Archives November 2013

"Learn to deprive large masses of their gravity and give them absolute levity, for the sake of transport." Benjamin Franklin Magnetically levitated (maglev) trains glide above a track, propelled by superconducting electromagnets. The principle is more than a century old, but initially the huge electrical currents needed to provide a sufficiently strong magnetic field were impractical. The breakthrough came when two physicists, Gordon Danby and James Powell, at Brookhaven National Laboratory decided to use high temperature superconductors as electromagnets. They obtained a patent for the technology in 1968, and by 1979 visitors to a transportation exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, were enjoying a short test run on a Transrapid maglev train. Maglev trains need a guiding track and the carriages float just above it. Changing the field produced by the electromagnets in the guideway pulls the train along. The only friction is due to air resistance, so extremely high speeds are more...

Napoleon was once asked what the great need of France was. He answered," Nation's progress is impossible without trained and educated mothers. If the women of my country are not educated, about half of the people will be ignorant." A woman has to play three roles in the course of her life. Each of these roles expects some duties from her. It is only with the help. Of education that she would be able to do them successfully the first duty of a woman is to be good daughter. The second duty is to be a good wife and third duty is to be a good mother. Education teaches a woman what she should be. It also teaches her how she should do it to be good daughter, a good wife and a good mother. Many men spend their evening time at clubs and societies. But a gentleman with an more...

The ice skate is believed to have been invented circa 3000 B.C.E. in Finland. For many years scientists were not sure where exactly the skate originated, ancient models havina been found throughout Scandinavia as well as Russia. However, in 2008 news emerged that people living in what is now southern Finland would have benefited the most from skating on the crude blades. This country's nickname, "the land of the thousand lakes," is an understatement as it boasts no fewer than 187,888 of them. Finland is also a cold land and therefore each winter its thousands of frozen lakes have presented serious transportation problems for the population. With neighboring villages often separated by lakes, and rowboats locked up until spring, the options were to try to navigate around the frozen water or find a way to negotiate the slippery surfaces. The first skates consisted of the leg bones of large animals. more...

"We have your satellite. If you want it back send twenty billion in Martian money." Graffiti at NASA laboratory, Pasadena, California A space probe is a satellite that leaves the grip of Earth's gravity and moves off to flyby, or orbit, another solar system body. The first target was the moon. There were three U.S. attempts in 1958, Pioneer 2, and 3, which all failed. The U.S.S.R. had the first success in January 1959 with the Luna 1 probe, which was launched with the objective of impacting the lunar surface. It flew by, missing by 3,700 miles (5,950 km), but at least it got there. The U.S.'s Pioneer 4 flew past at a miss distance of 37,300 miles (60,000 km). The greatest early successes were Luna 2 (September 1959) and Luna 3 (October 1959), the first hitting the moon Just east of the Sea of Serenity and the second imaging more...

The concept of credit is not a new one. The word "credit" comes from the Latin word credo, to believe or trust, and we know that the Egyptians were using credit methods over 3,000 years ago. The credit card is a system of payment and is named after the plastic card issued to people who subscribe to the system. Although the term was used several times in Edward Bellamy's 1887 novel Looking Backward, and Western .Union issued charge cards to users from 1914, the modern credit card was not invented until 1949. It is said that Frank X. McNamara, a New York banker, came up with the idea after forgetting his wallet when out entertaining clients. He distributed 200 Diners Club cards, which were essentially charge card accounts as the bill had to be settled entirely on issue. Modern credit cards, where the issuer lends money to the consumer to more...

The boiler of a steam engine uses the heat from both fire and the hot gases produced by fire to boil water and produce steam. The efficiency of this process can be greatly improved if the contact area between the hot gases and the water vessel is very large. Instead of just having a kettle-type boiler sitting on a fire, a multiple-tube boiler passes the fire gases through the boiler along a series of narrow tubes. Cornish boilers had one tube, Lancashire boilers two, and marine and locomotive boilers had many tubes, which sometimes were passed back and forward through the boiler. The first two-pass multi-tube boiler was invented in 1828 by the French engineer Mark Seguin (1786- 1875). This quickly led to a considerable improvement in the power and speed of early railway engines and was a major factor in the success of George Stephenson's Rocket in the Rainhill more...

Primitive padlocks have been around since medieval times, but their design left them prone to force or picking. In 1720, Swedish inventor Christopher Polhem (1661-1751) conjured up a lock that was much more resistant to the dexterous hands.of lockpickers. Polhem was one of the most gifted mechanical engineers of his day. After studying mathematics, physics, and engineering at Uppsala University, he set up as a clock repairer. His ingenuity was soon spotted by important patrons, including King Charles XI of Sweden. Polhem went on to design many intricate devices both small (watch mechanisms) and large (industrial machinery). Perhaps his most enduring invention, however, was the padlock. His basic design comprises an elliptical cast iron body containing a series of rotating disks. When locked, the disks fit into grooves on the shackle (the U- shaped bar on top of the padlock), preventing its release from the body. Notches on the discs more...

"The world can only be changed one piece at a time. The art is picking that piece." Tim Berners-Lee Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955) knows a lot about changing the world. There was a time when his web pages were the only pages on the World Wide Web. Born to parents who had met while developing one of the earliest computers, Berners-Lee studied for a physics degree from Queen's College, Oxford, then headed straight for the computer industry. By 1989 he was working in Geneva, Switzerland, at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. CERN was interested in finding 'a way by which groups of researchers could share information more easily. Berners-Lee saw the'- potential for marrying hypertext—a technique for linking documents together using clickable words—with the Internet, which was already heavily used by CERN. Working with colleague Robert Cailliau, he proposed a system he called the World Wide Web. The first more...

India is a land of fairs. Almost every district has a fair. Some of them are religious fairs. Others are commercial fairs. Some of them are both. On the Kartik Purnima, it was a holiday. I went with some friends to see the Bateshwar Fair. It is very famous and people come to see it from far and wide. We went there in the morning.  When we reached the fair, we had to cross bridge over a part of the river. Then we reached the Mela ground. We saw a large number of donkeys, pigs, camels and horses in different parts of the fair ground. The donkeys were holding a braying competition. The pigs were grunting, the horses were neighing and camels were making a babbling sound. I liked the horses show best. The owners of the horses were riding and showing them to the buyers. Some of them were more...

"They come and pushed me off. They come with the cats... the Caterpillar tractors." The Grapes of Wrath, Nunally Johnson screenplay When you want to navigate areas where the terrain is uneven and muddy, what better solution than to take the road with you? This was precisely the conclusion of Englishman Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817) when he invented the "portable railway," the earliest incarnation of a full-track vehicle. Although his 1770 patent is open to interpretation, it could describe anything from a vehicle with shoed wheels to a system similar to that seen today where continuous tracks run between front and rear wheels. The nineteenth century saw a glut of patents filed for vehicles sporting tracks. However, they suffered from problems such as poor steering and a lack of materials capable of taking the stresses and strains exerted by the system. But perhaps the biggest stumbling block was insufficient propulsive power, more...