STEM Blog
Who Invented That? The Telephone
Every schoolchild knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Or did he? The Scottish-born Bell came to the United States in 1871 to teach at schools for the deaf in New England. This vocation came naturally to him since his mother was deaf, and his father taught elocution to deaf students. While pursuing this…
Who Invented That? The Telegraph
What are those funny cast iron blue and red boxes you see on poles around Washington DC? They look like something from a bygone era. These were telegraphic call boxes to the police (blue) and fire (red) departments. The fire department used them from 1864 until the 1980s! Many remain – with their telegraphic mechanisms…
Who Invented That? The Printing Press
Imagine you invented something amazing. Does this mean you’ll be famous for your invention a hundred years from now? The inventors we remember (and revere) introduced technologies that forever changed the course of human history. They invented things like the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the electric light bulb. We already know their…
The Greek Antikythera: The World’s First Computer
In 1900 and 1901, divers retrieved three bronze fragments from a shipwreck near the island of Antikythera in the Mediterranean Sea. The pieces were very corroded, but markings of an ancient technology remained evident. One fragment contained a gear with teeth, just like in a mechanical clock. Another piece was a ring with degrees marked…
The German V-2 Rocket: Adapting Navigation and Guidance Technology for Wartime
Imagine yourself awakening on the morning of September 8, 1944, in newly-liberated Paris. Suddenly, an explosion intrudes on your tranquility. Later that same day, two explosions rock the London environs. The German V-2 rocket campaign had begun. The V-2 (Vengeance Weapon 2, also known as the A-4) was the world’s first ballistic missile. But wait…
Beam Me Down Scotty: How Airplane Auto-Landing Came to Be
You dream of becoming a pilot. It’s 1919, only 16 years after the Wright brothers took their first flight. You are airborne with an instructor. Suddenly, the weather turns bad, and you can’t see anything. With the realization that you are now “flying blind”, you begin to panic. How will you safely navigate and land?…
The Gyroscope and Autopilot
Many of us first encountered the gyroscope as a toy. Invented nearly 170 years ago, it appears to be a simple spinning wheel surrounded by rings that balances on a pedestal. In fact, it is much more. When properly designed, it can actually maintain its orientation in xyz space in a traveling vehicle. This feature…
Why Choose that Frequency?
You may have wondered how different devices came to use the RF frequency bands they use. This is not a trivial question. It usually depends on what people can imagine, what can be built, how urgently it’s needed, and what the market will bear. Let’s start at the beginning. James Maxwell formalized electromagnetic theory with…
How Inaccurate Timekeeping can Unravel the Metaverse
We were not celebrating this New Year’s Eve. As the clock clicked down to midnight on 31 December 1999, we became increasingly anxious. How were the world’s networks going to react when the millennium (computer) bug awoke? We had been preparing for years to confront this moment of truth. The bug had inadvertently been introduced…
GPS
Before GPS (the Global Positioning System), we relied on paper maps to find our ways to new locations. If we got lost, we would stop at a telephone booth – there were no cell phones yet – and call someone for directions. That all changed when GPS became available on mobile phones. Today we jump…