August 12, 2012 - Vinyl Record Day

Ladies and gentlemen, ready your turntables! Get out your LPs! Place your needles to vinyl...and listen!

On this date in 1877, Thomas Edison introduced the phonograph.

Thomas Edison's phonograph cylinder was the first invention that could record and play back sounds. Note that Edison didn't invent vinyl records. But his cylinder-based phonographs were a major consumer item from the 1880s until around 1910, when gramophone discs or records overtook them. Early discs/records were made of lacquer, by the way; vinyl records weren't developed until 1948. Still, vinyl records are clear successors of Edison's invention, and are accessible to many of us today. For these reasons, somebody (I have no idea who) has declared today to be Vinyl Record Day.

Celebrate the day by listening to music on vinyl, if you can!

• Check out this YouTube video of an Edison Home Phonograph.
  
  
• Here is a video of a guy who made his own phonograph with the humblest of materials! 
  
  
• And this video shows how vinyl records are made. 

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the discovery of the largest T-Rex 

Anniversary of the extinction of the quagga 

February 11, 2010

National Inventors' Day

This is the birthday of Thomas Edison, who had more than one thousand patents and who remains one of America's most honored inventors.

This is a day to celebrate all inventors. One of the most unexpected inventors in U.S. history, to me at least, is glamorous actress Hedy Lamarr.

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, Hedy Lamarr had an interesting life. She studied ballet and piano as a child, and acted in German films as a teenager. She married a man who turned out to be controlling and who didn't like her to be in movies. Her husband manufactured arms, and Lamarr, who was intelligent and gifted in math, learned a lot about military technology from attending meetings with him. She became angry when she realized that her husband was consorting with Nazis (both she and her husband were Jewish), so in 1937 she disguised herself as one of her maids and ran off to Paris.

Lamarr went from Paris to London to Hollywood. There MGM heads changed her name and cast her in 18 films.

So...where does the title “inventor” come in?

Hedy Lamarr, as you recall, learned a lot about military technology. Well, during World War II, Lamarr and German immigrant and composer George Antheil came up with an idea for a secret communication system based on frequency hopping. Their invention, which they patented, used a piano roll from a player piano to change between 88 frequencies; it would make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam.

There was a lag in the military development of the idea, but eventually it was used during a blockade of Cuba. In the 1990s, Lamarr got an award for her idea plus payment (in stock) for the rights to develop the idea, which became “modern spread-spectrum communication technology.”

In other words, Hedy Lamarr invented something that is used today in many cordless and wireless telephones.

Check out these inventions.

• Invisibility sweatshirt. (Can we have it in a cloak style, please?)

• A building toy and more!

• A self-stirring mug.

• A machine that grows meat without an animal!

Explore the Lemelson - MIT website about inventions.

December 20, 2009

Electricity Theme Day

On this day in 1879, Thomas Edison privately demonstrated his incandescent light bulb at his Menlo Park research lab.

Remember, Edison didn't invent or even discover electricity (known from ancient times), and he didn't invent the first light bulb (Sir Humphrey Davy made an arc lamp in 1809, and Frederick de Moleyns got the first patent for an incandescent bulb in 1841). What Edison did was to make the first commercially practical light bulb and an entire system of electric lighting. Edison said on the last day of 1879, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."

<--1904

Today -->

On this day in 1880, Broadway in Manhattan, NYC, became one of the first streets in the U.S. lit by electricity. A mile of the street was lit by carbon-based Brush arc lamps, which provided much brighter light than the incandescent light bulbs of the time. Since then, that section of Broadway, which features the Theatre District and Times Square, has become known as “The Great White Way” because it is lit by millions of lights on marquees and billboards.

On this day in 1901, Robert J. Van de Graaf was born. This American physicist invented a high-voltage electrostatic generator, which looks like a large silver ball mounted on a pedestal. It makes your hair stand on end, but more importantly, it can be used as a particle accelerator in physics research.


