My Science School

             George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. He was a renowned playwright, critic and polemicist. When Shaw was 15-years-old, his mother left him and his father.

            Later, Shaw’s plays, including ‘Misalliance’, are filled with problematic parent-child relationships: with children who are brought up in isolation from their parents.

            He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ‘Widowers’ Houses’, ‘Pygmalion’ and ‘Candida’. George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in the year 1925.

            Over a decade later in 1938 he earned an Academy Award for the film adaptation of ‘Pygmalion’. In the final decade of his life, he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death. Bernard Shaw refused all state honours including the Order of Merit in 1946.

          Bernard Shaw’s complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950.

          Today he is considered as one of the greatest wits of English language. Film adaptations of his plays are considered classics.

Picture credit: google

               Leonardo de Vinci (1452-1519) was thought until recently to have been the first to design a parachute. But drawings have now been found that were made five years before da Vinci’s sketches, possibly by an engineer in Siena central Italy.

               However, the first man to make and successfully use a parachute was a Frenchman, Andre Garnerin (1770-1825), who stretched cloth across a bamboo framework and parachuted from a balloon over Paris in 1797. It was an uncomfortable descent as the fabric was too thick o spill out any wind, and the parachute came down swinging violently like a pendulum. Garnerin was is a tiny basket, to which he clung tightly until his rough landing on the plain of Monceau. The parachutes of those days were developed from the crude canvas devices used to descend from hot air balloons.

               Modern parachutes are made of pure silk or good-quality nylon in small panels and have a small pilot parachutes which open first and helps to pull out the main parachute.

    

          Smoke will rise up the chimney or through the nearest opening it can find because it is hotter and, therefore, lighter than the air in the room.

           Before the days of chimneys smoke was allowed to escape through vents or open turrets in the roof. Chimneys were introduced to induce a draught, thus providing more air for the fire. The hot smoke passing up the shaft made room for cool air, of higher density.

           Thus a chimney would not only carry away the smoke and gases from a fire but also act as a ventilator enabling a change of air in the room.