Science Projects And Inventions

When, in 1958, fifteen-year-old Bobby Fisher became the youngest Grandmaster in chess history, few onlookers would have believed that, one day, a machine would be capable of beating him. After the invention of the transistor, electronic equipment became ever more complex. Thousands of different sized components had to be soldered together to make the circuits and were being crammed into less and less space. This was time- consuming, expensive, and unreliable. The Micro- Module program undertaken by the U.S. Army's Signal Corps made pre-wired building block components of a standardized size that could be snapped together. This still did not solve the core problem, however. Texas Instruments were working with the Micro- Module project when Jack Kilby joined them in 1958. Before long he saw a better solution. As passive components such as capacitors and resistors could be made from the same semiconductor material as active devices such. as transistors, more...

The fact that the current passing through a wire conductor produces a magnetic field around the wire, and that two current-carrying wires could attract or repel each other depending on the direction of the current, was emphasized in 1820 by the independent writings of Hans Oersted and Andre-Marie Ampere (after whom the Sl unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named). It was, however, William Sturgeon (1783-1850), a physicist working at the Royal Academy, Woolwich, London, who recognized the significance of the phenomenon. He converted electromagnetic devices from toys into practical weightlifting machines. A horseshoe of iron around which is wound a loose current-carrying coil becomes a strong metal-lifting device when the current is switched on and, just as important, the force disappears when the current is switched off. The action of the device can be speedily controlled by electricity. Electricity can flow down miles of wire, so more...

"You can't keep changing your men, so you settle for changing your lipstick." Heather Locklear, American actress Women have added color to their lips for at least five millennia. The earliest evidence of a colored paste or lipstick comes from Mesopotamia in around 3000 B.C.E. There, it was made of crushed semi-precious Jewels and then put on to the eyelids as well as the lips. Cleopatra, Pharoah of Egypt (69-30 B.C.E.) used crushed carmine beetles in a base made of ants as lipstick. Some formulations would have resulted in serious illness or even death, such as the Ancient Egyptian concoction from 1400, B.C.E., which used a red dye extracted from seaweed, mixed with iodine and toxic bromine compounds. In 1915, Maurice Levy invented the sliding tube that we know as lipstick. Levy's tubes were just 2 inches (5 cm) long. The sliding tube worked by a set of slide levers more...

Imagine inventing a process that made a task 3,000 times faster than it used to be, not to mention substantially less dangerous and labor intensive. Now imagine that process as the key to unlocking and mapping the human genome. That is what Leroy Hood (b. 1938) and Lloyd Smith (b. 1954) did in 1985 when they invented automated DNA seguencing. DNA seguencing was initially invented in the 1970s, but it involved a long, laborious process in which the nucleotide base pairs that make up DNA were tagged radioactively and then attached to existing single strands of DNA. The resulting strands of DNA were run through a separation gel and painstakingly examined manually, base pair by base pair, strand by strand, and the seguence recorded by hand. Hood and Smith recognized that this process was at best impractical, and along with their colleagues Tim and Michael Hunkapillar set out to streamline more...

"The Good God, Golden [Horus], Shining in the chariot, like the rising of the Sun..." Tablet of victory of Amenhotep III (1391-1353 B.C.E) The development of the spoked-wheel chariot circa 2000 B.C.E revolutionized warfare. Bronze tools allowed carpenters to discard the solid, heavy, planked wheel in favor of a lighter, spoked wheel. This was made by placing a set of same-length spokes around a central hub and then fixing them within a wooden, circular rim, itself held together by an outer bronze band. Spoked wheels were larger and lighter than their predecessors and ran better over uneven ground. Used on a two-wheeled chariot that was pulled by a single horse and driven by a charioteer, with room for a warrior alongside, the charioteer could now easily outpace the foot soldier while the warrior—with the advantage of speed and maneuverability—attacked him with spear, lance, or bow. The use of such chariots more...

The first handmade material that humans created to make into clothing was felt, which was made by intermeshing animal fibers under heat and pressure. Felt lacked the necessary durability, however, and the real textile breakthrough came later with weaving. Weaving is accomplished with a loom, a frame that holds vertical threads taut while the weaver interlaces a horizontal thread. The thread itself is obtained through spinning, in which animal or plant fibers are twisted together by hand or machine. The earliest evidence of weaving was discovered in 1962, in the town of Catalhoyuk, Turkey. A piece of carbonized cloth, it was found to date from 6500 B.C.E. It is unclear whether the cloth was made from flax (a wild Mediterranean plant) or from sheep's wool. A more recent piece of linen, dating from 5000 B.C.E. and woven from flax, was discovered in Egypt prior to this find, and it seemed more...

"They stretched the cables by twisting them taut with wooden windlasses." Herodotus of Halicarnassus, historian The first known reference to a winch is made in the writings of Herodotus of Halicarnassus on the Persian Wars in 480 B.C.E., in which wooden winches were used to tighten cables used in a bridge that crossed the Hellespont. The idea caught on quickly and within a hundred or so years the winch had reached Greek construction sites, though evidence suggests that it was invented by the Assyrians in the fifth century B.C.E. A simple winch is used to wind rope or cable, but the tool has many more applications when fitted with a cleat to maintain tension and prevent the rope or cable from unwinding. Cleated winches have long served on boats and harborsides to keep ships and boats closely moored to docksides. They are important for lifting work on construction sites, enabling more...

The first specific reference to a quill pen is found in the writings of St. Isidore of Seville around 580, although pens made of bird feathers are likely to have been used even earlier. The q-uill pen was the main writing tool in the Western world until the invention of the fountain pen in the nineteenth century. The quill's development was assisted by the rise of Christianity because its fine script was suitable for the promulgation of religion, as well as lending itself to other documents in increasingly dense text. Although the outer wing feathers of many birds could be used, those of the goose and crow were preferred. A slit would be made in the base of the quill to allow ink to flow to the nib, with goose quills especially adept at holding the ink. The composition and size of goose quills also allowed the nib to be more...

"We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately." Benjamin Franklin The invention of the unassuming rotary clothes line—also known as the "Hills Hoist"—has a controversial and confusing history. It is named after Lance Hill, an Australian who developed the device in 1946.The Hills Hoist is considered an Australian icon and a symbol of Australian culture. With a winding mechanism that allowed the frame to be raised and lowered, it was extremely useful in the days of the baby boom when cloth diapers were abundant. Many believe that this was the first rotary clothes line, but the invention was built upon earlier, less efficient, and more expensive models. Prior renditions of the clothes line include the James Hardie Company's 1925 clothes line called the "Drywell." In 1914 both a U.S. and an Australian company had come up with different versions of a rotary clothes line. Gilbert more...

"Today, Ethernet stands as the dominant networking technology..." The Economist (2003) In 1973, Bob Metcaife (b. 1946) of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) faced a problem. Increasing numbers of computers were springing up around him, all of which needed to be connected to each other. Just down the hallway the world's first laser printer, invented at PARC in 1971, was hungry for documents. Computer networking was in its infancy. The hardware was expensive, and the wiring at PARC looked like an explosion in a spaghetti factory. Any glitch in the computers or the cabling would bring down the whole-system. Metcaife was given the job of building a simpler, more reliable computer network. Desperate for inspiration from any source, he stumbled across the University of Hawaii's ALOHAnet, a radio network. Unlike most computer networks, which were carefully regulated so only one computercould talk to another at any given moment, ALOHAnet more...