World's lightest material

http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/59722-worlds-lightest-material-created

Les Paul

Les Paul died this past August. He was an inventor, a recording engineer, and one of the finest guitarists the world has known.

Here is an American Masters presentation of "Les Paul - Chasing Sound"

This is a 10 minute version - the entire program can be viewed at Hulu

Watch The Wright Brothers ~ In Flight. Vintage footage includes 1908-1909 flights at Fort Myer, France and Italy – as well as the first motion pictures taken from an airplane. This is a new edit of century-old motion picture footage, made for the Engineers Club of Dayton Foundation. Dayton's legacy of innovation goes far beyond the Wright Brothers. The Foundation wants to capture the stories of Dayton's living innovators in their own words and pictures with a multimedia website. Dayton Innovation Legacy will be an internet resource that anyone can access. See more at www.DaytonInnovationLegacy.org

Whazzit?

The Hervey Bay Historical Museum in Australia is using "Ropewalk" for ropemaking demonstrations. Now, they've passed on a puzzle to Dayton's engineers.

Brian Taylor writes:
"I am trying to identify a piece of machinery we have.
It is marked "Follows & Bate Ltd Manchester."
It is marked at the other end "The Handy" "No 2"

The original rollers were some rubber compound and have been replaced with steel.
One similar to this was on E-Bay as a Victorian Candy Roller.
To operate properly it would seem to need a third roller but there is no provision for this.
At first glance it appears to be a mini mangle [wringer] of some kind but closer inspection reveals that both rollers actually rotate in the same direction so could not feed stuff through.
The 3rd gear is part of it and causes the rollers to rotate in the same direction.
There is NO provision for a third roller, which would make it all work ok.
I have asked numerous people but no one can help."

It does look like a wringer, press, or rubber-maker - but is so small it appears to sit on a kitchen table - and the third gear makes the rollers roll in the same direction. That's the puzzle.

Post a comment here or email Kate@StoryOfRope.org if you can explain it!

First Flight

This is a colorized version of the Wright's at Kitty Hawk upon their first flight. This image is cropped to 1680 x 1050, a common size for desktop wallpaper. To download full size, just double click on the photo.

Vision and the Wrights

The following is from an article I read in the Fall of 2003.

It is difficult to imagine the incredible changes that lay before the world
100 years ago at the outset of human flight. A taste of that time and of the
mental gymnastics through which it took a man’s mind were recorded in, of all
places, a beekeeping magazine. In the January 1, 1905, issue of Gleanings of Bee
Culture, Amos Root gave his account of the startling sight of an airplane in
flight:
“When it first turned that circle and came near the starting point, I
was right in front of it; and I said then, and I believe still, it was one of
the grandest sights, if not the grandest sight, of my life. Imagine a locomotive
that has left its track, and it is climbing up in the air right toward you—a
locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead. . . .
Well, now imagine that locomotive, with wings that spread 20 feet each way,
coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers, and you will
have something like what I saw. . . . I tell you friends, the sensation that one
feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe” (reported in Air &
Space/Smithsonian, March 2003).
Today, a century after those preliminary
flights of the Wright brothers’ Wright Flyer, the sight of an airplane hardly
turns a head. A dream that might have been dismissed over the millennia with the
assertion that “if God had meant man to fly, He would have given him wings,” has
become our commonplace reality.

From: "A Wright Mind", Vision Magazine, Fall - 2003