Graham. Like the Graham cracker? No. Don’t worry. We’re not talking about the cracker. We’re talking about Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone!
You probably heard of the telephone. It’s the thing you call someone with. And Alexander Graham Bell invented it! Technically, he’s one of the inventors. Buttttt, whatever.
The actual definition of a telephone is “a telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be heard directly,” states Wikipedia.
The purpose of the telephone was to convert sound, typically and most efficiently, the human voice, into electric signals that are transmitted, via cables and other communication channels to another telephone which reproduces the sound to the receiving user.
The invention of the telephone provided an important device for facilitating human communication. Now, no one needs to be side-by-side to actually talk to each other!
In 1880, it cost $9 to buy a telephone. That may not sound like a lot, but that was a lot back then, considering most people make $2-6 a week! I guess telephones are really important to cost that much!
The telephone in 1880. Looks pretty old fashioned to me.
Some people think Nikola Tesla invented the neon sign. But it’s really Georges Claude who invented it. (And yes, his name is spelled Georges, not George.)
Did Nikola Tesla invent the Tesla, then? Nope. That’s a different person. Then what did he invent? Well, he invented the neon lamp!
A neon lamp is a miniature gas discharge lamp. Simple as that.
How does a neon lamp work? “Neon lighting consists of brightly glowing, electrified glass tubes or bulbs that contain rarefied (thin) neon or other gases.” says Wikipedia.
Or, in simpler terms, a neon lamp is a light bulb that can make many colors when Noble gasses are inside of the bulb.
Fun Fact: Neon signs are made out of neon lamps! Pretty cool, right?
Benjamin Franklin. A Founding Father of the USA. You probably heard of him. He’s famous! If you haven’t heard of him, well, I’ll… I’ll… I don’t know what I’ll do!
But, today we’re not gonna talk about him. We’re gonna talk about the Bifocals.
“Bifocals are eyeglasses with two distinct optical powers. Bifocals are commonly prescribed to people with farsightedness.” states Wikipedia.
Yup.
Bifocals are glasses.
Benjamin Franklin used his own invention, too.
Bifocals are commonly prescribed to people with presbyopia, which means farsightedness caused by loss of elasticity of the lens of the eye, occurring typically in middle and old age. Presbyopia was a condition Benjamin Franklin suffered.
But the Bifocals weren’t perfect.
Bifocals can cause headaches and even dizziness to some users. It could take a few weeks to adjust to the Bifocal glasses, and the Bifocal line could be too high.
Bifocals. It looks like something an old lady would wear. (No offense to old ladies reading this.)
An anode is where the electrons leave, and the cathode is where the electrons come in.
If you don’t understand this, neither do I, so don’t worry.Thomas Edison! We all know him!
Or do you?
But what is a vacuum diode? How do you even pronounce that? Well, thanks to Google, just look it up.
Jk.
It’s pronounced dai-owd.
So, what even is a vacuum diode, anyway? “A diode is an electronic component with two electrodes (connectors) that allows electricity to go through it in one direction and not the other direction.” states kiddle.co.
The anode is where the electrons leave, and the cathode is where the electrons enter the diode. If you don’t understand, neither do I, so don’t worry.
Although the vacuum tube was invented by John Ambrose Fleming, Thomas Edison was the one who later discovered the “Edison effect,” which says that electricity doesn’t definitely need a solid material to move through! It can move through gas or vacuums, too! Without this realization, vacuum tubes would never have been invented! Pretty awesome, right?
Ah! Yes. Albert Einstein. The famous scientist and mathematician who’s last name I can never spell correctly! Yes. Today, I’m going to teach you about Albert Einstein. But not about him. I’m going to talk about his refrigerator.
What?! Albert Einstein invented a refrigerator! Yes. Why yes he did.
The Einstein–Szilard, or Einstein refrigerator is an absorption refrigerator that has no moving parts, operates at constant pressure, and requires only a heat source to operate. Pretty cool, right?
Did you know? Albert Einstein was fascinated by what happened to a Berlin family who had been killed when a seal in their refrigerator failed and leaked toxic fumes into their home. Pretty strange reason to get fascinated, am I right? (But no one came blame Einstein. He changed our lives!)
Einstein’s refrigerator was patented in the 1930s and doesn’t use greenhouse gases and can be used without electricity! Do we still use it now? I have no idea!
Calculus. You might’ve heard it from someone, you might know it as some kind of math, but you might not know that Newton discovered it!
Many people know Isaac Newton for his discovery about his three law’s of motion, but he also invented calculus! I bet you didn’t know that! It impacted the world when he invented calculus in 1665. We take this for granted nowadays, but what Newton did hundreds of years ago is astonishing, considering now, many people take ages to learn it!
Calculus has uses in physics, chemistry, biology, economics, pure mathematics, all branches of engineering and much more!
Newton’s focus on gravity and laws of motion are linked to his breakthrough in calculus. Newton started by trying to recount the speed of a falling object. When he did, Newton found out that the rate of a falling object increases every second, but there was no currently existing mathematical explanation for this!
