Sir Isaac Newton was brilliant. He was a mathematical genius who developed a new method of calculus, which he called fluxions. He developed the laws of motion as well as a theory on light and color. He invented the reflecting telescope.
Sir Isaac Newton had studied earlier men’s work on the earth’s forces, and in 1684 he proved his gravitational theory. But it was the accident of an apple’s falling that aroused questions in Newton’s mind.
FLABBERGASTING FACTS
The gravity Sir Isaac Newton identified is what determines how much something weighs. If a person’s weight on Earth is 100 pounds, gravity is pulling that person’s body toward the center of the earth with 100 pounds of force.
Each planet has a different gravity force. A person who weighs 100 pounds on Earth would weigh 16 pounds on the moon, 38 pounds on the planet Mercury, 265 pounds on Jupiter, 39 pounds on Mars, 25 pounds out in space 4,000 miles from Earth, and 1 pound out in space 36,000 miles from Earth.
PHOTOGRAPHY
Museums have no photographs of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson.
Why?
Photography had not been invented when those men were alive.
No one really invented photography. In about 330 B.C., Aristotle, an ancient Greek philosopher, discovered that light passing through a small hole in the wall of a room formed an upside-down image of an object or scene on the wall opposite the hole.
In the late 1500s A.D. the first camera obscura was made. It was a box with a tiny hole that admitted light. On the opposite side of the box, the light formed an upside-down image of the scene outside the box.
Artists used the camera obscura to outline a scene projected onto a piece of paper. Then the artist colored the sketch and had a finished picture.
Various people improved the camera obscura, adding a lens and making the box smaller. Then scientists discovered that chemicals could be used in the camera obscura; exposure to light would produce an image in the chemicals.
In 1835 Louis J. M. Daguerre, a Frenchman, was attempting to make “fixed images” using the camera obscura when he had an accidental breakthrough.
Daguerre had been using plates of silver-plated copper, exposing them to iodine vapor. This produced a thin layer of iodized silver on the surface of the plate. He then exposed these plates in a camera obscura—essentially “taking a picture.” (Film had not been invented, so the image was supposed to appear right on the plate.) But the results were very faint images.
Daguerre tried many methods to make a stronger image, but nothing worked. So he put the plates away in the cupboard, planning to clean them and use them again later.
After several days Daguerre went back to the cupboard to get the plates. To his surprise, there was a clear image on the surface of each plate.
Daguerre realized that one of the chemicals stored in the cupboard must have made the image stronger. To find out which chemical had worked, he put another exposed plate in the cabinet every day and removed one of the chemicals. But when he had removed all the chemicals, the strong image remained.
Daguerre then examined the cupboard itself. He found that a few drops of mercury had spilled on one of the shelves. It was the vapor of the mercury that made the image stronger.
Daguerre named his discovery the Daguerreotype. It was the first real picture fixed on a metal plate. Improved methods were quickly discovered by other people, but Daguerre’s discovery was the beginning of today’s photographic industry.
THE TELEPHONE
TEACHER: What happens when a human body is immersed in water?
STUDENT: The telephone rings.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland in 1847. Like his father and grandfather, he studied ways of helping the deaf. In fact, he was a professor of voice physiology at Boston University.
On June 2, 1875, Bell was working on a telegraph that would send several messages over the same wire at the same time by using tuning forks of different pitches—sort of a musical telegraph.
Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, was in another room. Watson mistakenly adjusted a contact screw too tightly. When he plucked a spring on the transmitter, Bell heard the continuous musical tones of the spring and realized that if the sound of the spring could be transmitted, voices could also be sent.
Almost a year later, on March 10, 1876, Bell and Watson were working in separate rooms when Bell had an accident. He spilled battery acid on his trousers and said the now famous words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.”
Thomas Watson burst into the room where Bell was working. “Mr. Bell, I distinctly heard you,” he said. Bell’s call for help became the first words ever spoken over wires carrying an electric current. With those words, the telephone was born.
8. Explosive Discoveries
“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.”
—Nikki Giovanni
CELLULOID
For many years billiard balls were made of ivory from elephant tusks. The elephants had to sacrifice their lives for someone’s billiard game.
By 1863 there was a problem. Herds of wild elephants in Africa had been killed, causing a serious shortage of ivory, a serious shortage of billiard balls, and a serious shortage of elephants.
So a major manufacturer of billiard balls offered a $10,000 prize for an ivory substitute.
A New Jersey printer named John Wesley Hyatt and his brother Isaiah were interested in the $10,000. They began experimenting with mixtures of sawdust and paper bonded with glue.
While John Hyatt was working one day, he cut his finger. He went to the cupboard to get some collodion, a popular protection at the time for wounds. His bottle of collodion had spilled. The solvent had evaporated, and a hardened sheet of cellulose nitrate was all that remained on the shelf. Hyatt realized that this material might work better than glue on his sawdust and paper mixture.
In 1870 the Hyatt brothers developed and patented their plastic made of cellulose nitrate and camphor. They called it celluloid.
