My Science School

            Valdemar Poulsen, popularly known as the Danish Edison, invented the first answering machine, by capturing sound on piano wire with magnetic recordings in 1898. Following the invention a flexible tape with magnetic coating was first patented by the German engineer Fritz Pfleumer in 1929.

            Pfleumer also built the first tape recorder in the modern sense in 1935. By the end of the Second World War, high quality tape recorders were made in Europe and the US also.

            Masura Ibuka, a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony, introduced the first walkman. The Sony Walkman went on sale in 1979.

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            In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This inspired him to try singing into the machine to hear it recorded. He termed his invention a ‘phonograph’, and it worked by recording sounds on round cylinders. However, poor recording quality was a big issue.

            Improving on Edison’s design, Alexander Graham Bell invented the first graphophone which recorded sounds on records instead of cylinders, allowing for mass production of recorded materials. This version offered better sound quality, but it also had a drawback that each cylinder had to be recorded separately.

            In 1887, Emile Berliner was granted his first patent on a device called gramophone. It had all the similar characteristics of Edison’s phonograph and Bell’s graphophone, but the storage medium was not wax or tinfoil-covered cylinders, but flat records made of glass. Thus, the mass production of records was made possible.

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            The history of cinema took off when the Lumiere Brothers held the first paid-for screening on 28th December 1895, of their 10 short films, in Paris. In the 1890s, films were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces.

            On November 21st, 1895, the Skladanowsky brothers unveiled their ‘Bioskop’ at the Winter-garten Hall in Berlin. That was the first official film screening in the Europe. Thus movie theatres became popular entertainment venues. In October 1896, the first movie was shown in Australia in the Athenaeum Hall in Melbourne. In 1897, a cinema building was built in Paris, solely for the purpose of showing films. The year 1900 marks the emergence of the first motion pictures that can be considered as films. Until 1927, it was the silent film era as motion pictures were produced without sound. The first films to consist of more than one shot appeared in the 19th century.

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               Thermometer is one of the most commonly found first aid instruments in almost every home. The thermometer was not a single invention, however, but a development.

               A primitive type of thermometer was mentioned by the Greek physicist, Hero of Alexandria in the second century BC. In 1592, Galileo devised an instrument similar to the modern-day thermometer, consisting of a glass bulb a glass tube, which he immersed in water. Ferdinand II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, is credited with developing the first thermometer that stays unaffected by atmospheric pressure.

               Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit from Germany made the first reliable thermometers, and the temperature scale he created is named after him. He made thermometers replacing water with mercury. In 1742, Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius invented the Celsius temperature scale. In 1866, Sir Thomas Allbutt invented a clinical thermometer for measuring body temperature.

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            Several men laid claim to inventing the telescope, but the credit usually goes to Hans Lippershey, a Dutch lensmaker. In 1608 he created an instrument consisting of a concave and convex lens in a tube.

            Galileo Galilei improved on Lippershey’s design and was the first to point a telescope toward the sky. In 1609, having identified the moons in orbit around Jupiter, Galileo deduced that the Earth was not the motionless centre of the Universe.

            Later, in 1668, Sir Isaac Newton improved on Galileo’s design.

            His reflecting telescope used curved mirrors to focus light from the heavens.

            Binoculars, first seen in Paris in 1823, consisted of a small telescope for each eye. However, the credit for the first real binocular telescope goes to J. P. Lemiere, who devised one in 1825.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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               The inventor of the microscope is still disputed. During the first century AD itself, the Romans invented glass, and tried out many uses of the substance, including microscopic views.

               However, the most noted microscope was developed by a Dutch duo, Hans and Zacharias Janssen. They invented the first compound microscope in the 16th century. They discovered that, if they put a lens at the top and bottom of a tube and looked through it, objects at the other end became magnified.

               Later, Anton van Leeuwenhoek improved the microscope. Using handcrafted microscopes, he became the first person to observe single celled organisms. These preliminary microscopes had many drawbacks like distortion. These were sorted out over the centuries, especially with the introduction of the electron microscope.

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               The word plastic originates from the Greek language; it means ‘fit for moulding’ in Greek. Materials with naturally plastic qualities have been used for thousands of years. Some historians trace the invention of modern plastic to the English chemist Alexander Parkes, when he made imitation ivory combs. His experiment began by adding nitric acid to cellulose. He then used camphor to shape the resulting material, cellulose nitrate. He called it Parkesine. In the 19th century various types of plastics were introduced in the market. Bakelite, a kind of plastic, was invented in 1907 by Leo Baekeland.

               On March 27th, 1933, the first industrially practical polyethylene synthesis was discovered by Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson, in North-wich, England. It was easily moulded, and was used from 1939 as a cable insulator, and in radar components. The first polythene household product was a washing-up bowl, made in 1948.

               The earliest archaeological evidence of the use of natural latex comes from the Olmec culture. They cultivated natural latex from rubber tree for making rubber balls for games. The Aztec and Maya are also known to have made rubber using natural latex. By 1615, Spanish troops in South America were using a resin from Para rubber trees, to waterproof their cloaks.

