Science Projects And Inventions

“Everything we are today, we owe to the inspirational ingenuity of Linus Yale Sr. and Linus Yale Jr.” Yale website Securing one's valuables was big business in the nineteenth century. Locksmiths were determined to get one up on the opposition by devising a superior lock to their rivals' devices. In 1847, Linus Yale Sr. (1797-1858) opened the Yale Lock Shop in Newport, New York. He was interested in bank safe locks and began looking into the pin tumbler lock that had been used by the Egyptians over 4,000 years ago. The Egyptians' locks had two major shortcomings—they were wooden and bulky, with some measuring 23.5 inches (60 cm) in length. His early attempts to improve the design focused on incorporating a pin tumbler into the case of the lock, which could then be opened with a round, fluted key. This was only a modest improvement, however, and it was Yale's more...

"... alternating current will undoubtedly drive the hangmen out of business in this state." New York Times, 1888, on a prototype The word electrocution is actually a combination of the words electricity and execution, and was initially only applied to executions performed with electricity, ft was only later that this word was adopted to describe any death caused by electricity. The original idea for the electric chair can be credited to Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist, who observed the death of a man who touched a live electrical terminal while sitting in his dentist's chair. At the same time, a fierce rivalry was developing between Edison and Westinghouse, both of them trying to market their own forms of electricity to the public. Edison (who favored direct current) wanted to show that alternating current was unsafe by having it used for executions. In the late 1880s, he and Harold Pitney Brown, more...

"We shall be able to transport ourselves and families... more securely by air than by water." George Cayley, "On Aerial Navigation 1809-10" Born into a wealthy family in Yorkshire, northern England, George Cayley (1773-1857) was a prolific inventor with an interest in human flight. He devised a heavier-than-air flying machine, with a wing to provide lift, a fuselage in which a pilot could sit, and a cruciform tail for balance and control. In 1804 he built a glider based on this design, with a kite for a wing and a pole some 5 feet (1.5 m) long as the fuselage. This seems to have flown down slopes unmanned, with varying weights of ballast onboard, although Cayley recorded that in later experiments with similar but larger gliders a man running into "a gentle breeze" had found himself lifted off the ground "for several yards." The originality of Cayley's design lay in more...

The Julian year (introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C.E.) contained exactly 365.25 days and had a leap year every fourth year (when the year number was divisible by four). But the actual year is 365.24219879 days long and thus the Roman calendar gradually became out of step with reality. By the sixteenth century, the calendar was ten days adrift from the seasons. In 1576 Pope Gregory XIII assembled a commission of astronomers, mathematicians, and clergy, and this advisory body eventually adopted a plan suggested by the Calabrian physician Luigi Lilio, who was also known as Aloysius Lilius. On February 24, 1582, the pope declared that Thursday, October 4, 1582, was to be followed by Friday October 15. From that date, century leap years would only be allowed if the year number was exactly divisible by 400. Thus, 2000 was a leap year, to be followed by 2400,2800, and so more...

In the nineteenth century there was a confusing multiplicity of units of measurement. In England, for example, length was measured in inches, feet, yards, furlongs, rods, chains, poles, perches, miles, and more. In 1791 the French National Assembly instructed the Academy of Sciences to design a simple decimal system. In 1793 the unit of length, the meter, was chosen to be one ten-millionth of the distance between the north pole of Earth and the equator, the specific meridian that was chosen being the one that passes though Paris. Unfortunately, the length of the meridian had not been measured at the time and this Job was carried out by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (1749-1822) and Pierre Mechain (1744-1804). A platinum bar engraved with two marks separated by the new "meter" was then placed in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. Decimal divisions, such as the centimeter and kilometer were then more...

“Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon would be as much science fiction if they went by rubber band." Philip K. Dick, science fiction writer Even though the Mesoamericans of Central America used rubber—made from the sap of the indigenous rubber tree—as early as 1600 B.C.E., it was not until the first half of the nineteenth century that American Charles Goodyear developed a chemical process to make commercially viable rubber. By adding sulfur to naturally milky latex and then heating the substance, he "vulcanized" the rubber, thereby making it harder and more durable. Six years later, in early 1845, Englishman Stephen Perry of Messrs Perry and Co. used this process to produce the world's first vulcanized rubber band. Previously, fellow Englishman Thomas Hancock had produced rubber bands by cutting Central American rubber bottles into sheets and slicing these into thin strips. In order to dispose of the resulting waste more...

The first person to attempt to reversibly connect two materials with a ziplike mechanism was the American inventor Elias Howe (1819-1867) in 1851 with his "Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure." However, Howe devoted little time to his fastening invention. A short while later, fellow-American Whitcomb Judson invented the clasp locker, primarily to help a friend who had a bad back and couldn't do up his shoes. The design was based around a hook-and-eye mechanism and had little commercial success. One of Judson's employees, however, went on to hit the jackpot. Gideon Sundback (1880-1954) worked for Judson's Universal Fastener Company. Because of his great skill he was appointed as head designer. He had been tasked with improving the Judson hook-and-eye fastener, which had an unfortunate tendency to come apart. Sundback's breakthrough design was based on the principle of interlocking teeth, and he called his invention the "Hookless Fastener." It consisted of two more...

Unlike a great deal of the software that the first few major waves of computer programming produced, the word processor was slightly anomalous in that it was created to satisfy the needs of writers rather than those of mathematicians and engineers. After the introduction of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) in the late 1960s, there was some lofty talk about computers soon being able to take the place of books. The idea of using computers to do the work of typewriters also began to gain momentum. Specialist computer hardware designed to act as a word processor already existed. It had a keyboard, a screen, and a printer all housed in one stand-alone unit that utilized modern technology to create printed, processed documents. But one young entrepreneur saw the chance to create a software program that would not be tied to any one particular machine. Seymour Ivan Rubinstein (b. 1934) had more...

"The great promise of interferon as an antiviral agent was evident from the moment of its discovery." Dr. Sidney Pestka In 1969 research scientist and physician Dr. Sidney Pestka [b. 1936) started research into a protein called interferon, which he knew was involved in the immune system's response to viruses, bacteria, allergens, and even cancer. Pestka wanted to know its role and whether it could be used to create an antiviral drug. Interferon is a very rare protein (so potent that only a very small amount is needed to cause a large response) and it proved very difficult to get enough of a pure sample to experiment with, Pestka eventually refined a method called reverse phase high- performance liquid chromatography, which allowed for the purification of interferon in large enough quantities to study its mechanism of action. He found that interferon, secreted by human cells when they are under attack, more...

The stent, a mesh tube device designed to hold open blood vessels, has revolutionized management of coronary artery disease. The first successful stent was invented by Argentinian doctor Julio Palmaz (b. 1945). Palmaz had heard that blood vessels had a tendency to close up after balloon angioplasty, in which narrowed heart vessels are opened with a catheter. Pafmaz had the idea of putting a "scaffold" inside the vessels to prevent them from closing over. Palmaz began working on creating prototypes of an implantable stent, using simple materials such as copper wire and a soldering iron. He modeled the mesh with a structure of staggered openings he just happened to find lying on his garage floor. The design proved perfect—the structure was collapsible but remained rigid when inserted into the blood vessel. After testing his device on pigs and rabbits, Palmaz secured funding from the unlikely partnership of Phil Romano, a more...