Unfortunately, they did not win the $10,000. The cellulose nitrate in the mixture was explosive, and billiard balls made from the Hyatts’ celluloid often blew up. A gunfight almost erupted in a Colorado saloon when celluloid billiard balls exploded, sounding like gunshots.
The Hyatt brothers’ invention was not a loss, however. Celluloid exploded from severe blows, but manufacturers were quick to order celluloid to make:
false teeth knife handles
dice and game pieces buttons
jewel boxes brushes and combs
fountain pens photographic film
Christmas ornaments buckles
collars and cuffs for men’s shirts babies’ rattles dolls
Celluloid has been improved and is still used today to make Ping-Pong balls, eyeglass frames, and coverings for piano keys.
FLABBERGASTING FACTS
• Celluloid was the most popular plastic until Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite in 1907.
• Celluloid false teeth proved to be an embarrassing failure. The plates always tasted of camphor. Worse, the teeth curled and warped with a sip of hot soup or tea.
• John Wesley Hyatt received more than two hundred patents during his lifetime.
GUNCOTTON (NITROCELLULOSE)
Guncotton (or nitrocellulose) is an explosive. It burns if ignited. Attached to a detonator, it explodes.
Guncotton is used in making torpedoes, for blasting in mines (mixed with nitroglycerin), for underwater blasting, and in making smokeless powder.
Christian Schönbein discovered guncotton … by accident!
Schönbein was a professor of chemistry at the University of Basel in Switzerland. One day in 1846 he was experimenting with some chemicals in his wife’s kitchen when he broke a flask. The flask contained nitric and sulfuric acids. The chemicals spilled all over the floor.
Schönbein couldn’t find a mop, so he grabbed his wife’s cotton apron to wipe up the mess. He t
hen hung it in front of the hot stove to dry. When it got dry enough, it went poof! The apron flared up and disappeared. Schönbein had accidentally invented guncotton.
Schönbein experimented further and realized that the potential of his discovery was tremendous. When gunpowder was fired on the battlefield, it made a thick smoke. The smoke blackened the gunners, left residue in the cannon, and formed a dark cloud that hid the battlefield. But guncotton burned clean and left no residue.
Schönbein sold his “recipe” to several governments, and guncotton factories sprang up. But guncotton was unpredictable, and the factories not only sprang up, they also blew up. One of Schönbein’s own factories blew up and killed twenty-one people.
NITROGLYCERIN
An Italian chemist named Ascanio Sobrero was experimenting in 1847 with ordinary glycerin. Some say he was trying to find a headache remedy.
As he worked, he let the glycerin fall drop by drop into a mixture of strong nitric and sulfuric acids, which he kept cool. The result was a small quantity of nitroglycerin.
When Sobrero heated one drop in a glass tube, it exploded so violently that the glass splinters cut his face and injured other workers in the laboratory. This explosive was even more powerful than the kind produced by guncotton.
Sobrero was horrified. He’d had no intention of inventing anything with such terrible destructive power. He did nothing to promote his discovery. In fact, he begged other scientists to forget about it.
It was another twenty years before Alfred Nobel discovered how to control nitroglycerin and turn it into dynamite.
DYNAMITE
Dynamite is a wonderful thing to have around—if you’re building roads, drilling mines, or capping fires in oil wells.
Unfortunately, dynamite is also used as a weapon of war.
Dynamite is made from nitroglycerin, a highly explosive substance. Nitroglycerin was invented in 1847 when Alfred Nobel was fourteen years old.
But nitroglycerin was extremely explosive and very dangerous to handle. When Alfred Nobel was twenty-nine, he set about trying to make the substance safer and invented a blasting cap.
Nobel and his family opened a factory to make “Nobel’s Blasting Oil.” But an explosion in the factory killed Nobel’s younger brother. The family continued their work, but over the next five years they had two more explosions.
And it wasn’t just the factories that were exploding. Anyone who tried to use or move the explosive materials, or merely came in contact with them, could be killed.
Nobel’s blasting caps were not safe enough to control the explosives. But an accident one day gave Alfred Nobel the break he needed.
To transport his explosives, he surrounded the flasks with an insulation called kieselguhr (a porous volcanic soil found in northern Germany). One day one of the flasks broke. But there was no explosion, since the kieselguhr kept the nitroglycerin from being jolted.
When Nobel discovered that the kieselguhr had absorbed the nitroglycerin, he tested it. The accident had been lucky! The nitroglycerin didn’t lose any of its explosive properties when mixed with the kieselguhr, but it was more stable and easier to handle.
Nobel hardened the soil-nitroclycerin mixture into sticks. He called it dynamite, from the Greek word for power, dynamis.
Alfred Nobel was a peace-loving man. He called war “the horror of horrors and the greatest of all crimes.” He wanted dynamite to be used for opening mines and building roads, not for destruction and killing people.
