Our friends, The Whipples, who we met in Illinois, recently moved to Wilmington Delaware. It's only an hour drive from where we live in Lansdale so we try to get together once a month. On November 19th, we went with the Whipples to Haggley museum which is all about the DuPont company.
We walked around the river exploring the ins and outs of the museum. We saw a demonstration with old machinery of how gears were made in the early 1800's.
I was really surprised at how informative, yet kid friendly this museum was. I also had no idea how much of an impact DuPont and his chemistry discoveries have on our daily lives.
I can thank that company for many different types of material including the Spandex shorts I had to wear while playing volleyball, the knee high nylons I wear to church every Sunday, the awesome non stick frying pans (made with Teflon) I use to cook, and the coolant that keeps my food cold in the refrigerator. Not to mention the thousands of other things his polymers are found in.
From their website, Dupont puts science to work by creating sustainable solutions essential to a better, safer, healthier life for people. Chemists that work for his company developed things like gun powder, Mylar (film is made of this), Cellophane which revolutionized food packaging and marketing world wide, synthetic rubber, synthetic fiber, Lycra, Dacron (the roots for Polyester), and stain resistant carpet to name a few.
The DuPont company is responsible for shatterproof glass, the flame resistant suits and material the Nascar drivers wear.
Cutest Nascar driver around!
The material for the space suit.
Perfect for my little space explorer.
If you want to know what a magnified strand of cotton, polyester, nylon, etc. looks like, you can find out at the mini-scientist center.
Here we are sitting on a giant polymer.
I'm glad so many smart people invented so many wonderful things that make our lives a lot easier. I never knew that it used to take nearly 2.5 years to make the perfect animal hide coat. I'm sure that with today's technologies, it doesn't take near as long.
They also had a portion of the museum all about simple machines like levers, pulleys, and gears. There were hands on demonstrations of common uses of simple machines. I used a pulley to "lift" myself by pulling on a chain. Here is Eliza helping me learn about how the steering on your car works.
It's interesting to see how far we've come. Olden day blacksmiths are taken over by modern day engineers. Objects that were once made by hand and took months to complete can now be made in mass production in hours by modern machines. I would like to live in the early 1700's for a month to see if I could survive. I'd like to think that I could and for longer than a month, but maybe I couldn't - I like my dish washer and washing machine a bit too much.
0 comments:
Post a Comment