Time travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world
No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. ~Victor Hugo
1846 – The saxophone is patented by Adolphe Sax in Paris, France.
The saxophone was developed in 1841, by Adolphe Sax, a Belgian instrument maker, flautist, and clarinetist working in Paris.[2] While still working at his father’s instrument shop in Brussels, Sax began developing an instrument with the projection of a brass instrument and the agility of a woodwind. He wanted it to overblow at the octave, unlike the clarinet, which rises in pitch by a twelfth when overblown. An instrument that overblew at the octave, would have identical fingering for both registers.
Wilhelm Cauer was a German mathematician and scientist. He is most noted for his work on the analysis and synthesis of electrical filters and his work marked the beginning of the field of network synthesis. Prior to his work, electronic filter design used techniques which accurately predicted filter behaviour only under unrealistic conditions. This required a certain amount of experience on the part of the designer to choose suitable sections to include in the design. Cauer placed the field on a firm mathematical footing, providing tools that could produce exact solutions to a given specification for the design of an electronic filter.
1938 – Pieces of a meteor, estimated to have weighed 450 metric tons when it hit the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded, land near Chicora, Pennsylvania.
On June 24, 1938, a meteorite fell in the vicinity of Chicora. Named the “Chicora Meteor”, the 450+ tonne meteorite exploded approximately 12 miles (19 km) above the Earth’s surface. Only two fragments of the meteorite were found following initial investigations. They had masses of 242g and 61g, and were discovered some miles short of the calculated point of impact of the main mass – which is yet to be found. Two more small fragments were found nearby in 1940.
Announcing the “Get Closer” Wearables Challenge with Adafruit FLORA & element14! Recruitment is open– apply now for your chance to win a sweet pack of FLORA goodies to build the wearable electronics project of your dreams. Pitch your project idea via element14′s RoadTest page, and you could be selected to receive your supplies for free! Then during the course of the challenge, we’ll follow your progress in the element14 Arduino community.
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
