Author: legostudent

One early morning my dad was changing my little four-month-old brothers diaper when I walked into the room with my cardboard box costume on. My cardboard box costume is a box that goes over my head and a box that goes around my body. My head box has 3 holes, 2 for my eyes and one for my mouth. I drew an oversized tongue on it, two fangs, and angry Goomba eyebrows. My body box is a super big box that only leaves room for my head, I also taped unusable cardboard strips on the sides to look like arms. It is an overall scary image, especially to a sleepy man who just woke up. when he saw me he staggered back, scared.

In the 1850s oil was used to make kerosene and John D. Rockefeller made his fortune on standardizing oil production. But a problem that people in oil business had is the fact that it is hard to ship it to anywhere since it is a liquid. The easiest way to ship it is through pipes. The most used metal in pipes is iron instead of steel since it is softer than steel, more bendable and was more common than steel at the time. Since pipes are round and have round nuts and bolts it was hard for plumbers and pipe workers since they were used to hexagonal bolts and used monkey wrenches so they couldn’t grip the soft iron pipes. A man of the name Daniel Stillson invented the pipe wrench with easier pipe turning in mind when inventing it. The main difference between the pipe wrench and the monkey wrench is the fact the pipe wrench has small metal teeth in the jaws whereas the monkey wrench has flat jaws. The steel teeth dig in to the round, soft pipes which allows you to get a grip on the pipe you are working on. The second biggest difference is the pivot point. The pivot point is a point on the wrench that allows the wrench to automatically clamp onto a pipe when you start twisting and to unclamp when you pull back. Another bonus to the pipe wrench is that all parts are replaceable so that if you damage the handle you only have to replace the handle.

Gunpowder was invented by the Chinese during their search for the elixir of life. They didn’t use it for more than fireworks or innovate on it but people like the Mongolians used it for small hand canons. When the western people like Marco Polo came to China they brought some of it back to Europe and when they realized its explosive capabilities they used it to make weaponry. Gunpowder stayed as the biggest and strongest explosive until the early 1800s. In the early 1800s an Italian chemist discovered nitroglycerin which is a highly unstable explosive that deteriorates over time and will explode if it gets shook to much. When telling his friends and colleagues about his discovery he advised them not use it if possible and before telling them about it he had kept it a secret for a little less than a year because he was scared of it. It was so powerful that it quickly replaced gunpowder in mining and for blowing holes in mountains so trains can go through. But it was so unstable it would often explode en route which often killed people. A man named Alfred Nobel was very interested in explosives since his father made bombs for the Russian czar like the underwater mine. So him, his father, and his brother opened a factory to make nitroglycerin. Unfortunately the factory exploded, killing 5 people including his brother. This made him want to make a safe version of nitroglycerin so he eventually made dynamite which is a stable nitroglycerin and it made him rich. But since dynamite is used by terrorists he spent all of it making the Nobel peace prize to make up for it.

If I could go back in time I would go to the cretaceous period to see the dinosaurs. I would try to see if they were warm or cold blooded. I would go at the end of the cretaceous period so that I could see what killed the dinosaurs- a volcano, asteroid, disease, or something else. I would try to see what dinosaurs really looked like: feathered, scaled, furred, plain skin, a combination of them, or something else entirely. I would also try to bring back an egg or small dinosaur but that would be very hard with the parent dinosaurs taking care of them. Of course, I could not see any dinosaurs at all, or I could walk right into a dinosaur’s mouth.

The civil war killed 600,000 American men in 4 years. The south had seceded from the United States because the president Abraham Lincoln had said and passed a law that said you couldn’t own slaves. The south flourished with slaves so they left the United States. That was okay since that was what was supposed to happen, but Lincoln wanted the tax or “tariff” money so he started the war that killed the most Americans in history. A quote from Lincoln is “I have no purpose, directly or in-directly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so,” another is “My policy sought only to collect the Revenue (a 40 percent federal sales tax on imports to Southern States under the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861).”. In Europe an inventor named John Joseph Merlin made the first roller skates. He had gotten the idea from ice skates that have a blade in the center of the shoe but he replaced the blade with wheels lined up in a straight line but couldn’t swivel very good. He knew that public demonstrations was good advertising so at a party he planned to roller skate around while playing the violin but since he couldn’t turn he smashed into a mirror. James Plimpton saw that the country needed some relax time after the war so he invented the roller skates. His skates were different because they look like cars instead of ice blades and could easily turn. Parents could chaperon their kids and roller-disco music became a thing because of it.