Nobel was extremely rich when he died. Instead of leaving his fortune to his family, he decided it should be awarded as five prizes each year to outstanding citizens of the world. The prizes were first awarded in 1901, and today the Nobel prizes are given for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. A sixth award, for economics, was added in 1969.
THE NATIONAL INVENTORS HALL OF FAME
About twenty-five years ago, members of the National Council of Patent Law Associations agreed that inventors deserved recognition. They established the National Inventors Hall of Fame, Inc., and in 1973 made Thomas Edison the first inductee. (Edison received 1,093 patents in his lifetime.)
The National Inventors Hall of Fame has recently moved to Akron, Ohio.
CAMP INVENTION
Inventure Place in Akron, which is the home of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, sponsors summer camps for kids in grades one through six. The camps are called Camp Invention and are held in various places across the United States. They focus on inventing and hands-on learning.
A relatively new camp called Camp Ingenuity is for seventh- to ninth-graders.
If you’re an inventing kid or would like to learn more about these camps, write:
Camp Invention, Inc.
80 West Bowery, Suite 201
Akron, OH 44308
(Phone 216/762–4463)
PROJECT XL
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has a program called Project XL—A Quest for Excellence.
Project XL encourages inventive thinking programs in schools. Teachers, parents, or anyone who wants to develop a program to encourage problem-solving skills in young people can write for more information:
Project XL
Office of Public Affairs
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
Washington, D.C. 20231
(Phone 703/305–8341)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982.
Baring-Gould, William S., and Ceil Baring-Gould. The Annotated Mother Goose. New York: Bramhall House, 1962.
Beeching, Wilfred A. Century of the Typewriter. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974.
Bernardo, Stephanie. Ethnic Almanac. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1981.
Big “G” Cereals: A Short History. Minneapolis: General Mills, 1993.
Burnam, Tom. The Dictionary of Misinformation. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975.
The Cracker Jack Story. Columbus, Ohio: Borden, 1993.
d’Estaing, Valerie-Anne Giscard, and Mark Young, Editors. Inventions and Discoveries 1993. New York: Facts on File, 1993.
Dickson, Paul. The Great American Ice Cream Book. New York: Atheneum, 1973.
Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 3. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970.
Ensminger, Audrey H., M. E. Ensminger, James E. Konlande, and John R. K. Robson, M.D. Foods and Nutrition Encyclopedia. Clovis, California: Pegus Press, 1983.
Fifty-Year History of Masonite. Chicago: Masonite, 1974.
Flatow, Ira. They All Laughed. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Gardner, Robert. Crime Lab 101. New York: Walker & Co., 1992.
Gernshoim, Helmut. The Origins of Photography. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Guinness Book of World Records, The, 1994. New York: Facts on File, 1993.
Halacy, D. S., Jr. Science and Serendipity: Great Discoveries by Accident. Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1967.
Heyn, Ernest V. Fire of Genius. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1976.
The History of Kellogg Company. Battle Creek, Michigan: Kellogg Company, 1992.
How in the World? Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest Association, 1990.
Inventors and Discoverers Changing Our World. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1988.
Kane, Joseph Nathan. Famous First Facts. New York: H. W. Wilson, 1981.
Lehrer, Steven. Explorers of the Body. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1979.
Levy, Richard C, and Ronald O. Weingartner. Inside Santa’s Workshop. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1990.
Liquid Paper Corporation History. Boston: Gillette Company, undated.
Lynn Peavey Company. Letter to the author. Lenexa, Kansas, December 15, 1993.
Maguire, Jack. Hopscotch, Hangman, Hot Potato and Ha, Ha, Ha. New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1990.
Meyer, Jerome S. Great Accidents in Science that Changed the
World. New York: Arco Publishing, 1967.
Mount, Ellis, and Barbara A. List. Milestones in Science and Technology. Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1987.
New Encyclopedia of Science, Vols. 3, 10, and 11. Milwaukee: Raintree Publishers, 1982.
On the Brink of Tomorrow: Frontiers of Science. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1982.
Panati, Charles. Panati’s Browser’s Book of Beginnings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
Panati, Charles. Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things. New York: Perennial Library, Harper & Row Publishers, 1987.
Raintree Illustrated Science Encyclopedia, Vols. 3, 9, 14, and 17. Milwaukee: Raintree Publishers, 1979.
A Raisin Is a Dried Grape. Fresno: California Raisin Advisory Board, 1980.
Roberts, Royston M. Serendipity in Science. New York: Wiley, 1989.
Schur, Sylvia. The Woman’s Day Crepe Cookbook. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1976.
Shenkman, Richard. Legends, Lies and Cherished Myths of American History. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988.
Shenkman, Richard, and Kurt Reiger. One-Night Stands with American History. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1980.
Stories Behind Everyday Things. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest Association, 1980.
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest Association, 1976.
Strange Stories, Amazing Facts of America’s Past. Pleasantville, New York: Reader’s Digest Association, 1989.
Studley, Vance. The Woodworker’s Book of Wooden Toys. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980.
Accidents May Happen* Page 5