Week 26 Summary Essay

             This week I learned about the light switch, the skyscraper, the dishwasher, and finally, electromagnetic waves. The inventors were John Henry Holmes, William Jenney, Josephine Cochrane, and Heinrich Hertz. As usual, I have written a paragraph about each of them.

             In week twenty-six I started off with the light switch, which was invented by John Henry Holmes, born in England in 1857. He and his brother founded a manufacturing company making motors, lights, different types of switches, and other things. However, the switches of the day for lights were slow, dangerous, and difficult to work. This is because of the electrical arc that would form when the circuit was opened or closed. So, in 1884, at the age of twenty-seven, John Henry Holmes invented the quick-break light switch. The quick-break light switch made sure the circuit the open and close quickly, making it less likely for the arc to form, and reducing the possibility of fire. This invention is very reliable, and it is still widely used today.

             Lesson 127 was about the skyscraper, which was invented in 1884, in Chicago. It was invented by William Jenney, born in Massachusetts, in 1832. You might want to know that he went to a school where he learned how to build buildings in Paris, France. After that, he moved to Chicago and got married. You see, one day he surprised his wife, Elizabeth, by coming home from work early. She happened to be reading, and, when he came in, she placed her heavy book on the nearby steel birdcage. Jenney saw this and started examining it. After picking up and dropping the book on the birdcage multiple times, he realized that you could use an iron or steel frame for a tall building, and he invented the skyscraper. This invention led to glass walls, and taller and taller skyscrapers are built each year.

              The third thing I learned about this week was the dishwasher, invented in 1886 by Josephine Cochrane, born in Ohio in 1839. She grew up in Indiana and then she moved to Illinois to live with her sister. Not long after she moved, she got married to a rich business owner, who bought a mansion to live in with his family. Only, there was one problem. The servants kept chipping their expensive China by washing the dishes by hand, so she invented the dishwasher, which uses hot water and a cleansing detergent sprayed through rotating arms to clean the dishes. The dishwasher cleans dishes much faster and better than people can do by hand, and dishwashers are in almost every house today.

              Lastly, there were electromagnetic waves, discovered in 1887, in Berlin, Germany by Heinrich Hertz. However, he didn’t exactly discover it; someone else did, he just proved the existence of electromagnetic waves. He believed visible light was created through radiation and electromagnetic fields. He then purposefully made radio waves by making oscillations in the electrical field that were slower then light waves. Hertz discovered ways to detect these waves, which later led to the discovery of radio waves and microwaves.

               This week made it difficult to choose which invention was my favorite, but I think I like the dishwasher the best. This invention kept families from getting diseases from the washroom, prevented dishes from being cracked, and it saves time. Today, people use the dishwasher all the time without even realizing it! That goes with other inventions also, including the light switch. I can’t wait to see what invention my favorite invention next week will be. 

Bonus Question: Think about how Maxwell predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves, and then Hertz confirmed them using experiments in a laboratory. We know Maxwell’s math is correct because we can test its predictions. In cosmology, scientists build models of what they believe happened at the beginning of the universe (such as in the “Big Bang”). But, we cannot test their models because we can’t go back to the beginning of the universe and see if it happened the way the models predict. What are the similarities and differences between the Maxwell/Hertz approach and the “Big Bang” approach, and which approach can we be more confident in — and why?

                 Maxwell and the scientists with the “Big Bang” theory were both theorizing about something that they could not see. However, people can prove that Maxwell’s discovery on electromagnetic waves is real, because one, Hertz did it, and two, we use them every day and we have tested them multiple times. We cannot predict that the “Big Bang” because scientists cannot explain it. Hertz used math to prove electromagnetic waves, but people can’t use math to prove the “Big Bang” because for everything to have happened perfectly is mathematically imposable. Because of this, I can be more confident in Maxwell and Hertz.