Current Affairs Science Projects And Inventions

"One thing I feel most passionately about: love of invention will never die,” KarlBenz' The invention of the gear system used in motorcars followed hot on the heels of the construction of the first automobiles. Karl Benz was the first to add a second gear to his machine and also invented the gear shift to transfer between the two. The suggestion for this additional gear came from Benz's wife, Bertha, who drove the three-wheeled Motorwagen 65 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim—the first long-distance automobile trip. The need for gears arises from the specifics of an internal combustion engine. The engine has a narrow range of revolutions per minute (rpm), where the horsepower and torque produced by the engine is at a maximum. The gears allow the engine to be maintained at its most efficient rpm while altering the relative speed of the drive shaft to the wheels. This allows the car to speed up or slow down while operating the engine in its optimal range. Gears originally required "double clutching," where the clutch had to be depressed to disengage the first gear from the drive shaft, then released to allow the correct rpm for the new gear to be selected. The clutch was then pressed again to engage the drive shaft with the new gear. Modern cars use synchronizers which use friction to match the speeds of the new gear and drive shaft before the teeth of the gears engage, meaning that the clutch only needs to be pressed once. 

"One day there will be a telephone In every major town in America." Alexander Graham Bell, inventor The invention of the telephone was a gigantic leap forward. However, early models were connected by a wire in pairs, meaning that you could only connect to one other telephone. This was not useful for keeping in contact with lots of different people. Early phones did not even use a ringing bell—you had to whistle into the speaker to get the other person's attention. The telephone had a long way to go, and it was Almon Strowger (1839-1902), a Missouri undertaker in the United States who devised a big improvement— the automatic telephone exchange. His local exchange operator was the wife of a rival undertaker and would divert calls away from Strowger's business. This motivated Strowger to invent an automated exchange that recognized the number dialed in by the caller. The earliest model was a hollow cylinder with a shaft in the middle capable of moving up and down and also rotating. A connector in the shaft could make contact with many different contacts on the inside of the cylinder and so send this down the line as a pulse, hence pulse dialing and rotary dial telephones. This system ended the need for manually connected calls until it too was superseded by digital systems. 

"Life is like a cash register, in that every thought, every deed, like every sale, is... recorded." Fulton J. Sheen, archbishop Before the cash register came into-being, short of sitting and watching every transaction taking place, there was no way for the boss or manager of a shop or other establishment to check exactly how much money was being taken over the counter each day. Sick of his light-fingered staff pilfering the takings from his saloon in Dayton, Ohio, proprietor James Ritty (1836-1918) decided that he would design a system to put a stop to employee embezzlement. The inspiration for the machine came to Ritty after he traveled by ship to Europe. While on board he became fascinated by a contraption that kept a record of how many rotations the ship's propeller had made. With this as inspiration, Ritty set to Work on the prototype for the first cash register. Ritty was trained as a mechanic, but he had given up manual labor in favor of running his own business. It therefore took him several attempts to create a working model but, with the help of his mechanic brother, the first cash register—"Rttty's Incorruptible Cashier"—was patented in 1879. Ritty's cash register differed from today's versions significantly. For example, it had no cash drawer. The fledgling machines were simply devices to record that a transaction had taken place and counted the grand total on a dial like a clock face. Ritty continued to develop the machine, later adding paper rolls and pins to make a physical record of the transaction, and he began to sell them to the public, Unable to run both the saloon and his cash register business, Ritty sold the company to Jacob H. Eckhart for the sum of $1,000. Eckhart in turn, sold it on to John H. Patterson. In 1884, the company was renamed the National Cash Register Company, which is still in operation today as NCR Corporation. 

