My Science School

The ship The Bounty was commanded by Captain Bligh. In 1787 some of the crew, led by Fletcher Christian, mutinied against Bligh's cruel discipline and set him and 18 sailors adrift in a small boat.

This tiny boat crossed 5,793km (3,600 miles) of open sea and landed safely in the East Indies. In 1805 Bligh was made governor of New South Wales and he planted Australia's first apple trees.

Bligh had visited Van Diemen’s Land in 1777 when he was a navigation officer on Captain James Cook’s Resolution. He returned to the island in the Bounty in 1788 on a voyage that had been intended to transport breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. The ship had called at the Cape of Good Hope in Africa and the apple trees planted were most likely acquired there.

Blight’s visit on the Bounty occurred on the voyage which ended in the famous mutiny. He navigated a longboat to Timor and continued his naval service.

Four years later Bligh returned to Adventure Bay, again on his way to Tahiti. He recorded in his log that one of the first apple trees that he had planted had survived. The others had been destroyed by fire. He described the fruit of the surviving tree as green and slightly bitter.

Bligh became Governor of New South Wales in 1806. However, he seemed to attract mutiny and was deposed by the New South Wales Corps in 1808.

Credit : Australian Food Time 

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During the first World War, a doctor at a German hospital left his German shepherd dog to look after a patient for a few minutes.

The way the dog behaved impressed the doctor so much that he began training dogs purely to help the blind.

The modern guide dog story, however, begins during the First World War, with thousands of soldiers returning from the Front blinded, often by poison gas. A German doctor, Dr Gerhard Stalling, got the idea of training dogs en masse to help those affected. While walking with a patient one day through the hospital grounds, he was called away urgently and left his dog with the patient as company. When he returned, he saw signs, from the way the dog was behaving, that it was looking after the blind patient.

Dr Stalling started to explore ways of training dogs to become reliable guides and in August 1916 opened the world’s first guide dog school for the blind in Oldenburg. The school grew and many new branches opened in Bonn, Breslau, Dresden, Essen, Freiburg, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Münster and Hannover, training up to 600 dogs a year. These schools provided dogs not only to ex-servicemen, but also to blind people in Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the United States, Canada and the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, due to a reduction in dog quality, the venture had to shut down in 1926, but by that time another large guide dog training centre had opened in Potsdam, near Berlin, which was proving to be highly successful. This school’s work broke new ground in the training of guide dogs and it was capable of accommodating around 100 dogs at a time and providing up to 12 fully-trained guide dogs a month.

Around this time, a wealthy American woman, Dorothy Harrison Eustis, was already training dogs for the army, police and customs service in Switzerland. It was to be Dorothy Eustis’s energy and expertise that would properly launch the guide dog movement internationally.

Having heard about the Potsdam centre, Eustis was curious to study the school’s methods and spent several months there. She came away so impressed that she wrote an article about it for the Saturday Evening Post in America in October 1927.

A blind American man, Morris Frank, heard about the article and bought a copy of the newspaper. He later said that the five cents the newspaper cost him “bought an article that was worth more than a million dollars to me. It changed my life”. He wrote to Eustis, telling her that he would very much like to help introduce guide dogs to the United States.

Taking up the challenge, Dorothy Eustis trained a dog, Buddy, and brought Frank over to Switzerland to learn how to work with the dog. Frank went back to the United States with what many believe to be America’s first guide dog. Eustis later established the Seeing Eye School in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1929, but before this went back to Switzerland to do further work there. Meanwhile, an Italian Guide Dog organisation, Sculola Nazionale Cani Guida per Ciechi was also established in 1928.

The success of the United States experience encouraged Eustis to set up guide a dog school at Vevey in Switzerland in 1928. She called this school, like the one a year later in New Jersey, ‘L’Oeil qui Voit’, or The Seeing Eye (the name comes from the Old Testament of the Bible – ‘the hearing ear and the seeing eye’, Proverbs, XX, 12). The schools in Vevey, New Jersey and Italy were the first guide dog schools of the modern era that have survived the test of time.

In 1930, two British women, Muriel Crooke and Rosamund Bond, heard about The Seeing Eye and contacted Dorothy Eustis, who sent over one of her trainers. In 1931, the first four British guide dogs completed their training and three years later The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association was founded in the UK.

Since then, guide dog schools have opened all round the world, and more open their doors every decade. Thousands of people have had their lives transformed by guide dogs, thanks to the organisations that provide them. The commitment of the people who work for these organisations, and the people who financially support them, is as deep today as it ever was, and the heirs of Dorothy Eustis’s legacy continue to work for the increased mobility, dignity and independence of blind and partially-sighted people the world over. The movement goes on.

Credit : International Guide Dog Federation

Picture Credit : Google

Paper was first made by wasps! They make paper for their nests by chewing up fragments of wood.

The ancient Egyptians made paper from a water reed called papyrus-hence the name paper.

As early as the second century the Chinese manufactured paper from bamboo fibres, pounded and pulped and then left to dry.

Paper made out of plant-like fibres was invented by the Chinese Cai Lun, who in the 2nd century China, mixed textile fibres from the bark of the mulberry in water and produced sheets of paper from that. The invention of paper was one of the reasons for the successes of early China, through easier governing of the country.

Archaeological findings have shown that paper was first made from plantlike fibres, were already used from 140 to 87 BC.

