Telegraph was a wonderful instrument. Now it seems a fossil in the world of developed computer technologies. But when it was invented it was a real miracle. At first people would not believe that messages could possibly come over a wire. They waited until the mails brought the same news before they would believe it.
It was Samuel Morse who invented telegraph. He had studied both painting and sculpture and expected to earn his living as an artist. Morse tramped from town to town, painting portraits for a living for himself and his three children. However, he was thinking of different inventions. Once, Morse thought that messages could be sent by electricity and began working on his invention. He worked on it for twelve years. He also had to invent an alphabet to use in sending telegrams. It consisted of dots, dashes, and spaces.
“What hath God wrought!” was the first message sent by telegraph. By the end of the nineteenth century, most of the world was connected by telegraph lines. In 1842 Morse laid the first underwater conductor in New York Harbor.
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A railroad, also called a railway, is a type of land transportation. A vehicle called a locomotive pulls most trains. A locomotive can be powered by an engine that burns diesel fuel or by electricity.
Trains can be divided into two types: passenger and freight. The speed of many large passenger trains is about 100 miles (160 kilometers) an hour. However, some trains in Europe and Japan can go more than 180 miles (290 kilometers) an hour.
Before trains and locomotives people used horses to pull carts along tracks. In 1803, Richard Trevithick from Britain built a locomotive that ran on steam power. The railway cars were quite like stagecoaches except that they ran on wooden rails. Locomotives which breathed out steam and flame had taken the places of horses. The engine of those days had four light driving wheels and a tall smokestack. The wood, which was used for fuel, and also the water, were carried on a small platform behind the engine. As the engine had no engineer had to drive facing the winds and storms. For that reason, the locomotives were not always used in rainy weather.
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In much of Asia food is usually eaten with chopsticks. Chopsticks are two long, thin, usually tapered, pieces of wood. Bamboo is the most common material, but they are also be made of various types of wood, as well as plastic, porcelain, animal bone, ivory, metal, coral, agate, and jade.
Royal families and aristocrats preferred silver ones, believing in the metal’s capacity to detect arsenic.
Today chopsticks can be made of coral, agate, jade, silk, plastic, horn, porcelain, animal bone, and stainless steel. Truly elegant chopsticks might be made of gold and embossed in silver with Chinese calligraphy.
Chopsticks may be totally smooth or carved or modeled ripples. Silver or gold paint can be used to give them a rough texture. In Thailand, wood is often elaborately carved into chopsticks. The ends of chopsticks can be rounded or squared, while the tips can be blunt or sharp.
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In the good old days, clothes were washed in a stream, by pounding the garments with rocks, stones and heavy sticks without any soap.
Fire added heat to the laundry mix, when clothes were washed in tubs with water heated over open fires and soap made at home from a combination of lye and ashes. Clothes were scrubbed on a corrugated board, wrung by hand, rinsed, then wrung again, and draped on lines or bushes to dry.
In 1797, a washboard was created. And already in 1851, American James King patented a washing machine with a rotating drum, which was very similar to the modern.
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The tradition of throwing disks for play or sport extends from ancient Greece to the modem Olympics. We also know that Roman soldiers used their shields as a Frisbee. Roman shields had razor-sharp edges. They threw them to the enemy in the same way as now we throw Frisbee.
However, in the 1940s, students at Yale University unintentionally put a twist on this tradition: they distracted themselves between classes by tossing around the shallow tin platters in which the popular pies of the nearby William R. Frisbie bakery were sold. The fad soon spread to other New England schools.
Meanwhile, in the 1950s, Walter F. Morrison of southern California created a toy disk that would fly and hover like the alien spacecraft made popular by Hollywood at that time. Soon after switching from metal to plastic material, Morrison reached an agreement with the Wham-O Company to produce and distribute these “Flyin’ Saucers” (1957), which were an instant success locally.
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Although developed after the airplane, the helicopter grew out of an idea that is several hundred years old. In the late Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci drew up a plan for such a flying machine. He made the first sketch of the helicopter with a brief description in 1489.
Three hundred years after Leonardo Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov built the first model of the helicopter. It consisted of a fuselage and two screws rotate in opposite directions.
In the early 20th century experiments with vertical flight failed for lack of a powerful enough engine.
A French engineer named Paul Cornu designed and built a workable helicopter in 1907. It was powered by a 24-horsepower engine and actually flew for a few minutes. As a prototype it was interesting, but the design proved impractical, in subsequent years numerous other designers built helicopter-like machines. Some never got beyond the planning stage, while others flew for short periods.
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Shortly after the end of World War II, Percy Spencer, already known as an electronics genius and war hero, was touring one of his laboratories at the Raytheon Company. He stopped momentarily in front of a magnetron, the power tube that drives a radar set. Feeling a sudden and strange sensation, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had begun to melt.
Spencer, who obtained 120 patents in his lifetime, knew how to apply his curiosity. So he did what any good inventor would – he went for some popcorn. Spencer didn’t feel like a snack, he asked for unpopped popcorn. Holding the bag of corn next to the magnetron, Spencer watched as the kernels exploded into puffy white morsels.
From this simple experiment, Spencer and Raytheon developed the microwave oven. The first microwave oven weighed a hefty 750 pounds and stood five feet, six inches. At first, it was used exclusively in restaurants, railroad cars and ocean liners – places where large quantities of food had to be cooked quickly. But culinary experts quickly noticed the oven’s shortcomings. Meat refused to brown.
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