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.

Lesson 91: Roller Skates

The 1860s were busy times. The Civil War started in 1861 and killed 600,000 people. It was the worst war in American history.

The first early skates were invented by John Merlin, and they were ice skates with wheels. He himself was wounded in 1760 trying to demonstrate them. They were hard to stop and steer. The roller skate was invented in 1863 by James Plimpton. Not much is known about him.

Roller skates are shoes with 4 wheels on each shoe.  Skating is a fun way to get healthy exercise. Another sport that uses skates is roller hockey.

The 4 wheel design was safer than 2 wheels and Plimpton experimented with how to sell them best. He built roller rinks in 1866. He started renting out the skates to young dating couples and got rich of the business. He had to fight 300 lawsuits and then roller skates took off in the 1870s.

The reason roller skates took off was because of disco. The music went well with roller skates. The skates led to the skateboard in the 1950s and the roller blade in the 1990s. The rinks are still in use today.

Lesson 92: Barbed Wire

The US was expanding by 1850 and there were few fences on the open range. The only fences were farmer’s, to keep cattle out of their crop. Cattle went where they wanted so the only way to keep the cattle strait was by branding. Cattle were watched by cowboys on horses because no one could walk as far as was needed to feed the cows. Cattle drives were growing after the Civil War. The first cattle drive was in 1866. It took two months with 10 cowboys driving 3,000 head of cattle 15 miles per day.

Free roaming cows became a problem. The cows would wander onto train tracks and hold up trains. They would also eat farmers’ crops. Back then fencing was expensive and there were no close hardware stores. 160 acres was a lot of land to fence. That problem was solved in 1868.

Michael Kelly invented barbed wire in 1868. Not a lot is known about him.

Barbed wire is an easy and cheap way to control cattle. It lasts 10-20 years and works better than you would think.

Joseph Glidden invented a better version in 1873. What do you think he did to advertise it? He went and built a ranch in the middle of 160 acres and then fenced the entire thing in barbed wire. He then put 12,000 cattle on the ranch and sat back. Not one cow escaped.  Then a man named John Gates created an even better on and put on a demonstration where he drove a stampede towards a fence and it did not break.

Ranches grew and the barbed wire is used today to keep prisoners on prison and it is used to keep trespassers out. The barbed wire ended the need for cowboys and the old west.

Lesson 93: Cowboy Hat

Fur traders made the coonskin hat fashionable.  And it was used by cowboys. It was not really a good hat for cowboy work though.  Meanwhile, the gold rush had started and the 49ers appeared.

John .B. Stetson was born in 1830 in New York. He was the 7^th child of 12. His father was a hat maker and he learned the trade. Then, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He figured it was his last chance to see the frontier. So he headed west. While he was there, he noticed that coonskin hats had fleas! He also noticed that no one had the same hat. No one had the same style and none of the hats were good for work. So when he realized that he was not going to die he invented the Cowboy hat in 1865.

The cowboy hat is designed to be functional.  The brim kept the sun off your face, neck and back. The water proof fur-felt kept your face dry when it rained. It was made of rabbit and beaver. It could be used as a water bucket for your horse and to steer cattle.

Stetson knew how to advertise and the hat became popular almost immediately. It was called the hat that won the west.

The cowboy hat was iconic in the old west. Buffalo bill wore a custom made one and nothing shows the cowboy hat more than the movies.

Lesson 94: Pasteurization

Louis Pasture was born in France in 1822. He was an average student and went to school in 1838. He was a good philosophy student but a bad chemist. Then he got better with chemistry and was asked to investigate wine that was going bad. He patented his germ theory in 1865.

Pasteurization kills germs and bacteria. You heat the milk of wine hot enough to kill the germs but keep the taste. You use hot temperatures and short time.

He advertised to wine makers and it was not until 20 years later that it was used on milk. Most milk nowadays is pasteurized. The process led Thomas Whelch to invent Grape Juice.

My favorite invention this week was the roller skate. It was my favorite because I love roller skating and its lots of fun. I had not thought about its invention before. I just had fun skating. Now I know all about its invention and inventor.

Lesson 66: Safety Elevator.

Rome and Greece had a sort of elevator, and the people in the Middle Ages also used one.  One was needed for coal mining, but nobody used them because they just weren’t safe. Because of that buildings were limited to two or three stories because they used stairs.

