Acute Angles: Little Background Material |
Every school child knows the story of Isaac Newton and the apple. While he was sitting under a tree one day, an apple fell and hit him on the head. Some children nearby saw what had happened and started laughing, whereupon Sir Isaac said, “This is not an occasion for levity, it’s an occasion for gravity.”
We all know about gravity, but we tend to take for granted so many of the other great innovations of our modern culture without wondering how they originated.
The yo-yo is a child’s toy, but most people aren’t aware of the fact that it actually was a hunting device. Hunters in the Philippines used a yo-yo made of wooden disks and twine which, when thrown at an animal, caught its legs and tripped it to the ground so that it could be easily killed. It has the same important characteristic of the boomerang that, if it misses, it comes back by itself without the user having to go retrieve it. Last year the Australian newspapers had a story about a teen-ager who was given a new boomerang for his birthday and went crazy trying to throw the old one away.
In 1938 a DuPont chemist was experimenting with coolant gases of the type used in refrigerators and air conditioners. In one of the containers he found that the gas had congealed overnight into a waxy solid that was impervious to any of the corrosive agents he tried. The substance became known as Teflon, which is the slipperiest substance on earth and doesn’t stick to anything. The French stuck this non-stick substance to the insides of frying pans and other cooking utensils, creating the non-stick cookware now found in almost every kitchen.
The standard American railway gauge – the distance between the inside faces of the rails – is 4 feet 8.5 inches – a pretty odd dimension that really doesn’t make much sense. This spacing was adopted because the first locomotives were imported from England where they were built to that standard. The English locomotives used this spacing because it was used by the pre-railroad tramways that carried coal from the mines. Their wheel spacing conformed to the wheel spacing of the English wagons and carriages because they were built by the same companies using the same jigs and tools. The construction of the carriages was dictated by the fact that their wheels would break if they didn’t fit into the spacing of the ruts in the roads on which they traveled. The first long-distance roads in England were built by the Romans, and the ruts that everybody had to conform to were initially made by their chariots. The solid-fuel rocket boosters used in the space shuttle are built in Utah by Thiokol, and have to be shipped by rail through tunnels in the mountains. Their maximum diameter is limited by the fact that the tunnels are only slightly wider than the railroad tracks. Which means that a major design feature of America’s space program is based on the width of a Roman war horse’s rear end.
In 1779 the famous French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, who is considered to be the father of modern chemistry, discovered the role of oxygen in combustion. This led him to the invention of the “whoopee cushion”. In spite of this accomplishment, he was considered by the leaders of the French revolution to be an aristocrat and was executed in 1794. His widow later married British physicist Count Rumford who, after the marriage failed, said Lavoisier was lucky to have gone to the guillotine.
The tobacco plant is native to America, and was unknown in Europe until it was brought there from the New World by the Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. Until then there were two types of continents – smoking and non-smoking.
In the 1880’s David McConnell was a young door-to-door book salesman. In order to gain entry to be able to make his pitch, he decided to offer sales prospects a free introductory gift – a complimentary vial of perfume that he had blended by a local pharmacist. It turned out that the ladies he called on were more interested in the perfume than in the books, so he started selling the perfumes. He hired more women as door-to-door salespeople and started a company which he eventually named Avon. David McConnell was the first Avon Lady.
Doughnuts and bagels both have holes, but for different reasons. Bagels are sturdy, so they can be stacked up on sticks through the holes, or carried in bunches with a string through the holes. The hole in the doughnut has a different purpose – to provide more surface area and permit uniform deep-fat frying with no soggy center. The hole in the doughnut is reported to have been invented by a sea captain named James Gregory, a native of Rockport, Maine, where there is a bronze plaque commemorating his creation of the hole. Captain Gregory is honored for inventing a nothing.
One of the customs of modern journalism was the use of the symbol -30- to signify the end of a news item or column. This custom probably dates back to the days of the Roman Empire. Reporters on Roman newspapers must have typed the symbol -XXX- to mark the ends of their dispatches, which reporters on American papers translated into Arabic numerals.