Inventor - Analogies

Heritage Flight over New York.
The Skyscraper and Airplane may be the greatest inventions in 20th century.
I divided examples into two sections : Scientific Questions and Human Behavior.

1.Skyscraper


Chicago Night.

 William Le Baron Jenney. The father of the skyscraper.

One day, he came home early and surprised his wife who was reading. She put her book down 

on top of a bird cage and ran to meet him. He strode across the room, lifted the book and

dropped it back on the bird cage to or three times. Then, he exclaimed : It work ! It works !

Don't you see ?? If this little can hold this heavy book, why can not an iron or steel cage be the  frame for a whole building ?? Jenney applied his new idea to the construction of the 
Home Insurance Building, the first skyscraper in the world, which was erected in 1884 at the
corner of Lasalle and Monroe Streets in Chicago. The Home Insurance Building was the first
example of steel skeleton building, the first grid of iron columns, girders, beams and floor joists
ever constructed. 


One World Trade Center
As we can the steel frame as the skeleton of the skyscraper, like the birdcage upholding
the cumbersome book.

London Aerial Photo.

Have you found something different from London city to Chicago city ?? London city has not

as many skyscrapers as Chicago city ?? Do you know why ?? I speculate two factors affecting

the skyscraper in the European city. The first is the steel, steel must be mass produced as the 

skeleton of the skyscraper. The second is about the bond, because you need to fund enough

budget to build the skyscraper.

2.Airplane


 







Inner Tube Box Experiment

Over one hundred years ago, Wilbur Wright discovered a method for controlling an aircraft in
flight known as Wing Warping or Aileron Principle. Wilbur and Orville had grasped this
theory behind this method some months ago. They observed buzzards circling above the Great
Miami River. The bird rolls left or right by changing the angle at which the wings meet the wind,
tilting one up and other down simultaneously. They tried to do a mechanism that would do this
a glider, but their initial attempts were too heavy and complex. 

Then one early summer day in 1899, Wilbur was chatting with a customer in the Wright's
Bicycle shop. The customer had come for an inner tube - a piece of cutting edge bicycle
technology at the time. And Wilbur wad idly toying with the pasteboard box it had come in. He
happened to notice that when he squeezed two diagonal corners on one end of the box and the
two opposite corners on the other end, the box twisted. In his mind's eye, Wilbur imagined 
that the top and the bottom of the box were the wings of a biplane. With a set of cables,
he could draw the struts and spars together, Warping the wings so one side tilted up and the
other down.

Wilbur had hit upon what engineers call the " elegant solution " to his and Orville's control
problem. It was not the most important discovery the Wright brothers made, but it was the first
and possibly the most thrilling. The elation of having stumbled upon an effective solution to the 
problem that had eluded men for centuries was the hook that drew the brothers on to seven
years of painstaking, dangerous work.

3. Cotton Gin

4. Maxim Machine