Technology in modern history

Technology in Modern History

Airplanes

The earliest experiments of airplanes were conducted in the pre-19th century. The Wright brothers conducted their maiden flight in 1902 but before this, there was decades of research and development. During the First World War, there was widespread use of aircrafts. Aircrafts were first used to conduct reconnaissance before they began being used to transport military people and their equipment. With further advancements, aircrafts began being used to mount machine guns and to drop bombs. Civil aviation began in the period between the First World War and the Second World War. This was made possible by the availability of inexpensive military aircraft used for World War I. During the Second World War, air warfare was highly used. This involved the deployment of strategic bombers, long-range bombers, and anti-aircraft artillery which was used to shoot down airplanes. The jet age is the period which saw the development of faster airplanes that could fly at higher altitudes and longer distances. Today, aircrafts have revolutionized transport and helped people move from continent to continent and country to country faster. This is what I have learnt regarding the history of airplanes and how they have impacted technology. I will teach this to future middle school classes by helping them to see how airplanes were developed and how they influenced technology. The lesson will be conducted in a systematic way which starts with the history of airplanes from the pre-19th century to the planes we see today while highlighting the important developments of each period.

Telephone

The history of the telephone began in the mid-1870s when Alexander Graham Bell first used two cups connected by a string to do point-to-point communication. This discovery was made as Bell was trying to develop a device to help the hearing impaired. With years of further development came the invention of the electric telephone which included a receiver (earpiece) and a bar magnet transmitter (microphone), a coil of wire and a thin metal diaphragm. This was then followed by the invention of a bell which acts as a ringer at each end of the phone so that the bell would ring to alert the other party when they needed to converse. At this time, even those who were not meant to hear the conversation could hear it since when one picked up their phone, all other phones rang. This problem was addressed by the development of the telephone dial which created a special switch that when the dial was pressed, the phone with the corresponding digits was alerted and all others were muted. Today, telephones have made communication very easy. It is even possible to communicate with a person thousands of miles away in another country or even continent. I will teach this to the future middle school students by addressing each age in the development of the telephone and letting them know how the telephones that we currently use came about.