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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.

One of my hobbies is reading. I like reading good books because-well they’re good books. I am reading Michael Crichton’s book the Andromeda strain and I recommend it if you want to read a good book. My favorite authors are Rick Riordan and Michael Crichton. So one of my hobbies is reading.

Back in ancient Rome the Romans used their slaves to make sturdy and very strong roads which used a lot of slaves and a lot of time. The roman roads were made out of a bottom layer of very large stones and then there are multiple layers of gravel and more gravel then they put slightly rounded stones on top of it all in a way that makes the road rounded so that any rain will go down to the sides of the road instead of staying in the middle of the road which is an inconvenience to travelers. During the American revolution a man named John McAdam payed people who sunk American ships money from the government of Britain but he always stole a little bit of the money so he quickly became a rich man and he got a hobby of seeing how roads were made and that hobby quickly became an obsession and he tried to convince parliament who the people in charge of road building that he had designed a faster and cheaper road design but since parliament made more money off the slower and more expensive road they didn’t like his idea but he did build it which showed all the people who were forced to pay for the road that it was a faster a cheaper road to build so parliament was forced to use his roads which weren’t all that different from the old roads. He just took out the large bottom stones and put dust all over the road to keep it together. But the dust would get blown away so the roads fell apart more but one man noticed that tar once spilled on a road and that road didn’t fall apart and wee still put tar on our roads today

The french revolution changed the way France worked. The neighboring countries went to war with France because they didn’t like how France operated now and that meant the french needed a big army to defend France so the french drafted 10000 men to help defend France but as you can probably guess that is a lot of people to feed especially since they are on the borders of France and therefore the middle of nowhere so it was hard to get enough food. General Napoleon had supposedly fixed this problem since he always had about half of his army out looking for food but an attack from the Italians showed the problem that his plan had. The Italians nearly defeated the french but failed. If they had had all of their men and not had half of them foraging and hunting it would not have been such a close call and less of their men would have died. Napoleon had been offering a lot of money for anyone who had an idea for how to store more food or make more food faster but after the near disastrous attack by the Italians he near doubled the amount of money he would pay for an idea. Around this time a man was experimenting with ways to preserve food. He was a chef so he had access to all types of foods. He did all kinds of experiments with all kinds of foods which eventually led him to the canning process. The canning process is very simple but effective. You put whatever food you want in a mason jar then fill it with water, screw the lid on snugly but not to tightly or else it won’t work then put the jar in boiling water. The water inside the jar or can boils since all the water around it is boiling so the water turns to vaper and evaporates out the lid creating a vacuum sealing the lid on. The boiling kills all the bad micro creatures that make the food go bad and the vacuum makes sure no micro creatures get in the food. The chef gave this to Napoleon, got the money and owned a company that still makes canned food today.

My favorite summer vacation was when I went to Legoland. We stayed at the knight hotel and there was Lego statues of knights and a king and queen. All the workers at Legoland had name tags that had minifigs and you could trade your minifigs for their minifigs. The rides where really fun. That is why going to Legoland is my favorite summer vacation.

The Industrial Revolution made way for an era where the speed of inventions was 2% faster than the invention speed of the past. About every 2 years the speed of inventions increases 2% because we make inventions and then with those inventions we make more inventions and so on. I know this sounds crazy, but I don’t think that it will ever end, I mean why would it slow down or stop?

The Romans were the best bridge builders of their time. They had a lot of slaves and used them to make arch bridges. People that didn’t have so many slaves couldn’t easily or cheaply make arch bridges. So other peoples made different bridges and some made suspension bridges. Suspension bridges are cheap to make and can hold things that are much heavier than it.

Before the Industrial Revolution pipes used for sewage were made out of elm wood. Elm wood when kept wet deteriorated at a slow enough rate it could be used as a pipe easily. Before the fire hydrant if there was a fire people had to dig down to the pipes and cut a hole in the wood wait for the hole to fill up with water then use buckets to quench the fire and do all that while the fire is burning.

Watt improved the Newcomen steam engine but he still used low pressure steam and this meant it was bulky and not mobile. Another man who had grown up near a mine wanted to attach an engine to the heavy carts used for moving stone but it required a high pressure steam engine so he made one. It was called the puffin devil and the first train engine ever.

My favorite plant is the sun flower. The sun flower is my favorite plant because I once grew some and their seeds taste very good. Sun flowers are angiosperms which means they have flowers and can stand on its own. Sun flowers are annual which means you pant them, they grow up, they die and stay dead so you have to plant new seeds in the spring. Sun flowers don’t produce fruit but as I said earlier they have good seeds. Sun flowers originated in south and north America.

A meal that I would like to know how to make is cucumber sandwiches with tea. I want to make tea because there is lemon balm growing in my backyard and so I want to use it to make tea. I thought about what goes good with tea and decided cucumber sandwiches did. the ingredients I think go in cucumber sandwiches with tea are: fluffy white bread, mayonnaise, cucumber, lemon balm leaves and water. I would share it with my mom and dad and I also have two younger cousins in the Ron Paul curriculum so I would share it with them and if they were interested teach them how to make it.

A pattern that appears in history is that the inventors of the invention notice something peculiar and instead of just shrugging it off they investigate it and learn what makes it do something. this is called the eureka moment. They use that in an invention or someone else uses it in an invention but could only do that because the first person wrote it down. Another pattern that can be noticed in history is that when a labor-saving device is slowed down by mobs of people who have the job the device is supposed to help will try to destroy it so that they make more money instead of everyone having more money and time. Nowadays you don’t see farmers trying to destroy tractors but if they did then the ones who use it will make more money and have more time to do other productive things and the ones who don’t use it make less money and less time to do other productive things

I liked the English 4 because of all that it taught me. I thought the teachers mispronunciations of words was funny. I Liked learning about the vocab words because I learned things about words I didn’t know. I really liked reading all the different books the teacher gave to us. I did not like the homework though.