Whiteboard
A whiteboard is any glossy white surface for nonpermanent markings. Whiteboards are analogous to blackboards, but with a smoother surface allowing rapid marking and erasing of markings on their surface; the popularity of whiteboards increased in the mid-1990s and they have become a fixture in many offices, meeting rooms, school classrooms, other work environments. The term whiteboard is used metaphorically to refer to features of computer software applications that simulate whiteboards; such "virtual Tech whiteboards" allow one or more people to write or draw images on a simulated canvas. This is a common feature of many virtual meeting and instant messaging applications; the term whiteboard is used to refer to interactive whiteboards. Albert Stallion invented whiteboards while working at Alliance in the 1960s. Alliance produced enameled steel for architectural cladding, but Stallion noted it could potentially be used as a writing surface. Stallion left Alliance to form his own whiteboard production company, MagiBoards.
Whiteboards became commercially available in the early 1960s, but did not become used until 30 years later. Early whiteboards needed to be wiped with a damp cloth and markers had a tendency to leave marks behind after erasing the board. Dry-erase markers for whiteboards were invented in 1975. Whiteboards started becoming used by businesses in the early 1990s, they became more common in classrooms during the 1990s due to concerns over health problems in children with dust allergies and the potential for chalkdust to damage computers. By the late 1990s, about 21% of American classrooms had converted from chalkboards to whiteboards; the first whiteboards were expensive and were made of an enameled steel. Cheaper versions were produced, including laminated chipboard, high-pressure laminates and steel boards with a white polyester or acrylic, coating. Enameled whiteboards referred to as porcelain, sometimes glass boards, have the advantage that markings can be erased completely. Enameled boards are more expensive and less used in commercial environments, but in more demanding environments with heavier use, such as educational establishments, porcelain boards are considered superior.
Other types of dry marker boards are available, such as high gloss vinyl and coated paper, which can be rolled up, high-density two-part high gloss paints and coated acrylics and polypropylene magic whiteboards which use static electricity to cling to walls and doors. Clear marker surfaces, made of glass or specially coated acrylic, became available around the mid-2000s, they are manufactured from technical glass, e.g. for monitor screen filters, optically coated. Whiteboard material can be bought in rolls and pre-formed boards. Adhesive whiteboards come in either a sheet or a roll and feature a stick back enabling the user to create a custom size board or project with the material. Although adhesive whiteboard material does not come in a thick, hard glass or painted steel plate, the melamine allows for a flexible material while preserving the high-quality whiteboard attributes of other surface materials. Adhesive whiteboards allow for custom projects such as dry erase wall calendars, whiteboard tables, cupboard grocery lists, indoor games for kids, more.
The whiteboard pen was invented by Jerry Woolf of Techform Laboratories and patented by Pilot Pen in 1975. It is a non-permanent marker and uses an erasable ink that adheres to the writing surface without binding to or being absorbed by it. Applications range from temporary writing with acetate sheets to whiteboards and similar glossy surfaces; the erasable ink does not contain the toxic chemical compounds xylene and/or toluene, unlike permanent markers. There are six types of materials used for whiteboard surfaces: Melamine A resin-infused paper, used over a substrate that can range from particle board to MDF. Melamine boards range in quality because of the amount of resin deposited on the base material; some melamine boards remain clean for others less so. This least expensive type of whiteboard is most found in use in non-institutional applications, they are available in any office supply stores. Performance varies widely; these boards are not suitable for heavy use, as in many educational cases, with time the paint erodes and the original surface reappears.
Painted steel or aluminum Painted steel and aluminum dry erase have a wide range of quality. Painted surfaces tend to be smoother; the painted surface is a multiple layer of coatings made up of a base coat in color and a clear performance coating, the dry erase component. Paint varies from electron beam cured coatings to other coating systems. Good commercial grade painted steel or aluminum has excellent dry erase properties and many will be able to have permanent marker cleaned from the surface. Any coated surface is susceptible to scratching. Painted steel surfaces allow the use of magnets. Painted aluminum surfaces are used as a base for whiteboards as they are not magnetic and are more expensive than steel. Painted steel whiteboards are most used for custom printed whiteboards; these products are used as tracking boards, patient information boards and tournament and training boards. Hardcoat laminate
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. A patent gives its owner the right to exclude others from making, using and importing an invention for a limited period of time twenty years; the patent rights are granted in exchange for an enabling public disclosure of the invention. In most countries patent rights fall under civil law and the patent holder needs to sue someone infringing the patent in order to enforce his or her rights. In some industries patents are an essential form of competitive advantage; the procedure for granting patents, requirements placed on the patentee, the extent of the exclusive rights vary between countries according to national laws and international agreements. However, a granted patent application must include one or more claims that define the invention. A patent may include many claims; these claims must meet relevant patentability requirements, such as novelty and non-obviousness. Under the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement, patents should be available in WTO member states for any invention, in all fields of technology, provided they are new, involve an inventive step, are capable of industrial application.
