Author: legostudent

I do not think we should keep going with space travel because we haven’t even explored and understood all of the earth. I believe that at a point in the future we should go to the Moon, Mars, the solar system, the galaxy, and all that. But right now we should focus on the earth. We humans have explored very little of the ocean. It is estimated that mankind knows of 5-20% of the ocean that covers more than 70% of the planet, that does not make sense. Also, we have better maps of the Moon, Mars,and Venus than we have of our own oceans. I say we should at least get that 5% up to 90% before we set up colonies on the Moon.

China invented lots of things long before other peoples did like gunpowder and the compass but they had far less of an impact there than in the western half of the eastern continent because it was not what they were looking for at the time which was the philosophers stone which could turn lead to gold. So when the Europeans sailed to China they found all these inventions and brought them back Europe which caused quite a stir. One of those inventions was paper and therefore toilet paper. Before toilet paper was invented many different things were used to wipe human poop off your buttocks. The Romans had public baths and toilets and but they didn’t have toilet paper so they used a sponge on a stick and scrubbed their butt clean but if that doesn’t sound so bad to you then know it was used by the community which means when they were done with it they just stuck it into a tub of salt water for the next person to use. Other peoples were not any better. Native Americans and colonists used corncobs which they often reused and some people in India used seashells which does not sound like fun. After paper was discovered people started using old newspapers but that was bad because some types of ink are poisonous so people would die from newspaper poisoning. What a way to go. So a man named Joseph Gayetty made toilet paper with his name printed on it with nonpoisonous ink to let people know it was name brand. In the 1930s a toilet paper factory started to advertise their paper as “splinter free”. Can you imagine getting splinters it your butt?

Back in ancient times the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians all had an early type of elevator but they were not used very much because the rope could snap and then you plummet to your death which nobody likes to do very much on a regular basis. Very big ones to lift lumber and water out of wells but no one trusted it enough to use it for people and especially not in apartment buildings where people routinely go up and down to their apartments. Elisha Otis was the cousin of the inventor William Otis But the coal and lumber industries used who invented the steam shovel. He moved to a river and opened a grist mill using a water wheel powered by the river so he opened his own business but it failed since he didn’t get enough business. He went to go work at a saw mill and was picking up wood scraps from the day when he was thinking about a more efficient way to haul the scraps up without spilling down the stairs as he carried them up, then he thought about the small elevators the mill had but they had a bad track record so he built the safety elevator. The safety elevator has hooks in it that get pulled into the elevator when the rope pulls on it but if the rope snaps its hooks are no longer being pulled on so they will shoot out of the elevator because of springs and latch onto the hooks on the side the shaft.

An influential person in my life is John Flanagan because he wrote the Ranger’s Apprentice book series. In that series the main character is a boy named Will who influenced me by making me want to be brave and determined to do things I need to do. When I started basketball I didn’t want to be with those unknown kids who are shoving each other to get a ball but I did it because I was determined.

The potato famine in Ireland caused a major influx of immigrants to the united states of America because so many people were fleeing in fear of going hungry and dying of starvation which happened to about 1,000,000 people in Ireland which tells you how many people lived off of potatoes and that is a good reason for why another 1,000,000 people fled Ireland to America in the 1800s. Walter Hunt was an inventor who managed to invent many things including a lock stitch sewing machine, ice plow, streetcar bell, hard-coal-burning stove, knife sharpener, and flax spinner. He was in debt to someone and he owed them 15 dollars which because of inflation would be 507 dollars in 2020 money. So to pay off his debts he invented the safety pin. The safety pin is a relatively simple device that is a bit of wire that is bent so that its middle is a spring which pushes the sharp part of the pin outward and away from the latch which is attached to the other end. Walter patented the paper clip and then sold the patent to a company that was made by an Irish immigrant for 400 dollars which because of inflation would be 13,518 in 2020 money so he was able to pay off his debt and still have 385 dollars($13,011 because of inflation) to spend. The company that bought the safety pin was advertising it to nurses to use on their patients because they could hurt themselves on a regular pin and they advertised it to moms for their babies for the same reasons.

