Week 9 Summary Essay

               This week was about more interesting inventions. These included the steel plow, the steam shovel, the postage stamp, and finally, vulcanized rubber. Here is a summary of these four inventions.

               The first invention was the steel plow. It was invented by John Deere, who started the John Deere farming supplies company. As a child, his father owned a place where people would sew for other people. John usually watched and sometimes sewed at his father’s business. After that, he became an apprentice to a blacksmith. When he knew everything that he needed to know, he moved to Illinois and started his own blacksmith shop. There he heard some customers talking about a plowing problem. In the Western states of the United States of America, the soil was to damp to plow, so he set out to fix this problem. That’s when he invented the steel plow. He remembered in his father’s shop, polished needles worked better the unpolished needles. He did the same with the steel plow, and it worked. Lots of farmers bought his plows, and he was extremely successful. Like I said before, he started his own business that is still in use today.

               The next lesson was about William Otis Smith, who invented the steam shovel. At the time, construction equipment was powered by one or two people, or an animal, such as a donkey or a horse. The steam shovel says what it is powered by in the name: steam. It had sharp blades at the end of the shovel, which made it easier to dig up the ground. Skyscrapers and early road systems were able to be invented, because of the steam shovel. Many buildings on Earth could not have been built if it wasn’t for the steam shovel. It was smart for Smith to think to invent this, and I am extremely grateful he did.

               The next lesson was about Rowland Hill, and how he invented the postage stamp. He invented it because saw a lady who could not afford to receive a letter from her fiancé. Hill also heard about other postage problems. The postage stamp is a small piece of metal, like bronze or gold, with a stamped picture of a person, building, animal, event, et cetera into it. Postage stamps provide a way to show the PO that the person who sent the letter already paid for the mail to be delivered. Because of the postage stamp, mail prices went down, people were able to send and receive mail more efficiently, and the cost of packages became biased on weight, not distance.

                In the next lesson, I learned about vulcanized rubber, which Charles Goodyear created by accident. Rubber has been around for thousands of years; even ancient cultures used rubber to waterproof containers and make bouncy balls for games. The British found rubber in South America and started experimenting with it. There was, however, a problem. It was too sticky to work with. That is when Goodyear came in. He started examining it and invented vulcanized rubber accidentally. He got a little too excited showing people his chemical-covered rubber and dropped it onto a hot stove. He examined it and found that it was not sticky, but still elastic. He traveled to New York when his daughter was sick, but when he got there, she had already died. He collapsed and a little bit later, he died too. A generation after his death, there was company that is still here today named after him. Vulcanized rubber is durable and strong, but only if you handle it the right way. There are so many things that are made of rubber we use every day. Two examples would be shoes and tires. I am so grateful for rubber, especially vulcanized.

               As you can see, this week was filled with four more interesting inventions that make a large impact on our lives today. Of course, these inventions have evolved over time, but these intelligent inventors saw a problem and fixed it. Perhaps I’ll be able to do the same someday.