"It was evident that it was much^ more economical to renounce the lighting power of the open flame" Carl Auer von Welsbach In 1807 Pall Mall in London became the first public street to be lit with coal gas, and other countries soon followed. Although gaslight was much cheaper than oil lamps or candles, it also produced smoke, bad smells, and lots of heat. These problems were resolved by an Austrian chemist. Carl Auer von Welsbach (1858-1929) had studied chemistry at the University of Heidelberg under Robert Bunsen (co-inventor of the Bunsen burner). In 1885, Welsbach discovered the rare-earth elements neodymium and praseodymium. In the course of his research he found that some rare-earths produced a bright light when heated in a Bunsen burner. In 1885, he patented a mantle, a sheath of metallic threads, made of 60 percent magnesium oxide, 20 percent yttrium oxide, and 20 percent lanthanum oxide. It was not a commercial success. Five years later, he developed a mantle made of 99 percent thorium dioxide and 1 percent cerium dioxide. These mantles lasted longer, produced a brighter white light, and were soon used to light streets, factories, and homes. Welsbach mantles still produced soot and heat. The solution to this was found in incandescent electric lamps, and most gaslights were replaced by electric lights in the early twentieth century. Welsbach mantles are still used today for camping. 

"Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away." Elvis Presley, singer When the legendary fashion designer Coco Chanel inadvertently developed a suntan during a Mediterranean cruise in the 1920s, tanned skin immediately became synonymous with beauty, fashion, and a healthy lifestyle. When the Popular Front won the 1936 French general elections and legislated for annual paid holidays, people began to spend more of their time in the sun. In response to increasing French demands for a product to assist in the tanning process/the' French chemist and founder of L'Oreal, Eugene Schueller (1881-1957), created "Bellis," the world's first sunscreen lotion. Its effectiveness in the prevention of skin cancers, however, was poor when compared with modern formulations, and many early attempts at tanning lotions amounted to nothing more than crude oil- based pastes. Twenty-six years would pass before the chemist Franz Greiter introduced the Sun Protection Factor (SPF) in 1962, the first real attempt to grade a sunscreen's effectiveness at blocking the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. Schueller began experimenting at home with chemicals responsible for color pigmentation in 1903. He found the chemicals became permanently absorbed into human hair when mixed with ammonia and peroxide. In 1907 he successfully began to market his new synthetic hair-coloring formula to Parisien hairdressers under the name Aureole. The first mass- produced suntan lotion was a combination of jasmine and cocoa butter, mixed in an old granite coffee pot in 1944 by the Florida-based pharmacist Benjamin Green, a researcher with the Coppertone Company. 

"The fact that fat oils from vegetable sources can be used may seem insignificant today..." Rudolf Diesel, 1912 While it can be safely asserted that the Diesel engine was, indeed, invented by Paris-born inventor Rudolf Diesel (1858-1913), it is not the case that we can attribute to him the very first "diesel" engine. "Diesel engine" has for some time been the generic term used to describe any compression ignition (Cl), internal-combustion engine, that is an engine that has no carburetor or spark plugs but instead injects a fuel oil directly into the cylinder. Because the piston has compressed the air therein so tightly, it is hot enough to ignite the fuel with no spark. As a cold engine cannot ignite the diesel fuel, glow plugs are sometimes used to preheat the cylinder/mixture. Diesel researched Cl engine technology for many years, testing a variety of fuels ranging from coal dust to thick tar-type oil. His engine design was patented in 1892—some two years after a patent for a Cl engine had already been issued to one Herbert Akroyd Stuart (1864-1927), of Buckinghamshire, England. Stuart's patent is but one of several related patents jointly filed by him and Charles Richard Binney. It was following demonstrations of Cl engines at the Munich Exhibition of 1898, and the Paris Exhibition of 1900, that Diesel's name became synonymous with both the style of engine and the kerosene-type fuel ultimately selected to power it. Excellent fuel economy and the non-explosive nature of the fuel itself ensured the engine's widespread success. Diesel actually foresaw the potential of (and ultimate need for) organically derived fuel sources. He died at sea after falling from the steamer, "Dresden," in September, 1913. 

"My head is full of [ideas] ...but they serve no purpose thereby must be put down on papery Camilo Jose Cela, writer The first modern paper was invented in 105 C.E. by a Chinese court official called Ts'ai Lun. He made sheets out of mulberry bark, rags, and hemp waste mixed with water. Paper continued to be made primarily of rags until the early nineteenth century, when mechanized papermaking took off. Soon, demand for paper far outweighed the supply of rags, and wood was explored as a substitute. In order to make paper from timber, the plant fibers must be turned into a pulp, which is then spread onto a flat screen. When the fibers dry, they stick together forming a sheet of paper. In 1866, Benjamin C. Tilghman invented the sulphite process, where wood is heated in a liquor containing an excess of sulfur dioxide to create pulp. Then in 1884, German inventor Carl F. Dahl found that using caustic soda and sodium sulphate in a "white liquor" resulted in a much stronger pulp. This pulp produced paper that was more resistant to tearing and so the process was named kraft after the German word meaning "strength". The kraft process had the advantage of being capable of pulping pine trees. It also had higher recoverability than the sulphite process so the chemicals could be recovered for future use, making it more efficient. It overtook the sulphite process as the dominant form of pulping and is still used today. 

