Science Projects And Inventions

"[Red Clay Creek] demonstrated for the first time the fully integrated automatic factory" Eugene Ferguson, historian of technology In 1782, Oliver Evans (1755-1819), along with his brother Joseph, opened a village store in Maryland. There, dealing with the local milling community, Evans discovered how cumbersome the milling process was. The stone or log mills were quite primitive, requiring hours of hard labor, and the flour produced by them was often contaminated with dirt from the floor. Evans suspected that there was a better way to make flour, and he began to design an automatic flour mill. The site of Evans's flour mill was in Red Clay Creek, where an old stone mill had been built in 1742. By 1785 the automatic flour mill was in operation. It consisted of a bucket elevator, a belt conveyor, a horizontal conveyor, and S mechanical hopper-boy, which was a rake used for spreading and more...

"The S3200 standard will sustain the position of IEEE 1394 as the absolute performance leader..." James Snider, 1394 Trade Association During the mid-1980s, engineers at Apple, Inc., began working on a new, high-speed data transfer medium to exchange large amounts of data on computers. They dubbed this technology "FireWire"in view of the increased speed, and released it in 1995. Apple's engineers produced their first specification sheet for the setup in 1987. The company realized that USB devices were fine for keyboards and mice, but faster speeds were required for high-memory applications, such as video cameras, which had many gigabytes of data to be exchanged. They approached the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) with the intention of making the technology the standard for all computers, both Macintosh and Windows-based, which the IEEE endorsed in 1995. The first instance of the interface system was called IEEE 1394 and had data more...

Before the invention of the lawn mower, fine lawns were the exclusive preserve of those who could employ gardeners to scythe the grass. English engineer Edwin Beard Budding (1795-1846) invented the cylinder mower to maintain the grass of sports fields and the gardens of the wealthy. Patented in England in 1830, Budding's machine used a heavy roller to drive the cylinder, requiring two gardeners to push and pull it. The Regent's Park Zoological Garden in London was an early adopter, using one in 1831. By 1860 lawn mowers were being manufactured in eight roller sizes, up to 36 inches (900 cm), and in 1859 Thomas Green produced the first chain-driven mower. Grass boxes were added during the 1860s. A steam-powered mower fueled by petrol or kerosene was patented in 1893 by James Sumner, who co-founded the Lancashire Steam Motor Company (later the Leyland Motor Company) in 1896 to produce steam-powered more...

"We ride nonpolluting bicycles to save mankind, but we lock them because we can't trust mankind." Unknown In 1206 an Arab scholar, AI-Jazari, published a book called Kitab fi ma'rifat al-hiyal al-handasiyya (Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices). The little- known academic described numerous devices that had not yet been invented, including the waterwheel, the crankshaft, and the combination lock. In 1550 an eccentric Italian mathematician expanded on AI-Jazari's early ideas and produced what is now recognized as the first combination lock. Gerolamo Cardano (1501-1576), notoriously short of money, kept himself financially afloat through successful gambling and chess playing. But he was also a notable inventor and produced a practical product to help keep possessions secure. Cardano's design used a number of rotating discs with notches cut into them. The lock could be secured by a pin with several teeth that hooked into the rotating discs. When the notches more...

"Today, we are in a state where a car can drive 100 miles... before human assistance is necessary." Dr. Sebastian Thrun, Stanford University As professor at the Universitat der Bundeswehr Munchen, Ernst Dieter Dickmanns (b. 1936) and his team designed a fully automated, driverless vehicle. They equipped a van with a series of cameras and sensors that processed images of the changing scenery and relayed the information to a mechanism that controlled the steering, accelerator, and brakes. This was not the first autonomous vehicle to drive unmanned. Nearly a decade earlier, the Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Lab in Japan created an automobile that could travel around a specially designed and clearly marked course at speeds of up to 18 miles (30 km) per hour. But in 1986 Dickmanns's van did a lot better, navigating its way around ordinary (albeit empty) roads, attaining a top speed of about 60 miles (100 km) more...

