Category: Technology

Tudor Period Mining and Metal Smelting

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During the Tudor period, lead was utilized to build roofs and windows because it was easily mailable and resistive to corrosion. Farmers would mine for lead during the summer months when their crops did not need tending to in order to generate additional income. Mining during the summer months could earn an extra £5.00 which equates to £25,000 as of 2012 when accounting for inflation. Entire families often worked within the mines because 50 barrels worth of ore and soil would be extracted per day to meet the quota of what was required to be profitable. Smelting involved the use of white coal which is effectively dried wood from a kiln and was always setup upon windy hilltops or mountains because the wind would cause the fire blaze with more intensity therefore reaching higher overall temperatures. The best wood to make white coal is oak. Kilns must be airtight, so gaps were filled with clay. Knowing a kiln to be airtight was easily verifiable by searching for smoke as if smoke only came out of only the front entrance, the kiln was considered airtight. Ore was smashed into small pieces to help it smelt more rapidly which yielded approximately an 80% return upon investment. Metals were then refined using a secondary kiln, and smelted to remove any ash or impurities. The first burn removes ore from the rock, and the second burn removes impurities with the main impurity being sulphur. Molds were constructed using sand and wood to create divots which allowed the ore to be molded into blocks much the same as a modern day bar of gold. The sand gives the mold an indentation which archeologists use to identify Medieval bars of smelted ore

Large Technology Corporations Purchasing Competition to Monopolize the Marketplace

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Large technology corporations have the ability to analyze potential competitors and acquire them before they have a chance to compete. This is detrimental to consumers as it eliminates competition in the marketplace. Facebook has acquired more then 75 companies (e.g. WhatsApp, Instagram, Lightbox etc. ), Amazon has acquired more than 100 (e.g. Audible, Whole Foods, Ring etc.), and Alphabet, the umbrella organization which owns Google, has acquired more than 200 (e.g. Picasa, YouTube, Songza etc.). In 2010 and 2011, these technology juggernauts were acquiring competition at a rate of more than 1 company per week

The U.S.’ Attempt to Combat Fraudulent Currency in 2013

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The U.S. $100.00 note was updated in 2013 to employ better and more advanced security measures. The $100.00 bill released in 2013 was a marvel of engineering which included the portrait watermark from the 1996 rendition, as well as the security strip which glows under ultraviolet light. In addition to these security features, color shifting ink was employed upon the bell which appears in the bottom right hand corner next to the text which states “100”, microprinting was implemented on Benjamin Franklin’s jacket cuff to inscribe “The United States of America”, “USA100” around the blank space containing Franklin’s portrait, “ONEHUNDREDUSA” along the golden quill, small 100’s in the notes borders, and a three dimensional ribbon which causes the bill to change its bell icons into text which states “100” when tilting the bill either up or down while continuing to focus upon the blue ribbon shown

The First Personal Computer and its Ramifications Upon Technology

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The Altair 8800 from Micro Instrumentation Telemetry Systems is considered to be the first personal computer, although ironically, the system itself did nothing as software had yet to be invented. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used the Altair 8800 as the basis for the Apple I, the first ever Apple product. Additionally, Bill Gates and his team wrote Basic for the Altair 8800 and created Microsoft from that programming language

The First Use of Spaces In Writing

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Ancient Greek writing did not observe spaces as modern day written language does so all words were connected, forming a continuous string of text. Aerated text with irregular spaced intervals did not develop until the late 7th century A.D. and standard modern day spacing after each term did not develop until the 11th century A.D. Ancient Greek writing also observed the practice of Boustrophedon (pronounced “boos-trah-fee-don”) which is when text is written and read right to left instead of left to right as modern day English and most other, however not all other, world languages do (e.g. Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew etc.)

How Holograms Work

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Holograms work by taking a single laser beam and splitting it into 2 parts, with the primary beam falling upon the object being photographed which then bounces away and falls onto a specialized screen, and the secondary beam falling directly upon the screen. The mixing of these beams creates a complex interface pattern containing a three dimensional image of the original object which can be captured on specialized film. By flashing another laser beam through the screen, the image of the original object suddenly becomes holographic. The term “holograph” is derived from the ancient Greek terms ”holo” which means “whole” and “graphos” which means “written”. The main issue with holographic technology is that unlike traditional visual media which needs to flash a minimum of 30 frames per second, scattering the image into pixels, a three dimensional holograph must also flash 30 frames per second, but of every angle to create depth of field, and the amount of data required far exceeds that of a traditional television photograph or video, even exceeding the capability of the internet until recently in 2014 when internet speeds reached 1 gigabyte per second

