Author: legostudent

The first recorded plow was the scratch plow which was a sharpened stick or knife attached to wooden frame pulled by an ox or horse and since it was dry and not nutritious it didn’t need a better plow for it was loose, dry dirt. As people moved north, however, they encountered tough, nutritious, cold, and unfarmed soil which could not be plowed by a simple scratch plow. The heavy plow had a large iron blade that cut into the soil as it was pulled by the ox. Then a moldboard positioned to slide into the cut but then the moldboard curved outward so that the soil would get dumped to the side making the iconic rows of dirt we think of today. John Deere was a blacksmith in the 1800s and decided to go out to the Midwest because it was new area and all farmland so there weren’t a lot of blacksmiths which meant he could get a lot more business then in a more populated area like New York or Boston. The soil in the new farmland was even more nutritious then than when they went to northern Europe and therefore even stickier than northern Europe so the heavy plow was practically useless. The dirt would stick and clump to the moldboard so farmers had to scrape the soil off with their hands. They would tell their blacksmith about it and urge him to fix it. So fix it Deere did. John Deere had seen polished needles sowed and cut threw the cloth much better than unpolished needles so why not the same for plows? Since steel was easier to polish he made the steel plow out of steel. To make it easier to polish Deere also combined the moldboard and blade.

The Spanish empire was spreading out and conquering Mexico and some states such as Texas. Since Napoleon was conquering Spain the Spanish government couldn’t stop the Mexicans from declaring their independence. But when Texas tried to declare its independence from Mexico it was basically a small civil war between Texas and Mexico. As a boy Samuel colt was very interested in electricity and one day during a thunder storm he went up onto his roof with a large metal shovel and tried to capture electricity using the shovel. Good thing it didn’t work or he might not have lived to make the revolver. When Samuel was in school he tried to impress his school mates by making an explosion. He successfully made the explosion and nearly burned down the school which makes me think he successfully impressed his class mates but not his teachers since he was kicked out of school and his dad sent him to sail on a ship. While on the ship Colt was interested in how the steering wheel was able to turn but still rest when not in use with one spoke pointing straight up and one pointing straight down using a clutch. This and the older model of a pepper box revolver made him decide to make the modern revolver. The revolver is a hand gun that lets you load six bullets in so that you don’t have to reload after each shot but after every six shots which is a large improvement could make a smaller place like Texas have a chance at beating a bigger place like Mexico if Texas used the revolver which exactly what happened. Texas bought thousands of Colt revolvers and was its own country for a while before it became a state.

Me and my family went to Disney land but we were only staying one day since I wanted to have two days at Lego land. I did not want to go on all the biggest roller coasters like the incredible coaster that had a loop the loop but my mom convinced me to get on and I am glad I did because they closed it down to make sure it was still safe, so if we had waited I wouldn’t have been able to go on that ride which would have made me sad.

I made cinnamon tea. Cinnamon tea is a very simple drink to make. You can use either crushed cinnamon or cinnamon sticks that you can crush yourself. I crushed my own cinnamon sticks because we happened to have some sticks but the cinnamon sticks are very tough and hard since they are literally sticks of good flavored, curled up tree bark. I had to use the bottom of a metal knife to hammer the pieces apart, but I do not recommend this unless you can do it safely or with a safer tool. You then have to put the pieces of cinnamon in a special tea ball that is a container that has lots of tiny holes for the flavoring to get into the liquid. You then put water in a tea pot and wait for it to boil on a stove top. Once the tea pot starts to whistle remove it from the burner, take the lid off, and swirl the tea ball in the pot for 5-10 minutes. Then pour into a cup.

Archimedes designed a screw which could carry water up a hill by cranking a handle. Leonardo da vinci used this screw to provide lift for a hand held helicopter but Leonardo never actually built this machine so it is unknown if it would have worked. Steamboats used paddle wheels to propel them through the water which is called thrust. Paddle wheels are large wheels that have paddles on them so that when the wheel turns it forces the water back and the ship forward. The paddle wheel was not the best because a large wave or lot of wind could tip the ship a bit making the paddle wheel come up out of the water and no provide thrust. A man named Francis smith made a Leonardo propeller but instead of using it to fly Smith used it on a boat. The propeller was lighter than the paddle wheel making captains have to pay less for fuel and it would be under water both making it less easy to lose thrust and less easy for enemies to destroy your source of power. Mr. Smith advertised all these benefits to the British navy by using all those benefits in an actual test of the ship on the sea. They decided they liked it, bought it from him and used it in their ships and scientists started making improvements on it and eventually used them in airplanes and other air and water crafts. Tickets to ships got cheaper and more people used ships more often

