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Presents...
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3 Check It Out! 4 Everyday Gadgets and Gizmos 6 Benny’s Invention 10 Women Inventors 12 Puzzles 14 What’s Candy Floss? 15 The Cozy Invention 16 Accidental Invention 19 Skiing with Determination 20 10 Cool Things to Invent 22 Sticky Business 23 The Chocolate Chip Mistake 24 Max & Gracie 25 Who Invented the Line? 26 Color My World 27 The Invention of LEGO® 28 Pizza Fit for a Queen 29 Kids Corner 30 Puzzle Solutions
If you think of one invention that changed the world, you might think of the light bulb. Before electric lights, people used candles and oil lamps to light their homes. Today, all you do is flip a switch. All inventions begin with an idea. Thomas Edison used ideas that came from many inventors before him. It took Edison a year of experimenting before he came up with an amazing, long-lasting light bulb. Do you have an idea for a way to do something better? Maybe your idea is for something brand new. If you want to be an inventor, it won’t always be easy, but don’t give up! There are people who can help you. Some inventions are accidental. Others take a long time to create. They can be practical or just plain fun. You’ll discover all kinds of inventions in this issue. What’s your invention idea? Let us know! Email us at: kidscorner@funforkidz.com or write to: Kids Corner, PO Box 227, Bluffton, OH 45817-0227.
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by Emma Lee Fairchilde Some of the most-used things in our world didn’t start out perfect. When a new gadget doesn’t work right, inventors try to fix it. Then we get even newer gizmos.
Getting It Together Long, long ago, people used bone pins to fasten their fur-skin wraps. But the pins became loose and let in those Ice Age drafts. Brrr!
Romans used fancy pins to hold together cloaks and togas.
Romans invented a kind of safety pin 2500 years ago. It was used to hold together the cloaks and togas they wore. Nothing held the point of the pin in except the weight of the fabric itself. If the fabric slipped, ouch! In 1849, an inventor came up with the modern self-sprung safety pin. People no longer had to worry about getting pricked by pins.
Write On To make it easier to write with graphite, people wrapped it in sheepskin.
Before pencils and pens, a fine-pointed brush made of animal hairs was used for writing and drawing. It wrote dark, but wet. It also smeared. People also used a small pointed tool to scratch letters onto wax tablets. But the lines it made were faint and hard to read. In the 1500s, some shepherds discovered a form of coal within the roots of a blown-over tree. People called it “wadd.” Today we call it graphite. Graphite made a line on paper that was wonderfully dark and dry. People couldn’t get enough of this stuff. By the late 1600s, cabinet makers were encasing strips of flat graphite in wood. These were the first modern-day pencils!
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See how forks have changed throughout the years?
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Let s Eat Until table forks were invented, eating meals with two knives or with your fingers was thought to be good manners. Then along came the fork. When it was invented in the Middle East, forks had two tines. They were used only in the kitchen to hold meat for carving. A smaller version appeared on Italian tables in about 1100 A.D. Table forks made their way to England in the 1600s, but it was considered wimpy to use one. And they were tricky to use because food fell between the two tines and diners’ laps! By the late 1800s, most forks had four tines.
If you lived in 1901, you might use a finger toothbrush to clean your teeth. ’
Don t Forget to Brush Without toothbrushes, you might be using cloth to clean your teeth. Or maybe you’d chew up the end of a thin stick, and rub the frayed edge across your pearly whites. People used whatever they could find. Modern-style toothbrushes were used in the 1700s, but inventors kept trying to improve them. One clever inventor thought a finger brush would get teeth cleaner!
More Gadgets and Gizmos Before electric toasters (1909), bread was toasted by holding it over an open fire with a stick or fork. The first toasters could brown only one slice of bread at a time, and you had to flip the bread by hand to toast the other side! When the flashlight was invented (1898), people thought of it as a toy. The first batteries weren’t very strong, so flashlights gave off short “flashes” of weak light. That’s how these hand-held lamps got their name.
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