Carpets have been used for insulation as wall hangings for a very long time. The Greeks and Romans used flat, smooth, and large stones as floor coverings. Eastern Chinese nomads and the Mongolians kept portable rugs with them to double as bedrolls. The French made nice carpets and excelled at the weaving of them so France was the capital for the carpet trade until the french revolution, since most carpet weavers worked for the royalty they fled to other countries which balanced the carpet industry out. In north America wood was very plentiful so wood flooring coverings were most common until the discovery of rubber. A little while after the discovery of rubber a man decided to use it as a floor covering because water and mud would not soak into it and therefore it was very easy to clean. So it became a common floor covering with one drawback, it was very hard to decorate. So it was just a gray rubber on your floor. A while after this a man named Frederick Walton found that linseed oil that’s used as a binder in paint dries into a flexible rubber like materiel. He then found the fastest and best quality producing process for making it as a floor covering. His material was just like rubber in that it was very easy to clean but different in that it was easily decorateable. Walton’s first 5 years were unprofitable so he decided to make 2 shops in London where he would have demonstrations of cleaning it and people can see different designs and after that his linoleum flooring was the most popular until the 1950s.

I think a magnetic dog collar and leash would be an awesome invention. It would be a cool invention because you don’t need a leash. You would hold a handle that had a button on it that, when pressed, turned on the electromagnet in the handle. The collar would have a metal like iron in it so that when you turned the electromagnet in the handle on, the collar would be attracted to it. You would also have a dial in the handle so you can pull your dog in by turning up the electricity, and therefore the magnetism, when crossing the street. One reason why you would want no leash is that when you’re saying hi to other dog walkers and your dogs are sniffing each other their leashes get tangled up and it’s really annoying, but if you remove the leash that doesn’t happen. Another reason you’d want a magnetic collar is that sometimes your dog will not want to go back when you pull and he can out strength you and outlast your pulling on him, but a magnet doesn’t get tired and would be stronger than him.

People in the 18^th century were discovering aerodynamics and that a pointy bullet could go farther, faster, and hurt more than the circular ball of lead. People were also figuring out that a bullet with threads in it like a screw in a gun that also had threads in it was more accurate than no threads. A man named Benjamin Tyler Henry learned how to make guns from a local gunsmith, then went to work for Smith and Wesson a prominent gun manufacturer. The Smith and Wesson company changed their name and acquired new investors for the company. One of those investors was named Mr. Winchester and after a while he forced the company into bankruptcy so that he could buy it from them at a low price. Then after getting the company he changed the name to the New Haven Arms Company. Then, Benjamin Tyler Henry went to go work for the New Haven Arms Company and was quickly promoted to manager. As manager Henry started tinkering with a new design for a rifle and in the 1860s he made the lever action repeating rifle. It was a rear loading design which was new at the time since before the bullet was just jammed in the barrel. The lever near the trigger would, when pulled, eject the shell of the previous bullet and ready the new bullet. It could hold 16 shots in the butt of the gun then another in the barrel which makes 17 bullets total. In the downfall of Custer the Indians the Americans lead by general Custer were supposed to be moving out of their territory had gotten some of Henry’s rifles and even against the 2-1 or 3-1 odds against them they killed Custer an a huge portion of his men.

Salt and pepper are daily seasonings that we use all the time in our foods, so we don’t think of it often but salt and pepper have had quite a life. When humans were hunter-gatherers people got all the salt they needed from the animal blood. But when humans became farmers and lived off of more plants than meat people needed to add more salt to their diet and that came as raw salt added to their meals. Towns and cities were built near salt mines and other sources of salt which could be found in just about any country so it was not very rare. Pepper on the other hand was very expensive. It is native to India but since it is so good and can be effectively used in almost all meals Europe traded with India to get it on a regular basis, although it is so expensive only kings and emperors could really afford it. It is just like how ice cream was. Ice cream was a delicacy that kings and other royalty could afford but was just too expensive for the common people to eat but is now a common desert. Salt and pepper shakers were invented by John Landis Mason, inventor of the mason jar. The shaker is basically a mason jar with the lid and band combined and with holes in the lid. Salt and pepper shakers are most often simple glass jars but some are more ornate like two dogs, with one lighter than the other which causes collecting shakers to be a hobby. After Masons patent ran out manufacturers started making them, proof that patents just stint the market, because if he hadn’t patented it we would’ve had the shakers much earlier.

If I want to know what something means I ask my dad or my mom to explain how it works to me. If I can’t figure out a word in a book I ask someone what it means. If I can’t understand something in my school work it is often because I can’t keep my mind on a recorded voice droning on about whatever I’m working on. I can do a lot better if I learn it in a conversation. I can normally figure out a word in a book out by myself but if I can’t I don’t use the dictionary because it’s too confusing, so I ask my parents.