Today we visited the Norsk Teknisk Museum. This time in the history of science and technology sections. There will very many interesting exhibits; I'll talk about a few here.
This is an Electomagnetic Cannon. The goal was to fire a projectile by using electricity and magnets instead of gunpowder. It is famous for its failure during 1903 when it short-circuited and produced an arc of flame whose direction was caused by the magnets. This flame arc inspired the creation of the Electric Arc process. That is the process used for removing nitrogen from the atmosphere for the purpose of selling it in fertilizers.
Hi Jesse,
ReplyDeleteI remember our guide briefly talking about that canon, but I didn’t know that the failure of it allowed the development of pulling nitrogen out of the atmosphere. I think it’s really cool how failures are not always the end of the road for innovation, and often spark ingenuity. I also saw the algorithm art and thought it was so pretty. I wish we could’ve gotten the ones where we sat down at to work, but I’ll settle for admiring the beauty from afar.
-Grace Semaan
This was really well put Jesse! I also really enjoyed watching the algorithm art, but I was upset that I couldn't actually figure out how to run it on the computer, as I think the computer Grace and I were working on wasn't running correctly. I also really liked reading about Moddy, because I found it interesting that this robot was so successful, but yet the company went out of business. Overall, great post!
ReplyDelete-Kaitlynn Fisher