Author: legostudent

Before the pencil came along all people had to write with was a pen or quill. Artists didn’t like this because they couldn’t shade or make lighter lines. Writers didn’t like it because if they made a mistake they had to scrap the whole page and do it again without mistakes. The first graphite mine found was in England where all the graphite was solid. In other mines the graphite was powder and dust. For a long time England was the only place that could make pencils because nobody could make powder graphite into solid graphite. When the mine was first found people thought it was lead. That mistake is why we call it pencil lead. Eventually someone found out how to make solid graphite out of powder graphite.

Percy Jackson was a normal ADHD, dyslexic, teenage kid. He discovers his favorite teacher is a centaur and his best friend is a satyr. Later he and his mother are pursued by the Minotaur to camp half-blood, where all demigods live in the smmer. Percy learns he is the god Poseidon’s son. He meets some friends at camp half-blood who aid him on his quest to show Zeus his father didn’t steal his lightning bolt. On his quest he battles Medusa, Hades, and Areas. Those are a few reasons this is my favorite story.

Leonardo Da Vinci was a very skilled artist and scientist who could be called a Renaissance man. A renaissance man is a man who is interested and skilled at lots of subjects. Leonardo is best known for his painting and his most famous paintings the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. Leonardo is also known for making very ahead of his time inventions like a man powered flying machine, the first parachute, machine guns, a diving suit, and an android. He made all these and more in the 15 century, and today is the 21 century so Leonardo made those 600 years ago. Leonardo was born into renaissance Italy and was apprenticed to a master painter. His father and mother had him but his father married 4 more wives and had 12 other kids. Leonardo was 40 when his youngest half sibling was born. He was also very interested in human anatomy and dissected more than 30 dead humans.

The Chinese had made the hand cannon and the mongols were spreading it by using it on people they were trying to conquer. The hand cannon wasn’t very good at shooting at long range and it mostly just pinged off knight’s plate armor so people started looking for better hand cannons. The arquebus is the ancestor of the rifle and matchlock. The original arquebus could hold a lot more gunpowder than the hand cannon could and could blast straight through plate armor but to light the gunpowder you had to light a match and stick it in the barrel and get your hand out of the way before it goes off. People eventually drilled a hole in the back of the stock to put in the match in so that you don’t blow off your hand. The arquebus can shoot far further than arrows can and be more deadly.

If I could fly I wouldn’t waste time telling you about it. Instead I would careen through the clouds to Legoland. I would have a terrific time on the rides and roller coasters. I would buy and build a literal ton of Lego sets in the Legoland store. I would scare a bunch of people by flying right in front of them and yelling “BOO!”. I would float down into gaps in the lines and the people behind me would be so stunned they wouldn’t do anything about it. That is what I would do if I could fly.

Knights and knighthood had really taken off in Europe by the 13^th century (1200s). The earliest form of armor was chain mail armor. Chain mail armor can protect you from most slashing attacks but you can pierce it with spears or arrows. You could also just hit them with a very big hammer. Plate armor blocked slashing and piercing attacks, but hitting it with a very big hammer still worked. The lightest plate armor weighs about 30 pounds and the heaviest 55 pounds. My dogs dog food weighs about 47 pounds but then the plate armor is evenly (if you had a good blacksmith) distributed around your body making it feel even lighter. Knights and plate armor died out in the 17^th century (1600s) because guns could easily penetrate the armor.

Before spectacles old age meant early retirement for most monks and scholars. When people age their eyesight usually gets worse and gets blurry and most scholars whole job is basically just reading and writing about certain subjects need their vision to read and write correctly. People who study vision like Al Hazen who were great at optics and vision started using lenses – which were known to make things look bigger and light fires – to fix bad eyesight. Like most things they spread by being bought by the rich who could stand to lose a bit of money then by the common people who knew they were safe since the rich people kept buying them. It was Johann Kepler who finally determined that refraction drives vision in the eye

Just so you know this is not a sleep dream this is a daydream.

I am an assassin from assassin’s creed (awesome video game) and I am flying a dragon. the dragon is bright yellow, not gold and is breathing sky blue flames! The spectacular dragon is soaring at a thousand miles a minute. I leap off the powerful dragon and grab my white parachute and float down to the ground. There is a Templar fleeing so I hurl my dragon bone spear at him and he tumbles to the ground, never heard from him again. My dragon flies back to me and roars “The apple is mine.” then blows blue fire all over me.

The cannon is a fantastic siege weapon that can blow holes in walls the trebuchet can’t dent. Cannons are large metal tubes filled with gunpowder and a ball put in the front to get blasted. The hand cannon probably inspired the first cannon. The people most fit to making the cannon were bell making blacksmiths. The bell makers were used to handling large chunks of metal and making it round with a hole at the end. The only differences were the hole for the fuse and it being so much skinnier. The main and effective way the cannon spread was with the use of it on other armies and castles. The attacking side would use it on the defense and the defense would copy it and use it on either another attacker or would try to conquer a different place spreading it even more.

The trebuchet was inspired by the sling. The traction trebuchet was made by the Chinese in the 4^th century BC (300 BC). The traction trebuchet is basically a giant sling. The trebuchet is a great siege weapon because it can sling giant boulders, flaming boulders, and dead body’s to cause infection at or above walls from a very great distance away and out of reach of the archers. The traction trebuchet requires lots of men to pull on ropes to sling projectiles but the counter weight trebuchet has a giant weight on it to make it fall down, making the other end fly up kinda like a seesaw. The counter weight trebuchet is one of the best war machines and catapults ever seen in Europe and China.