Science Projects And Inventions

"You guys have really come up with somethin'..." Dr. Flood, 200: A Space Odyssey (1968) The first wrist-worn timepiece to tell the time digitally was the Hamilton Watch Company's "Pulsar." This 18-carat gold-cased device used a red LED display to tell the user what time it was in clean, crisp, twentieth- century digits at the push of a simple button, and retailed for a cool $2,100. Teething problems meant the Pulsar did not become commercially available until 1972, but when it was released, it caused many to think that the end had come for conventional dial face watches with mechanical movements. Hamilton claimed that their inspiration for developing a digital watch was the futuristic digital clock that they had created for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only problem with the Pulsar was the hefty accompanying price tag—although many would argue that $2,100 was cheap for the opportunity more...

For millennia, humankind has kept track of the progress of time by observing natural bodies, most notably the sun and the stars. In cloudy periods, however, these cannot be seen. The water clock, or clepsydra in Greek, is a timekeeper that works by measuring a regulated, uniform flow of water out of, or into, a vessel. With sufficient water, and a large enough vessel, this timekeeper can "run" for a day or two without needing to be refilled, or emptied. Imagine a cylindrical water container with a hole in the bottom. The rate at which water drips out of the container is a function of the pressure exerted by the water that it contains; so the more water in the vessel (that is, the greater the "head" of water) the faster is the flow rate. When the container is full, the water level goes down quickly, but the flow is more...

While studying science in school we may have been taught that electrical conduction occurs in metals and in some liquids containing ions. That particular lesson changed when chemists Alan MacDiarmid (1927- 2007) and Hideki Shirakawa (b. 1936), and physicist Alan Heeger (b. 1936) created the first polymer that could conduct electricity. Shirakawa was working on the polymerization of acetylene when a mistake was made in the amount of a catalyst used in the process (a thousand times too much!). Instead of the usual black powder, a "ragged film" of polyacetylene was formed. This film had a metallic luster, and Shirakawa began investigating its properties. Alan MacDiarmid at the University of Pennsylvania invited him to collaborate, and together with Alan Heeger, the three experimented on modifying the polyacetylene by oxidization with iodine vapor. When one of Heeger's students was examining this iodine-doped version, it was discovered that the electrical conductivity had more...

The ancient Chinese were technologically and culturally advanced. Between 3950 and 1700 B.C.E, the people of the Yang-shao culture farmed pigs, grew wheat and millet, made highly specialized tools, and produced painted pottery. They also produced pottery instruments called lings, which became the first tuned bells. One of the earliest examples of these clay bells is a small red ling uncovered at an excavation site in the Henan Province of central China. Later, during the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, the Chinese made bells from metal and decorated them with intricate designs. Bells came to play an important part in culture by the fifth century B.C.E., when sets of bronze bells were used in ritual ceremonies for musical accompaniment.- Large, clapperless bells known as zhong were sometimes struck with mallets. It is said that these represented the sound of the Autumn Equinox, when all the crops had been harvested—in Chinese, the more...

The textile industry was one of the cornerstones of Britain's Industrial Revolution. The production process had changed little in centuries: yarn was spun skillfully on a human-powered wheel. Invariably performed by women and young children, it was hard work and provided little in the way of reward. By the middle of the eighteenth century, as the demand for textiles for export grew, labor-saving devices enabling yarn to be spun at greater speed began to emerge. The two most significant developments were the water frame and the spinning jenny. The water frame used the principles of the water wheel to power the spinning frame, thus dramatically reducing the amount of human effort required; the spinning jenny, a multispool spinning wheel, boosted output by enabling a single worker to operate up to eight spools at once. In 1779 the inventor Samuel Crompton (1753-1827) combined the main features of both, creating the spinning more...

"Regardless of our ancestral heritage, we're all descended from flintnappers." Bert Mathews, sharp stone maker The use of stone instruments more than two million years ago heralded what we call the Stone Age and the very origins of humankind. While it is impossible to date when distinctly worked (rather than simply found) stone blades first appeared in the world, it seems to have occurred circa 30,000 B.C.E. The technique that evolved to create sharp stones is now called lithic reduction. This involves the use of an implement (made of stone itself or of wood or bone) to strike a stone block in order to break off flakes. Such flakes will be naturally sharp and can be turned into a range of useful tools and weapons such as scrapers, scythes, knives, arrow heads, or spear points. Some early toolmakers may also have used what was left of the stone block to more...

Forty-five years before the word "Jukebox" was first coined, the world's first "nickel-in-the-slot phonograph" (later abbreviated to nickelodeon) was demonstrated to a small group of patrons at the Palais Royale restaurant on San Francisco's Sutler Street by its creator Louis Glass (1845-1924), General Manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. Glass attached a coin mechanism designed to accept nickels to an Edison Class M electric cylinder phonograph housed in an oak cabinet. With amplification still waiting to be discovered, prerecorded music from a single tin foil and wax cylinder was transmitted to a group of four people via listening tubes resembling stethoscopes held to their ears. Towels were supplied to wipe patrons' sweat from their earpiece. Only a single cylinder could be played at any one time. This limitation nevertheless failed to dent the new machine's popularity, which went on to earn more than $1,000 in its first six months of more...

"Fair is foul and foul is fair; Hover through the fog and filthy air." William Shakespeare, Macbeth A hovercraft—also known as an Air Cushion Vehicle (ACV)—floats on a cushion of air, the air being pumped under it by a large dueled centrifugal fan. It is amphibious and can be driven across relatively flat land for loading purposes, and then across reasonably calm water. As the cushion of air greatly reduces drag, the craft can travel across water at high speed. Sir Christopher Cockerell (1910-1999) designed the first commercial hovercraft, the Saunders Roe Nautical One (SRN1). He conceived the idea in 1953, but it was not until June 1959 that his three-man craft—traveling at about 29 miles (46 km) per hour—was first tested. Cockerell decided to pump air into a narrow tunnel around the circumference of the craft. The air then escaped towards the center, where it built up a high- more...

The largest machine built by man, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator occupying an enormous circular tunnel some 17 miles (27 km) in circumference, ranging from 165 to 575 feet (50-175 m) below ground. Situated near Geneva, it is so large that over the course of its circumference it crosses the border between France and Switzerland four times. The tunnel itself was constructed between 1983 and 1988 to house another particle accelerator, the Large Electron-Positron Collider, which operated until 2000. Its replacement, the LHG.-was approved in 1995, and was finally switched on in September 2008. The LHC is the most powerful particle accelerator ever built and has been designed to explore the limits of what physicists refer to as the Standard Model, which deals with fundamental sub-atomic particles. The machine uses magnets capable of accelerating protons to near the speed of light, so they can complete a more...

“I had no fixed ideas... and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right." Sir Henry Bessemer English engineer Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898) was an inventor for all of his adult life. At seventeen he devised a counterfeit-proof embossed stamp for title deeds. He held more than 100 patents, including making lead for pencils, brass powder for use as "gold" paint, a hydraulic machine for extracting juice from sugar cane, and, most famously, the Bessemer process. The Bessemer process was basically a considerably cheaper, faster, and more efficient way of making steel than the method then in use. Before Bessemer devised his process, steel was made by adding carbon to wrought iron. This process could take up to a week of continuous heat to produce and reguired immense amounts of fuel. The cost of steel for structural use in bridges or buildings, or on any mass-production more...