2nd Class

"The person who has health has hope; and the person who has hope has everything." Arabic proverb Inspired by chicken incubators, which had been based on those depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphs, a French obstetrician by the name of Etienne Stephane Tarnier enlisted the help of a poultry raiser, Odile Martin, to construct incubators suitable for human infants. This 1880 adaptation of an ancient design has gone on to save millions of lives. The design was very simple: two chambers, one on top of the other with space for a baby in the upper chamber, and water heated by an oil lamp in the lower chamber. The lower chamber gently warmed the upper chamber whereas an opening in the uppermost compartment ensured that the infant could breathe. Since 1880 incubators have changed hugely with the modern version housing some of the most sophisticated equipment humans have devised. With around fourteen million more...

Dane Valdemar Poulsen (1869-1942) shaped a surprising amount of the modern world with the invention of magnetically recorded sound in 1898. It was an incredibly useful innovation that has been used in tape recordings, hard disks, floppy disks, and credit cards. It also led him to create, in 1904, the world's first "telephone answering device." Modern society relies on communication tools such as the telephone to function, and today it is very unusual to encounter a telephone that does not have some form of answering phone or voicemail. After its invention in 1876, the telephone became a world- changing tool, allowing anyone in the world to have a conversation with anyone else, immediately. It was only a matter of time before somebody had the idea for an answering machine. Poulsen's magnetic wire recording device was initially used in the answering machine but later versions used magnetic tape to record the more...

"We live in a changing universe, and few things are changing faster than our conception of it." Timothy Ferris, The Whole Shebang Bell Telephone Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, was investigating the introduction of short-wave radio transatlantic telephone services, and was worried that static signals might interfere with voice transmission. In 1931 Bell physicist and engineer Karl Guthe Jansky (1905-1950) was instructed to find the source of the static. Using a high-quality 14.6 m (20.5 MHz) radio receiver and a quaint, wheel-mounted antenna system, he found three sources: nearby thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms, and a faint background hiss. The intensity of the latter varied daily. After a few months' work, Jansky realized that the period was not the solar day of twenty-four hours but the twenty- three hours fifty-six minutes sidereal day. By 1932 he had pinpointed the source of the hiss as being the Sagittarius region of the Milky Way more...

Aluminum has not always been the light, cheap metal it is now. Chemists once painstakingly toiled to produce even small amounts, largely because it quickly burned when heated to high temperatures. The Washington Monument was topped with aluminum at the end of its construction in 1884. The 6.1-pound (2.8 kg) pyramid was one of the biggest pieces created. In 1886, aluminum alchemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Heroult discovered, independently, a process for cheap aluminum production. The twenty-two- year-olds, from the United States and France respectively, found that molten cryolite was the optimal environment for a chemical reaction to create large amounts of aluminum.                  Before being put through the Hall-Heroult process, bauxite ore must first be changed into aluminum-oxide. In the process, powdered aluminum oxide is dissolved in molten cryolite, a substance made up of sodium, aluminum, and fluoride. In the cryolite, more...

In 1870 nineteen-year-old Emile Berliner (1851-1929) left his native Germany and emigrated to the United States where he worked in a livery stable. There was nothing in his background or education—he had only the most rudimentary knowledge of electricity and physics—to suggest that he might have any impact on the emerging technology of the day. However, in 1876 he was so inspired by a demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell's telephone during the U.S. centennial celebrations that he decided to study the instrument. He discerned that its main weakness was the sound detector—the mouthpiece. The following year, working alone in his boarding house, Berliner created a new "loose contact" detector. This was arguably the earliest microphone because it increased the volume of the transmitted voice. At this time, Alexander Graham Bell, who had recently founded the Bell Telephone Company, became aware that a young unknown inventor had submitted a patent covering more...

Last year, our school visited the Deegha Beach among other places. The Deegha Beach is situated in Midnapore district in West Bengal on the Bay of Bengal, about 300 km from Kolkata. We took night bus from Kolkata. It started at 10 o'clock. Our teacher took the seat near the door while we all sat behind. We sang songs, cracked jokes and talked to enjoy ourselves. We all fell asleep at about 12 o'clock while the bus drove at its normal speed in the stillness of night.                                   Our bus reached the Deegha Beach as early as 4 o'clock. We hurriedly hired a hotel room and left our luggage there. Then we all hurried to the beach in the dark of early morning. We hurried because we wanted to see the sunrise. The beach more...

There are a number of situations in which you might want to be able to see in the dark, but it was for military purposes that night vision goggles were originally developed by American Wiliam Spicer in 1942. In later years, cameras on the goggles would take tiny amounts of light and amplify it, producing a gray or green, albeit fuzzy, image of what was happening. Alternatively, in. pitch black, where there was no light to amplify, infrared sensors showed the heat coming off things, enabling you to see everything in colors that depended on the degree of heat. A big problem with a night-vision world represented in gray or green is that distances are hard to judge. Without the range of colors that are seen in daylight, grayish objects can be hard to distinguish from a background of similar color. The Dutch military approached the TNO research team led more...

“At the time I little realized the extent to which the food business might develop in Battle CreeK.” Will Keith Kellogg Cornflakes were invented by accident in 1894 by John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) and his brother Will Keith Kellogg (1860-1951). A group of Seventh Day. Adventists, including the Kellogg brothers, were trying to develop new foods to conform to a strict vegan diet, in the belief that this was beneficial to health. As the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanatorium, a hospital and health spa for wealthy customers, John Kellogg tested out the foods on his guests. Grains of all kinds were known to be nutritious. On one occasion, the Kellogg brothers left some cooked wheat to attend to something else, and when they returned the wheat had dried out. Not wanting to waste it, they pressed the wheat with rollers to try and make flat dough. But the grains more...

Last year the National Book Trust of India organized The World Book Fair at Pragati  Maidan, New Delhi. It was a –grand Occasion for me. As I am very fond of books, I with my friends decided to visit and watch this mega festival. The entry was free for the students. Hence, we went to the Book Fair on the Very inaugural day. The book fair was indeed a spectacle to watch. There Were hoardings everywhere "All for books and books for all." Each hall was segmented into many stalls managed by the respective publishing houses. There were local publishers, National publishers and International publishers with various kinds of books. Periodicals, Teaching Aids, audio-visual materials, computer software and hardware etc. We were very happy on seeing that. Books on wide range of disciplines such as Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, Children books, Literature were displayed in almost all stalls. There more...

In an age when everything seems to have gone topsy turvy  when everyone seems to run after some monetary achievement, no one can deny the importance of moral education. It is the only way out to keep control that they find themselves unable to differentiate between right and wrong. Moral education will enable them to go on the right path forgetting all those which are not at all desirable.  What is moral education after all ? It can be anything which teaches a person moral values and virtue. Values arc the set of guidelines that a human being learns to follow.  Nobody is born with moral content in him." It is inculcated in him by his education and experience of life. Hence, it is necessary to teach moral values from the very beginning of the childhood. We all pick up morals throughout our life, but it is the education that more...