There are variations on what is patentable subject matter from country to country among WTO member states. TRIPS provides that the term of protection available should be a minimum of twenty years; the word patent originates from the Latin patere, which means "to lay open". It is a shortened version of the term letters patent, an open document or instrument issued by a monarch or government granting exclusive rights to a person, predating the modern patent system. Similar grants included land patents, which were land grants by early state governments in the USA, printing patents, a precursor of modern copyright. In modern usage, the term patent refers to the right granted to anyone who invents something new and non-obvious; some other types of intellectual property rights are called patents in some jurisdictions: industrial design rights are called design patents in the US, plant breeders' rights are sometimes called plant patents, utility models and Gebrauchsmuster are sometimes called petty patents or innovation patents.
The additional qualification utility patent is sometimes used to distinguish the primary meaning from these other types of patents. Particular species of patents for inventions include biological patents, business method patents, chemical patents and software patents. Although there is some evidence that some form of patent rights was recognized in Ancient Greece in the Greek city of Sybaris, the first statutory patent system is regarded to be the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474. Patents were systematically granted in Venice as of 1474, where they issued a decree by which new and inventive devices had to be communicated to the Republic in order to obtain legal protection against potential infringers; the period of protection was 10 years.. As Venetians emigrated, they sought similar patent protection in their new homes; this led to the diffusion of patent systems to other countries. The English patent system evolved from its early medieval origins into the first modern patent system that recognised intellectual property in order to stimulate invention.
By the 16th century, the English Crown would habitually abuse the granting of letters patent for monopolies. After public outcry, King James I of England was forced to revoke all existing monopolies and declare that they were only to be used for "projects of new invention"; this was incorporated into the Statute of Monopolies in which Parliament restricted the Crown's power explicitly so that the King could only issue letters patent to the inventors or introducers of original inventions for a fixed number of years. The Statute became the foundation for developments in patent law in England and elsewhere. Important developments in patent law emerged during the 18th century through a slow process of judicial interpretation of the law. During the reign of Queen Anne, patent applications were required to supply a complete specification of the principles of operation of the invention for public access. Legal battles around the 1796 patent taken out by James Watt for his steam engine, established the principles that patents could be issued for improvements of an existing machine and that ideas or principles without specific practical application could legally be patented.
Influenced by the philosophy of John Locke, the granting of patents began to be viewed as a form of intellectual property right, rather than the obtaining of economic privilege. The English legal system became the foundation for patent law in countries with a common law heritage, including the United States, New Zealand and Australia. In the Thirteen Colonies, inventors could obtain patents through petition to a given colony's legislature. In 1641, Samuel Winslow was granted the first patent in North America by the Massachusetts General Court for a new process for making salt; the modern French patent system was created during the Revolution in 1791. Patents were granted without examination. Patent costs were high. Importation patents protected new devices coming from foreign countries; the patent law was revised in 1844 - patent cost was lowered and importation patents were abolished. The first Patent Act of the U. S. Congress was passed on April 10, 1790, titled "An Act to promote the progress of
Parchment
Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep and goats. It has been used as a writing medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of young animals such as lambs and young calves, it may be called animal membrane by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between "parchment" and the more-restricted term vellum. Today the term "parchment" is used in non-technical contexts to refer to any animal skin goat, sheep or cow, scraped or dried under tension; the term referred only to the skin of sheep and goats. The equivalent material made from calfskin, of finer quality, was known as vellum; some authorities have sought to observe these distinctions strictly: for example, lexicographer Samuel Johnson in 1755, master calligrapher Edward Johnston in 1906. However, when old books and documents are encountered it may be difficult, without scientific analysis, to determine the precise animal origin of a skin either in terms of its species, or in terms of the animal's age.