On this day in 1938, Russian-American inventor Vladimir Zworykin (sometimes called the “true father of television,” although most give Philo Farnsworth that honor) was finally granted a patent for his iconoscope, an early television camera. (This camera had already been used for the historic TV transmission of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.)


On this day in 1951, the first electricity ever generated by nuclear energy was created near Arco, Idaho. (The Experimental Breeder Reactor in Idaho produced enough energy to light four 200-watt light bulbs that day.)

By 1952, the Paley Commission was already somewhat pessimistic about nuclear power and called for “aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy.” And by 1955, the Arco Reactor was the first reactor in the U.S. to experience partial meltdown.


Have fun with this model of the electric force
Virtually speaking, create electrons and see if you can keep them from getting sucked into the positive-charged proton.

Do some electricity experiments!
Try the ideas here. Or here is a fun website.
These experiments are so easy, they're considered “snack size.”

Build electric circuits with information found here.

Learn more.
Here is an interactive course about electricity.
And here is an interactive diagram that shows the difference between AC (alternating current) and DC (direct current).

December 4, 2009

Happy Birthday, Chester Greenwood

Born on this day in 1858, Greenwood was only 15 years old when he invented earmuffs. He ended up making a lot of money on his invention, which he called “Greenwood's Champion Ear Protectors.”

How did a kid who dropped out of elementary school manage to think up such a great invention?

His ears got really, really cold when he ice skated.

Greenwood lived in a cold state, Maine, and he hated how cold his ears got when he skated. One day he made two wire loops a little larger than his ears, and he asked his grandmother to sew fur onto the loops. Other kids in his town loved his idea and wanted some of their own.

Later, at age 18, he was awarded a patent and marketed his ear protectors more widely. He even supplied earmuffs to the US army during World War I; such a large customer meant big sales.

Greenwood invented other things over the course of his life: the bottom whistling kettle, a mechanical mouse trap, the spark plug, shock absorbers, a hook for pulling doughnuts from boiling oil, and the spring steel rake, and others. He even made the Smithsonian Institution's list of America's 15 Outstanding Inventors!

Not only did Chester Greenwood's great idea at age 15 support him for the rest of his life, “in its heyday, [it] 'supported half of Franklin County,' according to one resident.”

His town, Farmington, Maine, is known as the Earmuff Capital of the World, and every year celebrates Chester Greenwood Day with a parade in which cars and other items are disguised as earmuffs and cows and other creatures wear earmuffs. Chester Greenwood Day is the first Saturday of December—which is tomorrow! According to Franklin County's Daily Bulldog, thousands are expected to come to the parade.

Be an inventor!

Thomas Edison once said that you can become an inventor by looking around at everything created by humans—and then try to figure out how to make something better. Bigger, smaller, quicker, slower, more delicious, more nutritious, cheaper, more convenient... Thomas Edison was a bit of an expert on inventing stuff, and he said some pretty wise things. Here are a few:

There's a way to do it better - find it.
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
To have a great idea, have a lot of them.

Thomas Edison always said that you had to work hard and try lots of things that don't end up working before you come up with something that does work. He preached stick-to-it-iveness and said that many people quit just before they might have succeeded. Here's one more quote from him that shows his perseverance:

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

The Great Egg Drop

This time-tested idea has been enjoyed by many kids over the years. The challenge is to build a way to protect an egg from a high drop. You'll have to find a safe place to drop your eggs—perhaps off a second-story balcony—and make sure you have an adult's approval! Then build a safety seat for your raw egg and try it out. If lots of kids invent lots of different egg-drop protection devices, it's fun to see which ones work and which don't.

An additional challenge is to see who can make the smallest device that still works!

Here is one website that has details about an egg-drop activity.

One egg-drop contest was actually an egg-slingshot-against-the-wall contest. The protection devices had to be smaller than an 18" x 18" x 18" cube and less than 3 pounds.

Crazy Inventions

Rube Goldberg is famous for funny and crazy “inventions” that make simple things complicated and difficult. Check out his work in the Artwork Gallery here.