Essay #28 History Of Inventions
Hello, in today’s essay I will be writing about, soda water, Joseph Priestley, weighing scale, the boring machine. All right let’s get started!
Soda water
I think you know what soda water is, maybe you even have a machine that makes soda water, called a soda machine. Sparkling water is water with carbon dioxide dissolved in it under high pressure. Its bubbles were noted by the ancient Greek, but they never ever knew what caused the bubbles; they thought it was something with the moon, or something that had to do with good spirits and bad spirits. The tendency of wine to produce gas, in the champagne region of France, was noted back in the middle ages, but this was considered a faulty wine and was talked down to in the early winemaking. A monk, named Dom Pérignon, was ordered by his higher level colleagues to try and remove the bubbles from this sparkling wine. He had to do this because the bottles in their cellars kept bursting, glass back then wasn’t very thick. Later on, sparkling wine production increased and in the 18th centuries people had to use heavy iron masks to protect themselves from the bursting bottles. The cellars kept losing 20 to 90% of their wine due to bottles exploding. Englishmen were making sparkling wine by 1662 with much more success, due to better, thicker glass bottles and the usage of corks. A man named Joseph Priestly investigated air in a beer brewery in 1767, and discovered that the “strange air,” found there was carbon dioxide, and that’s what made the beer, wine and ultimately the water bubbly. He published his discovery of soda water a scientific paper. If we skip forward in time to the 1840s, there were over 50 soda companies, including Coke and Pepsi. Now, in 2022, soda water, champagne, Pepsi, Coke, beer, kombucha, all these bubbly drinks are used everywhere, and they sure are good, except for Coke and Pepys.
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley was born in England in 1733. He suffered a faith crisis when he was 16. He taught science and literal theology for a living, he married into a wealthy Wilkinson family who helped support his scientific dabbling. He invented a new method for producing CO2 gas. He discovered oxygen around 1775, he identified the process of photosynthesis too. He wrote a popular textbook on history of electricity. Overall Joseph Priestley was an influential, good, and famous, or should I say popular inventor.
The weighing scale
How did people measure weight in the old days? In the old days there were things called spring scales, they relied on Hookes law. Spring scales allow you to read weight immediately, which means, it saves a lot of time. The scales were handheld models. Did you know that the first bathroom scales were made in the 1800s? Scales are used in medicine, chemistry, food industries, and in the kitchen at home. Scales are a very used and popular invention; we should be very grateful that we have them today.
The boring machine
A boring machine makes holes in solid metal. The machine rotates the barrel being bored. Coolant is applied to keep the metals from melting. By the way, I am not talking about a machine that is very boring, the machine I’m talking about is used to make perfect barrels in anything. This machine was extremely accurate, I should actually say still is extremely accurate because we still use it today. The machine was used to make Watt’s steam engine. Before this invention, the precision required to make Watts condenser, or anything of that skill level, for instance, was impossible to attain. The machine was used to manufacture French cannons and American cannons too. It also partly made Watt’s steam engine possible.
Thank you for reading this essay, I hope you enjoyed it! Would you like to share with me a cool fact that you learned recently? Bye for now and see you next time.
AnyTime2Learn 