The process of harvesting wheat was a very labor intensive process. You have to start by reaping the entire field of wheat which you could do one of three ways. The first is reaping by hand which is where you pick all the tops of the wheat by hand and put them in a basket. You repeat this for the entire field of wheat which would take you all day long and sometimes the next day would be devoted to picking wheat as well. The second way to do this is to have a sickle which is an especially designed curved blade which lets you reap more and faster but it would still take you a full day to clear the field. The third way to reap a field is to use a scythe which is basically a sickle blade on the side of a long stick. This is the fastest way to clear a field of wheat because it has more reach than the sickle. when you have reaped the field you then have to thresh the wheat which is very hard work because you have to take a large bat and beat the wheat until all the little seeds fall out which takes an hour for each bundle and there would be many, many more bundles of wheat. Then there is the winnowing which is where you take the pile of seeds and the papery chaff which was the shell on the seeds, throw them in the air and since the seeds are heavier than the chaff the seeds fall right in the basket and the chaff floats down slowly. A man named Cyrus McCormick made and patented a reaping machine that could reduce the time for reaping from more than a day to a few hours. He then lost his patent in a legal case making him have to rely on the market which made him decide to give free tests before receiving the money and in this way he got more money and farmers got more money by selling more wheat and there was more food overall.

One thing I like about where I live is the fact that my house is in a cul-de-sac which is a dead end street but is in the shape of a circle. Another thing I like about living here is that we know all of our neighbors. We also live very close to a park which has a basketball hoop and a small playground and very tall trees that you can climb. We also live close to a hiking trail that has lots of trees and tons of ferns, if you hike all the way up you are on some cliffs which have an amazing view. That is what I like about my home.

A captain in Napoleons army named Charles Barbier was ordered by Napoleon to make a system for soldiers to send messages during the night to each other without giving away their location which would happen if they used lights. Barbier did make a system of 12 dots with some missing in certain spots that encoded the alphabet but Napoleon and Napoleons army never really used it because it was to hard to use and to hard to learn. A boy named Louis braille had a father that worked as a leather worker and had lots of tools that had to be kept very sharp because leather is tough, so Louis’ father had big, and sharp scissors and a very large cone shaped knife used for making holes in the leather. It takes a very strong, firm, and skilled worker to use them as safely as possible and a three year old boy is not very strong, firm, and skilled so it makes sense that when three year old Louis tried to use his fathers tools he stabbed his eyeball that got infected causing him to go blind in both eyes. Even though he was blind he was very smart and attended the first school for blind people. The master of the school made a system for blind people to read that was just the letters of the alphabet raised up on the page that all the kids agreed was to complex. Some how Louis heard about Barbier’s system and tried to use it but it was to big and so Louis changed it from 12 dots to 6 and was able to encode the 64 uppercase and lower case letters of the alphabet.

The lemon is my favorite fruit. The lemon is a very acidic fruit that are believed to have first originated in northwest Asia though no one is completely sure. The lemon is also a hybrid of citrons and bitter oranges. Lemons have a very sour taste which most people do not like but I like the sour. Lemon juice is used a lot in cooking. Lemons and limes are very similar and the main difference is in the color and shape. Lemons are bigger than limes and yellow in color. Limes are smaller and green. But lemons are also sweeter than limes which means lemons have more sugar than limes.

The ancient Chinese alchemists were looking for a way to become immortal when they discovered a match that relied on friction to strike a flame. It spread in China but it never really moved on or spread outside of China.

In Europe and other places in the world had to use things like the magnifying glass to focus the suns rays on some tinder to make fire and that only worked when it was really sunny out and most of the time if it is sunny you don’t want a fire. You could also use flint and steel which was normally used in guns.

The European alchemists like Robert Boyle made different kinds of chemical matches in the 1600s when alchemy was turning into chemistry. Lots of people smoked tobacco in a pipe so lots of people wanted an easy way to light their pipe. One of the chemical fire starters was a small glass capsule filled with chemicals so that when you crushed the glass container a fire would start but this fire starter was never used was it didn’t succeed commercially and it couldn’t be mass produced.

A man named John Walker learned and apprenticed to be a surgeon but, understandably, he couldn’t handle the blood and gore so he quit but didn’t want to throw away his education so he became a pharmacist which is basically a chemist. Walker was also interested in fire and knew the answer to a good fire starter was chemistry. He was stirring chemicals together and tossed the stick aside and the stick then ignited.

The safety match vs the strike anywhere match. The safety match contains potassium chloride and the red bumpy part on the box that you light the match on contains red phosphorus which combine and the friction makes a fire. The strike anywhere match contains both potassium chloride and red phosphorus in the red part but the white part contains little shards of glass which make a spark lighting the red phosphorus and potassium chloride.