It was decided to call the raft Kon-Tiki after the legendary high priest who sailed with his people into the west from the coast of Peru and was never seen again.
The explorers stored their rations and drinking water under the bamboo deck in cardboard cartons and small cans. Special survival rations were given to them by the army. This, with baskets of fresh fruit and coconuts, was enough food to last six men for four months. They also took scientific instruments, a projector and films, radio equipment, books, red mats and straw mattresses.
Finally on 28 April 1947, people watched her sail away and wondered if they would see six adventures again.
The Kon-Tiki was towed out of the harbor into the rough seas by the coast. Now she was at the mercy of the winds and ocean currents. She was caught up in the swiftest part of the Humboldt Current and that, together with strong winds, soon carried her beyond any possibility of return. She bobbed about like a cork was a more modern ship would have been in trouble. They were now on their own with about 8,000 kilometers to go.
Nothing seemed firm on that raft. The logs moved against the ropes, which gradually bit into them. The raft sank lower as the outside wood became sodden with water. The ropes were inspected daily by the men who had to be held by their ankles over the edge of the raft with their heads under water.
Flying fish often fell on board and were eaten or used as habit to catch dolphin or other large fish for food. They had no fear of dying with danger or thirst. The men could have survived on water obtained by chewing the flesh of raw fish. At night the men would look into the sea at the big shining eyes of deep water fish. Sharks visited them often. Once, the raft was nudged by the nose of a 15 tones whale shark which as 17 meters long.
So the weeks passed with the Kon-Tiki bobbing on the crest of giant waves and sliding into the troughs. Sometimes the helmsman was up to his waist in water. They were traveling in a north westerly direction. It was so hot that they wore the breast minimum, of clothing. On June they came very close to the Equator. Now the raft was caught by another current called the South Equatorial current which carried the Kon-Tiki south west. They were still hundreds of kilometers from Polynesia. The Kon-Tiki’s long were getting weaker and very slippery. They sailed about 75 kilometers.
Al last they sighted sea –birds and so they knew that land was near. On 30 July they passed the island of Puka-Puka and saw a smoke signal there. But they were unable to steer towards.
Late on the ninety-seventh day, they saw a blue lagoon through a gap in a red coral reef. There were some islands in the lagoon. They could see some huts with roofs of palm leaves on one of these islands. There were people on the beach who came to meet them in a canoe. The Kon-Tiki continued to drift along the coral reef that was 80 km long. Great waves pounded the reef and the raft started drifting towards the Raiois reef. The adventures watched anxiously as the hours passed slowly by and they continued to be carried slowly towards the reef. Then the swell caught them and the Kon-Tiki rode on the crest of an enormous breaker which dashed her on the reef-a shattered wreck. It all happened in a few seconds but miraculously no life was lost. This was on 7 August, Thus ended an adventurous trip which had lasted 101 days.
In September 1519, the Portuguese sailor, Magellan, set out with five ships to try reaching the East Indies by the western route. He crossed the Atlantic to Brazil and then turned south. Eventually he reached the strait at the tip of South America that was later named after him. He sailed through the strait into an ocean that was so calm and smooth that he called it `the peaceful (pacific) ocean.’
He reached the Philippines in March 1521 where he was killed by the Filipinos. But the Victoria- one of Magellan’s five ships under Sebastian Del Cano-continued to sail west wards and reached Spain in September 1522. This was the first time people had sailed around the earth proving the earth to be round.
Thor Heyerdahl, a young Norwegian, wanted to prove to the world that the Polynesian people who live on islands in the South Pacific, had traveled from South America to those islands about 1500 years ago. Some people laughed as they did not believe that a raft could sail nearly 8,000 kilometers in an open ocean. Five other adventures joined Heyerdahl in South America they were to build a balsa wood raft just like the ones the ancient Inca Indians used hundreds of years ago and would sail it across the ocean them selves.
Logs of balsa wood were used by the ancient Indians because balsa is very light and floats in water. But balsa was hard to obtain. They had to go to the jungles on the slopes of the Andes Mountains of Equator. This was not a very pleasant journey as they met with snakes, gigantic ants, scorpions, giant lizards and alligators in the streams in the course of their journey.