Elisha Graves Otis was born in Vermont in 1811. He came from a rich family and he was the cousin of the inventor of the steam shovel.  He left home and became a wagon driver. He married and had 2 sons. Then, he moved to a river town and built a grist mill. But, he converted it to a saw mill and then gave that up and turned to building wagons.  His wife died in 1839 leaving him an 8 year-old son and a baby son still in diapers.  Then he moved to Albany New York and went to work in a toy factory. He had an idea for a safety stop and used it to invent the Safety Elevator in 1852 to lift wood scraps.

Elevators lift people up and down without them having to walk. They are used in sky scrapers, constriction sites and lots of other places. They are lifted by steel cable and balanced by a counterweight. But what if the cables snap? The safety elevator used a backup ratchet system and required manual lifting.

 It was remarkably slow to sale despite the benefits. It required good marketing so Elisha Otis rented a space at the World’s Fair and put on a dramatic demonstration of the elevator every hour. He would hoist himself up to the top and then order his assistant to cut the rope. The rope cut and sent him hurtling down the elevator, a couple of inches.  It got him the sales he needed.

The elevator made sky scrapers possible, they can be hundreds of feet high now and you can have lots of people living on a little bit of land.

Lesson 67: Syringe

Early civilizations had something like the syringe but it was lost during the Middle Ages. Muslims used it to preform eye surgery and it also was used for injecting medicine into blood veins.

Alexander Wood was born in Scotland in 1817. He had a good education and attained a medical degree at Edinburgh collage. He used morphine to treat patients and then he invented the Syringe in 1853.

Doctors today use hypodermic syringes. The syringe consists of a reciprocating pump and it is used to control the dosage given to patients and other things. They are used outside the hospital and they are used to fill ink cartridges.

The syringe was popularized in France by a doctor and the one handed syringe was invented in 1899. The glass syringe was invented in 1946 and the disposable syringe in 1949.

The syringe improves diabetes control and it can be used to give a patient a safe anesthesia by making sure the administration is done smoothly. Also, using the syringe helps injections act quicker. Solders during World War 1 carried morphine syringes. And they are used in Epi- pins today.

Lesson 68: The Bessemer Process

The Ottoman Empire was powerful in the 1200s but it declined by the 1800s. England was nervous about the growing Russian Empire; And France was growing and expanding under Napoleon. Then the Crimean War happened between France, England, Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1853.

Henry Bessemer was born in England in 1813. His father was an inventor and he passed down those traits to his son Henry. Henry was a prolific inventor and had experience in steam powered machines. He grew interested in weapons because of the Crimean War and had a talk with Napoleon the 3^rd who wanted more steel for his weapons. He invented the Bessemer Process in 1855.

The process converts useless pig iron into useful steel.  The process forces hot air through molten iron to remove all the impurities and that leaves behind slag.  The Bessemer process made mass scale steel production feasible and it increased production. The price of steel went down and less labor was required.

Henry Bessemer licensed his patent to 5 different area iron makers But the process was just too hard for them to understand. He had to open a factory of his own. The process came to America in 1862 and there he built 11 mills. He had a public demonstration and  the railway liked his idea.

The process made the railway better and longer trains could be built. Roads use steel and concrete buildings use steel to reinforce them.  Today no building is made without steel.

Lesson 69: Egg Beater

There was European conflict in the 19^th century and America was running full steam towards industrialization. Americas Midwest was growing and the south was becoming rich although it relied on slave labor. The northeast moved to factories and the north stayed a farming community.

The Egyptians were bakers and so were the Romans. Baking grew though the Middle Ages and by 1800 it was used everywhere. The egg beater was invented by a man named Ralph Collier in 1856. Not much is known about him other than he came from Baltimore.

Today the egg beater is called the kitchen mixer. It helps you bake and it reduces labor. The beaters spin on the mixer or the bowl spins around the beaters. Some are hand held others are non-lift able. Collier’s first device was a hand held cranking machine. The crank turned the gears which turned the beaters.

Other inventors swathe egg beater and improved upon it. In 1859 a model was sold to a company, and in 1918 the Kitchen Aid was invented by Herbert Johnson.

The mixer produces large batches of things with almost no labor required. It makes baking a cake easy.

This was my favorite invention this week. It was the most interesting thing I learned about this week as well, because I love to cook and I use the mixer all the time but had no idea about how it was invented.   

