Science Projects And Inventions

The rotary printing press developed by Richard March Hoe (181.2-1886) was the key invention that led to the development of the mass media. Hoe's father ran a factory for the production of printing presses in New York City, and Richard worked in the family business from a young age. Along with his father and .brothers-in-law, he made- various improvements to the traditional flat-bed press, which was based on the very earliest fifteenth-century presses from Europe. Hoe's press- was revolutionary because of the speed at which documents could be printed. Unlike the flat-bed press, which had to be reset for each new sheet of paper, the rotary or revolving printing press passed paper -continuously through, using several cylinders to apply the type. As long as there was someone there to feed the paper, Hoe's original "lightning press" could produce up to 8,000 sheets per hour with a good quality of output. more...

Power steering reduces the effort required to steer a car by using an external power source to assist in turning the wheels. The system was developed in the 1920s by Francis W. Davis and George Jessup in Waltham, Massachusetts. Davis was the chief engineer of the truck division of the Pierce Arrow Motor Car Company, and saw first hand how hard it was to steer heavy vehicles. He quit his Job and got work developing the hydraulic steering system that led to power steering. Chrysler introduced the first commercially available power steering system on its 1951 Imperial, under the name "Hydraguide." Most power-steering systems work by using a belt- driven pump to provide hydraulic pressure to the system. This pressure is generated by a rotary-vane pump driven by the vehicle's engine. As the speed of the engine increases, the pressure in the hydraulic fluid also increases, so a relief valve more...

"The lever tumbler lock... could still be picked. It merely required more skill and time." Jock Dempsey, blacksmith People depend on their locks and keys a lot more than they would like to admit. Without having to stand guard over their possessions from morning to night, they are free to pursue their lives away from their homes and businesses. Locks and keys existed before Robert Barren patented his tumbler lock in 1778, but the sheer number of people now carrying keys to tumbler locks testifies to the success of his invention. Barren's lock, which offered considerably improved security over any previous locks, was called a double- acting tumbler and was very similar to many modern models. A tumbler, essentially a lever inside the lock, prevents the bolt of the lock from being opened unless it is raised to a certain height. Barren's lock employed two tumblers and these needed to more...

The use of flowing water as a source of energy has been exploited for hundreds of years, with traditional water mills powering early industrial processes. Turbines are the modern equivalent of a water mill but run at much higher energy efficiency due to the efforts of engineer James Francis (1815-1892), who invented the Francis turbine, and whose calculations enabled modern, super-efficient turbines to be built, allowing clean, renewable energy production. The first large-scale turbine for power generation was built by Benott Fourneyron in 1827. His invention was an out-flow design, but it took another ten years for him to stabilize the turbine, at which point he managed 80 percent efficiency—that is, the turbine could usefully extract 80 percent of the kinetic energy theoretically contained within the running water. Francis, an English engineer, moved to the United States to work for the proprietors of Locks and Canals Company in Lowell, Massachusetts. more...

“[The parking meter is] just another way of getting money out of people…” Sugar Ray Robinson, on New York’s first meter In 1932, Carl Magee, lawyer, newspaper publisher, and newly appointed chair of the Oklahoma traffic committee, was asked to develop a solution to the problem of traffic congestion in the city. He observed that many people were driving into town and parking their cars all day, blocking up the streets. This slowed trade in shops, because people could not park nearby, and there was no turnover of custom. As a solution to this problem, Magee struck upon the idea of the parking meter. He designed a crude prototype and then joined with the Oklahoma State University to develop the idea. The result of this was the first coin-operated parking meter, dubbed the "Black Maria," and it was installed on July 16,1935. The Reverend C. H. North was the first more...

If they ever create a hall of fame for materials, epoxy resin would be a shoe-in. This exceptional substance is the adhesive of choice when you really do not want two surfaces to come unstuck; holding bits of an aircraft together, for example, or the rotor blades of wind turbines. Epoxy resin is also resistant to heat and chemicals, while some epoxies are waterproof and even capable of curing underwater. They are also excellent electrical insulators.   Epoxy is a thermosetting plastic. That is to say, when it is mixed with a "hardener" or catalyst, it forms crosslinks with itself, curing into a robust material with the properties mentioned above. The raw compound comes in many forms, including a low-viscosity liquid and a powder. Because the hardener is also highly variable, a broad suite of cured polymers can be created with differing properties. Swiss chemist Pierre Castan (1899-1985) and the more...

"The most important single experiment... in the history of the silicone industry." Herman Liebhafsky, GE chemist In the 1930s alternatives to natural rubber were desperately needed. Uses for rubber were increasing, but the supply—trees grown mostly in Asia—was literally being tapped out. Soon World War II made it impossible to obtain natural rubber. However, synthetic rubber had been around for a few decades. Russian Sergey Lebedev made the first fake, butadiene rubber (BR), in 1910. Since then scientists had been in a race, either to make bulk quantities of BR faster and cheaper or to discover the next great fake. That fake turned out to be the silicone rubber of American Eugene Rochow (1909-2002). Within five years of his first day at General Electric's (GE) Research Laboratory, Rochow made one of the most important materials of the modern age—silicon rubber (SR). A unique fake, Rochow's rubber was the first with more...

In 1798 Austrian actor and playwright Alois Senefelder (1771-1834) created a print by using a press to copy an image onto paper from the smooth surface of a section of limestone. Senefelder erroneously referred to his process as chemical printing. It would go on to become the most significant innovation in printing since relief printing in the fifteenth century. Although the precise details of his discovery are vague at best, the most commonly accepted story is that, when asked by his mother to prepare a laundry list, he was unable to find a suitable piece of paper, so he used a grease pencil to write the list on the flat surface of a piece of dense Solenhofen limestone. Senefelder then at some point must Jnave observed how the greasy residue left by the pencil became absorbed and embedded into the porous limestone, retaining its ink even after having its surface more...

Traditional grain harvesting was a laborious process, requiring separate cutting, binding, and threshing operations. Although the mechanical reaper, invented in 1831 by Cyrus McCormick, did the cutting, farmers still had to follow the machine and bind the sheaves of grain by hand. Hiram Moore created the first successful combine harvester in 1834 with the aim of speeding up the production of grain from the vast wheat lands of America. Corn and wheat spelled big money in the 1800s, but farmers had to employ dozens of farmhands in order to reap the benefits of their harvests, and this was a costly business. Moore's invention, developed in the farmlands of Michigan, succeeded in combining the two separate processes of cropping and threshing grain into one simplified, mechanically powered step. This creation, paradoxically, was both a blessing and a curse for farm workers—while it saved their backs it also cost many of them more...

English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, working with an early spectrometer—a graduated glass prism—noted in 1666 that the seven rainbow colors, dispersed when white light was passed through the prism, could not be subdivided into more colors. A second breakthrough in light research occurred when German glassmaker Joseph von Fraunhofer found that the solar spectrum contained dark absorption lines of constant wavelength. Robert Bunsen (1811-1899), Professor of Chemistry at the University of Heidelberg, working with Gustav Kirchhoff (1824-1887), used a prism spectrometer to reveal the spectral emission lines produced by elements when heated in a flame. In 1859 they became convinced that elements were uniquely characterized by their line spectra, and this led to the discovery of cesium and rubidium. The researchers also realized that the orange Fraunhofer D lines in the solar spectrum were at the same wavelength as the lines emitted by laboratory sodium. So it was more...