Science Projects And Inventions

"Players have been installed in powerboats and airplanes, as well as in funeral limousines..." Time magazine (August 5,1966) The eight-track cartridge (or "Stereo 8") was developed by a consortium of U.S. businesses lead by Bill Lear (1902-1978) of the Lear Jet Corporation. Their aim was to produce a convenient magnetic tape playback System that could be used in cars. The eight-track cartridge contained a continuous loop of 1/4-inch (0.6 cm) tape that played back at 3.75 inches (9.5 cm) per second. It was so named since the music was recorded as four parallel pairs of stereo tracks on a single piece of tape. Switching between tracks was achieved automatically by mechanically altering the .height" of the playback head so that it aligned with -the correct piece of music. While Lear touted the system as being superior to reel-to-reel because more music was available in a smaller package, the audio quality more...

“learning to read music in braille and play by ear helped me develop a damn good memory." Ray Charles, musician Louis Braille (1809-1852) was fifteen years old when he devised a system of raised dots to reproduce the alphabet so that it could be read by touch. Braille became blind at the age of four as a. result of an accident while playing in his father's saddler workshop and was educated at the National Institute for Blind Children in Paris from the age of ten. He learned to read using raised wooden letters designed by the school's founder, Valentin Hauy. In 1821, Charles Barbier, a former captain in the French Army, visited the school. Braille was introduced to the letter code that Barbier had developed to enable soldiers to communicate, without sound or light at night. Barbier's system used large symbols to represent sounds, each using dots and dashes raised more...

The world's first enclosed harbor, or tidal dock, is believed to have been constructed thousands of years ago during the Harappan or Indus Valley Civilization. It is located at Lothal, in the present-day Mangroul harbor, on India's Gujarat coast, bordering the Indian Ocean. The dock was discovered in 1955 and is believed to have been constructed around 2500 B.C.E. It was trapezoid in shape and its walls were constructed from burned brick. It measured 40 yards (37 m) from east to west and 24 yards (22 m) from north to south. Inlet channels allowed excess water to escape and prevented erosion of the banks. On its northern side the structure was connected with the estuary of the Sabarmati River, and lock gates on that side ensured that ships remained afloat in the dockyard. The entrance to the dock was able to accommodate two ships at a time, and the dock more...

A pleasurable beverage appears. The accidental fermentation of a mixture of water and fruit in sunlight is thought to have led to the first discovery of an alcoholic drink by a prehistoric people. Evidence of intentionally fermented beverages exists in the form of Stone Age beer jugs dated as early as the Neolithic period (10,000 B.C.E.). Other jugs have been excavated in Southwest Asia and North Africa. Alcoholic beverages have been an integral part of many cultures, used as a source of nutrition, in meals, for celebrations, and also in religious ceremonies. Alcohol can give a sense of wellbeing, but also acts as a depressant, lowering behavioral inhibitions. Alcohol consumption became a status symbol for the wealthy. During the Middle Ages, concoctions were distilled to produce spirits. Alcohol has also served as a thirst quencher when water was polluted. In the 1700s, home-brewing processes were replaced by commercially made beer more...

The fiber or "felt-tip" pen is a wondrous development in the history of writing. It allows the writer to scrawl their message to the world on almost any surface, safe in the knowledge that their pearls of wisdom will be read for the rest of time. Primitive felt-tip pens date back to the 1940s. They were crude devices—not unlike a fountain pen in design—with a reservoir for ink, but with a piece of felt or some other porous material for the ink to slowly run through, instead of the traditional nib or stylus. Sidney Rosenthal dramatically improved on this in design in 1953. He took a squat glass bottle of ink with a wool-felt wick and writing tip. He called this new device the "Magic Marker" due to its ability to write on any surface. It represented a significant development in the technology of felt-tip pens, which started to be more...

“[Using] wheels to reduce friction while moving objects was one of the most important invention…” Odis Hayden Griffin, Engineer Most inventions do not appear out of thin air or from the ingenious brain of a brilliant scientist, but evolve from something already in existence. This is certainly true of the wheel and its attached axle, which developed from two different sources. The first was the revolving potter's wheel, invented in Mesopotamia in around 3500 B.C.E. Although not a tool essential to the potter's craft, the wheel did help in the faster production of better-quality pots. The second source was the sledge, a primitive but effective means of hauling large loads on parallel sleds or bars of wood. The sledge was ideal in icy and snowy conditions, and on hot sand, but not on hard, dry terrain, where great effort was required to pull it along. Evidence that the use of more...

For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man." Wilbur Wright in 1900 On the morning of December 17,1903, amid the sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, Orville Wright (1871-1948) took off into a gale-force wind aboard the gasoline-powered biplane, Wright Flyer. Orville flew for only twelve seconds, but later, in the fourth flight attempt of the day, his brother Wilbur (1867-1912) stayed aloft for. fifty-nine seconds, traveling a distance of 852 feet (260 m). It was enough to constitute the holy grail of flight experimenters—sustained, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. Bicycle manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers had approached the problem of flight with a combination of practical hands-on experimentation and scientific rigor. After absorbing all published information on previous flight experiments, in 1900 they built the first of a series of gliders that they tested each summer in North more...

"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other." Ann Landers, journalist Color television is possible because the human brain can convert a grid of differently colored dots (usually known as pixels, short for picture elements) into a complete color image. Color television cathode ray tubes have three electron beams, as opposed to the single electron beam in a black and white TV. The screen is coated with red, green, and blue phosphor dots placed behind the holes of the tube's shadow mask. All the observed colors are combinations of the red, green, and blue signals (that is, if all dots are firing, the image appears white). The fact that color television is essentially only three times more complicated than black and white television means that the basic invention processes for the two devices almost took place simultaneously. John Logie Baird (1888-1946) is recognized as a more...

“... for printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it was marvelously quick" Shen Kuo, Dream Pool Essays (1088) In 1041, in the best traditions of China's inventive and technologically vibrant Song Dynasty (960-1280 C.E.), an alchemist named Bi Sheng shaped a series of reusable, moistened clay tablets, inscribed an individual Chinese character upon the surface of each one, fired them to harden and make them permanent, and in the process invented movable type. Printers then took the characters and laid them within an iron frame coated with a mix of resin, turpentine, wax, and paper ash, arranging the characters to reflect what was to become the printed page. Unlike the Western alphabet that requires the generation and arrangement of only twenty-six characters, Bi Sheng worked in a language with over 5,000 distinct characters. Many of these needed several pieces of type to complete, and all of them required the making more...

Before kitchens were ventilated, cooking was a smelly and smoky experience. The kitchen would quickly fill with smoke and nasty gases, stinky odors would spread throughout the house, and grease would stick to and damage the walls. However, in 1933, Vent-a- Hood set about making cooking in the home a more enjoyable and safe experience and invented the first kitchen extractor. Also known as an extractor hood, it was able to capture all the by-products of cooking, except grease. Early kitchen extractors were considered, quite correctly, to be fire hazards because the grease they could not catch could easily ignite with the high temperatures generated by cookers. Later extractor designs, using wire mesh to catch grease, were incredibly inefficient and could only capture about 25 percent of the product. In 1937, Vent-a-Hood improved their original design and incorporated a special blower into their kitchen extractor, known as the Magic Lung®, more...