Time!

Hey guys, it's Adventure Van with a blog about Time, and how we record it. We've used the sun for a long time, from just looking at it to sundials, and we've invented complex machines that were huge to do it before being able to just have to look at a clock installed on your electronic device or watch. One of the reasons we have such an accurate system is because of 1967, when we changed the definition of time from Solar to Atomic. But what led up to that point? What happened before? What happened after? What started us to care about what time it is more then Morning and Evening? Find out on this blogpost.

Now, we've always had an attention to time, using sundials as top of the art ways to tell what time it was for hundreds of years. But in 1583, something diffrent happened to the way we tell time today. Thanks to a person named Galileo Galilei, whom you may not know, being bored at church and needing to be distracted came across a extremely important discovery. As a teen in that era, it was extremely uncommon to NOT go to church, so he went to do church-like things, but noticed something. Behind the priest, one of the altar lamps was swinging. He noticed that it seemed to not change the amount of time it took to get from one side to the lowest point, even though the swings were getting smaller and smaller.

He used this idea 20 years later, building a machine, a 'pendulum', to work with the study of dynamics. He discovered that the weight or mass of the ball and the arc of the swing didn't change how it swung, but the length of the string. As he wrote to a colleague, "The marvelous property of the pendulum, ... is that it makes all vibrations, large or small, in equal times." Now, you see, the thing about it being 1603 when this was discovered meant that for the 'time' (ha), being able to keep such exact timings was unheard of. Yet Galileo discovered this sneaky way to find the correct time, being within 16 seconds of the correct time sometimes. There was just one problem.

Remember my blog about Cold? In that blog, I discussed how Fredrick Tudor had no official market for bringing ice down into the equator area. The same can be said here, as there really was no need to be exact to the second. But the opportunity opened itself in the sea. As Columbus had discovered the Americas, there was a sudden boom in trading being done with ships with all these cool new things. However, there was a problem. Longitude then depended on knowing the port clock and the ship clock, and reseting the ship clock to match the current time.

The problem with this was in the port clock, as it could be off by as much as 20 minutes a day, making just 3 days at sea let the clock go off by an hour. Anyone who figured out how to do a way to tell the exact time without constant stops and resets would be rich for life. So, a old man named Galileo figured out that the machine he made that kept 'equal times' would be perfect for such a thing. By then 58 years old, the pendulum was gathering dust in his mind. But it was perfect for this, and after introducing it to the crews, the ports realized that their times were off and changed to the pendulum clock. The cities near the ports were forced to change in order to keep up constant trade, and so it spread.

However, was stopped us from forever using 'grandfather' clocks? I mean, we were able to keep correct times, meaning that farmers who worked from dusk to dawn now could work from 6:00am to 7:00pm. We could have precise meetings, keeping our schedule small and slim to do things we'd have to wait an hour for in the past. So why did we realize again how off this clock system was? One thing we can thank is the idea that you shouldn't have to glance at a clock tower to find out what time it was. What if it was small, concise, and could literally be watched on your wrist? Yup, the idea to be able to keep time anywhere was one of the reason we had to upgrade out of pendulums and into spring-loaded gear systems.

Now, you might think that the next step would be the now used Atomic Time. But did you know about Quartz time? The rock Quarts when examined moves very slightly by expanding and contracting 'in equal times', to speak in Galileo's words. It could measure down to the thousandths of a second, and was only changed by one or two of those a day. It also wasn't effected by humidity or movement as pendulum and gear systems were, and was entirely automatic. We also got upgraded Quartz Watches because of this, which were really cool on their own. But being able to keep a small time keeper that's completely accurate even at the size of a pinhead? That opened a special door, the computer one, as it was necessary in microprocessors, which turned the huge, bulky, gigantic computers, (along with other things), into medium sized computers with only 1 by 2 feet difference.

But what about Atomic Time? It was invented when things extremely high tech, like the railroads in japan, or the dreaded Wall Street, needed to be correct to the millisecond or they'd break, crash, or be deadly in the cases of trains and hospital equipment. We really needed to figure out a way to be super accurate. So we combined a newly discovered thing, the 'Atom', in 1950, and began measuring how fast it moved. And, weirdly, it moved in time, but it wasn't 'human eye' time, it was nanosecond time, which over a million passed in reading that word. Since now we could keep our errors down to that level of smallness, we could be accurate way over the millisecond, which is the reason why computers, phones, trains, radios, air travel, heck, even high-frequency trading for Wall Street was now possible.

All in All, our love of keeping good watch of time advanced us as a civilization, and in turn it advanced us as well.

That's Adventure Van, Keeping Time.

Trico, John R. Oishei, and Window Wipers.

Hey guys it's Adventure Van here with a blog about John R. Oishei, the founder of Trico, which was the leader of the Windshield cleaner industry for over 100 years and still is a major force in the industry. He also was one of the most localized business owners, keeping the company in it's original founding place (Buffalo, NY). He's the main reason you honestly have such high tech window washers, even if you don't think of them that much.

As for those who think that window washers are simple and easy, there was a time when you had to manually control them. Because of Trico's continuous need to stay on the top of the business, they pioneered and mastered the spring loaded wipers, then went on to create a prototype of the wipers we have today. They also work together on advancing other products, but they always are trying to stay on top, and improving our safety in the process. Now, on to the man behind the wheel. (ha ha ha)

The reason we have window wipers are because a rich man who owned a car going by the name of John Oishei hit a bicyclist on a rainy dark night. While the bicyclist was okay, this gave him a 'harrowing experience' that helped drive his motives to create safe ways to drive in the rain with a clear view. After finding that the only way to really do so was cut a hole in your windshield, which defies it's purpose of being a 'wind shield', he met John Jepson, who had created a squeegee contraption that would mount between two panes of glass in the car.

Oishei worked with him for the patent to become popularized, and met up with two friends named Peter Cornell and William Haines and formed a company to begin producing, with only 8 employees. In fact, they were put into a great position of power as Buffalo's market for them were ready receptors for this invention, and the business advanced so well that Oishei was able to buy the patent from Jepson, and began selling the 'Rain Rubber' across the country.

While their business slackened off during WII, afterwords they expanded immensely and put out branches into Europe and Australia. Oishei wanted this company to be named the Ti-Continental Corporation, but it was already in use, so they named themselves 'Tri-Co', and then dropped the hyphen, become Trico. With the car business in huge success for all people, Trico was the leading producer of the wipers required to pass the new government standards of safety.

However, despite all this growth, there was one problem. The main heart of the auto industry moved to Detroit, but Trico stayed based in Buffalo. They set a business branch to Detroit, but the main producing kept going on in Buffalo. He ended up having to talk to people like Henry Ford and tell them that he would not move, 'due to an allegiance to his city', resulting in Ford yelling that he'd never do business with them again. (Ford began buying Trico wipers a year after this statement.) He was threatened by GM that if he didn't move, they'd produce their own wipers. He replied that they should.

However, all good things come to the end, and he got old like the rest of us. He created the John R. Oishei Foundation to help supplement '(the city's) needs, medical care, education welfare, and assistance in such a manner that the Trustees shall determine.' He died in 1968, but both Trico and the John R. Oishei Foundation are still running, the former still topping the industry and the latter giving out contributions of up to $140 million to those who need it.

That's Adventure Van, cleaning to the brightest.