Civilizations Mastery of Metal By Manipulating Fire

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The more carbon rich a fuel is, the more heat it produces. Typical wood fires burn at 700 degrees Celsius, however 6000 years ago, ancient people discovered the adaptation of burning wood in a low oxygen environment, only partially burning, but in doing so creating a much purer carbon rich fuel; charcoal. Charcoal can burn at temperatures upwards of 1100 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt ore out of rock. The mastering of metal produced tools, finance, and weaponry, forever changing the evolutionary story of human beings. By the Middle Ages, the production of charcoal for metal smelting and metal work was a major industry

 

The Rationale as to Why Scientific Fact is Often Referred to as “Scientific Theory”

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The term “theory” placed behind suffixes of large theories like gravity, evolution, and special relativity (e.g. the Theory of Gravity, the Theory of Evolution, the Theory of Special Relativity etc.), doesn’t mean “theory” in the traditional sense. During the 20th century, Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion began to break down within the theories own borderlines as physics progressed further and further to answer continually larger and more complex questions. As a direct result of this, a grander, more encapsulating law was required to explain certain phenomena (e.g. the reason the sun has a corona of light bend around it during a total solar eclipse) which is why Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is so immensely important, as it explains such phenomena after which Newton’s laws begin to break down (e.g. Newton’s ability to predict planetary orbit but not explain why such a function occurs in nature etc.). Eventually the international scientific community unanimously agreed that laws should not be named as such because they may not remain laws in the long term, as there may be concepts outside of them which help explain both the supposed law itself as well broader phenomena outside of the suppositional law. The term “theory” was utilized to replace the term “law” because something scientific which can change over time, is not or was not truly a law to begin with. The term “theory” is used in the connotation of an idea which accurately describes a phenomena and empowers an observer to accurately predict what they have yet to observe. An idea isn’t genuinely a “theory” until it’s supported by empirical evidence, before which time it remains as a “hypothesis”

The First Successful Flight Machine

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Paper makers Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier (pronounced “jha-ack ee-tee-yen mon-go-fee-yay”) and his brother Joseph-Michel Montgolfier (pronounced “zho-seef mee-shell mon-go-fee-yay”) created the hot air balloon after noticing that paper in their factory would be lifted by warm currents of air. This discovery lead to the innovation of hot air being confined within a bag which birthed the modern hot air ballon, an overall design which has remained relatively unchanged since its advent in 1783 despite advances in technology. As hot air is filled into a sack, the sack becomes less dense than the air which surrounds it, allowing the sack to rise in its altitude, be it 1 meter or 10,000 meters. The first successful untethered flight with passengers occurred on September 19, 1783. This initial flight was completed by a sheep, duck, and rooster. The first flight with humans occurred just 2 months later, with the hot air balloon raising 3000’ into the air and traveled a distance of 8 kilometers. The Age of Flight was born during this event as it was the first time in human history that a person or group had successfully lifted off the ground and remained in control of their flight path trajectory

The Person Who Invented the Internet

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Tim Berners-Lee created the internet. Berners-Lee is the son of mathematicians, his mother and father part of a team who programmed the worlds first commercial stored program computer, the Manchester University Mark 1. Berners-Lee developed the original concept for the internet as a young boy, after discussing how machines might one day possess artificial intelligence with his father who was reading a book upon the human brain. Berners-Lee realized that if information could be linked, knowledge which would not normally be associated together, it would become much more useful. Ted Nelson helped expand upon Berners-Lee’s invention by developing the concept of hypertext, a method of digitally linking from one section to another. The development of the internet during the 1960’s became user friendly during the 1990’s as it became increasingly available to the public. Berners-Lee was able to take something which was too complicated for most people to use, and create a system which made it user friendly. Incompatibility between computers had been a thorn in the side of technology for years as specialized cables were needed to ensure computers could communicate with one another. Berners-Lee had the brilliant idea to create a centralized block which all cables would feed into so that one central unit could be used for every computer in the world to communicate. Berners-Lee furthered this idea by designing the concept of anything being linked to anything. A single global information space would be birthed as a direct result of this, a system with common rules, which would be accessible to everyone, that effectively provided as close as possible to no rules at all; a decentralized system. This arrangement would allow a new person to use the internet without having to ask anyone else. Anyone, anywhere, could now build a server and put anything upon it. Berners-Lee decided to name his creation the “World Wide Web” because he thought of it as a global network. Berners-Lee took his intellectual property and provided it to the public free of charge, despite having many commercial offers. Berners-Lee felt that the idea would not become the largest and greatest invention of humanity had it not been free, democratized, and decentralized. The fact that anybody could access the internet and anybody could put content onto it, made the internet massively popular early on and grew at a rate of 10x year upon year. Berners-Lee also created the World Wide Web Consortion, an institution which was designed to help the World Wide Web to develop and grow