Find equator on your map. It is very near the equator. This area is very hot and the adventures found the heat terrible. At last they found nine suitable trees. These trees were cut down and lashed together with lianas and the rough raft floated down a fast flowing river to the sea.
From there the raft was taken by ship to a place in Peru called Callao. Here the raft was rebuilt to the same design that the Indians had used long ago. Over the logs of the raft, there was a deck of split bamboo and a small open cabin of bamboo canes with walls of plaited bamboo leaves. Two masts of hard mangrove wood leaned towards each other and were lashed crosswise at the top. A big square was attached to the masts.
Nagpur is located in the heart of Maharashtra and in the center of INDIA.
Nagpur Oranges are famous throught, as well well known Haldiram bhujiyawala.
The main classic thing about Nagpur is its a place of hearty people cause in the summer temperature rose to 49 degree centigrade and in winter its chilling cold. But its the place for all, place for Marathy and hindi peoples as it was the capital of Madya pradesh we speak Hindi and as its in the Maharashtra we speak Marathy,
The most important points to rememeber
1)India's centre point is located in Nagpur
2) RBI is located in Nagpur
3) Orange Hub is Nagpur.
4) Diksha Bhoomi is in Nagpur.
5) RSS( Rastriya Seva Sangh) main headquarter in INDIA is in Nagpur. and many more
6) Nagpur is well known for the roads and comes third in Green city.
Nagpur food is delicious for any part of people as we have all verieties of food available in Nagpur from North to South so any one can easily surview in Nagpur.
The most recent activities in Nagpur
1) VCA international stadium.
2) Kargo hub under construction.
3) Many IT companies are entering in Nagpur.
Its very convinient from Pune/Mumbai/Hydrabad a overnight journey, there are many forest and good places to vist near nagpur.
The best thing about Nagpur is Dhaba's all over on any highways which we ppl miss when we are out of Nagpur. The kanda poha is vary famous in nagpur.
If you going to Nagpur dont forget to have it once atleast.
The scientist who invented the electric light and many other important devices –Thomas Alva Edison was born February 11, 1847 at Milan, Ohio, in the United States of America. He came from a poor family. In school he asked his teacher so many questions that they thought he was stupid. Finally, his mother withdrew him from school and taught him herself at home. At the age of 12, Edison started selling newspapers in trains. In 1869, he purchased a printing press and printed and printed his own journal Grand Trunk herald. He set up a laboratory in the railway compartment and performed experiments in his spare time. During one such experiment, phosphorus fell on the floor and the compartment were caught in fire. The railway guard was so angry that he slapped Edison so hard which left him short of hearing in one ear. But Edison did give up. He started selling newspapers at the station itself. He saved the son of the telegraph operator Mackenzie from an accident and as a reward was offered a job at the Port Huron telegraph office. At the age of 16, he got a better ob as a night operator at a station in Canada, on the Grand Trunk railway. However, Edison was so busy during the daytime with his experiments that he used to fall asleep during the night while duty and so was fired. Edison found himself another job ad earned enough money to set p his own laboratory. He improved up on the telephone invented by Graham Bell by providing better sound quality. He invented a talking machine called the phonograph. His most important invitation, the electric light bulb came about in 1879 and Edison became a famous man. In 1881, he invented the kinetograph, a kind of movie camera. He even created a machine that could project visuals on a screen, which he called kinetograph. He connected the phonograph with it and projected audio –visual images on the screen. Edison, the greatest inventor of all times, he died October 18, 1931, at the age of 84. The electric bulbs across the nation were dimmed for a minute in his honor.
How fast are you on your bicycle? A gown –up usually a bicycle rides at fifteen kilometers an hour. A fast rider can go at thirty, and in bicycle races athletes can do over forty-five kilometers an hour. Now what makes such speeds possible for bicycles?
Many things have been put together to get bicycle to move as fast as they do today. But there is one thing that should take the first place among them. Before it was invented, no one cared to ride fast bicycles unless there was a strong reason for doing so, speed on a bicycle was a punishment in those days!
Who, then took, such punishment, and why? Some sports –persons were ready to take great risks to win prizes in races. Our story begins with one of those races. It looks place in Belfast in Ireland.
It was a bright summer day in 1887. A ten-year-old boy came home from the playing fields in great excitement. A big event was going to take place, and he was going to take part in it. The school Tricycle Race was fixed for the next day!
