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The Boyhood of John Muir I happened to think it would be a
fine thing to make a timekeeper which would tell the day of the week and
the day of the month, as well as strike like a common clock and point
out the hours; also to have an attachment whereby it could be connected
with a bedstead to set me on my feet at any hour in the morning. |
Introduction Studying the Natural World The Young Inventor Resources Home
Imagine you live and work on a farm in the 1850s Wisconsin. Your nearest neighbors are ten miles away, the nearest town is twenty-five miles away. Day after day, you carry out the same chores: you feed and water the barn animals, build and mend fences, carry an endless supply of wood for the kitchen fire. This was John's life for many years, and when he wrote about it later, he admitted that he was often discouraged and exhausted. But he was able to find ways to amuse himself, and one of those amusements was quite surprising: mechanical inventions. He taught himself to make, among other things, locks and latches, thermometers, hygrometers, an automatic lamp lighter and a water-wheel.
Four of John's inventions are featured in the film, THE BOYHOOD OF JOHN MUIR. One of these is a labor-saving device, an automatic cow-feeder. This consisted of a clock, a set of pulleys and wooden buckets. John set the clock the way we set an alarm clock today. When the clock went off, it triggered the pulleys to raise the buckets filled with water and grain, and the contents were dumped into the feeding troughs in the barn
The second device in the film was the loafer's chair, which John made as a practical joke. Whenever anyone sat in it, a pistol mounted beneath the chair fired a blank cartridge. The mechanics behind this invention were very simple: the person in the chair tripped a simple lever which supported a weight tied to the gun's trigger. When the weight fell, the trigger was pulled.
The desk was more complicated. It used the same devices; clockworks, levers and pulleys, but the clock was set to go off many times in a day, and the pulleys had to raise and lower books to the study platform of the desk.
In the factory, John used his mechanical skill and his powers of close observation to make the work go more smoothly. He carried out time-and-motion studies, first by listing the movements that a worker went through in a certain job, then by timing the work. He showed the workers that they could make the same thing, but save time, effort and money by planning more carefully.
Design simple Time-and-Motion Study -- Take a simple classroom task like distributing paper to each student and make a list of the ways it can be done: a single student could hand out each sheet, students seated in the front desks could hand out sheets, students could come to the teacherâs desk to pick up the sheets. List at least ten ways, then over the next two school weeks, distribute the paper in these different ways. Make a chart that shows time necessary for the task, and decide on the most efficient way to get the task done. Is time the only factor you should consider? Perhaps you should be charting noise level and other factors as well.