Author: legostudent

Before 1792 the fastest messages could travel was about ten miles an hour. Technically you could go faster than that but you would probably take longer over all because the horse would have to take a lot of breaks and if you pushed it it may die and then you would have to go on foot which would take even longer. Most people couldn’t even send mail because it was to expensive. A man recognized the fact that the mail was very slow so he designed a new way to send messages that was quicker than a rider on a horse and that new way was the semaphore telegraph. The semaphore telegraph was a bunch of towers that had little arms to make signs at the other towers and this way was much faster.

For thousands of years nothing had really changed the oil lamp. The oil lamp is a candle soaked in oil The shape of it had changed but it itself had not changed. In ancient Rome their oil lamps looked like little bowls with a picture on top and a small hole for the light to come out. Then there is the Aladdin style oil lamp but instead of a genie in it there is oil and to light it you stick the candle or lighter in the hole and boom you have a bright lamp. But a man named Argand made an new type of oil lamp that uses glass walls to make the light better originated and keeps the flame alive longer and brighter.

Benjamin Franklin was a smart guy and he had been experimenting with the Leiden jar and he saw what the electricity looked like when he discharged the Leiden jar. He then saw lightning looked just like the electricity from a Leiden jar when he discharged it. He knew that when you discharged a Leiden jar to something but there was a pointy thing next to it the electricity goes to the pointy thing so if a pointy thing on a house then the electricity goes to the house. To stop it from blowing up the house there is a wire attached to the pointy thing that leads down to a metal stick in the ground where the electricity dies out because the ground is a terrible conductor.

if you have not watched avengers endgame then you may not want to get a spoiler but in that movie iron man has a suit that has nanotechnology which lets it self repair. in the real world scientists are actually experimenting with how to do this but instead of a metal suit it’s more biological. one way this would help scientists is to see if something causes an explosion they can defiantly live instead of maby dying.

A long time ago about 98% of people were farmers and all of them could barely feed all the people enough to survive. Most people actually died of starvation. Today nearly no one dies of starvation and by that I mean every tenth homeless person and today only about 2% of people are farmers. Back then the farmers had to reap, thresh, and winnow. You have probably guessed what reaping is but just to make sure reaping is when you cut the stalks of wheat. Then threshing is where you beat the grains out of the little shell called a chafe which you have to do for about an hour. So now you have a pile of chafe and grain. Winnowing is where you sort the grain and chafe out the quickest way to do this is to throw handful of grain and chafe in the air and the wind blows away the light chafe and the heavy grain falls into your hand.

In England the English couldn’t grow grapes to turn into wine so they had wine imported from France. The exact place in France was a little area called champagne that was pretty far north in France. The french would get the grape juice and start the fermentation process but because champagne was so far north that the cold would stop the fermentation process so when it got to warm England the fermentation process would start back up but it was sealed up making the wine sit in the carbon air which gives it the bubbles and a weirder taste. In France the french realized what had happened and considered the bubbles to be an imperfection but the English realized that they actually really liked it.

The weaving industry was a cottage industry meaning the workers didn’t work in a factory, but they worked from their homes. Thanks to the flying shuttle people were able to sew way faster than threads could be made so there was a thread shortage which meant clothing and towels were more expensive. A man named James Hargreaves had been trying to make an invention that would even out the amount of cloth being made and the cloth being sewn. He had been trying for years when it hit him. His family spinning wheel was knocked over by one of his daughters and it kept spinning. It is called the spinning jenny for two reasons: the first is that his wife’s name is jenny an two jenny is short for engine.

A man made a power generator and could do experiments with electricity but the generator had to keep the generator running the whole time. This was inconvenient so they immediately liked the leyden jar. A man named leyden thought of electricity as a fluid that he could hold in a jar. So he made a jar to do that. The leyden jar is a jar that has a layer of tinfoil on the inside and outside. It is filled to about halfway with alcohol and has a chain draped across the bottom and the other end attached to a stick of metal poking out the top. The outer tinfoil layer gets a serious shock and before the outer layer people would have their hand on it so they would get a serious shock

France was going to war with Spain to take the Netherlands. The Spanish, English, and Dutch teamed up to fight the French. The English backed out of it and got a beating from the Dutch so they joined back up to fight the French. A group of 15 English ships went off course and they couldn’t check their longitude so they ended up crashing on some rocks. The English people were very angry about this so some very rich people set a reward out for anything that could tell you you longitude. A rich man devoted most of his time trying to make the longitude calculator. He ended up making it. The octant is a device that uses mirrors and the sun. You point it at the horizon and aline the mirrors with the sun until you got it right. Then you check you longitude.

My favorite season is falinter. The reason I like falinter is that it is super snowy all the time. You can make a ton of snowmen and play in the snow. The trees leaves dont fall off, they turn red, yellow, and brown but they don’t fall off the tree. You also have another hot chocolate-drinking season!