His father smiled and asked are you going to win the race?
`I am certainly going to try,’ the boy replied. He was going to put all the speed and strength of his legs on the pedals of his tricycle.
`But how I wish it didn’t jolt so terribly! He complained.
`And the boy will be a bundle of aching bones by the end of the day,’ said his mother. `And if the tricycle overturns, he could get badly hurt. Can’t you do something to that tricycle and make it a little less bumpy?’ she pleaded.
Her husband shook his head. `What can I do? A tricycle isn’t an animal that I can treat,’ he said, laughing. He was a doctor for animals, a veterinary doctor surgeon. He really did not know what he could do to make a machine better.
In those days, tricycle had no springs, and they gave their young riders a thorough shaking. Even the bicycles that grown-ups rode were nicknamed `bone-shakers’.
That evening, after dinner, the doctor sat in his garden, thinking. He was worried about the next day’s race. As he looked round at the plants and flowers, something that he saw in a corner caught his attention.
It was an old garden hose. Suddenly, he had an idea! `Surprise I blow air into that hose!’ he thought.
When water in full force through the rubber tube, it stayed firm and round. If it was filled with air, would the hose stay firm and round in the same way? He decided to try and find out.
He took the hose and cut two lengths of it. They were long enough to wind round the rear wheels of the tricycle. He pasted them round two suitable metal rings and filled air into them. When they felt firm to the touch, he sealed their ends. He then stretched them and fastened them round the two rear wheels of the tricycle with strips of canvas.
When he put his foot on the seat and pushed the tricycle, he was very pleasantly surprised. It moved very smoothly.
The doctor could not treat the front wheel in the same way. The fork that held it was too narrow for the air-filled garden hose to pass through.
`I hope you’ll today’s tricycle race a little easier than the last one,’ he told his son the next morning.
You can guess what happened at the race. The doctor’s son rode so fast that he reached the mother end all alone. He left the faster of his rivals halfway.
And he did not look as tired as the other boys.
As he rode, the tyres of his tricycle went smoothly over every jolt and bump on the track.
That evening, all the boys in the race were at the doctor’s house on their tricycles. They all wanted `those tyres’. They rode back home as happy as ten-years-olds on tricycles could ever be!
Everyone in the neighborhood soon heard about the `air-filled tyres’. By that weekend, the doctor’s backyard was filled with tricycles and bicycles! As the weeks passed, their number grew larger and larger.
Every evening after work, the doctor was busy putting tyres on bicycle wheels. Still the number of bicycles in his yard only grew larger. So one day he said to himself, `Enough is enough. I can’t go on like this for ever.’
Then firmly, but politely, he told the cyclists that he could not `treat’ any more machines. The cyclists had to go back home disappointed, but the doctor’s
Evenings were once again as quiet as they used to be before the tricycle race.
Then, one day, his son, brought home a stranger. He said he was a racing-cyclist, shook the doctor’s hand and said, `Here you are, with a wonderful idea, and you are doing nothing about it1 patent it, my dear sir, patent it immediately. You mustn’t waste any more time. You have invented something which will increase the speed of all road vehicles twice over!’
Soon after the stranger’s arrival, the doctor took out a patent on his invention. A patent is a document which gives inventers the sole right to produce or sell their invention for a certain number of years. No one else can sell or copy that invention as long as the patent lasts.
The newspapers of that week were full of stories about a new invitation called a `pneumatic tyre’. Learned people said, `those pneumatic or air- filled tyres will turn bicycles into flying horses! Now who is going to make them in large enough numbers?
The question did not have to wait log for an answer. William Harvey du Cross, who was a rich businessman, bought from the inventor, for a small sum of money, the sole right to manufacture his air-fill tyres. He then built a factory and named it the Dunlop Company.
The `animal doctor’ in our story, who invented the pneumatic tyre, was John Dunlop
Soon pneumatic tyres were made in millions. They did not make their inventor rich. But John Dunlop became so famous that, even today in many places, pneumatic tyres are called Dunlops.
When Dr. Dunlop fitted the first two tyres on his son’s tricycles wheels, there were only 300,000 bicycles in the world. Today, there are many more than 98 million of them in the United States of America alone.
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