Lesson 61: Jackhammer

In 1848 there was a strange outbreak of revolutions. A lot of them occurred because of cults.Also because some people believed that violent revolutions healed society. Across the sea America did not have these problems.

Mining was important but dangerous and steam engines were important tools for the process. An early jackhammer was invented in 1809 and a man named Jonathan Couch invented the modern version in 1848 which he called a percussion drill.

The jackhammer is a device for chipping away stone and concrete. The bit attached to a piston that a steam engine would bash into the rock. The bit is pushed up and down by pressurized air. Some run on electricity.

The steam engines could not be installed in the mines they produced to many bad gases. So Couch’s assistant Fowle invented compressed air.

The Mont Cenis tunnel links Italy to France. It was destined to take 25 years to build, as it was built into a mountain. But, thanks to the jackhammer it only took 14 years. The jackhammer can be used by homeowners and helps speed up road construction.

Lesson 62: Pin Tumbler Lock

Linus Yale Sr. was born in Connecticut in 1797. He moved to New York, married his wife at age 18 and had 4 children. He opened a lock shop to sell bank locks and invented the pin tumbler lock in 1843 to use in safes.

It was first called a Yale Lock and was a cylinder drum. The key lined up with the pins, pushed some up and some down, and then opened the lock. It was hard to know the length of the pins so harder to pick.

Linus Yale Jr. continued his father’s industry after he died. He became an electrical engineer and the lock became popular. Linus Jr. took the invention to the World’s Fair and advertised its benefits. He also exposed the easy picking of other locks.

The pin tumbler lock is used in the common door and new feature enhanced security adjustments are always being made. Its safety guarantees helped people trust banks for keeping their money safe. This led to the banking industry to becoming the most elite industry today.

Lesson 63: Safety Pin

The Irish Potato Famine drove immigration to America. It all started with a potato blight in the 1840s and two thirds of the population (that relied on potatoes because of outrageous Corn Laws) went hungry and immigrated to America. So 1 million people died and 1 million immigrated.

Walter Hunt was born in New York in 1797. Not much is known about him except that he became a mechanic and had an eye for invention. He invented version of the sewing machine and had experience with needles. He invented the safety pin in 1849 to pay back a debt.

Safety pins are simple folding needles. They have sharp heads and guards to keep the pins from sticking you. Sewing pins wiggled free and pricked you, these did not.

Hunt invented the safety pin to pay back a debt of 15 dollars. He sold his patent for 400 dollars to a company named WR Grace and company. Grace was the last name of the man who founded the company, an immigrant from the Irish potato famine. 15$ then is equal to 450$ today and 400$ to 12,000$. The company advertised to house wives and nurses for diapers and clothes.

Today they are still used in diapers and they helped reduce household expenses.

Lesson 64: Gyroscopes

France had a long 19th century. Napoleon was overthrown in 1814, the Bourbon Dynasty was overthrown in 1830 and the socialist overthrow happened in 1848. Then, Napoleon the 3rd took over in 1852.

Leon Foucault was born in Paris in 1819. He was home-schooled and went to medical school to become a doctor but was afraid of blood. He became interested in physics and became apprenticed to the man who discovered Leukemia. He then worked with a man and helped discover the speed of light. In 1851 he experimented with the earth’s rotation and then invented gyroscopes in 1852.

The gyroscope is a spinning disc inside gimbals. The word gyroscope is a combination of two Greek words that mean “circle” and “to look”. They seem to defy the laws of physics but they don’t. the gimbals allow the rotation and they resist forces that try to turn them. The gyros create stability.

Foucault used the gyroscope to prove the earth’s rotation and electrical motors were added in the1860s. The compass used gyroscopes in 1904 and they were used for military aircraft in World War 1 and World War 2.

Lesson 56: Rotary Printing Press

Gutenberg’s printing press launched the protestant reformation. With the press, workers could print 2 book pages an hour. Steam engines increased the rate by 1824 to 1,000 pages an hour. Richard Hoe was born in 1812 in New York. He was the son of a mechanic who owned a printing press company. At age 21 he became the president of his father’s company and he learned about the printing operation. He invented lots of things including the rotary printing press in 1843. The Press uses rotating drums and allows a never ending stream of paper to be printed. The type is on the cylinder face and hundreds of feet of paper can be loaded. It can print 7 million pages an hour at twenty miles per hour. In the 1820s the newspapers were political operations. But a man named Abell founded the Baltimore Sun, the start of penny papers. He was quick to adopt the rotary printing press. And once he did, others followed. It led to the New York Times in 1851 which used the rotary printing press, and the middle class started relying on the newspaper. The rotary printing press led to the massive greeting cards industry creation and the Christmas card industry. And it helped start the magazine industry.

