This is my summary of the inventions I learned about in lessons fifty-six through fifty-nine. In lesson fifty-six, I learned about the invention of the rotary printing press. After the printing press was invented, it was improved time and time gain. One of these improvers was Richard Hoe, an inventor who ran a factory that built printing presses in New York. in 1843, Hoe invented his improved version of the printing press: the rotary press. What makes the rotary press different? It fed a continuous stream of paper into the press, making it faster than other types of printing presses. Before Hoe’s improvement, presses could print about one thousand pages an hour. The rotary printing press could print over one million pages an hour!

In lesson fifty-seven, I studied the invention of kerosene. Kerosene was originally discovered during the Islamic Golden Age by Al-Razi, who also discovered the smallpox virus. Kerosene was used to fuel lamps, but that use and knowledge was lost to time. Later, coal oil was discovered during mining coal oil could also be used as a lamp fuel, but it was dirty and made lots of smoke. Whale oil replaced coal oil, but it smelled bad. Eventually, kerosene was rediscovered and replaced that.

Abraham Gesner is the inventor of modern kerosene. He went to England to study medicine. While there, he met Charles Lyell- a lawyer who was interested in the theory of uniformitarianism. Gesner brought this interest back to Canada with him, and he practised geology in his free time. He found a way to extract a clear, clean fuel from coal, and he called it kerosene. Kerosene is a clean-burning, stable form of fuel that is less explosive than gasoline. Combined with liquid oxygen, kerosene makes rocket fuel.

While Gesner patented kerosene distilled (extracted) from coal oil, others found ways to get around it. When petroleum was discovered, people experimented with it. Soon, it was found that kerosene could be distilled from petroleum, too.

In lesson fifty-eight, I learned about the invention of antiseptics. In Australia, there were two childbirth clinics, one of which had a death rate of over ten percent. Nobody wanted to go to that clinic, since there was a very high chance of death. People wondered why this was so. Ignaz Semmelweis helped solve this mystery.

Ignaz Semmelweis went to school and became a doctor. He got a job and became top doctor of the hospital with the two clinics, and he couldn’t stop trying to find out what the problem was. However, it wasn’t easy: the only difference between the two clinics were the workers. The clinic with the high death rate was also used to train medical students, and the other was used to train midwives.

Semmelweis finally had his eureka moment when one of his friends, a professor, died after being cut. The cut was caused by the scalpel one of his students used to dissect a dead body. The professor’s symptoms were identical to those of the women in the death clinic, and Semmelweis realized they died because the medical students would touch them after touching dead corpses.

Semmelweis quickly made hand-washing a requirement, and the death rate immediately went down. He then invented antiseptics. Antiseptics come in many different forms, and are used to both kill germs and prevent infections from spreading.

Lastly, lesson fifty-nine was about the invention of the gas mask. Mining and firefighting jobs were dangerous before the invention of the gas mask due to the toxic gases in the air. The first gas mask- invented in 1847- was originally used for mining. It was patented in 1847 by Louis Hazlet as a mask that protected your lungs from coal particles.

The gas mask filters out both particles and chemical vapors from the air that might otherwise kill you. It works by forcing the person wearing it to breath air through a series of mesh filters, letting nothing but air get through.