Science Projects And Inventions

"Ancient Egyptians made glue by boiling animal hides and used [it] as a binder ...for woodworking." Joe Hurst-Wajszczuk, writer We may not make direct use of adhesives every day, but glue is an important component of many common manufactured items: Books, envelopes, supermarket packaging, and even cheap sneakers benefit from this invention. Although in recent decades chemists have provided us with super glues—substances so phenomenally strong that the user is warned to take extreme care—naturally occurring alternatives such as beeswax and tree sap have been in use for much longer. In the burial sites of ancient tribes, archeologists have discovered pottery vessels whose cracks had been mended with plant saps. This tar-like glue was also applied to Babylonian statues that had eyeballs glued into their corresponding sockets. Egyptian carvings from more than 3,000 years ago portray the adhesion of veneer to sycamore, while in northern Europe 6,000-year-old clay pots have more...

"I gave illuminating oil for lighting the lamps of your temple." Inscription of Nesuhor(589-570 B.C.E.) The humble oil lamp may only be needed to provide light during the occasional power cut today, but for thousands of years versions of it allowed man to see by night, as well as provide decoration and symbolic power in ceremonies and festivals. Only with the invention of the Argand Lamp in 1780, and eventually electric lighting, were oil lamps all but extinguished. Estimates suggest that crude lamps were first used around 80,000 B.C.E. A lamp is a vessel containing flammable oil with a slow-burning wick designed to draw up the fuel from the reserve. Early man made lamps from stone or seashell crucibles filled with animal fat, with a piece of vegetation as the wick. The first real oil lamp appeared alongside settled agriculture around 10,000 B.C.E. (the Upper Paleolithic period—otherwise known as the more...

The precursors of roller coasters first appeared in Russia in the fifteenth century, in the form of huge ice slides. The first modern coasters opened in Paris in 1817, but it took another sixty years and the invention of the inclined railway for the rides to really take off. Regarded as the father of the roller coaster in the United States, La Marcus Adna Thompson filed his first patent for a roller coaster in 1865 and built the first such ride in 1884 at Coney Island, New York. Charging five cents a ride, he was soon grossing over $600 a day. Thompson's Switchback Railway consisted of two parallel tracks undulating over a wooden structure 600 foot (182.8 m) long. A small train with seats facing sideways for sightseeing started on a 50-foot (15 m) peak at one end of the beach, and rolled down the grade at around 6 miles more...

"A short pencil is more reliable than the longest memory." Proverb The graphite pencil was invented in England in 1564 following the discovery of an extensive deposit of pure graphite at Seathwaite Fell near Borrowdale in Cumbria. The Borrowdale deposit was so pure it could be cut into sheets and subsequently into tiny square- profile lengths. The material left a darker mark than other less pure graphite composites, possessed a greasy texture, was .extremely brittle, and quickly dirtied the hands of the user, thus requiring some form of protective sheath. However, the fact that it could be erased made it a popular alternative to ink. The first known account of a graphite pencil was written in 1565 by the German scientist Konrad von Gesner. He described a rudimentary lead pencil "enclosed in a wood holder," and it was not until the 1660s that a Keswick Joiner hollowed out a piece more...

"In the Argand ...the air and the gas were brought into contact by means of numerous small orifices." The Mechanics' Magazine (1854) Fuel-burning lamps had been used for hundreds of years without significant improvement. Then, in 1780, Swiss scientist Aime Argand (1750-1803) invented a lamp that would revolutionize the lives of two species—Homosapiens and Physeter macrocephalus. Argand studied chemistry under the French chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, who discovered that oxygen was required for burning. Argand's lamp used a hollow wick to draw more air to the inside of the flame and had a glass cylinder around the wick to increase the flow of air outside the flame. Argand also provided a way to lower or raise the wick to decrease or increase the size of the flame and thus the amount of light the lamp produced. Because of the additional oxygen, the flame burned at a higher temperature, which produced more...

The development of the internal-combustion engine at the end of the nineteenth century was a long process, and hundreds of problems had to be overcome before a working engine actually appeared. One of these problems was getting the fuel into the engine. Fuel, oxygen, and heat are needed for fire to happen, but producing the right mix inside the engine was difficult. The gas pump in the first engines vaporized the gas and mixed it with air, but the proportion of air to gas was not controlled, so the combustion was sometimes big, sometimes small, and this made the engine very unstable. The solution to this problem was found by two Hungarian engine manufacturers, Donat Banki (1859- 1922) and Janos Csonka (1852-1939). Banki was responsible for a number of advancements in automobiles, and together with Csonka he eliminated the problem of mixing gas and air. Inspiration came, as inspiration often more...

The idea of 3D graphics—just like painting—is making an image thattricks the brain into thinking it is looking at something with three dimensions rather than two. To do this, you must consider the effect of lighting on the object, as well as depth, perspective, texture, and many more qualities, which the computer then has to project on a two-dimensional surface in a realistic way. The advance in computer graphics started in the early 1960s, with the first commercially available graphics terminal, the IBM 2250, hitting the market in 1965. Three years later, Ivan Sutherland (b. 1938) created the first computer-controlled head-mounted display (HMD). The wearer of this helmet was able to see a computer scene in stereoscopic 3D, because separate images were displayed for each eye. Sutherland subsequently joined what was then the world's leading research center for computer graphics at the University of Utah. One of his students was more...

"This device is... the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful the astronomy is exactly right." Professor Michael Edmunds, Cardiff University One of the most remarkable inventions of the ancient world came to light in 1900 when a Greek sponge diver discovered the wreck of an ancient Greek or Roman cargo ship that had sunk off the Greek island of Antikythera around 80 B.C.E. Among the objects recovered from the wreck was a geared mechanism that, from the shape of its inscribed Greek letters, dated to between 150 and 100 B.C.E. The mechanism has more than thirty gearwheels and three main dials. When reassembled, it formed a scientific instrument that could be used to calculate the astronomical positions of the sun, moon, and the five planets then known. When a date was entered via a crank, now lost, the mechanism calculated the position of the sun, moon, or more...

"Iron weapons revolutionized" — warfare and iron implements .. did the same for farming" Alan W. Cramb, Professor of Engineering The use of metals to make tools, weapons, or Jewelry has been one of humanity's pivotal achievements. Manipulated metals are everywhere, from kitchen utensils to high-tech weapons and tools. Even items that contain no metal are likely to owe some debt to a metal tool that was used in their construction. As near as archeologists can tell, the love affair between humans and metals probably began around 8700 B.C.E., evidenced by a copper pendant found in northern Iraq. Smelting, the extraction of metal from a metal-containing rock, began around 5000 B.C.E. when copper ores were melted to get at the metal. By 4000 B.C.E. people were using gold and adding arsenic to copper to create arsenical bronze, probably the first man-made alloy, or metal mixture. Although harder than copper, arsenical more...

Fire alarms were originally raised by ringing church bells. Due to the nature of sound, bells had the huge disadvantage of being affected by environmental conditions, making finding the fire extremely difficult. In 1845 American William Channing proposed using Samuel Morse's telegraph system to raise the alarm and coordinate a, response. His system comprised signal boxes that would send automated messages of their location (and hence the fire) to a central office. The fire-alarm signal-box system is still used in the United States and is akin to the manual "break-glass" fire call point more commonly used in Europe. In the central office an operator would forward the message to all other signal boxes within the circuit. At the same time electrical impulses would be sent to automatic bell strikers to sound the alarm and alert the firefighters, who at that time were mostly volunteers. By going to their nearest signal more...