Discovery of wireless transmission

Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose demonstrated that the electric rays had the ability to travel long distances without the help of any wire. He did so by initiating the electric rays using a radiator in the lecture room, which passed through three solid walls of the lecture room, an intervening room, to a third room. The receiver of the radiation used the incoming rays to ring a bell, discharge a pistol, and explode a miniature mine. Bose never patented his findings. Almost about the same time, Guglielmo Marconi devised a system using a transmitter, some coherers and receivers that could send wireless signals through long distances. He was successful in patenting the system and commercializing it.

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Evaporation to precipitation – Time taken by a droplet of water

Water evaporates from oceans, seas, rivers, etc., and rises up in the atmosphere. At the height of several thousand kilometres, these vapours condense to form clouds and eventually droplets. By this time, the droplet may have travelled many miles from its place of origin. Once the droplets reach a certain size, typically 6 mm in diameter, they begin to fall from a great height and would travel thousands of miles.

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Invention of the first vending machine

Hero of Alexandria was a mathematician and an engineer about the time of Christ in the 1st century AD. He built a machine that could dispense holy water by accepting a coin. This was the world’s first vending machine. Its internal structure comprised essentially of levers resembling a balance beam. On one end of the beam, a pan was attached. On the other end of the beam, a plug was attached by a string to a plug that stopped the flow of water. When the coin was dropped inside, the machine, it fell into the pan. The weight of the coin caused the lever to open a valve through which water trickled out. The pan continued to tilt due to the weight of the coin. Finally, the coin fell off and the plug at the other end of the beam shut off the valve, and subsequently the flow of water.

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What does the word ‘engineer’ mean?

The root of the word ‘engineer’ lies in the Latin word ingenium, meaning  ‘innate  quality  of  mental  power’ or cleverness. In olden days, the engineers were required to be extremely skilful and inventive as they devised various levers, pulleys and other machines that helped in the civil and military development of any society. Engineer, as a verb, means to skillfully plan or manage a project or an enterprise.

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