Review of Lessons 96-99

Lesson 96: Dynamite

Gun powder was the most powerful explosive of the 1800s. And then Nitroglycerin was discovered. It was extremely unstable.
Alfred Nobel was born in 1833 in Sweden. He had 7 siblings and his father made weapons. His family moved to Russia and there he studied chemistry. He learned to speak 5 languages. He then moved back to Sweden and learned about explosives. He invented dynamite in 1867.
Dynamite is a powerful explosive. He named it Nobel’s blasting powder. It is packaged in cardboard tubes and is very useful in building and construction.
Nobel’s blasting powder was instantly popular because it could be shipped without blowing up. He became very rich.
Nobel left all his money to the Nobel Prizes named after him. Dynamite was used as a weapon in the 1880s and it was used to invent the atomic bomb. Dynamite is used in safe city demolition.

Lesson 97: Chuck Wagon

The covered wagon was used in the 1700s. It carried families out west. It was pulled by either 8 horses or 12 oxen. The wagons were not smooth rides but they were vital.
Charles Goodnight was born in Illinois in 1836. He had 3 siblings and after he was born his family moved to Texas. He became a cowboy and joined the Texas rangers. After that he joined the confederacy and then joined the cattle drives. He then partnered with a man named Oliver Loving and they drove cattle across Texas together. He invented the chuck wagon in 1866.
“Chuck” means food. And that’s what the chuck wagon was, a mobile Kitchen. You could easily preserve food in the chuck wagon and some things they stored were coffee, beans, and biscuits. The chuck wagon allowed large groups to travel long ways.
The rise of a profit because of cattle drives after the Civil War increased and the chuck wagon became vital. A packing plant in Chicago opened and they bought cattle for 40$ apiece. That made cattle drives very popular. The cattle drives had a trail boss, horse wrangler, and cook. The cook was second in command after the trail boss because if you made the cook mad there would be no food for you.
The chuck wagon helped established the old west because they helped the cattle drives. The cattle drives made cow towns spring up and Goodnight and Loving inspired Lonesome Dove a TV show.

Lesson 98: Typewriter part 2

William Austin Burt invented the first typewriter, but it did not reach the market. The need for a faster typewriter emerged.
Christopher Latham Sholes was born in 1819 in Pennsylvania. He became a printer’s apprentice and tried to invent a machine to print page numbers. He invented the modern typewriter in 1867.
The typewriter printed neat numbers and letters. Later models reduced the jams and allowed you to type faster than you could write.
The prototype that he made in 1867 secured him some investors by typing some letters up and sending them to the people telling them about the typewriter. Sholes then built a better but sales were slow. They got better when in 1878 he added lowercase letters.
The QWERTY keyboard appeared and it eliminated the need for shorthand. Women became typists and secretaries.

Lesson 99: Ticker Tape

Stock markets are important. They first appeared in the Middle Ages in Europe. Dutch Calvinists invented the modern stock market in the 1600s.The printing telegraph appeared in 1846. And the David Hughes improved the printing telegraph 1855.
Edward Callahan was born in Massachusetts in 1838. He quit school when he was 11 and moved to New York City to go into business. He invented ticker tape in 1867.
Ticker Tape is a strip of paper with stock market information on it. It provides real time price updates. It could keep up with the ever changing stock prices. It worked over the telegraph system. It was called ticker tape because of the sound it made as it printed. It had a slight lagging problem though.
It was improved by other people including Thomas Edison. Edison corrected the lagging problem.
Today ticker tape is obsolete. It led to the Wall Street crash in 1919 because it could not keep up and it singled the end of the 1920s.

This week ticker tape was my favorite invention. It was the most interesting thing I learned about this week because; when I read the lesson name I thought Ticker tape? But when I learned about it I knew what it was.