               Joseph Priestly is said to have discovered rubber’s erasing properties. However, it is the British engineer Edward Nairne who is generally credited with developing the first rubber eraser in Europe. Giovanni Fabbroni is credited with the discovery of naphtha as a rubber solvent in 1779. In 1834, Charles Goodyear managed to find a way to harden rubber and make it waterproof and pliant. This was later patented by Thomas Hancock.

 

 

 

 

 

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               Ancient men used a variety of colours naturally collected from plants - madder, saffron, indigo, oak apples and myrtle. Wood smouldered to charcoal   was used to make deep black colour. Local minerals were another rich source of colour. Indigo is the oldest dye of all. Many minerals exhibit various colours; the varieties are mainly due to impurities, or a slight change in chemical composition.

               The oldest dyed fabrics were found in Egypt, dating from 2000 BC. However, the invention of dyeing was probably much older. In 1856, while attempting to produce quinine, William Henry Perkin accidentally synthesized mauve, the earliest synthetic dye. Later, other man-made dyes appeared, but the most significant was a synthetic version of alizarin by Heinrich Caro in 1869.

               In the 18th century, England was a hive of paint innovation. Linseed oil and zinc oxide became increasingly available. Mixed together they composed the new paints. A much whiter pigment titanium dioxide came into use after First World War.

               Oil and natural gas were formed from the remains of prehistoric plants and animals, and that’s why they’re called fossil fuels.

               This happened millions of years ago when plant and animal remains settled into the sea bed along with salt, silt and rocks.

               In AD 300, while drilling for brine, the Chinese accidentally came across natural gas, and learned how to extract it and use it.

               From the 9th century BC, people of the Middle East burned tarry bitumen, which they found seeping from the Earth’s surface. In 1908, oil was found near the city of Masjed Soleiman, in Iran by a British prospecting team funded by William D’Arcy. This event significantly changed the history of the Middle East.

               The demand for petrol increased after the invention of the combustion engine and vehicles driven by petrol engines.

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               The Indians discovered diamonds before the 4th millennium BC. The name diamond is derived from the Greek word ‘adamas’, which means impenetrable. This valued gem was traded between India and Mesopotamia. They have been used as a display of prosperity ever since.

               The first diamond discoveries in South Africa were alluvial. Diamonds were found on volcanic rocks in farms in Kimberley, South Africa in 1870. Till then, diamonds were always dug from sand and gravel. For a long time the world’s most important rough diamond producers were South Africa, Congo, and the former Soviet Union.

               In the 15th century, tools were invented to cut facets into diamonds. Until then, the stones were simply polished, or shaped into a dome, known as a cabochon. The largest diamond in the world is the ‘Star of Africa I’, or ‘Cullinan I’, which is a colourless diamond, set in the British monarch’s sceptre.

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               Gold has always been one of the most valued metals of all time.

               Gold’s malleability and non-decaying properties made it popular in the Middle East about 6000 years ago.

               Gold was found on riverbeds, and was filtered from sand.

               Because gold is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, its discovery occurred to many different groups in many different locales.

               Early civilizations equated gold with gods and rulers, and gold was sought in their name, and dedicated to their glorification.

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               It was after 1856 that the mass production of steel began, when English inventor Henry Bessemer found a way to convert pig iron to steel, a stronger and more malleable metal.

               To make steel, iron ore is first mined from the ground. It is then smelted in blast furnaces where the impurities are removed, and carbon is added. In fact, steel is nothing but iron alloyed with carbon. Today, it is generally accepted that stainless steel was manufactured in Europe sometime in the early 20th century.

               The car manufacturer Henry Ford pioneered the use of high tensile sheet metal for car bodies in 1908. He discovered that any steel containing 15 per cent chromium does not rust.

                From the 1920s, this steel was used in refrigerators and washing machines.

 

               The story of iron’s origins is astronomical; with the element being born from the explosion of stars. In Egypt, they called it the metal from heaven. The Bronze Age ended with the beginning of the Iron Age in 1500 BC, about the time the Hittites may have started working with iron, and discovered a way of smelting iron from local ores. Around 600 BC, cast iron was made by the Chinese by melting iron containing phosphorous.

             In the West, the first cast iron was a 14th century material. When fired with charcoal, the iron absorbed a significant amount of carbon, which lowered its melting point. Cast iron cannons and medieval iron changed the face of warfare.

              In Britain, the iron from furnaces was known as pig iron, as it was a mass of iron roughly resembling the shape of a reclining pig. However, pig iron was too brittle for most heavy industrial uses.

               It was the people from the south-eastern part of Turkey who discovered copper for the first time, more than 9000 years ago. They found that copper could be obtained from the shiny rocks of the region. However, copper’s name comes from Cyprus, which supplied much of the metal to the ancient world.

               Though copper was a popular metal its value was noted only since the 17th century, when it was realized that the metal is a great conductor of heat. Later, in the 19th century, copper was proved to be the second best conductor of electricity after silver.

               Use of the metal bronze became widespread in Europe during the Bronze Age, around 2000 BC. Bronze was made by heating the metals tin and copper, and mixing them together. Bronze objects are highly resistant to decay, and are still found in many ancient sites around the world.

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