Eureka (UK TV series)

Eureka (sometimes referred to as Eureka!) is a British educational television series about science and inventiveness which was originally produced and broadcast by the BBC from 1982 to 1986, and repeated until 1987. Devised and written by Clive Doig and Jeremy Beadle, the series told the stories behind the inventions of commonplace objects.

Cast

Presented by Jeremy Beadle (series 1, 1982), then Sarah Greene (series 2, 1983), Paul McDowell (series 2 and 3, 1983 & 1985) and Wilf Lunn (series 4, 1986), the show featured an ensemble cast who re-enacted the moments of invention or performed humorous sketches to deliver key facts and information. Notable cast members included Sylvester McCoy, Simon Gipps-Kent, Bernard Holley,Madeline Smith, Mike Savage, Julia Binsted, Philip Fox and Jackie Clarke.

Each show also featured a segment showcasing a madcap and not always reliable invention by Wilf Lunn often to the bemusement of McCoy or another of the regular cast. In the fourth and final series, the format changed slightly and Lunn became the presenter, playing the Doctor of Alternative Invention at the Eureka Museum of Invention.

Eureka (company)

Eureka is a brand of Electrolux Small Appliances North America and a manufacturer of vacuum and other household floor and surface cleaners. The company offers a full line of vacuum cleaners, including uprights, canisters, sticks, handhelds, home built-in systems, battery-powered vacuums, steam cleaners and home cleaning systems. Eureka also manufactures aftermarket vacuum accessories, such as bags, belts and filters.

History

Eureka Vacuum Cleaner Company was founded in 1909 in Detroit, Mich. by Toronto, Canada-born real estate auctioneer Fred Wardell (1866-1952) to sell vacuum cleaners for which he had acquired several patents. At first only selling vacuum cleaners manufactured by others, in 1913 he and four partners purchased their first plant. In 1922 they introduced the Eureka Model 9, which undercut their main competitor Hoover by 50% in price, with the same horsepower motor and a front-mounted bag that customers preferred to Hoover's rear-mounted bag, offered with a 10-day home trial, becoming the Model T of the vacuum cleaner industry, selling 1 million units in three years. By 1927 Eureka sold 2 million units, selling one-third of all vacuums manufactured in the United States and settling into a perennial second place position behind Hoover.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia (ⁱ/ˌwɪkᵻˈpiːdiə/ or ⁱ/ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ WIK-i-PEE-dee-ə) is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet's largest and most popular general reference work.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name, a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Initially only in English, Wikipedia quickly became multilingual as it developed similar versions in other languages, which differ in content and in editing practices. The English Wikipedia is now one of 291 Wikipedia editions and is the largest with 5,081,662 articles (having reached 5,000,000 articles in November 2015). There is a grand total, including all Wikipedias, of over 38 million articles in over 250 different languages. As of February 2014, it had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors each month.