, or any other absorbent metal. It was invented by William Sturgeon in 1824 after Oersted discovered the link between electricity and magnetism. The electromagnet is behind most common devices, such as motors and computers. 

Portland cement is the strongest type of cement on the planet and the most popular. It was invented by Joseph Aspdin in 1824. His son was able to improve upon it, and now modern buildings today rely on his son’s recipe. It can be very helpful in situations like, building sky scrapers, big buildings, and things that need a lot of structural building materials in general.

Passenger rail was an important innovation creating rail roads all across the world. Fascination with high pressure steam powered engines led to the inventing of the locomotive. The problem was, that we had nothing that would be able to support that kind of weight for travel. A man named George Stephenson built a reinforced rail in 1807 to be able to support the needs of passenger cars.

The match has a chemical head embedded on a stick. It ignites when struck due to friction. It was invented to light tobacco or a cigarette. It was invented by a young man, named John walker, in 1826.

These inventions where invented between the 1800s-1820s, and served us a great bit of time. In fact, we still use them today!