Science Projects And Inventions

"He [Seymour Cray] is the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry." Larry L. Smarr, physicist Imagine if you could revolutionize the design of computers and leave the competition standing; U.S. inventor Seymour Cray (1925-1996) made a habit of doing just that. In 1972, with a long history of extending the reach of computer technology already behind him, Cray set up the Cray Research company to concentrate on building a powerful computer. His design for the Cray 1 was the first major commercial success in supercomputing. It was essentially a giant microprocessor capable of completing 133 million floating-point operations per second with an 8- megabyte main memory The secret to its immense speed was Cray's own vector register technology and its revolutionary "C" shape, which meant its integrated circuits could be packed together as tightly as possible. It produced an immense amount of heat and it needed a complex Freon-based cooling more...

"Political power...  grows out of the barrel of a gun...” Mao Zedong, political leader The basic mechanism from which the traditional flintlock originated is thought to have first appeared on a firearm made for King Louis XIII of France. The name of the French courtier Marin Le Bourgeoys appears on the flintlock, and it is thought to have been made in about 1612. The flintlock works as follows. First, the hammer of the gun, which holds a piece of flint, is pulled back or rotated to the half-cock position. Gunpowder is poured into the barrel, followed by ammunition— often a steel ball—and both are pressed into position with a ramrod. A small amount of finely ground gunpowder is then placed in a compartment below the hammer, known as the flashpan. The hammer is then pulled back or rotated to the full-cock position, and the gun is ready to be fired. more...

“... the only standard in worldwide use in the automotive industry." David Beecroft, Society of Automotive Engineers There is a part on all cars and bicycles whose design has not changed in more than a century: the tire valve. It was created by August Schrader (b. 1820), a German immigrant who owned rubber depots and warehouses in Manhattan. He became intimately linked with the rubber industry, making molds and brass fittings for Goodyear and the Union India Rubber Company. In 1890 Schrader received a request to research and develop an airtight seal for the newly developed pneumatic tire. Two years later, August and his son George applied for a patent for the Schrader tire valve. The valve consists of a small brass air tube with its outside surface threaded like a screw. The hollow tube contains a metal pin in its center, running parallel to the tube. Screwing a pump more...

"There are, Indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together..." Robert Louis Stevenson, writer The early history of the windmill is much contested, and it is not known for sure when or where it first appeared. Some date it as far back as Babylonia in the seventeenth century B.C.E., while others claim it was not until 200 B.C.E. that wind power was used to pump water in China and mill cereal in Persia. It is, however, reliably documented that windmills were widespread in Persia by the seventh century C.E. They ground grain between millstones rotated by wind blowing on woven reed sails mounted around a vertical axis. The earliest European windmills were built in France and England in the twelfth century and are thought by some to have been the result of a transfer of knowledge from the returning Crusaders. However, the horizontal-axis mills of northern Europe more...

Until the 1980s, most commercial audio recordings were made according to analog principles, with the original sound modulated onto another medium, the physical characteristics of which are directly related to the original sound. In contrast, digital recording sees the original sound converted to digital information and stored as a series of 1s and 0s—known as "bits." Although the principles of digital recording were already in place in the late 1930s, it was not until 1975 that a usable commercial system was developed, when Dr. Thomas Stockham (1933-2004) established Soundstream, Inc., the first dedicated digital recording company. The original audio was passed through an Analog-Digital-Converter (ADC), converted to 16-bit audio, and stored on a 1-inch (2.54 cm) Honeywell tape deck. To play back the sound, the digital information was passed through a Digital-Analog- Converter (DAC). The system offered the highest quality sound without any of the problems of analog recording. Mechanical more...

"Learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity, for the sake of transport." Benjamin Franklin Magnetically levitated (maglev) trains glide above a track, propelled by superconducting electromagnets. The principle is more than a century old, but initially the huge electrical currents needed to provide a sufficiently strong magnetic field were impractical. The breakthrough came when two physicists, Gordon Danby and James Powell, at Brookhaven National Laboratory decided to use high temperature superconductors as electromagnets. They obtained a patent for the technology in 1968, and by 1979 visitors to a transportation exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, were enjoying a short test run on a Transrapid maglev train. Maglev trains need a guiding track and the carriages float just above it. Changing the field produced by the electromagnets in the guideway pulls the train along. The only friction is due to air resistance, so extremely high speeds are more...

The ice skate is believed to have been invented circa 3000 B.C.E. in Finland. For many years scientists were not sure where exactly the skate originated, ancient models havina been found throughout Scandinavia as well as Russia. However, in 2008 news emerged that people living in what is now southern Finland would have benefited the most from skating on the crude blades. This country's nickname, "the land of the thousand lakes," is an understatement as it boasts no fewer than 187,888 of them. Finland is also a cold land and therefore each winter its thousands of frozen lakes have presented serious transportation problems for the population. With neighboring villages often separated by lakes, and rowboats locked up until spring, the options were to try to navigate around the frozen water or find a way to negotiate the slippery surfaces. The first skates consisted of the leg bones of large animals. more...

"We have your satellite. If you want it back send twenty billion in Martian money." Graffiti at NASA laboratory, Pasadena, California A space probe is a satellite that leaves the grip of Earth's gravity and moves off to flyby, or orbit, another solar system body. The first target was the moon. There were three U.S. attempts in 1958, Pioneer 2, and 3, which all failed. The U.S.S.R. had the first success in January 1959 with the Luna 1 probe, which was launched with the objective of impacting the lunar surface. It flew by, missing by 3,700 miles (5,950 km), but at least it got there. The U.S.'s Pioneer 4 flew past at a miss distance of 37,300 miles (60,000 km). The greatest early successes were Luna 2 (September 1959) and Luna 3 (October 1959), the first hitting the moon Just east of the Sea of Serenity and the second imaging more...

The concept of credit is not a new one. The word "credit" comes from the Latin word credo, to believe or trust, and we know that the Egyptians were using credit methods over 3,000 years ago. The credit card is a system of payment and is named after the plastic card issued to people who subscribe to the system. Although the term was used several times in Edward Bellamy's 1887 novel Looking Backward, and Western .Union issued charge cards to users from 1914, the modern credit card was not invented until 1949. It is said that Frank X. McNamara, a New York banker, came up with the idea after forgetting his wallet when out entertaining clients. He distributed 200 Diners Club cards, which were essentially charge card accounts as the bill had to be settled entirely on issue. Modern credit cards, where the issuer lends money to the consumer to more...

The boiler of a steam engine uses the heat from both fire and the hot gases produced by fire to boil water and produce steam. The efficiency of this process can be greatly improved if the contact area between the hot gases and the water vessel is very large. Instead of just having a kettle-type boiler sitting on a fire, a multiple-tube boiler passes the fire gases through the boiler along a series of narrow tubes. Cornish boilers had one tube, Lancashire boilers two, and marine and locomotive boilers had many tubes, which sometimes were passed back and forward through the boiler. The first two-pass multi-tube boiler was invented in 1828 by the French engineer Mark Seguin (1786- 1875). This quickly led to a considerable improvement in the power and speed of early railway engines and was a major factor in the success of George Stephenson's Rocket in the Rainhill more...