Lesson 57: Kerosene

Al-Razi actually discovered kerosene in the19th century and it was used for heat and lighting but lost over time. Abraham Gesner was born in 1797 in Canada. He wanted to be a sailor and by the time he was 20 he had been in 2 shipwrecks. He got married at age 27 and then became a doctor. He then turned his interests to geology. He practiced both medicine and geology in Canada and invented kerosene in 1846. Kerosene is a fuel and generalized trademark. It is derived from the distillation of petroleum. It has a 350 to 450 degree evaporation point. It is clear, stable and thin. Kerosene is used in lamps, heaters and Airplane fuel. Gesner founded a company in 1850 and sold kerosene, lamps and oil. Also an American inventor competed with him. With the discovery of petroleum Gesner lost control of the kerosene industry. The invention of kerosene led to the decline in the whaling industry. And it put men on the Moon.

Lesson 58: Antiseptics

Hospitals and churches took in babies from mothers who could not take care of them. And in Vienna there were two hospitals. One hospital had a death rate of 10% the other one had a death rate of 5%. Women going to have their babies, begged the doctors on their hands and knees to send them to the lower death rate hospital. Some had their babies on the street. This was a problem. Ignaz Semmelweis was born in 1818 in Budapest. He was the 5th of 10 children and his family was wealthy. He went into obstetrics and was 26 when he was finished learning, it took him 7 years. He went to work in a Vienna hospital which happened to be the hospital with the higher death rate. He witnessed the women begging the doctors and it troubled him greatly. He resolved to fix the problem. He started by eliminating the differences. He discovered that the biggest difference was that the hospital with the higher death rate had only medical students working there. The hospital with the lower death rate had only midwives in training employed. Then one of his friends died after being stabbed accidently with a student’s scalpel while preforming an autopsy. The symptoms were exactly that of the women that died. The midwives did not perform autopsies, students did. Eureka! He invented Antiseptics in 1847. Antiseptics kill germs and infection. Semmelweis’ antiseptics were made out if lime and chlorine. He did not know about germs as Pasteur’s germ theory was not known. All he knew was that the smells on the student’s hands were making women sick. Semmelweis’ antiseptics reduced the death rate from 18 % to 2 % in just one month. Some months there was a death rate of 0 %. Students from the hospital spread the word around. What do you think the other doctors’ reception to the idea was? If you think they loved the idea and thought Semmelweis was a genius, you are absolutely wrong. They hated the idea. They said he was offending them. If you said their hands were unclean then you were saying that the doctors were unclean. The hospital that he worked at fired him. Semmelweis wrote letters calling doctors irresponsible murderers. And he eventually went crazy. He died in an asylum. Dead bodies, as it was discovered were not the problem . It was germs. After Pasteur’s germ theory decreased resistance. But the doctors still ignored the data. The Germ theory was in dominance in the1880’s and today hand washing is part of our daily lives. In Semmelweis’ life, hand washing and antiseptics saved 100s of lives. Today millions are saved.

Lesson 59: Gas Masks

Gas masks are common today. You can buy a pack of little breathing masks at the store for home. They are common today for fire fighters. But before gas masks were invented firefighting was hard, you had to breathe in all those harmful chemicals. Coal mining was hard as well; too much coal dust was breathed in. Naturally inventors wanted to fix this problem. Almost nothing is known about the man who invented it. His name was Lewis .P. Haslett and he was from Kentucky. He was probably a miner himself or was involved in the mining industry somehow. A gas mask protects you from polluted air. It forces air into a filter and blocks the harmful vapors and germs from the air. The filters react with the vapors keeping them out. In some cases oxygen tanks may be needed but they help you work in harsh environments. The first gas warfare was in World War 1 and during World War 2 in 1944 the modern version was invented. It was used during the Cold War by school children. Today they are used everywhere, by nuclear weapons builders, radiation workers and many others. Please let know about any mistakes.