In practice, there has long been considerable blurring of the boundaries between the different terms. In 1519, William Horman wrote in his Vulgaria: "That stouffe that we wrytte upon, is made of beestis skynnes, is somtyme called parchement, somtyme velem, somtyme abortyve, somtyme membraan." In Shakespeare's Hamlet the following exchange occurs: Hamlet. Is not parchment made of sheepskins? Horatio. Ay, my lord, of calves' skins too. Lee Ustick, writing in 1936, commented that: To-day the distinction, among collectors of manuscripts, is that vellum is a refined form of skin, parchment a cruder form thick, less polished than vellum, but with no distinction between skin of calf, or sheep, or of goat, it is for these reasons that many modern conservators and archivists prefer to use either the broader term "parchment", or the neutral term "animal membrane". The word parchment evolved from the name of the city of Pergamon, a thriving center of parchment production during the Hellenistic period; the city so dominated the trade that a legend arose which said that parchment had been invented in Pergamon to replace the use of papyrus which had become monopolized by the rival city of Alexandria.
This account, originating in the writings of Pliny the Elder, is dubious because parchment had been in use in Anatolia and elsewhere long before the rise of Pergamon. Herodotus mentions writing on skins as common in his time, the 5th century BC. In the 2nd century BC, a great library was set up in Pergamon that rivaled the famous Library of Alexandria; as prices rose for papyrus and the reed used for making it was over-harvested towards local extinction in the two nomes of the Nile delta that produced it, Pergamon adapted by increasing use of parchment. Writing on prepared animal skins had a long history, however. David Diringer noted that "the first mention of Egyptian documents written on leather goes back to the Fourth Dynasty, but the earliest of such documents extant are: a fragmentary roll of leather of the Sixth Dynasty, unrolled by Dr. H. Ibscher, preserved in the Cairo Museum. Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians impressed their cuneiform on clay tablets, they wrote on parchment from the 6th century BC onward.
Rabbinic literature traditionally maintains that the institution of employing parchment made of animal hides for the writing of ritual objects such as the Torah and tefillin is Sinaitic in origin, with special designations for different types of parchment such as gevil and klaf. Early Islamic texts are found on parchment. In the Middle Ages the 15th century, parchment was replaced by paper for most uses except luxury manuscripts, some of which were on paper. New techniques in paper milling allowed it to be much cheaper than parchment. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, the demands of printers far exceeded the supply of animal skins for parchment. There was a short period during the introduction of printing where parchment and paper were used at the same time, with parchment the more expensive luxury option, preferred by rich and conservative customers. Although most copies of the Gutenberg Bible are on paper, some were printed on parchment. In 1490, Johannes Trithemius preferred the older methods, because "handwriting placed on parchment will be able to endure a thousand years.
But how long will printing last, dependent on paper? For if... it lasts for two hundred years, a long time." In fact high quality paper from this period has survived 500 years or more well, if kept in reasonable library conditions. The heyday of parchment use was during the medieval period, but there has been a growing revival of its use among artists since the late 20th century. Although parchment never stopped being used (primarily for gover
Natural gum
Natural gums are polysaccharides of natural origin, capable of causing a large increase in a solution’s viscosity at small concentrations. They are botanical gums, found in the woody elements of plants or in seed coatings, they are used in the food industry as thickening agents, gelling agents, emulsifying agents, stabilizers, in other industries as adhesives, binding agents, crystal inhibitors, clarifying agents, encapsulating agents, flocculating agents, swelling agents, foam stabilizers, etc. Natural gums can be classified according to their origin, they can be classified as uncharged or ionic polymers. Examples include: Natural gums obtained from seaweeds: Polyelectrolytes: Agar Alginic acid and sodium alginate Carrageenan Natural gums obtained from non-marine botanical resources: Polyelectrolytes: Gum arabic, from the sap of Acacia trees Gum ghatti, from the sap of Anogeissus trees Gum tragacanth, from the sap of Astragalus shrubs Karaya gum, from the sap of Sterculia trees Uncharged: Guar gum, from guar beans Locust bean gum, from the seeds of the carob tree Beta-glucan, from oat or barley bran Dammar gum, from the sap of Dipterocarpaceae trees Glucomannan, from the konjac plant Psyllium seed husks, from the Plantago plant Tara gum, from the seeds of the tara tree Natural gums produced by bacterial fermentation: Polyelectrolytes: Gellan gum Uncharged: Xanthan gum
Charles Goodyear
Charles Goodyear was an American self-taught chemist and manufacturing engineer who developed vulcanized rubber, for which he received patent number 3633 from the United States Patent Office on June 15, 1844. Goodyear is credited with inventing the chemical process to create and manufacture pliable, moldable rubber. Goodyear's discovery of the vulcanization process followed five years of searching for a more stable rubber and stumbling upon the effectiveness of heating after Thomas Hancock, his discovery initiated decades of successful rubber manufacturing in the Lower Naugatuck Valley in Connecticut, as rubber was adopted to multiple applications, including footwear and tires. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company is named after him. Charles Goodyear was born in New Haven, the son of Amasa Goodyear, the oldest of six children, his father was a descendant of Stephen Goodyear of London, England, one of the founders of the colony of New Haven in 1638. In 1823, Charles went to Philadelphia to learn the hardware business.
