The Wise Book of Whys (14 page)

Why Engines are Commonly Measured in Horsepower

We owe this unit of engine power measurement to Scottish engineer James Watt.

In the early 1780s, after making a vastly superior steam engine to the then classic Newcomen steam engine, Watt was looking for a way to market his invention, advertising the fact that his engine used about 75% less fuel than a similarly powered Newcomen, among many other improvements.

At first, he tried selling his engine on a royalty scheme, where
the customers would owe him one-third of the money they saved by using his engine over other steam engines. Of course, many at the time used horses, not steam engines, so it was difficult to compare without them actually buying the engine to see how it would perform for their particular usage. Thus, he scrapped the royalty scheme and decided to try a different tact to convince people to buy his engine.

Ever the inventor, his solution was to come up with a new unit of measurement that those i
n need of his engine understood -horse power, referring to powerful draft horses.

Thus, he set about determining how much power a typical draft horse could generate
. It isn’t known exactly how he came up with the numbers he did, as there are conflicting accounts of the experiments he ran. But after doing those experiments, he figured out a typical draft horse could do about 32,400 foot-pounds of work in 60 seconds and maintain that power rate for a good long workday. He then rounded up, going with 33,000 foot-pounds per minute for 1 horsepower.

So, in other words, by his estimation a good draft horse could lift 33,000
pounds of material 1 foot in 1 minute or 3,300 pounds of material 10 feet in one minute, etc .

In truth, that’s a very generous estimate as very few horses could maintain tha
t kind of power for a full workday, but getting a perfect figure wasn’t that important to what Watt was trying to do. Further, by overestimating what a horse could do, whether intentionally or not, he made sure that his product would always over deliver what he said when trying to get people to buy it, which is a great word-of-mouth marketing trick.

In the end, Watt’s engine was revolutionary and played a huge role in the Industrial Revolution
. Thanks to this fact, his unit of measure of an engine’s power, horsepower, also became popular. Funny enough, today the SI unit of power, the Watt, which was named in homage to James Watt, has widely come to replace “horsepower” in most applications.

Why Sideburns are Named
“Sideburns”

Despite this particular brand of facial hair style being around as far back as at least 100 BC, with one of the earliest known instances being in a Roman floor mosaic of Alexander the Great who lived from 356 BC to 323 BC (with the mosaic possibly being a copy of a painting from Alexander’s era), sideburns were named after a specific man in the late nineteenth century.

Ambrose Burnside
was a politician, businessman, and Union Army General. Burnside sported a slightly unusual facial hair style with particularly prominent “mutton chop” sideburns connected to a moustache, while keeping his chin shaved perfectly clean.

While an extremely poor General, something he himself was well aware of, Burnside’s popularity as a General and later politician, in combination with the fairly unique formation of his whiskers, helped start something of a new facial hair trend
. Around the 1870s-1880s, this gave rise to this facial hair style being named “burnsides.”

Within a few years of this, the facial hair down the side of one’s cheeks, rather than being called “mutton chops” as it was at the time in some regions, began being called a modification of “burnsides
,” “sideburns,” with the first documented instance of this being in 1887. Presumably the shift was from the fact that this part of the “burnsides” facial hair style was on the sides of the face and, of course, leaving the “burns” part in homage to the aforementioned style.

Why Chemotherapy Causes Hair to Fall Out

This has to do with how different types of chemotherapy target cancer cells. There are many different chemotherapy drugs that work in a variety of ways, so I will only speak in general terms regarding their side effects.

Most cells in the human body divide using a process ca
lled mitosis. This process has five phases (prophase, prometaphase, metaphase, anaphase, and telephase). It is preceded by interphase, and results in the cell dividing, called cytokinesis. When a cell reaches the end of its lifespan, it gets destroyed in a pre-programed process called apoptosis.

There are many types of cancer (over 200). All types a
re a result of the same problem -unregulated cell growth. The result is excessive tissue, known as tumors. These tumors can be localized, or they can spread to surrounding areas through your lymphatic system or your blood stream.

Many c
hemotherapy drugs work by interrupting mitosis. Most chemotherapy cannot differentiate between abnormal cancer cells and normal healthy cells. Because of this, cells that have high mitotic rates (multiply rapidly) can also be affected by chemotherapy, cells like those found in your hair follicles, the lining of your mouth and stomach, and those found in your bone marrow.

The result can be hair loss, decrease in production of white blood cells (thus why cancer patients are immune-suppressed), and inflammation of your digestive tract. In the end, chemotherapy will hopefully kill the cancer cells, and in the process, unfortunately, potentially cause hair loss. However, the healthy cells of one’s hair follicles will repair themselves, making hair loss temporary, as is hopefully the cancer!

Why Blueprints are Blue

Making copies of architectural drawings hasn’t always been the easiest thing to do in the world. For the majority of human history, the most economical solution was simply to have someone make a tracing of the original plans.

In the mid-nineteenth
century, the process abruptly became much quicker and easier thanks to famed polymath Sir John Herschel. In 1842, Herschel invented a method to easily copy drawings using potassium ferrocyanide and ammonium iron citrate.

The exa
ct method, called cyanotype, is performed as follows. First, you take a drawing of the plans done on relatively translucent tracing paper or cloth and place it on top of and attach it to paper (or sometimes linen, Mylar, etc.) that has been previously soaked in a mixture of the aforementioned two chemicals, then dried. Next, you expose the papers to a bright ultra-violet light source, such as the Sun, for several minutes.

The result is that the paper soaked in the chemicals ends up turning blue as the chemicals react to the light and form a compound called blue ferric ferrocyanide, also known as “Prussian Blue
.”

This wouldn’t be very helpful for making a copy of a document except for the fact that where the light cannot penetrate the translucent paper, namely where the drawing marks are, the coated paper remains the original color of the paper, usually white, effectively making a nice copy.

You might see a potential problem here in that you then can’t expose the un-blued bits to any bright light source at first, but this problem is easily solved by simply washing the chemicals off, then allowing the paper to dry. At this point, the copy is complete.

Within a few decades of the discovery of this method of copying (as well as other blue-printing methods such as one developed by Alphonse Louis Poitevin in 1861 using ferro-
gallate), the price dropped to about one-tenth the cost of having someone simply trace the original plans, helping the popularity of blueprints explode.

In the mid-twentieth
century, copying methods such as as diazo prints, and then later xerographic prints, finally supplanted blueprints. Much more recently, simply sticking with digital versions of plans has become popular, with these having the advantage of being easy to modify and distribute as needed during the construction process.

Despite the technological changes and the fact that these plans usually aren’t on blue paper anymore, in popular vernacular the term “blueprints” has stuck around anyways.