"AT&T is proud to follow in the footsteps of Espenschied and Affel as we continue to drive innovation." Dave Belanger, chief scientist at AT&T Labs In the early 1920s it was clear to communications engineers that high-frequency transmission lines were paramountto the success of any further developments in communications, since ordinary wires and cables simply could not cope. Two engineers at Bell Laboratories, Lloyd Espenschied (1889-1986) and Herman A. Affel (1893-1972), came to the rescue. Together they created the coaxial cable, which is capable of carrying high-frequency (or broadband) signals successfully. Instead of having just single strands of copper covered by a jacket of a flexible plastic, they widened their working diameter to include an insulating spacer and a conducting shield, which gives the cable a very distinctive cross section. Running through the very center of the cable is the conductor, which carries the signal. Wrapped around this is the inner dielectric insulator and wrapped around that is a conducting shield that reduces electromagnetic interference from any external sources, meaning that the signal stays clear. The shield can be made from layers of braided wire (which allows flexibility, but creates gaps) or can be a solid metal tube (which is rigid, but more secure). Usually, the whole cable is coated in some sort of vinyl material. The name coaxial means "sharing the same axis," which is what the conductor, the spacer, the shield, and the jacket all do. 

The Sturtevant family business was founded in 1883 by Thomas L. Sturtevant, with the aim of satisfying the increasing need for mechanization in the fertilizer industry. Thoms's son Lawrence, and his nephew Thomas J. Sturtevant, came to work for him—Thomas bringing with him a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sturtevant soon branched out into the automotive field and designed various improvements including vacuum brakes and automatic engine lubrication. However, it was his bold invention of the automatic transmission that paved the way for today's automatic cars. At the time, one of the biggest headaches for designers in the fast evolving car industry was simply getting the power from the engine to the wheels. Sturtevant wanted a way to change gear without having to depress a clutch and temporarily disengage the engine from the wheels. His solution was innovative, but initially a failure. His first automatic car of 1904 used the centrifugal force of spinning weights to change gear. As the speed of the car increased, the spinning action caused these weights to swing outward, where they would eventually engage with a band that shifted the car from low to high gear. The design was flawed and often the weights would fly apart under the stress. But the concept of a car automatically changing gear was proven. Despite various experimental attempts to come up with a practical automatic car, the initial costs, reliability, and lack of demand meant that it was several decades before the automatic became a common site on the road. 

"If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves." Thomas Alva Edison On November 21, 1877, Thomas Alva Edison (1847- 1931) announced the invention of the first device for recording and replaying sound—the "phonograph." Like the development of photography, it was a landmark invention that allowed for moments or periods in time to be captured in perpetuity. This worked by engraving a visual representation of a sound wave on a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder; the sound was captured as a series of indentations in the foil using a cutting stylus that responded to the vibrations of the sound being recorded. When a playback stylus passed over the cylinder a crude representation of the original recording could be heard. As with so many of his inventions, Edison was spurred on in his efforts by his own hearing difficulties. The inventor's first recorded words were the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb." Edison considered cutting the indentations into a spiral groove on a flat disk, but he instead chose the outside of a rotating. cylinder as it provided the stylus with a constant speed in the groove. Nevertheless, the principles that governed his invention would later evolve into the mass-produced gramophone record. While Edison was working in New Jersey, French scientist, Charles Cros, was working on much the same concept. Cros had published his theories in April 1877, but he did not build-such a machine. By the time he submitted his paper to the French Academy of Sciences, however, Edison had already given a practical demonstration of his invention, guaranteeing his place in the history books. The phonograph was the invention which made Edison famous, and he received a patent for it in February 1878, leaving Cros little more than a minor footnote.