He worked industriously until he was twenty-five years old, returning to Connecticut, entered into partnership in his father’s business in Naugatuck, CT where they manufactured not only ivory and metal buttons, but a variety of agricultural supplements. On August 3, 1824 he married Clarissa Beecher. Two years the family moved to Philadelphia, there Charles Goodyear opened a hardware store; this is. His specialties were the valuable agricultural implements that his firm had been manufacturing, after the first distrust of domestically made goods had worn away—for all agricultural implements were imported from England at that time—he found himself heading a successful business; this continued to increase. Between 1829 and 1830 he broke down in health. At the same time, the failure of a number of business endeavors embarrassed his firm, they struggled on, for some time, but were obliged to fail. Between the years 1831 and 1832, Goodyear heard about gum elastic and examined every article that appeared in the newspapers relative to this new material.
The Roxbury Rubber Company, of Boston, had been for some time experimenting with the gum, believed it had found means for manufacturing goods from it. It was sending its goods all over the country, it was some of Roxbury's goods. Soon after this, Goodyear visited New York, his attention went to life preservers, it struck him that the tube used for inflation was not effective nor well-made. Therefore, upon returning to Philadelphia, he made tubes and brought them back to New York and showed them to the manager of the Roxbury Rubber Company; the manager was pleased with the ingenuity. He confessed to Goodyear that the business was on the verge of ruin, that his products had to be tested for a year before it could be determined if they were perfect or not. To their surprise, thousands of US$ worth of goods that they had determined to be of good quality were being returned, the gum having rotted, making them useless. Goodyear at once made up his mind to experiment on this gum and see if he could overcome the problems with these rubber products.
However, when he returned to Philadelphia, a creditor had him imprisoned. While there, he tried his first experiments with India rubber; the gum was inexpensive and by heating it and working it in his hands, he managed to incorporate in it a certain amount of magnesia which produced a beautiful white compound and appeared to take away the stickiness He thought he had discovered the secret, through the kindness of friends was able to improve his invention in New Haven. The first thing that he made was shoes, he used his own house for grinding and vulcanizing, with the help of his wife and children, his compound at this time consisted of India rubber and magnesia, the whole dissolved in turpentine and spread upon the flannel cloth which served as the lining for the shoes. It was not long, before he discovered that the gum treated this way, became sticky, his creditors discouraged, decided that he would not be allowed to go further in his research. Goodyear, had no mind to stop here in his experiments.
Selling his furniture and placing his family in a quiet boarding place, he went to New York and in an attic, helped by a friendly druggist, continued his experiments. His next step was to compound the rubber with magnesia and boil it in quicklime and water; this appeared to solve the problem. At once it was noticed abroad that he had treated India rubber to lose its stickiness, he received international acclamation, he seemed on the high road to success, until one day he noticed that a drop of weak acid, falling on the cloth, neutralized the alkali and caused the rubber to become soft again. This proved to him, he therefore continued experimenting, after preparing his mixtures in his attic in New York, would walk three miles to a mill in Greenwich Village to try various experiments. In the line of these, he discovered that rubber dipped in nitric acid formed a surface cure, he made many products with this acid cure which were held in high regard, he received a letter of commendation from Andrew Jackson.
