Science Projects And Inventions

Primitive padlocks have been around since medieval times, but their design left them prone to force or picking. In 1720, Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem (1661-1751) conjured up a lock that was much more resistant to the dexterous hands.of lockpickers. Polhem was one of the most gifted mechanical engineers of his day. After studying mathematics, physics, and engineering at Uppsala University, he set up as a clock repairer. His ingenuity was soon spotted by important patrons, including King Charles XI of Sweden. Polhem went on to design many intricate devices both small (watch mechanisms) and large (industrial machinery). Perhaps his most enduring invention, however, was the padlock. His basic design comprises an elliptical cast iron body containing a series of rotating disks. When locked, the disks fit into grooves on the shackle (the U- shaped bar on top of the padlock), preventing its release from the body. Notches on the discs more...

"The world can only be changed one piece at a time. The art is picking that piece." Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955) knows a lot about changing the world. There was a time when his web pages were the only pages on the World Wide Web. Born to parents who had met while developing one of the earliest computers, Berners-Lee studied for a physics degree from Queen's College, Oxford, then headed straight for the computer industry. By 1989 he was working in Geneva, Switzerland, at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. CERN was interested in finding 'a way by which groups of researchers could share information more easily. Berners-Lee saw the'- potential for marrying hypertext—a technique for linking documents together using clickable words—with the Internet, which was already heavily used by CERN. Working with colleague Robert Cailliau, he proposed a system he called the World Wide Web. The first more...

"They come and pushed me off. They come with the cats... the Caterpillar tractors." The Grapes of Wrath, Nunally Johnson screenplay When you want to navigate areas where the terrain is uneven and muddy, what better solution than to take the road with you? This was precisely the conclusion of Englishman Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) when he invented the "portable railway," the earliest incarnation of a full-track vehicle. Although his 1770 patent is open to interpretation, it could describe anything from a vehicle with shoed wheels to a system similar to that seen today where continuous tracks run between front and rear wheels. The nineteenth century saw a glut of patents filed for vehicles sporting tracks. However, they suffered from problems such as poor steering and a lack of materials capable of taking the stresses and strains exerted by the system. But perhaps the biggest stumbling block was insufficient propulsive power, more...

  “The best materials… include obsidian (a form natural glass), chert, flint, and chalcedony.”   -  Floyd Largent, writer The very first human invention consisted of sharp flints, found and used in their natural state by primitive peoples, who then went on to purposely sharpen stones. The practice reaches back to the very dawn of humankind; stone tools found in 1969 in Kenya are estimated to be 2,600,000 years old. The principal types of tools, which appeared in the Paleolithic period, and varied in size and appearance, are known as core, flake, and blade tools. The core tools are the largest and most primitive, and were made by working on a fist-sized piece of rock or stone (core) with a similar rock (hammerstone) and knocking large flakes off one side to produce a sharp crest. This was a general-purpose implement used for hacking, pounding, or cutting. Eventually, thinner and sharper more...

"David defeated Goliath with a sling and a rock. He killed him without even using a sword." Samuel 17:50 The sling is a prehistoric weapon probably dating back more than 10,000 years. The oldest known surviving slings were found in Tutankhamen's tomb, dating from 1325 B.C.E. And of course slings feature in the Bible, most famously in the story of David and Goliath. A sling is used to throw a missile many times farther than is possible with the human arm alone. It consists of a cradle, or pouch, in between two lengths of cord. A stone is placed in the pouch. Both cords are held in the hand, and the thrower draws back his arm and swings the sling up and forward. One of the two cords is released and the stone is projected away. As a weapon, the sling was a great success, being cheap to make, light more...

The crossbow originated in ancient China circa 550 B.C.E. and is thought to have been developed from the horizontal bow trap, which was used to kill game. For use as a Weapon, the Chinese developed many different designs of crossbows and drawstrings. Some had stirrups attached to them to hold the bow down when the bowmen were rearming. Later crossbow- cannons had winches to pull back the strings, because people would not have been strong enough to do this unaided. The Chinese also invented grid sights in 100 C.E. and a machine-gun type of crossbow, which had a magazine of bolts fitted above the arrow groove; as one bolt was fired another dropped into its place. Poisoned crossbow bolts were also used. Knowledge of the crossbow was probably transmitted from China to Europe via the Greeks and Romans. The weapon could be used by an untrained soldier to injure or more...

"Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko told a television interviewer that 'the price they had to pay was not fair.'" Time magazine on Soyuz 11 Space stations are permanently manned orbiting crafts that are designed to stay in space continuously. The first one, Salyut 1, was launched by the U.S.S.R. on April 19, 1971. It was about 65 feet (20m) in length and 13 feet (4 m) in diameter. The docking mechanism on the first crew's Soyuz 10 spacecraft failed, so it was first occupied by the Soyuz 11 three-man team who stayed in orbit for just under twenty-four days. Sadly all three men died when their capsule depressured on reentry to Earth's atmosphere. 'Later generations of Soviet space stations, such as Mir, had two docking ports and water regeneration facilities. They were designed to be manned permanently. The first U.S. space station, Skylab, was three times the size of Mir and was more...

American inventor Arthur Atwater Kent (1873-1949) had a fascination with electrical and mechanical gadgets. At the age of thirty, he set himself up as a battery maker in a run-down factory where, it was said, the cracks in the floor were so big that he never needed a dustpan. With his first earnings, Kent bought a one-cylinder automobile, and tinkering with it led him to develop his own ignition system. The ignition system is an essential part of any engine. An ignition coil turns the 12 volts in the car battery into the thousands of volts needed for the spark plugs to produce a spark to ignite the fuel in the tank. It works like a high voltage transformer, consisting of a primary and secondary winding wrapped around a metal core. The primary coil has a lower number of turns than the secondary coil and when the circuit is broken more...

"It takes a while before people realize they can do other things with a new medium." Ramanathan V. Guha Computer science is renowned for its use of confusing TLAs—Three Letter Abbreviations. Even in computing, however, RSS is notable for being a tricky example. During its history, RSS has stood for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a way of describing websites, especially sites with fast-moving content such as news. The original RSS was created by Ramanathan V. Guha (b. 1965) in 1999, for the popular My.Netscape.Com site. The "portal" site enabled browsers to customize news on a single page. This was only possible because each of the different source websites agreed to publish a description of their news in Guha's common format. Since then, RSS, which grew from Guha's earlier work at Apple's Advanced Technology Group, has been through several incarnations at the hands more...

"Antilocks help by preventing lockup; a vehicle with such brakes remains stable during hard braking." Brian O'Neill, Highway Institute for Traffic Safety The antilock braking system (ABS) was designed by Frenchman Gabriel Voisin (1880-1973), originally as a way of preventing planes from swerving on landing . He first installed a system to keep airplane brakes from locking up in 1920. Several decades later, after limited success with similar systems in cars, a breakthrough came in 1978, when Mercedes-Benz announced the installation of electronic ABS in its S-Class car. Theoretically, ABS can stop a serious car accident from occurring by allowing a driver to maintain control in slippery conditions or during an emergency stop. On an icy road, a car's wheels can lock up, sending the vehicle into a spin. In old cars that did not have ABS, drivers had to try to pump the brakes to prevent this. With ABS, more...