Tag: Science stories
This is a story about how Television went from clunky (awkwardly heavy and outdated) boxes to windows into another world. It all started way back, almost a century ago, with a curious German scientist named Karl. The year was 1897. In a German laboratory (a room or building for scientific experiments), physicist (a scientist who…
Finn and Ivan learned the discovery of electron by JJ Thomson and the conversation covers this topic of science. Here is what they learned. J.J. Thomson discovered electrons by experimenting with a cathode ray tube, a special glass tube with gas and two metal electrodes. When he applied electricity, a beam of light, called a…
Long ago, people dreamt of using steam for power. In the 1st century AD, Hero of Alexandria invented the aeolipile (an ancient steam-powered device). It fascinated many, but remained a curiosity (an interesting but impractical object). The Industrial Age: Seeking Efficiency In the early 18th century, coal miners faced a big problem. Mines filled with…
In the 1870s, a clever (very smart) inventor named Christopher Sholes dreamt of a revolutionary (innovative) machine. He envisioned a device that could write faster and neater than pen and paper. This ingenious (very clever) invention became the world’s first typewriter. However, Sholes’s creation had a glaring (obvious) flaw. The metal bars that stamped the…
Shuji Nakamura, a brilliant but often underestimated (seen as less important than others) researcher, harbored a dream – to create a bright blue light-emitting diode (LED). Back then, the 1980s, scientists could conjure red and green LEDs, but the elusive (Difficult to find) blue remained a missing puzzle piece (part of something that makes it…
Michael Faraday, a brilliant but unassuming (modest) scientist, was fascinated (greatly interested or attracted) by the invisible forces of electricity and magnetism. In his cluttered (filled with a lot of things messily arranged) lab, he spent hours conducting experiments, sparks of curiosity flickering (burning or shining in an unsteady way) in his eyes. One day,…
Benjamin Franklin was a curious (eager to know or learn something) young man who loved exploring (traveling through or examining a place to learn about it) the world around him. One stormy night, while tinkering (attempting to repair or improve something in a casual or experimental way) in his workshop, he noticed something strange. Whenever…
Alexander Fleming, a curious (eager to know or learn something) scientist, was studying bacteria (microscopic organisms that can cause disease) in his lab. He left for a vacation, forgetting about a petri dish [shallow dish with a lid for growing bacteria] containing Staphylococcus aureus, a nasty kind of bacteria that causes infections. When he returned,…