"Opportunities are... everywhere and so you must always let your hook be hanging." Augustine "Og" Mandino, writer The major problem with dating inventions earlier than the written word is that there are no first-hand accounts documenting their conception or use. Paleoarcheologists have the difficult task of piecing together the prehistory of man based on scraps of physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. The fishhook is one such ingenious conception of early man and is probably more important to the success of humans than most of us would suspect. The earliest examples of fishhooks so far found by archeologists date from around 35,000 B.C.E. Appearing well before the advent of metalworking, early fishhooks were fashioned from durable materials of organic origin such as bone, shells, animal horn, and wood. With the addition of a variety of baits on the hook, prehistoric man gained access, previously largely denied, to an more...

The aneroid barometer is now a small, inexpensive, robust, accurate, lightweight, and portable instrument. It does away with the delicate glass tubes of weighty mercury and easily overturned reservoirs of the original instrument, relying instead on a sealed bellows-type flexible'" container. This container contracts or expands according to the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. The pressure is displayed on the dial by a mechanically driven lever or pointer. This dial is usually fitted with a second pointer that can be set manually to indicate the current pressure. Thus the rate of pressure change can be assessed, as well as whether it is increasing or decreasing. The concept of the aneroid barometer was suggested by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1698 but the first working model was made and patented in 1843 by the French scientist and engineer Lucien Vidie (1805-1866). He developed the idea from his work on pressure-measuring manometers on more...

Only the visual and radio bands of the electromagnetic spectrum pass through Earth's atmosphere relatively unhindered. For everything else, gamma-ray. X-ray, ultraviolet, and infrared, observations of space are much better from above Earth's atmosphere. The first real telescope in space was Orbiting Solar Observatory-1 (OSO-1), which was launched into a low Earth orbit on March 7, 1962, from Cape Canaveral. The lower portion rditated every two seconds, and the upper portion was fixed in space, using sun sensors and servomotors to point instruments accurately at the solar disc. The main aim was to observe solar flares—extremely violent explosions that occur near sunspots on the solar surface—in the gamma-ray, X- ray, and ultraviolet wavelengths. The spinning part of the spacecraft searched the whole sky for stellar gamma-ray sources. After three months and over 1,000 orbits the effectiveness of OSO-1 was greatly reduced when the United States tested a nuclear device at more...

"This... revolutionary piece of technology ...has the potential to change people's lives." Anita Lifestone, Royal National Institute for the Blind Clinical trials were held in the United States in 2007 when seventy patients were fitted with a new device called the Argus II, which uses a camera connected to spectacles that feeds visual information to electrodes in the eye. In this trial, blind patients were able to see shape and movement. It seems that we could have a true "bionic eye" in the very near future. Prosthetics to restore vision have been researched since the 1950s. Usually ocular prosthetics consist of a thin, curved sheet—generally made of a type of glass called cryolite or medical grade acrylic—that is fitted over the existing nonfunctioning eye. More recently, however, researchers have been trying to restore vision to those who have lost it—although it is extremely difficult to give sight to people who- more...

"The stirrup... enabled the horseman to become a better archer and swordsman." Professor Albert Dien, historian The oldest recorded account of a single metal mounting stirrup is a depiction found on a pottery shard uncovered from a tomb in western China belonging to the Jin Dynasty and dating to around 300 B.C.E. The stirrup was at first used primarily as a tool to assist the rider in mounting his horse. China at that time was constantly plagued by threats of mounted warfare from its northern nomadic neighbors. Considering that the Chinese developed the harness and horse collar a thousand years before their arrival in Europe, and that they had an established expertise in metal casting, it is not surprising that stirrups appeared among China's elite mounted cavalry. Their use of a single stirrup for mounting soon evolved toward using stirrups in pairs to provide a stable foundation for riding and more...