Saturday May 9th, 2020 Water Blog

Happy birthday hand washing song to my daughter – who lights up my life

This day of course has major significance for me – as we are celebrating a very special birthday. Twenty seconds of handwashing while singing happy birthday to her – whose favourite thing to draw has been the rainbow

Isaac Newton first applied the word spectrum to describe the rainbow of colours that combine to form white light. In the late 1800s, Thomas Edison created a practical light bulb, an electrically-powered, long-lasting light source that significantly changed our work, play and sleep habits. The ability to control light in new ways transformed how we see the world.

Also, on May 9^th in 1893, the first motion picture exhibition was given by Thomas Alva Edison in Brooklyn, New York to an audience of 400 people at the Dept of Physics, Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y. using Edision’s Kinetograph. We are eagerly waiting to hear when we can get back in to the cinema in our staged process of exiting the COVID-19 lockdown.

The Kinetograph, was made up of an optical lantern projector that showed moving images of a blacksmith and his two helpers passing a bottle and forging a piece of iron on May 9^th 1893. Each filmstrip had 700 images, each image being shown for 1/92 sec. This I think inspired my own interest in photography and in optical sensing. Edison also had some quotes that keep me going and I want to share them today – because I am particularly positive, but also for all my students who may be struggling at self-motivating at the moment during this crisis.

Two of Edison’s quotes:

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

I particularly like the last one.