On itch scratching, hitchhikers and growing within the interactive ecosystem
The story goes like this: A couple hundred years ago, Scottish chemist Joseph Black was approached by some Scotch distillers. With the explosion of coal power, they wanted to know exactly what techniques they should use to replace their wood-burning distilling processes with coal-fired methods. Black did some experimentation and developed for them the appropriate method. But his calculations reportedly inspired some new ideas in his colleague, James Watt, who took Black’s ideas of “latent heat” and used them in the development of a new steam engine....