The art of papermaking was first exported from China to Korea and Japan around 610 AD. Arabic people have learned the papermaking technique in the 8th century from Chinese, as is being told, from Chinese people skilled in papermaking who were captured. The Arabic people spread the knowledge during their military campaigns in the North of Africa and the South of Europe. The first paper manufacturing in Europe started in 1144 in Xativa (near Valencia) in Spain. The first papermaking in countries in Europe, which were not controlled by the Arabians, was in the 13th century in Italy and Spain, although the usage of paper was already known in Europe since about 1100. A paper mill in Fabriano (near Ascona) in Italy existed in 1276 (and still exists nowadays). Around this time sizing paper with animal glue was invented in Italy. The Germans had their first paper mill in 1389, followed by the rest of Europe at the end of the 15th century. In Belgium the first paper production was in Huy (Hoei) in 1405 and in Holland in Dordrecht in 1586.

Picture Credit : Google

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, invented dynamite in 1867 and gelignite in 1875. During his early experiments his laboratory blew up, killing Nobel's younger brother and four workers.

Nobel made a huge fortune out of the manufacture of explosives and left the biggest part of the money for annual awards called Nobel Prizes. The seven prizes for physics, chemistry, are economics, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.

To make the handling of nitroglycerine safer Alfred Nobel experimented with different additives. He soon found that mixing nitroglycerine with kieselguhr would turn the liquid into a paste which could be shaped into rods of a size and form suitable for insertion into drilling holes. In 1867 he patented this material under the name of dynamite. To be able to detonate the dynamite rods he also invented a detonator (blasting cap) which could be ignited by lighting a fuse. These inventions were made at the same time as the diamond drilling crown and the pneumatic drill came into general use.

Together these inventions drastically reduced the cost of blasting rock, drilling tunnels, building canals and many other forms of construction work.

The market for dynamite and detonating caps grew very rapidly and Alfred Nobel also proved himself to be a very skillful entrepreneur and businessman. By 1865 his factory in Krümmel near Hamburg, Germany, was exporting nitroglycerine explosives to other countries in Europe, America and Australia.

Credit : Nobel Prize

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A sailmaker, Oscar Levi-Strauss, in San Francisco in 1850 invented jeans. The word 'jeans' may come from 'jene fustien', a strong twill cotton cloth, first made in Genoa. The original jeans were brown until blue denim was used.

With their patent secure, Levi Strauss & Co. was the only company to make riveted clothing for nearly 20 years. When their patent expired, however, dozens of other manufacturers began to copy their clothing. By that time, the public routinely referred to blue jeans as “Levi's," a name the company eventually trademarked.

Although they were originally designed as work pants, blue jeans became a significant part of popular culture in the 1950s after James Dean wore them in the movie Rebel Without a Cause. Their popularity continued to grow, and today they're routinely worn as casual dress in the United States and many countries around the world.

The visionary immigrants who transformed denim and small pieces of metal into the most popular clothing product in the world probably never imagined how famous they would become. Indeed, no other clothing product has been identified more with American culture, especially the American West.

Credit : Wonderopolis 

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The zip fastener or zipper with small interlocking teeth was invented back in 1890 by American Whitecomb Judson. It took about 20 years before his invention was satisfactory. The zip was first used on snow boots.

The popular "zipper" name came from the B. F. Goodrich Company, which decided to use Sundback's fastener on a new type of rubber boots or galoshes. Boots and tobacco pouches with a zippered closure were the two chief uses of the zipper during its early years. It took 20 more years to convince the fashion industry to seriously promote the novel closure on garments.

In the 1930s, a sales campaign began for children's clothing featuring zippers. The campaign advocated zippers as a way to promote self-reliance in young children as the devices made it possible for them to dress in self-help clothing. 

A landmark moment happened in 1937 when the zipper beat the button in the "Battle of the Fly." French fashion designers raved over the use of zippers in men's trousers and Esquire magazine declared the zipper the "Newest Tailoring Idea for Men." Among the zippered fly's many virtues was that it would exclude "The possibility of unintentional and embarrassing disarray." 

The next big boost for the zipper came when devices that open on both ends arrived, such as on jackets. Today the zipper is everywhere and is used in clothing, luggage, leather goods and countless other objects. Thousands of zipper miles are produced daily to meet the needs of consumers, thanks to the early efforts of the many famous zipper inventors.

Credit : Thought Co.

Picture Credit : Google

Will Keith Kellogg discovered cornflakes by accident in 1894. His brother was a doctor looking for a food that was easy for patients to digest. Will boiled a pan of wheat and from its contents thought up the idea of cornflakes.

He was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a world-renowned health resort which was founded by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

The Sanitarium combined aspects of a spa, a hydrotherapy institution, a hospital and a high class hotel.

Kellogg treated both the wealthy and the poor who could not afford other hospitals.

He also dedicated the last 30 years of his life to promoting eugenics, the practices aimed at improving the genetic makeup of the human race by excluding people and groups who have been judged to be inferior.

Kellogg discouraged the mixing of races and was in favour of sterilising people with mental handicaps.

Credit : The Scotsman

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John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, is said to have invented the sandwich in 1762.

The Earl loved to gamble, and so as not to interrupt his card game a servant was ordered to bring him a piece of meat between two slices of buttered bread. That is how the Earl gave his name to the sandwich!

Montagu was a hardened gambler and usually gambled for hours at a time at this restaurant, sometimes refusing to get up even for meals.  It is said that ordered his valet to bring him meat tucked between two pieces of bread.  Because Montagu also happened to be the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, others began to order “the same as Sandwich!”  The original sandwich was, in fact, a piece of salt beef between two slices of toasted bread.

John Montagu’s biographer, N. A. M. Rodger, points out in the book, The Insatiable Earl – A Life of John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, that the sole source for giving Montagu credit for the invention of the sandwich, was gossip mentioned in a travel book by Grosley, and that at the period in question 1765, he was known to be very busy, and it is just as likely that it was for the purpose of eating at his desk. 

Credit : What’s Cooking America 

Picture Credit : Google