In the Islamic golden age Al-Razi discovered smallpox and kerosene but the knowledge of kerosene was lost since the mongols raided the capital Baghdad and thereby ended the Islamic golden age. Making fires to light up areas was not a new idea but there weren’t a lot of ways to make a safer, smaller, and bright fire. There was coal oil which is made of coal and tar which did the job but it let off a lot of gas and smoke and therefore was not a popular type of oil for indoor lighting unless you wanted a bright and smoke filled room. Then there was whale oil and that worked good and was popular except for the fact that it was made of whale fat which is very stinky and gets stinkier as you burn it but did create the whaling industry and carving out of whalebone. So people were on the lookout for a smokeless and stinkless and preferably good smelling fuel for their lamps. This fuel was found by a Canadian named Abraham Gesner. Abraham studied medicine but got interested in geology while in England. He became chief geologist of Nova Scotia, Canada and therefor had access to Cole, petroleum, and oil shale which can make kerosene. Gesner made a company that sold his patented kerosene and he trademarked the name kerosene but people called other things of the same type kerosene to. To get around Gesner’s patent people made kerosene out of different amounts of diluted petroleum.

When I grow up I want to be a Lego set designer. I want to work at Lego because I like Lego and I think that I would like making and building Lego sets. I also think that I would like knowing I made a Lego set that a lot of kids were having fun with it. But even if I don’t become a designer I would still want to work at Legoland.

Ice cream is a ancient delicacy. The ancient Greeks, Romans and other cultures. Emperor Nero of Rome, probably the most famous emperor, paid for workers to haul ice from the snowy mountains and use it to make ice cream. They would put the cream part of the ice cream in a large bottle, they then set it in a large tub and filled the tub with the ice the had hauled from the mountains, waited for it to melt then mixed the cream in the bottle around and since all that cream was right next to the super cold water it would then become the ice cream. When they were mixing the mixture of cream into ice cream the cream would stick to the sides of the bottle, which makes it so they had to stop regularly and scrape the cream off. Lots of royalty and only very rich citizens could afford ice cream because of the ice collecting and churning. The modern ice cream maker is mostly the same as the old one and the process for using is has also changed slightly since olden times. The mixer in the old design would make it so you had to stop regularly to scrape the cream off the side of the bottle, while Nancy Johnson’s modern version had a blade on the mixer that would scrape it off the side mechanically which cut both labor and costs to make ice cream. The part of the process that changed was the fact that you add salt to the ice in the tub. Adding salt to water reduces the freezing point of water to much lower then 32 degrees making the ice melt much faster and allowing the water to get very cold without freezing making it take less time to make ice cream.

In ancient Egypt the Egyptians made architectural plans for the great pyramids to show the pharaoh what the monuments would look like and how they would work. The Greeks and Romans did the same thing for their temples and monuments. In the Renaissance the quality of structural plans was better and drafting became a job. Drafting is where you make copies of the plans by drawing copies of the plans. As you can probably guess this was hard to do and not make a mistake. A man named William Hershel was a scientist who discovered Uranus and some parts of the light spectrum. He passed his legacy down to his son who was named John Hershel. John helped his father in astrology and he made a method to research things in science. John and his wife went down to Africa to get a different view of the stars. While there John liked the fact that he didn’t have appointments or meetings or due dates or any of the tasks that were mandatory back in England. He decided to do other things than look at the stars. In this time John was experimenting with soaking paper in chemicals, and why he was I do not know. But he did soak paper in a chemical and he put a UV light and the paper turned blue. He then put a drawing on clear plastic, put it over a fresh soaked paper and the shadow of the drawing on plastic made it so he had an non erasable white picture on a blue background which was the first blue print.

The best birthday present that I can remember was a skeleton dragon Lego set that has a very big skeleton of a dragon and some human skeletons and lava. it comes with a small map and ninja minifigures so that you can play a dungeons and dragons game and this set is the dragon. you can buy other Lego sets that let you expand the game and let you play as different characters.