Science Projects And Inventions

"Today, centrifugal pumps and compressors have reached efficiency levels above 90 percent." Abraham Engeda, Michigan State University The centrifugal pump works by drawing in a fluid (a liquid or gas) at the center of a cylindrical chamber that contains a rotating impeller with vanes. This forces the fluid to rotate outward toward the wall of the cylinder before flowing into an outlet pipe. The rotation of the fluid causes the liquid to leave with a higher velocity and pressure than when it entered. The centrifugal pump was invented by French scientist Denis Papin in 1689 as he attempted to solve the problem of ventilating mines. Papin's device was used to pump air through mines and was also applied to furnaces, where it was known as the Hessian bellows. The basic centrifugal pump was improved by John Appold, who carried out an exhaustive study on the effect of blade shape on more...

No office is complete without a fax machine, so you would probably think that it was a modern invention. But the earliest facsimile machine was actually invented thirty years before the telephone, in 1842. Today faxes run a sheet of paper through rolls, using optical chips to record the image. These chips did not exist until the late 1960s, but machines using photoelectric cells, invented by Edouard Belin in 1907, sent the light and dark parts of a picture as electrical pulses. By 1902 Arthur Korn had already invented a similar machine. Even earlier, in 1898, Ernest A. Hummel invented the copying telegraph, which sent pictures between major newspapers in the United States. But long before Hummel there was a way to transmit images. In 1855 Giovanni Caselli made the pantelegraph, synchronizing the sending and receiving machines with an electronic heartbeat and sending pulses between them. But even this was more...

Sand casting with molten metal ranks as one of the oldest of the manufacturing technologies. For many years it was a dark art and its mysteries were known only to a select few. A sixteenth-century Italian metallurgist and arms maker, Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-c. 1539), would change this with his seminal work, De la pirotechnia (1540). Published in Venice a year after Biringuccio's death, the book is a veritable enclyclopedia of metallurgical knowledge and constitutes some of the earliest printed information on sand casting and foundry techniques in general. Born in Siena, Biringuccio, under the patronage of an Italian merchant politician and part-time tyrant, Pandolfo Petrucci, traveled widely throughout Italy and Germany, accumulating the information and experiences that he would summarize in his book. During a typical sand-casting operation, a model or "pattern" of the item to be cast is positioned in a frame. Sand, moistened to bind it together, is more...

The roar of a chain saw is a sound that is hard to separate from images of destruction and violence. Horror movies and wildlife documentaries have taught us that chain saws are, in general, a "bad thing." For maintenance workers and lumberjacks in the 1920s,the invention of the chain saw was undoubtedly a blessing. It is possible that early chain saws were in use before World War I, although there is little solid evidence for this and it was not until World War II that Andreas StihI's (1896-1973) "hand held mobile chain saw," invented in 1927, came into its own. German troops used the saws for making quick progress through wooded areas. When the Allies caught wind of this, they promptly dropped a bomb on the Germans' chain saw factory—but not before stealing a saw for themselves so that they could copy it. StihI's original chain saw was equal in more...

"Get in a supply of taffeta... and you will see one of the most astonishing sights In the world." Joseph Montgolfier in a letter to his brother At 1:45 p.m., November 21, 1783, in the courtyard of the Chateau de la Muette on the outskirts of Paris, the balloon constructed by brothers Joseph-Michael (1740-1810) and Jacques-Etienne de Montgolfier (1745-1799) made its first manned flight. Piloted by a young scientist named Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and an army officer, the Marquis d'Adlandes, the flight high over the city lasted for twenty-five minutes and came to the ground on the Butte-aux-Cailles, 10 miles (16 km) from where it had started. The Montgolfiers' inspiration came from watching a fire burning and speculating as to the "force" that caused the sparks, smoke, and embers to rise. They constructed a large envelope from taffeta, lit a fire beneath the opening, and watched as it rose more...

While other ancient civilizations were playing with balls made of stitched-up cloth or cow bladders, the people of Mesoamerica (present-day Mexico and Central America) were playing a game of life and death using balls made from a processed rubber. By adding the juice of the morning glory vine to latex (raw liquid rubber) harvested from the native rubber tree {Castilla elastica), they created balls that had great bounce. As early as 1600 B.C.E., the Mesoamericans used this method to make resilient rubber balls that defied the natural brittleness of solid latex. Their amalgamation could be shaped into any conceivable form, but would harden within minutes, making it impossible to reshape the object afterward. They used this process for a variety of artifacts and produced balls of different sizes, the biggest being larger than a volleyball and weighing up to eight pounds (3.6 kg). These were then used in ritual ball more...

"Ancient masons... could carve marble at more than double the speed of today's craftsmen." Evan Hadingon, Smithsonian Magazine Chisel-like tools have been dated to the Paleolithic era, which stretches across a vast expanse of evolutionary time, from before the first Homo sapiens to roughly 10,000 B.C.E. During this time humans were making and refining stone tools, which became gradually more specialized overtime. Other materials were also used, and bone chisels from around 30,000 B.C.E. have been uncovered in Southern France, near the village of Aurignac. Although very difficult to date exactly, it is thought that by about 7500 B.C.E., what we would recognize today as a chisel was in fairly common use. By the time of the Bronze Age, chisels had become quite varied and included gouges—chisels with curved blades—and tanged chisels, where the blade is connected to the handle by a collar. The Greek architect Manolis Korres believes the more...

"... developed when an enterprising human first daubed mud upon a branch shelter.."   Joseph F. Kennedy, The Art of Natural Building The technique of wattle and daub was first pioneered by human civilizations as early as 6000 B.C.E. as a way of weatherproofing their shelters. In its essence, wattle and daub is a way of filling in the gaps between the structural elements of wooden houses. In a typical Tudor example, oak staves were placed vertically between structural beams and then thin twigs of a flexible hardwood, such as willow or hazel, were woven horizontally between the staves, creating a robust mesh, or "wattle." The wattle was then coated with daub—a mixture of clay or mud and animal dung, strengthened with straw or horsehair. This mixture was pressed onto the wattle by hand. The mud and dung helped the daub adhere to the wattle, and the fiber content prevented more...

The first modems date back to the cold war and 1958, when the North American Air Defense transmitted data over telephone wires to hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada. A modem has one essential function, which is to translate the digital language of computers into the analog language of the telephonic system and back again. In 1981 Dennis Hayes (b. 1950) launched the Smart modem (originally named the Hayes Stack Smart modem). This was an automatic modem that for a time led the rapidly emerging personal computer market. Earlier modems were not adaptable to a variety of computers, were expensive to produce, and also were cumbersome to operate, requiring manual connection to telephone lines, The brilliance of the Smart modem lay in its ability to "think for itself" and program itself into the telephone networks* It did this by using its own data language to instruct more...

“I decided that if you could ski on snow, you could ski on water. Everyone... thought I was nuts." Ralph Samuelson, waterskiing pioneer Messing about on the water provides many of life's great pastimes; swimming, fishing, and boating being just a few. In 1922 one more activity was added to this list—waterskiing. Its inventor, Ralph Samuelson (1903- 1977), was already a keen exponent of aquaplaning— the art of being dragged behind a boat on a shaped piece of wood—but he wanted to replicate snow skiing on the water. After .several abortive attempts with barrel staves and snow skis, he build his own skis out of 8-foot (2.5 m) lengths of plank, using his mother's copper kettle to boil the ends of the wood to shape them. When they were ready, his next task was to work out the correct technique for getting himself "launched." For many years, the origins of more...