Exposure to harsh chemicals, such as nitric acid and lead oxide, adversely affected his health, once nearly suffocated him by gas generated in his laboratory. Goodyear survived. To
Paper
Paper is a thin material produced by pressing together moist fibres of cellulose pulp derived from wood, rags or grasses, drying them into flexible sheets. It is a versatile material with many uses, including writing, packaging, decorating, a number of industrial and construction processes. Papers are essential in non-legal documentation; the pulp papermaking process is said to have been developed in China during the early 2nd century CE as early as the year 105 CE, by the Han court eunuch Cai Lun, although the earliest archaeological fragments of paper derive from the 2nd century BCE in China. The modern pulp and paper industry is global, with China leading its production and the United States right behind it; the oldest known archaeological fragments of the immediate precursor to modern paper date to the 2nd century BCE in China. The pulp paper-making process is ascribed to a 2nd-century CE Han court eunuch. In the 13th century, the knowledge and uses of paper spread from China through the Middle East to medieval Europe, where the first water powered paper mills were built.
Because paper was introduced to the West through the city of Baghdad, it was first called bagdatikos. In the 19th century, industrialization reduced the cost of manufacturing paper. In 1844, the Canadian inventor Charles Fenerty and the German F. G. Keller independently developed processes for pulping wood fibres. Before the industrialisation of paper production the most common fibre source was recycled fibres from used textiles, called rags; the rags were from hemp and cotton. A process for removing printing inks from recycled paper was invented by German jurist Justus Claproth in 1774. Today this method is called deinking, it was not until the introduction of wood pulp in 1843 that paper production was not dependent on recycled materials from ragpickers. The word "paper" is etymologically derived from Latin papyrus, which comes from the Greek πάπυρος, the word for the Cyperus papyrus plant. Papyrus is a thick, paper-like material produced from the pith of the Cyperus papyrus plant, used in ancient Egypt and other Mediterranean cultures for writing before the introduction of paper into the Middle East and Europe.
Although the word paper is etymologically derived from papyrus, the two are produced differently and the development of the first is distinct from the development of the second. Papyrus is a lamination of natural plant fibres, while paper is manufactured from fibres whose properties have been changed by maceration. To make pulp from wood, a chemical pulping process separates lignin from cellulose fibres; this is accomplished by dissolving lignin in a cooking liquor, so that it may be washed from the cellulose. Paper made from chemical pulps are known as wood-free papers–not to be confused with tree-free paper; the pulp can be bleached to produce white paper, but this consumes 5% of the fibres. There are three main chemical pulping processes: the sulfite process dates back to the 1840s and it was the dominant method extent before the second world war; the kraft process, invented in the 1870s and first used in the 1890s, is now the most practiced strategy, one of its advantages is the chemical reaction with lignin, that produces heat, which can be used to run a generator.
Most pulping operations using the kraft process are net contributors to the electricity grid or use the electricity to run an adjacent paper mill. Another advantage is that this process reuses all inorganic chemical reagents. Soda pulping is another specialty process used to pulp straws and hardwoods with high silicate content. There are two major mechanical pulps: groundwood pulp. In the TMP process, wood is chipped and fed into steam heated refiners, where the chips are squeezed and converted to fibres between two steel discs. In the groundwood process, debarked logs are fed into grinders where they are pressed against rotating stones to be made into fibres. Mechanical pulping does not remove the lignin, so the yield is high, >95%, however it causes the paper thus produced to turn yellow and become brittle over time. Mechanical pulps have rather short fibres. Although large amounts of electrical energy are required to produce mechanical pulp, it costs less than the chemical kind. Paper recycling processes can use mechanically produced pulp.
Most recycled paper contains a proportion of virgin fibre for the sake of quality. There are three main classifications of recycled fibre:. Mill broke or internal mill waste – This incorporates any substandard or grade-change paper made within the paper mill itself, which goes back into the manufacturing system to be re-pulped back into paper; such out-of-specification paper is not sold and is therefore not classified as genuine reclaimed recycled fibre, however most paper mills have been reusing their own waste fibre for many years, long before recycling became popular. Preconsumer waste – This is offcut and processing waste, such as guillotine trims and envelope blank waste.
