Here, we are going to have another look at some interesting inventions from the United States during the Cold War:
Radiocarbon dating was invented as a procedure by Willard F. Libby in 1949. In this process, radiocarbon (or Carbon-14: a carbon isotope with 6 protons and 8 neutrons in its nucleus) is used to help determine the age of objects containing organic material. Carbon-14 has a half life of around 5,730 years & can combine with oxygen to be absorbed by plants and become a part of carbon-based animals. Carbon-14 exists in tissue of every deceased animal and plants with one in a trillion of their carbon atoms being Carbon-14. The radiocarbon dating mentioned can be used to see how old an organism is and estimate its time of death up to 60,000 years ago. Libby used this form of dating to see how old wood from the Egyptian funeral ship of Sesotris III, a bread roll from Pompeii, and linen from the Dead Sea scroll are. The dates found from carbon dating matched the historical dates for each of the tested items, showing the accuracy in carbon dating. Plus, radiocarbon decayed the same way other radioactive materials decayed, including items that decay faster such as carbon-11 with a half-life of 20 minutes. Thus, radiocarbon dating can be trusted to test if an item is 60,ooo years old or younger, even if there is no recorded date for said item. In 1960, Libby won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery and this new technique helped to usher in a revolution in the fields of biology and archaeology.
The ice resurfacer, or the Zamboni, was created by American inventor and engineer Frank Zamboni in 1949. The machine with a four-wheel drive smooths the surface of ice in an ice rink and was given a patent in 1953. Before the creation of this device, maintaining the quality of an ice surface was a time-consuming and labor-intensive task. For the Iceland Skating Rink, workers would have to scoop up ice shavings, spray ice with water, and squeegee the surface in a process which could take up to an hour to complete. The Boston Bruins, the National Hockey League team, began to use the Zamboni in 1954 and soon, other hockey teams did the same thing. Today, about 200 Zambonis are manufactured a year by the company created by Frank Zamboni himself.
This is good