Current Affairs Science Projects And Inventions

“... the flash of a neon light that split the night/And touched the sound of silence." Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence" Following the invention of the electric lightbulb by Edison and Swan in 1878, the race was on to improve its design and performance. French chemical engineer, Georges Claude (1870-1960) was working on an invention to extract oxygen from air, for use in hospitals and welding, and his experiments resulted in his discovery of the noble .gases—helium, argon, krypton, xenon, radon, and neon—so called because they do not react with other elements. Aware of the race for the perfect lightbulb, Claude experimented by passing an electric current through tubes containing different noble gases at low pressure. In 1902 he discovered that neon gas, with only a small current, produced an intense orange glow. He was unimpressed by the amount of light it produced, but Jacques Fonseque, an advertising agent, saw the potential for its application and the two men started to make neon signs, shaping the glass tubes and using mixtures of the other noble gases to produce different colors. In 1910, Claude displayed the first neon lamp to the public in Paris. In 1912, Claude and Fonseque sold the first neon sign to a barber's shop in Paris and, in 1919, just after World War I, they erected a huge neon sign over the entrance to the Paris Opera House. However, it was in the United States that neon really took off. The first sign there, made by Claude's factory in 1923, was an advertisement for a car dealership in Los Angeles. By 1927, New York had 750 neon signs. During the years before the Great Depression of the 1930s, neon lighting had become a symbol of American opulence and extravagance. 

Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen (1869-1942) developed the first magnetic recording system. It was the direct antecedent of analog tape recording, the medium for which most audio was captured throughout the twentieth century. The operating principles differed little from later analog recording systems. A motorized assembly pulled a spool of hair-thin wire at a constant speed across a magnetic recording head. The sound intended for capture was converted to electrical pulses that were then fed through a record head that imposed a pattern of magnetization onto the wire analogous to the original signal. The spool was then rewound, and the wire passed across a playback head that detected changes in the magnetic field stored on the wire; these were converted back to a continuous electrical signal that could then be heard. Poulsen patented his Telegraphone in 1898. Two years later he took it to the World Exposition in Paris, where he recorded the voice of Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, which remains the oldest surviving magnetic audio recording. Poulsen was awarded the Grand Prix for scientific invention and found licensees for production in Europe and the United States. In the first half of the twentieth century, the wire recorder was used as an office dictation machine. By the 1940s, the audio quality had improved and wire recorders were used in radio broadcasting. After World War II, manufacturers tried to introduce domestic wire recorders for home entertainment use, but the development of the magnetic tape recorder in the early 1950s all but rendered the medium obsolete. 

Wallace Carothers (1896-1937) was an excellent chemist and, as an undergraduate, was made head of the chemistry department at Tarkio College, Missouri. After becoming a professor at Harvard, he was lured into industry by chemical company DuPont, which had opened a science laboratory to develop new products. In 1928 he headed up a team looking into artificial materials. Carothers was interested in the hydrocarbon acetylene and its family of chemicals. After having developed the first synthetic rubber polymer—mass produced by DuPont as neoprene in 1931—he looked into creating a man-made synthetic fiber that could replace silk. Japan was the United States's main source of silk, but trade relations were breaking down as the political situation between the two countries worsened. Silk was becoming harder to source and very expensive. In 1935, Carothers made significant steps toward a silklike fiber by developing a chemical reaction between chemical units called monomers. The reaction resulted in a polymeric fiber and generated water as a by-product. If the water was removed from the reaction as it formed, then an even stronger fiber resulted. This fiber is now known as nylon and was introduced to the world in 1938. During the war it replaced silk in the manufacture of parachutes, and it subsequently found a huge and lucrative market in nylon stockings. Nylon now underpins the multi- billion-dollartextile industry. The highly ambitious Carothers suffered from severe depression and, in April 1937, despairing that he had no fresh inspiration, he committed suicide by taking a dose of potassium cyanide.

"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 babies born prematurely worldwide each year the need for a means to support fragile infants is clear. The exact number of lives this invention has saved is harder to determine. It is hard to imagine that just over a century ago premature babies were being placed in jars filled with feathers to help them through their perilous inaugurations into this world. 

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 telephone message. Today, equipment tends to use solid-state memory storage. The first digital answer-phone was invented in the United States by Kazuo Hashimoto in 1983. Telephones are, of course, intrinsically rude devices that pay no respect to normal methods of adult communication, and they interrupt whatever activity is going on. The answering machine—along with its related modern counterparts of voicemail, call registers, and text messages—gives people some relief from this impolite badgering, by allowing them to know who has been trying to talk to them and deciding whether they want to talk back. 

"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 galaxy. His antenna thus became the first radio telescope. Grote Reber, a ham radio operator and radio engineer from Wheaton, Illinois, subsequently built the first fully steerable radio telescope (that is, one that could move in both altitude and azimuth). His parabolic reflector turned out to be the prototype of several generations of radio telescopes. Reber started to map the radio sky, discovering the radio sources of Cassiopeia A and Cygnus A (in 1940) and the Andromeda Galaxy (in 1944). Radio emissions from the sun were discovered during World War II. 

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, aluminum oxide separates into highly reactive ions (charged atoms). The oxygen ions contain too many electrons, giving them a negative charge that pulls them toward positively charged carbon rods. The oxygen ions combine with the positively charged carbon to form carbon dioxide. Simultaneously, the aluminum ions are drawn toward negatively charged carbon lining the reaction container. When the aluminum contacts the carbon, it steals the carbon's excess electrons and thus becomes stable aluminum. Aluminum is used to make food packaging and kitchen utensils, as well as having many specialized uses as a sturdy, lightweight material. 

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 a new transmitter for his telephone system, and he dispatched his assistant, Thomas Watson, to Washington to investigate. So impressed was he that Bell bought the rights to the invention for $50,000 and hired him as a researcher. After seven years working with Bell, Berliner left to set up independently. After selling a number of his ideas to his former employer he began working in the field for which he is now best remembered—the early development of the gramophone record. In 1887 he worked out a way of recording onto a flat phonograph disc, over which a stylus moved horizontally, rather than vertically as in a cylinder. 

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 by Alex Toet in Soesterberg, Netherlands, to develop goggles that would show the night world in color. The goggles—whose workings were revealed in 2005—are given a sample picture of the world during daytime from which all the colors can be identified. The goggles map this color picture onto a gray night vision picture and compare the two. After this they can instantly translate the grays of the night vision into colors whenever the goggles are used at night. Initially the color night vision goggles have a range of settings based on urban, rural, desert, or coastal environments.   Eventually,   using   GPS   (Global Positioning System) data, they can be programmed to adjust the color ranges automatically for the specific location where they are being used. In addition to the military, the emergency services are likely to find the goggles invaluable in their night operations. 

“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 turned into flakes, which the brothers then toasted. The flakes, served with milk and marshmallows, proved popular with the sanatorium guests. Patenting their invention as "Granose," the brothers founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, led by Will Kellogg. Will developed similar recipes using other types of grain, including corn. He started to manufacture Granose in 1906 and—to his brother John's horror—added sugar to the flakes to make them more palatable. John Kellogg viewed the cereals business as a sideline and sold his shares, which his brother acquired covertly until he had a majority stake.