Research Rack: Did You Know?

• The Italian artist, Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first systematic explanation of how machines work and how the elements of machines can be combined.
  
• The oldest wheel found is believed to be over fifty-five hundred years old.
  
• Archimedes invented a screw that would raise water from a lower to a higher level. He also invented the catupult, the lever, and the compound pulley.
  
• Archimedes thought that anything could be moved with a lever. He is quoted as saying, “Give me a place to stand and I will move the Earth.”
  
• The Great Pyramid of Giza was built 4,500 years ago and it remains the tallest stone structure on Earth.
  
• It took 20,000 men working 10 hours a day for 23 years to complete the Great Pyramid of Giza.
  
• Rube Goldberg’s cartoons combined simple machines and common items to create complex, wacky, and logical machines that did simple tasks. His inventions became so widely known that Webster’s Dictionary added “rube Goldberg” defining it as “accomplishing by extremely complex roundabout means what seemingly could be done simply.”