Category Science

When was the first gas balloon used?

The first gas balloon, filled with hydrogen, was released in Paris is August, 1783 by a French professor of physics, J.A.C. Charles. Two months earlier, the first hot air balloon was sent aloft by the Montgolfier brothers, Jacques, Etienne and Joseph, of France. And it was with balloons of this type that the first manned flights were made.

         A rubberized silk balloon filled with hydrogen carried Professor Charles and M.N. Robert on a flight of 27 miles and rose to 2,000 feet. Ballooning became a popular spot in spite of the fact that hydrogen-filled balloons were always liable to catch fire. Some amazingly long trips were undertaken, including an unsuccessful attempt in 1958 to cross the Atlantic.

     Balloons play an important part in meteorology, the science concerned with the weather. The first aerial photographs were taken from balloons, and in the 1930s pressurized cabins or gondolas were designed enabling observers to rise over 60,000 feet into the stratosphere.

    Military observation balloons fastened to the ground by cables came into use at the end of the 18th Century and were employed by both North and South in the American Civil War (1861-1865)

 The Austrians used pilotless hot air balloons to bomb Venice in 1849. During the Franco-German War of 1870-1871 balloons transported mail and carrier pigeons. Barrage balloons tethered to the ground were used in the Second World War to provide barriers against low-flying enemy aircraft.

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Who invented the Aero Plane?

The first aero plane ever to fly was built by a French naval officer, Felix du Temple de la Croix. In 1874 his monoplane, powered with a hot-air engine, took off from the top of a hill near Brest in France. It did not get far, just a short hop, but it was a beginning. A few years later, in 1890, Clement Ader of France flew his own plane, Eole, entirely under its own power for about 50 meters. It was a world record.

     The first truly successful aero plane flight was in 1903. In December of that year Orville Wright flew his chain-driven plane Flyer I at a speed of 8m.p.h and at an altitude of 12 feet for 12 seconds in North Carolina, United States. It was several years before the Wrights’ achievements were fully appreciated in America.

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Who invented the Wankel engine?

Felix Wankel, a German motor engineer, invented the rotary piston engine which bears his name. Deprived of a university education when his family’s fortune vanished in the German inflation of 1919-20, he went in for car repairing and set up his own business in 1924 at the age of 22.

        Soon he began work at designing a rotary piston engine, an idea which had attracted engineers since the invention of the stream engine. From 1934 to 1936 his research was backed by B.M.W. and from 1936 to 1945 by the German air force. In 1951 he established his own research institute and financed it by working as a consultant.

Wankel succeeded in discovering the secret of effective seals between the rotating pistons and the casing. He also discovered the geometrical form of an engine that could carry out the four-stroke cycle in one chamber without valves, giving a useful high compression ratio. His engine ran successfully for the first February, 1957. N.S.U. began limited production of Wankel engines for a car is 1963, and went into large-scale production in 1967.

      The rotary piston engine challenges the usual internal combustion engine, using reciprocating pistons, because it offers reduced size, weight, vibration, noise and production costs for comparable thermal efficiency. It is considered suitable for industrial, marine and aeronautical uses.

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Why does an automobile have a carburetor?

An automobile is driven by an internal combustion engine which will work properly only if the right amounts of petrol and air are mixed together. The carburetor is the part of the engine where the mixing takes place.

     The burning of fuel in the engine is a chemical reaction in which petrol combines with the oxygen of the air to produce water, heat energy and oxides of carbon. A chemically correct mixture should have 15 parts of air to one part of petrol, both by weight. The amount of air then present is just sufficient to burn the petrol completely. If the engine uses a mixture with an excess of petrol a rich mixture-a small amount of unburnt petrol will be present in the exhaust fumes.

     A carburetor has to produce the required mixture to suit different engine conditions, such as starting, idling, acceleration, cruising and application of full power. It must be able to pass the correct mixture at all engine speeds and under varying loads, and has to atomize the petrol into tiny droplets and vaporize the resulting spray a combustible mixture.

     Inside the carburetor is a throttle valve which can increases or decreases the amount of mixture passing into the cylinders, which in turn control the power of the engine. This valve is mounted on a spindle which is operated by the accelerator pedal.

    A special device called a “strangler” or choke is also incorporated to help in starting the engine in cold weather by allowing an extra-rich mixture.

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What is plastic?

A plastic, in the modern sense of the word, is a synthetic or man-made material which can be formed into various shapes. The first plastic material was Celluloid, made in 1868 by an American, John W. Hyatt, by dissolving nitrocellulose under pressure.

      The use of plastic began slowly, but shortages of natural material caused by two world wars forced scientists to develop substitutes. Since the Second World War the making of plastics has become a gigantic industry, which has grown so fast that many people still have only a hazy idea what plastics are. In fact, the term “plastics” is as general as the word “metals”. The high-temperature cone of a rocket and the highly inflammable table-tennis ball are both plastics, just as lead and steel are both metals.

    However, all plastics have some things in common: first, they are entirely man-made and not found in nature; secondly, they consist of large molecules of an organic nature; thirdly, at some stage in their manufacture they are liquid and can be shaped; and fourthly, in their final state they are solid.

    Most of the raw materials for plastics are produced by the petroleum and coal industries. Scientists are able to produce different properties in plastics so that they can be used in a tremendous variety of articles.

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Who was the last man to discover a planet?

Clyde Tombaugh, a young American research student, made the last discovery of a planet while working in 1930 at the Lowell Observatory, Arizona state College. This planet is Pluto, the ninth one in order of distance from the sun, 3,670 million miles away.

    Although Tombaugh, who was 26 at the time, was the first astronomer to see Pluto, its existence had been suspected by Percival Lowell, builder of the observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell began searching for the planet in 1905, the year before Tombaugh was born. He observed that there was a difference between the predicted and actual positions of Uranus, and this led him to conclude that there must be another planet. His final calculations about “panel X” were published in 1914, but he had still not found the planet when he died two years later.

    Another American, W.H Pickering, took up the search, concentrating on the irregular movements of the planet Neptune. He saw a clue in the movement of comets, which seem to be attracted by large planets. Here were 16 known comets whose paths took them millions of miles beyond Neptune. Which is 2,800 million miles from the sun, and Pickering was convinced that they were being attracted by a still more distant planet.

   In 1919 yet another hunt was begun by Milton Humason at Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, California. Instead of mathematical calculation, Humason tried photograph. He took two pictures of a series of stretches of the sky, with a gap of one or two days between exposures. In such photographs stars stay still, but planets change position.

    When Tombaugh discovered Pluto, it became clear that Humason had photographed the planet twice. Once it had been masked by a star, and the second time its image had coincided with a flaw in the photographic plate. The main difficulty in the search had been that Pluto was extraordinarily faint. Pickering formed the opinion that it was not Lowell’s planet X, but that a huge planet remains to be discovered.

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