Newton immediately started working on this, and he figured out that when using calculus, he could explain it! So this is how Isaac Newton discovered calculus.
Okay. So who is this Ohm guy? His full name is Georg Ohm. (And yes. It’s spelled Georg. That’s not a typo. He has such a strange spelling name in my opinion. No offense Ohm!)
He was born on March 16, 1789, in the university town of Erlangen, Bavaria. His little brother, Martin Ohm, also became a famous mathematician! Johann Wolfgang Ohm, his father, was a locksmith. Maria Elizabeth Beck, his mother, was a daughter of a tailor. She died when Georg was ten.
“Ohm’s Law states that the current passing through a conductor is proportional to the voltage over the resistance,” says ducksters.com.
This may sound very confusing. I’m a little bit confused myself! But it can be written in a simple formula: I = V/R. I is currents in amps. V is voltage in volts. And R is resistance in ohms.
Voltage divided by current is resistance. Resistance times current equals voltage. Just like math. I don’t like math.
Hey! Ohm is not a thing. He’s a person! But an ohm CAN be defined as “an electrical resistance between two points of a conductor,” as said by Wikipedia.
So I guess when you say “ohm”, it could mean a person or a thing! Kinda like a noun. Haha.
Yes. Atoms. But what are atoms? Well, they make up everything! They’re made up of 3 teeny weeny particles: the proton, the neutron, and the electron.
The biggest idea from all time, is that stuff, is made, from atoms.
When the theory was proposed, it sounded absolutely insane! Nobody believed it! Now, nobody would run around shouting “Atoms are just a theory!” But not so long ago, people did do that. And you wanna know who settled it for good? Einstein.
Yes. The amazing scientist and mathematician. Of course it’s Einstein. Atoms had been theorized for a long time by the 20th century, but only when Einstein proved its existence in 1905 with amazing math skills (which I will never have), is when the matter was really settled.
Here’s the story about how the ancient Einstein found out about atoms. But it first started with a botanist.
In 1827, a botanist named Robert Brown was looking at pollen grains in water through a microscope and he noticed that they moved around even when there was no movement in the water to cause it! It was a mystery that lasted a really long time.
Until… In 1905, when Einstein theorized that this incident was caused by as to-be-proven atomic particles actually hitting into the grains of pollen. He wrote some fancy complicated math equation, proving that his theory predicted this motion almost perfectly, so everyone had to agree that yes, tiny bits of matter were really smacking into the pollen, and so atoms, had to exist.
Yes, a very interesting story indeed. I wonder how complicated Einstein’s math equation really was.
On October eighteenth, my team, the New Newtons, had our second launch. I think that our second launch was really good, even though when we checked how high our rocket went, it was lower. I think this happened because two of our fins were wiggly, so we pulled them off and our teacher aide glue it back on, except one side of our rocket had no fins, so the fin placement was really important. Our variable change was our nose cone, because it was really dirty. So we made it pointier on our second nose cone, and I think it turned our really well. On launch two, it was really windy and cold. I think the wind affected the launches for every group. I think that the clinometer readings could be wrong, because it was really chilly, so the clinometer readers might have moved a bit while taking the reading. The hardest part about the whole entire process was that when making the changes, everyone’s decision counted, it wasn’t just my decision, which was pretty hard for me. This is my YouTube video of my model rocket launches.
I did a rocket launch today. I think it was pretty fun. I was nervous that my rocket might blow up, but I put six layers of tape to connect the nosecone with the body. In the beginning, we had to do research. I didn’t like it. It was boring to me. But I did like making the inspiration boards. My team made a logo with our team name, the New Newtons, on it. We put pictures and information that we thought would help us on the launch on our board. A few days before, we had to prepare and learn to use the tools that we’ll be using on the launch day. One of them was the clinometer. The clinometer looked like a protractor with an arrow, a button, and a handle. Mastering the clinometer was hard. I was afraid that I would fail to use the clinometer rightly when the launch day came. There was also another tool: the trundle wheel. The trundle wheel measured the distance between the clinometer readers and the rocket. It was very resourceful. The preparation was tricky, but fun. I had three jobs, but only one for my launch. I was the countdown person for my launch. I was really happy to have that job. But I also was a clinometer reader for the group 1,2,3 Blastoff! and was a data recorder for the group the 3 Engineers. After the launch, I really wanted to do it again. I never wanted to stop. My teacher said that it would take an hour minimum for all the rockets to launch, but instead, it took forty five minutes. I think my group worked really well. We didn’t fight. I had to keep on checking my clipboard to see when I was up. And after I did my first job, I almost forgot that my group’s rocket was going to launch, and nearly missed the launch. But good thing I checked my clipboard. It was very useful. We were allowed to bring our iPhones outside. Some people did. I recorded some of the launches for two people. I observed that even though our rocket was the smallest rocket, we went higher than a taller rocket. So I don’t think that the height of the rocket mattered. But we had eight fins, and I think that helped. I don’t think our rocket needs changes. Maybe more tape?
