Science Projects And Inventions

Modern offices rely heavily on spreadsheets for calculations and sorting data. The idea of transferring what used to be a large sheet of accounts that had to be calculated by hand to a computer was first proposed by Professor Richard Mattessich in 1961. In 1969, a spreadsheet-type application was developed by Rene Pardo and Remy Lamau for use on mainframe computers and was used for budgeting in some major companies. The spreadsheet in its modern incarnation, however, was conceived in 1978 by Dan Bricklin {&. 1951), a student at Harvard Business School. Bricklin imagined a computer program that would show the data it contained and enable easy manipulation and calculations. It would also recalculate instantly if the initial data changed. The prototype spreadsheet was not very powerful, so Bricklin recruited Bob Frankston (b. 1949), from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to improve it. Frankston added better arithmetic and the ability more...

In gilding, a thin layer of gold covers an object of base material to give the appearance of a solid gold object. Plywood originated in much the same way. With fine woods in short supply in Egypt around 3500 B.C.E., it became necessary to find alternative solutions to the demands of high-quality furniture making. One such solution involved taking thin sheets of decorative woods and glueing them to thicker pieces of low- quality wood. This is believed to have been done purely for cosmetic and economic reasons, but the process also brings about improvements to the physical properties of the resulting hybrid wood. Since the days of Egyptian plywood, the material has maintained its place in popular design, as illustrated by its use in the stylish furniture .of Gerrit Rietveld, Marcel Breuer, and Alvar Aalto.-Unlike the designers of 5,000 years ago, however, these men were aware that the plywood items' more...

"Speed has never killed anyone; suddenly becoming stationary... that's what gets you." Jeremy Clarkson, TV presenter Rather ironically, it was a Dutch rally driver, Maurits Gatsonides (1911-1998), who invented the speed camera. Gatsonides enjoyed most of his driving successes in the 1950s, and it was during this period that he came up with a device—known as the Gatso—to measure his speed while cornering in a bid to improve his driving, that is, to make him drive faster. The camera works by using radar to measure the speed at which a vehicle passes the device, photographing those that break the limit. Two photographs are taken and, should the initial measurement be questioned, the position of the vehicle relative to the white lines painted on the road indicates the average speed that the vehicle traveled at during a set time interval. Fixed speed cameras have been used widely in the United Kingdom, more...

By the age of nineteen, Cornishman Richard Trevitbick (1771-1833) worked for the the Cornish mining industry as a consultant engineer. The mine owners were attempting to skirt around the patents owned by James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, because the royalties were costing them a fortune. William Murdoch had developed a model steam carriage, starting in 1784, and demonstrated it to Trevithick in 1794. Trevithick thus knew that recent improvements in the manufacturing of boilers meant that they could now cope with much higher steam pressures than before. Using steam at a higher pressure, Trevithick could eliminate the need for a separate condenser, which was integral to the patents held by Watt, as well as peripherals such as the air pump. Further, Watt's low-pressure engines required large buildings to house them. By using high-pressure steam in his experimental engines, Trevithick was able to make them smaller, lighter, and more more...

"An enormous amount of water is thrown out... by means of a trifling amount of labor."   Diodorus siculus, historian The Archimedes screw was first mentioned in the writings of Athenaeus of Naucratis in 200 B.C.E. He described the use of a screw mechanism to extract bilge water from a ship named Syracusia, and attributed its invention to Archimedes. Archimedes (c. 287-212 B.C.E.) himself lived in Syracuse, Sicily, and was devoted to the exploration of mathematics and science. The polymath is thought to have spent time studying in Egypt, and the screw named for him is used in the Nile delta to this day, more than 2,000 years later, as a means to raise water from rivers for irrigation purposes. The Archimedes screw consists of a helix within a hollow tube, the lower end of which is placed in a fluid. The screw is then rotated and the fluid is more...

Possibly in 1834, Robert Anderson of Scotland created the first electric carriage. The following year, a small electric car was built by the team of Professor Stratingh of Groningen, Holland and his assistant, Christopher Becker. More practical electric vehicles were brought onto the road by both American Thomas Davenport (1802-51) and Scotsman Robert Davidson (1804-1894) circa 1842. Both of these inventors introduced non- rechargeable electric cells in the electric car. The Parisian engineer Charles Jentaud fitted a carriage with an electric motor in 1881. William Edward Ayrton and John Perry, professors at the London's City and Guilds Institute, began road trials with an electrical tricycle in 1882; three years later a battery-driven electric cab serviced Brighton. Around 1900, internal combustion engines were only one of three competing-technologies for propelling cars. Steam engines were used, while electric vehicles were clean, quiet, and did not smell. In the United States, electric cabs more...

Useful as it might have been, an indication to drivers of how fast their automobiles were actually moving was not an option for pioneer motorists. The first production cars sported no such frivolous extras, but the race to develop suitable technology had begun. Extrapolating speed from the time taken to travel a given distance had been used for centuries, but it was a system for indicating an automobile's speed in real time—the speedometer proper—that was needed. The electric speedometer, in a form that would be recognized today, appeared between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Josip Belusic, a Croatian professor from the (then) Aystro- Hungarian region of Labin, was granted a patent for his electric "velocimeter" as early as 188-8. Other inventors were to produce various speedometers over the years that followed, and although most would achieve the required objective—to measure the rotational speed of the wheels or some more...

"We have never succeeded In slowing down our nuclear fusion reactors." Wilson Greatbatch, inventor In 1950 Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989) took a break from designing nuclear weapons to study plasma physics with Igor Tamm (1895-1971) for a year, during which time they developed the concept for a machine that could produce energy through nuclear fusion. Tamm went on to win the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics; Sakharov was awarded the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. Progress on fusion power has been slow. Nuclear fission produces energy by splitting highly radioactive atoms of uranium or plutonium. However, fission also produces waste that is dangerously radioactive for 10,000 years. Fusion, on the other hand, produces energy by combining deuterium (heavy hydrogen) into helium, with no dangerous waste. Sea water has one atom of deuterium for each 6,500 atoms of hydrogen. Deuterium atoms are twice as massive as hydrogen atoms, so they are relatively easy more...

“I have little patience with scientists who... drill...holes where drilling is easy." Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist Stone Age man figured out that spinning a sharp rock on a wooden board would produce a circular hole—a useful discovery. The application of a bow to such a drill increased the rate of spinning and therefore the speed of boring the hole. By the nineteenth century, the bow had been replaced by geared machinery and the stone bit by metal, but otherwise the concept remained basically the same. Prior to the early 1860s, the standard drill bit consisted simply of a flattened, sharpened piece of metal. These "spade bits" were notoriously imprecise and also prone to rapid dulling when used on hard surfaces. American Stephen Morse believed that he could improve the standard drill bit, and, in 1861, he patented what has now become known as the twist drill. The device was the more...

"Anything that needs communications or control will be wirelessly connected." Vie Hayes Today's wireless networks owe much to one of the earliest computer networks, the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet. This radio-based system, created in 1970, had many of the basic principles still in use today. Early wireless networks were expensive, however, and their equipment was bulky. They were used only in places where wired networks were awkward, such as across water or difficult terrain. It was not until the 1980s, with the arrival of cheaper, more portable equipment, that wireless networking began to go mainstream. There was a problem, however. By the end of the 1980s several companies were selling wireless networking equipment, but it was all incompatible. What was needed was some joined-up thinking. Step forward the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and in particular Vie Hayes {b. 1941). Hayes did not invent any new technology, but more...