Science Projects And Inventions

The tampon with applicator was invented in 1929 by Dr. Earle Haas (1888-1981). The design, submitted for patent in 1931, consisted of a narrow tube nestling inside a bigger tube containing a cotton plug. When the narrow tube was pushed into the bigger tube, the tampon was guided into place in the vagina. Dangling from the end of the tampon was a piece of string that could be used for easy withdrawal. The use of disposable plugs for menstrual flow dated back to the ancient Egyptians who invented tampons made from softened papyrus. Over the years women improvised with the materials at hand: in Rome it was wool, in Japan paper, in Indonesia vegetable fibers, and in Africa rolls of grass. Haas registered the name Tampax as a trademark. In 1934, Haas's patents were purchased by a group of investors, leading to the birth of the Tampax Sales Corporation. The more...

French chemist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was one of the truly brilliant minds of the nineteenth century, whose groundbreaking work in the field of microbiology and chemistry led to a long list of scientific discoveries. He is perhaps best remembered today for his development of "pasteurization" in milk, and the invention of a number of vaccines, including rabies, and anthrax. His discovery of a vaccination for cholera, however, was something of an accident, although he was aware of the work of Edward Jenner (1749-1823), who pioneered the smallpox vaccine. In the summer of 1880, Pasteur was conducting experiments on chickens with cholera, and had instructed his assistant Charles Chamberland to inoculate the birds with a culture of cholera-bacteria. Chamberland failed to do so, and a month later the culture, which had now spoiled, was used of the birds. They became ill but did not die, so Pasteur introduced a new group more...

In 1886, Ferdinand Frederic Henri Moissan (1852-1907) became the first person to isolate fluorine gas, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Six years later, he designed an electric arc furnace with the intention of turning iron and sugar into diamonds by heating them to temperatures of 3500°C. It is doubtful that he ever succeeded in this endeavor; however, he did discover other high-temperature chemical reactions, including a practical method of producing acetylene. Moissan constructed his furnace using two blocks of limestone with a hollow cavity between them, into which he inserted two carbon rods. The sample to be heated was placed in the cavity and then an electric current of hundreds of amperes was put on the rods, creating an energetic stream—or arc—of vaporized carbon between them that produced temperatures of thousands of degrees. To make acetylene, Moissan mixed limestone and coal at high temperature to create more...

The Kodak Brownie was the first handheld camera suitable for use by everyone, including children. It cost just one dollar and it was designed by camera-maker Frank Brownell who had been asked to invent the cheapest camera possible, without compromising its reliability and quality by George Eastman, the founder of Kodak. However, it was not Brownell after whom the camera was named. During the 1890s, children's author and illustrator Palmer Cox was the Walt Disney of his day. His Brownie characters were so popular that they were used to advertise everything from sweets and dolls, to trading cards and cigars. Eastman thought that branding the new camera with the Brownie name would ensure its success. And he was right because the Brownie name became synonymous with popular photography for the next eighty years. It was a simple device consisting of a cardboard box and a meniscus lens, which was curved more...

"Hair brings one's self-image into focus; it is vanity's proving ground" Shana Alexander, Journalist Hair salons were exclusively for rich women of the 1890s, and it was in that decade that French hairdresser Alexandre Godefroy introduced the first blow-drying hair dryers to put in his salon. His makeshift dryer was simply a bonnet attached to a flexible chimney stuck onto a gas stove. It is hydrogen bonds that determine whether your hair looks like you have been dragged through a hedge backward or just walked out of a shampoo ad. Blow-dried hair generally looks better because it accelerates the temporary hydrogen bonds that reside in each strand of hair, allowing better control of shape and style. Curlers, straighteners, and all other hair appliances that work by heating the hair to change its shape are simply controlling the hydrogen bonding. Strong, hydrogen bonds are susceptible to humidity and completely disappear when more...

"Technical progress is made by integration, not differentiation." Max M. Munk, physicist and mathematician Early airplane engineers based their flying machines on the flight of birds. It soon became clear, however, that this method was limited. When a bird is in flight, air flows over its wings, and engineers realized that the flow of air over an airplane's wings would need to be simulated in order to uncover the secrets of flight. Early simulation methods included the whirling arm in which a wing was attached to a pole and rotated. Shortly after, Frank Wenham (1824-1908) designed a crude wind tunnel in which a fan channeled air down a tube.-This produced a controlled airflow, and harnessing this led to the first variable- density wind tunnel of Max Munk (1890-1986). Munk moved from Germany to the United States in 1920 to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He decided to more...

"My hydraulic brakes stop on a dime—and with change left over." Malcolm Lougheed, aviation and auto engineer Before the invention of hydraulic brakes, various systems of levers and pads were developed, but their main drawback was that they needed regular adjustment to maintain equal braking on all wheels. Hydraulic brakes, invented in 1918 by Malcolm Lougheed, addressed this problem and gave much more responsive braking. Hydraulic brakes work by having a series of pistons connected to the brake pedal and the brake pads themselves. These are all interconnected by a central "reservoir" of non-compressible fluid, initially a mix of water and alcohol. The differences in diameter of the pistons means that the same pressure inside the system magnifies the force applied to the brake pedal. This greater force allowed the brakes to be applied much more firmly and so bring cars to a quicker halt. The system was taken up more...

In the fall of 1882 part of New York's lower Manhattan flipped the switch on what seemed to many to be an unholy miracle—a centralized, commercial electrical system providing both power and light. The power station at its hub stood on Pearl Street, in the capital's financial district. This was the first permanent system of its kind. It used direct (as opposed to alternating) current and 3,000 electric lamps. The man behind it was the irrepressible multiple inventor and "wizard of Menio Park Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931). In the late 1870s one of the greatest quests of practical science had been to replace large, powerful electric arc lamps, which overheated easily, with smaller, safer lights. Edison's Electric Light Company, backed by a brace of prominent financiers including J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts, set about creating a parallel circuit where the current was divided between a string of small lamps more...

Before 1878, the separation of cream from milk occurred through nothing more than the force of gravity. This process took time and was also inefficient since it limited the amount of cream that could be processed from the milk. Cream is formed when the lighter fat molecules of cream rise to the top of the milk through its heavier water-based fraction. This process happens naturally in raw milk when it is left to settle for a period of at least twenty-four hours. Cream can then be skimmed off or the milk can be drained from underneath, leaving only the cream behind. Fortunately, help was at hand for the dairy industry. Stockholm Institute of Technology graduate Carl Gustaf de Laval (1845-1913) had been experimenting with centrifugal force as a way of separating fluids. In 1878 he invented a steam-driven device that spun raw-milk sample at 4,000 revolutions per impute. Under the more...

"Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several.....thousand things that won't work." Thomas Edison American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) filed more than 1,000 patents during his lifetime. He fell into- the world of telegraphy after he saved a three-year- old boy from being struck by a train. To repay his good deed the child's father agreed to teach him railroad telegraphy. Edison quickly picked up the skill and went to work as a telegraph operator at Western Union. Although he was eventually fired from his job, Edison's interest in telegraphy was born. At the time, one wire could only send one telegram in one direction at a time; consequently sending and receiving messages was a slow process. Edison perfected the existing system to one signal in one direction and one signal in the other, and he called this duplex telegraphy. He later made it possible more...