Lesson 51: Ether

Anesthesia goes way back. Lots of people had different ways of relieving pain. In 1804 Fredrick Surturner invented morphine, and Ether was used as a collage party drug. Crawford Long was born in Georgia in 1815. He grew up in a wealthy family and became a surgeon after many years of studying. He moved home to Georgia and read a lot. He noticed the properties of Ether seeing that when someone got hurt, they did not, after becoming sober remember any pain or that it had happened. He invented the idea of Ether as an anesthetic in 1842. It was used by putting it on a rag and the person having the surgery breathing it in. He experimented on a brain surgery and when it was complete the man said he had felt something sort of itchy but no pain, the crowed marveled. Sometimes it did make people sick though. Long did not get credit until after his death. That’s because of three men. Men named Jackson, Morton and Wells. They all discovered Ether a little bit after Long. They had terrible fights about it for years. This is how it all ended: Jackson read an article saying that Morton was the discoverer of Ether and he went crazy. He died in an insane asylum. Morton read an article about Jackson being the true inventor. He tried to commit suicide by drowning himself. Instead, he got a heart attack and died. On his tombstone it said he was the true discoverer. When Wells saw what Morton put on his tombstone, he went crazy and committed suicide in an asylum. They all probably got the idea of ether from Long, and in the end the History books call him the inventor. March 30th is National Doctors Day. The same day Crawford Long used Ether for the first time. It has led to Anesthesia being a field all on its own. This was the most interesting thing I learned about this week. It is also a terrible thing that people will fight so hard to take credit for something.

Lesson 52: Fax Machine

Before the fax machine it was hard to make copies of important papers. You had to copy by hand. It was hard and time consuming. Alexander Bain was born in Scotland in 1811. His father was a tenant farmer and he had 12 siblings. He became a clockmaker in London. He invented the electric clock around 1840 and this lesson’s invention, the fax machine in 1843. Fax is derived from the word Faxcimily and it is Latin for: make like. It scans, copies and sends documents down a phone line. The graphic image is sent down the telephone line then the image is turned into an audio signal and the other machine, using the signal, makes a reproduction of the original paper. All in about 5 seconds. Bain kept improving the machine and a man named Fredrick Bakewell made a better version. An Italian man made a commercially successful one in 1861. In 1900 Elisha Gray created an even better one. And Xerox invented in the 1990s the modern version. The fax machines connected I Phones with computers and they make running a small business cheap.

Lesson 53: Steam Powered Iron Passengers Ships

Sailing was treacherous. It still is, but less dangerous. The steam boat fixed the problem of sailing up stream. But how could Europe trade with America. It took 80 days round trip and there were no big vessels. Isambard Brunel was born in England in 1806. He was the son of Mark Isambard Brunel the inventor of the tunneling shield. He also had good schooling and his father educated him in many things. He was apprenticed to a clockmaker and helped his father on his tunneling shield. He almost drowned doing so though. He became the chief engineer of the Great Western Railroad and invented the iron steam ship in 1843. He named it the S.S. Great Britain. Its befits were: It shipped on time and had predictable schedules. It also carried lots of passengers cheaply. Brunel was already famous and on top of that his ships out preformed his rival ships. He had grand ideas and he built the S.S. Great Eastern, the biggest ship in the world at the time. And due to immigration demands increased in the 1880s. The S.S. Great Eastern laid the transatlantic telegraph cable and immigrants transformed America. They led to the Gilded Age which gave way to the Progressive Era.

Lesson 54: Ice Cream Maker

There were ice cream types in the ancient world. Royalty enjoyed the treat. So did Roman Emperor Nero. Nero had people whose soul job was to get him ice cream. George Washington also loved ice cream. One year, he spent 200$ on ice cream. That’s the equivalent of 5,000$ today. But, it was too expensive for most people. It took hours just to make a small batch. It was very laborious. The Ice Cream Maker was invented by a woman named Nancy Johnson. Next to nothing is known about her. She patented the Ice Cream Maker in 1843. Cream, Sugar, Vanilla and Milk are what you use in your basic vanilla ice cream recipe. The ice cream maker is a bucket with a crank on it. You put your ice cream mix in a canister and put it in the middle of the bucket. Then you fill the space around the canister with layers of ice and rock salt. The salt lowers the melting point of the ice. Then you crank the handle and mix your ice cream. It makes the process less hard. Nancy Johnson sold the patent and others improved and released different designs. That led to ice cream stores. Also, mass production of ice cream emerged by the second half of the1800s. Ice Cream is cheap, delicious and can be any flavor. It represents the wealth of the western civilization. There are companies that exist just to sell ice cream.