Chewing Gum

Chewing gum is made from a gum base. In the past, the gum base was usually the sap or resin from trees. Today, the base consists of man-made polymers. A polymer is formed when many units of a simple chemical are repeated and then joined together using heat, pressure, or some kind of catalyst.

Cell Phones

Cell phones are mobile hand-held devices that can be used to contact people next door or in the next country.

Each cell-phone service provider has a network of bases, or cell sites. These sites have antennas on towers, poles, or buildings to receive radio waves. When a call is made, voice and data are sent to and received at the nearest cell site (about ½ to 10 miles away). From there, they go to a switching site and then to the phone being called (if it is on the same network) or to the public telephone network, which connects to other service providers’ networks. As phone users move about, the phone automatically connects to the nearest cell site.

PAPER

Paper is a material made mainly from wood pulp. It is used for writing, printing, and art work, to wrap things, and even to cover walls.

To make paper, woodchips are heated with chemicals, a process that turns them into pulp. The pulp is strained, washed, and put through a screen to remove any unwanted material. More chemicals are added, and the pulp is beaten until it is the correct texture. It is then put through a papermaking machine to form into sheets or rolls of paper. Finally, it is passed through heated metal rollers to give it a smooth finish.

New Year's Day

In England the New Year hasn't always begun on January 1st. Halloween was the Druids' New Year's Eve festival, so November 1st would have been their New Year. The Anglo Saxons then fixed the beginning of the year to coincide approximately with the sun's rebirth on around December 25th. Then Most of Europe switched their New Year to the beginning of spring. So, for many years, March 25th was New Year's Days.

In fact, most of Europe had been following the Julian calendar, which had been designed under the instructions of the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. But this calendar was too long by over 11 minutes a year, and after a number of centuries this amounted to 10 days. So in the 16th century Pope Gregory the 13th had a new calendar designed which revised the concept of leap years and set the beginning of the year to January 1st. Most Europe then adopted this new calendar in around 1582, even though it meant cancelling 10 days.

Hybrid Car

A hybrid car is a car that can be powered by gasoline or electricity or both at the same time.

The idea of hybrid vehicles is not new. In the mid 1600s, a Jesuit priest worked on plans for a carriage that could either be pulled by a horse or run by steam.

More recently, an American named Piper invented a system in 1905 in which an electric motor could be used to increase the power of a gasoline engine. About the same time, hybrid vehicles were developed, built, and used commercially in England, France, Belgium, and Germany.

BRAILLE

Braille is a form of communication that allows blind people to read, write, do math, and even compose music. It is not a language, but a system that can be used by blind people to read or write most of the world’s languages. 

Braille was developed in the 1820s by Louis Braille of France, who became blind after a childhood accident. While attending the National Institute for the Blind in Paris, he learned that French soldiers used a special code to send messages at night that could be read without a light. Raised dots and dashes formed a message on a piece of paper, which a soldier read by running a finger over them. 

Louis Braille was just 11 years old, but he used this military code to create an alphabet system that people could read with their fingertips. It took him almost nine years, but his system is still used today.

Hip Hop

 Hip Hop is a music genre and culture. It involves rapping, beat boxing, DJing, and dancing. Influences of hip hop include African American and Latino music, street dancing, spoken word poetry, and DJ block parties.

Clive Campbell is often called the “Father of Hip Hop”. He was born in Jamaica and moved to the US at the age of 11. His school friends called him Hercules because of his size. Clive Campbell grew up listening to Jamaican DJ battles. When he became a DJ in the 70’s, Clive Campbell named himself Kool Herc. 

 Kool Herc’s special technique of mixing records became very popular. DJs learned to buy two copies of an album. They remixed the tracks to prolong the drum solos or “breakbeats” . Rhyming, scratching, break dancing and emcee battling became part of the new hip-hop culture. Hip hop dancers were called b-boys or b- girls. The “b” stood for break, breaker, or break dancer.

Perfume

Perfume has been used for thousands of years. Its name comes from the Latin “per fume”, meaning “through smoke”.

Egyptians were the first to use perfume as part of their religious rituals. They burned incense and herbs and applied perfumed creams and oils to their skin. The Egyptians also invented glass, and introduced the use of perfume bottles around 1000 BC.

The use of perfume spread to Greece, Rome and the Islamic world. With the fall of the Roman Empire, perfume use declined and only became popular again in the 12th Century with the beginning of international trade.

Coffee

Coffee is a drink made from the beans of the arabica tree, a small tree that grows in tropical climates. The beans are harvested from its fruit.

The arabica tree grows wild in Ethiopia. About 1,000 years ago, monks noticed that after eating its berries, they stayed awake longer and had more energy. Other Africans made wine from the berries or mixed them with fat and ate them.

Sometime later, seeds of the tree arrived in the Arabian Peninsula, where the plants have been grown ever since. Arabians discovered how to take the beans out of the berries, roast them over high heat, grind them up, and boil them in water to make “kahweh” (coffee).

Coffee became very important to Muslim people. Their religion forbids them to drink alcohol, but they could drink coffee with their friends. By the 1300s, Arab traders and Muslims traveling to the holy shrine of Mecca were telling other Muslims about “kahweh.” Coffee made its way to Turkey in the 1500s and to Italy in the 1600s. A trader from Venice introduced it to northern Europe, where coffeehouses became very fashionable.

Coffee was not grown outside of Africa or Arabia until the late 1600s. The Arabians tried to control its production, but in 1616, some Dutch adventurers stole an arabica tree. The Dutch used it to start coffee plantations in their colonies in Indonesia and the South Pacific.

In 1723, a French naval officer managed to get a tree to Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. Fifty years later, coffee trees were growing throughout Central America.

In 1727, a military aide to the Emperor of Brazil snuck a tree branch out of French Guiana. By 1906, Brazil was the world’s largest coffee producer and still is.

Today, about 50 countries produce coffee for world markets.