Science Projects And Inventions

"The key to success is to risk thinking unconventional thoughts. Convention is the enemy of progress." Trevor Baylis The evolution of the battery-free radio is a curiously British success story. The tale begins in 1991 with part- time inventor Trevor Baylis (b. 1937) watching a television documentary about the spread of AIDS in Africa. It suggested that the epidemic could only be halted through education. A major problem, however. was that poverty and a lack of basic technology made communication to remote parts of Africa difficult. Baylis saw an immediate solution—a simple and cheap radio set that required no household current or battery power to operate. Crudely cobbling together parts from an old transistor radio, a small electric motor from a toy car, and the clockwork mechanism from a music box, he created a prototype powered by a clockwork wind-up mechanism that drove a tiny internal electrical generator. Fully wound, more...

"I don't own a cell phone or a pager. I just hang around everyone I know, all the time." Mitch Hedberg, comedian Alfred J. Gross (1918-2000), inventor of the pager, had a lifelong passion for communication devices. As a boy he built his own radio set from junk materials, and, by the age of sixteen, he had earned his amateur radio operator's license, the beginning of a career in the radio communications industry. The pager was originally developed as a tool for the medical profession, and was first introduced in a New York hospital. The devices responded to specific high-frequency radio signals and beeped to alert doctors to an emergency. They were not well received in the medical profession, however, with some doctors complaining that the beeping of the device would annoy patients, or even interrupt their golf swing. But the pager soon proved to be a useful device and more...

"[The glory] belongs to the author of the experiments made on the River Saone at Lyons in 1783" Robert Fulton on De Jouffroy's steamboat It is not uncommon for the American Robert Fulton (1765-1815) to be heralded as the inventor of the steamboat, but in actuality the true creative force behind its invention was a young French aristocrat, Claude-Francois-Dorothee, Marquis de Jouffroy d'Abbans (1751-1832). De Jouffroy d'Abbans, according to legend, was wild and unruly, resulting in his incarceration in a military prison on the Isle of St. Marguerite. While he was there he studied the boats passing by and developed an interest in engineering. On his release he went to Paris and studied with the Perier brothers, examining the Watt steam engine and devising methods in which it could be applied to propelling a vessel. He began work on an experimental boat, a steamship called the Palmipede, which he ran more...

The first attempt at a commercial surround system for the cinema is thought to be Disney's Fantasound. It was developed in 1939 at the inception of Walt Disney (1901-1966) himself, to accompany Fantasia, his projected hybrid of animation and classical music. Disney, who was dissatisfied with the quality of existing motion-picture sound, worked closely with conductor Leopold Stokowski, who himself had played a pioneering role in some of the first stereo recording experiments in the early 1930s. Disney's aim was less to create a surround panorama than to produce a cleaner, more distinct sound. Thus, nine independent optical recorders were used, each with its own microphones, to record different parts of the orchestra and soundtrack elements. These would then be replayed through independent speakers placed at different points behind the screen and around the perimeter of the theater. Fantasound, as it had by then been christened, was used at the more...

Oliver Smithies [b. 1925), a scientist working at the University of Toronto in the 1950s, discovered a way for scientists to separate proteins quickly and easily by their size, using potato starch to create a type of microscopic sieve. Smithies, who was one of three scientists sharing the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was looking for a way to separate insulin from its precursor when he developed starch-gel electrophoresis. Using potato starch, Smithies created a gel that allowed proteins to be separated by size. He found that the best potato starch came from a powder produced in Canada. Later, when Smithies worked at the University of Wisconsin, he made many trips from Madison, Wisconsin, to Toronto to obtain this special powder. The powder was used as a matrix in the gel. The proteins were applied to the gel and exposed to an electric charge, which allowed them to more...

Years before the format war between VHS and Betamax, and decades before DVDs came onto the scene, there was film. But film was hard to use and eventually videotape was invented. It was much faster to edit than film and speeded up the news business. But these first video machines were so big that they were stationary, and the roving reporters of the world stuck to film until portable versions eventually appeared. The first portable broadcast recorder, which had a huge backpack in which the tape sat, allowed news to be filmed on video outside a studio, although at a lower quality than film. The videotape was stored on reels, just like film, but this changed in 1971 when Sony released the U- Matic video recorder. The U-Matic had been designed for home use, and the tape was in cassette form, which made it easy to handle, although the units more...

Before the introduction of plastics, iron was one of the most multipurpose materials, used to make almost everything. However, the only pure iron on Earth fell from space as meteorites, and that is far too rare to rely on. Most iron has been pushed up to the Earth's crust by activity in the planet's core, but this has reacted with many other elements, resulting in iron ore, rather than pure elemental iron. The process of separating iron from ore is called smelting: The ore is heated to a temperature at which it becomes a liquid, and then the metal is separated from the waste. Charcoal is one of the few materials that burns hot enough to melt iron. In Britain the iron industry originally moved around the country, burning forests and then moving on, but by the seventeenth century the industry was running out of trees and wood was becoming more...

Willem J. Kolff (b. 1911), a doctor working in occupied Holland during World War II, cobbled together the first kidney dialysis (hemodialysis) machine. When kidneys are not functioning correctly, waste products accumulate in the blood, and can be fatal. Kolff was aware of experiments showing that when two solutions of different chemical concentrations are separated by a permeable membrane an exchange of molecules takes place from the area of greater concentration to the area of lower concentration. Kolff's machine consisted of 66 feet (20 m) of cellophane tubing wound around a wooden drum that was suspended horizontally inside a tank filled with saline. As the drum was rotated by a motor, the patient's blood was forced through the tubing and its waste products crossed the membrane into the saline. A severe shortage of materials due to the war forced Kolff to improvise; he used cellophane that came from sausage casings. more...

On December 26, 1783, before a large public gathering at the base of the Montpellier Observatory in Paris, the French scientist and physicist Louis-Sebastien Lenormand jumped from the observatory's tower clinging to a 14-foot (4.2 m) parachute attached to an improvised wooden frame. Lenormand's leap of faith was the first ever documented use of a parachute and followed on from an earlier attempt at a slowed descent when he leaped from a tree holding on to nothing more than two modified parasols. Lenormand's inspiration likely came from the popular writings of a former French ambassador to China whose memoirs included an account of Chinese acrobats floating to earth using umbrellas. Chinese legends dating to 90 B.C.E. also tell of a group of prisoners who cheated death by leaping from a tower and slowing their descent with the aid of conical straw hats. Leonardo da Vinci sketched his famous pyramid- shaped more...

Plain old concrete—undeniably useful and popular though it may be—is really not as spectacular a material as you might at first think. Yes, It is good for making good, hard pavements and keeping fence- posts firmly in place in the ground, but if you are hoping to build « multistory car park out of it, or an overpass that runs above a busy motorway, you will quickly discover that concrete itself is not enough. In the 1860s, however, French gardener Joseph Monier (1823-1906) demonstrated the reinforced garden tubs he had made using ferroconcrete—a concrete and chicken-mesh combination that fellow Frenchman Joseph-Louis Lambot had pioneered. The garden tubs made their debut at the Paris Exposition of 1867, and Monier applied for a patent the same year. Monier was not the first to think of strengthening concrete with metal, but his patent design clearly established the principle of reinforced concrete for structural more...