-Summarize each of the inventions you studied this week and how they impacted history. Also, explain the most interesting thing you learned this week, and why.
The Pencil
The earliest forms of writing were on clay tablets and Greeks and Romans used erasable wax tablets. The French Revolution began after France went broke. During it, Napoleon rose up the ranks and Britain blocked the inflow of the pencil and other goods to France. And England gained a monopoly over pencils because the had the only pure graphite mine in the world. So Nicolas Conte invented the modern pencil as we know it today. Pencils are graphite and clay rods encased in wood. They are cheap to make and use. The Conte pencil did not spread to America. You are probably thinking wait, wait, I thought you said he invented the pencil we use today, that’s true, he invented it first but 25 years later someone else invented the same pencil. His name was Henry David Thoreau and he wrote a book called Walden about how inventions are terrible and the time he spent just living off the land. But its a total fraud. During his time “living off the land” he went home and had his mother wash his clothes and used his invention of the pencil to write his book.
The Stethoscope
Hospitals go way back. At first they were christian enterprises but the government began getting involved in the 1600s. Rene Laennec was born in France in 17781. His mother died when he was young and he was sent to live with his uncle and as a child he was often sick. At age 12 he trained under great french doctors who taught him to use sound to determine the illness in the patient. Well he became a doctor and as a doctor he watched school children playing with hollowed out sticks, they would put one end to their ear and the other end they would scratch and listen to the sound it made. One day when treating a lady with a heart problem he was too modest to lay his head on her chest so he remembering the children with the sicks took a piece of paper and rolled it up and put it to her chest and he was surprised at how clearly he could hear her heartbeat and thus invented the stethoscope in 1816. The chest piece captures sound waves and they travel down tubes to our ears. Laennec published a book in 1819 and his design spread. The modern version was invented in 1852.
The Tunneling Shield
Ralph Dodd first attempted to tunnel under the Thames. They started building in 1798 but had to stop because they kept getting flooded. Marc Isambard Brunel was born in France in 1769. He had a talent for drawing and math. At age 17 he joined the french navy. While he was in the the navy the french revolution broke out and after he was out of the navy he had to escape the reign of Robespierre he fled France and barley escaped with his life. He arrived in New York City in 1793 and later was appointed Chief engineer of New York City. Then He went to England and married his old girlfriend who had been captured and nearly executed but when Robespierre’s reign ended, she was released and then went to England where they got married. In England he massed produced pulley blocks, While in England he patented the tunneling shield in 1818 he got the idea from the ship worm that chews holes in ships. The tunneling shield protects the men digging the tunnel. Each man has a sort of compartment where they dig the tunnel out then the shield is pushed forward and they dig again that way they are able to excavate 8 to 12 feet per week. Meanwhile Brunel was sent to deters prison because the people who were using his shield were not paying on time. So he sent letters to Russia saying that if they bailed him out of deters prison he would come build tunnels for them. That did it, people in England knew that if he went to Russia, England would lose his inventions they told Brunel that they would bail him out only if he promised not to go to Russia. This was the most interesting thing I learned this week. I think it is interesting that people will go to such extremes to keep ahead of other people. They started building the Thames tunnel in 1825 and finished in 1843.
Paved Roads
Systematic road building was passed on to local churches in the 1500s. A french engineer invented a new system in 1764 and that was improved in the 1800s by a Scottish inventor but they still were expensive to build. John Mcadam was born in Scotland in 1756. He was the youngest of 10 and at age 14 his mother died and he was sent to live with his uncle in New York at his counting house. He became a wealthy prize agent but had to flee England in 1782 and go back to Scotland. In Scotland he became involved in road building. He invented paved roads in 1816. Paved roads are made of layers of gravel 30 feet wide with a 3 foot rise toward the center to allow drainage. The first paved road in America was finished in 1823. Fun Fact: 1 trillion miles are driven on the interstate every year.
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