What floated Abe’s boat
QUESTION
Was US president Abraham Lincoln also an inventor? THE only US president to have a patent in his name was Abraham Lincoln. He was working as a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, when Patent No.6,469 was granted on May 22, 1849, for a device for buoying vessels over shoals.
The patent reads: ‘Be it known that I, Abraham Lincoln... have invented a new and improved manner of combining adjustable buoyant air chambers with a steamboat or other vessel for the purpose of enabling their draught of water to be readily lessened to enable them to pass over bars, or through shallow water, without discharging their cargoes.’
The idea was to equip boats’ hulls with inflatable bellows of ‘India rubber cloth or other suitable waterproof fabric’.
Lincoln had experience of boats becoming stuck. After working on a ferryboat near Posey’s Landing on the Ohio River in Spencer County, Indiana, in 1826-27, he built a small flatboat to carry cargo. This did not prove popular so Lincoln began carrying passengers to steamboats in the middle of the river instead.
At least twice, his boats ran aground or caught on obstacles. Freeing beached vessels usually involved unloading the cargo until the boat rode high enough to clear the snag. Some years later, Lincoln set to work on his invention.
His law partner, William H. Herndon, wrote that the future president ‘evinced a decided bent toward machinery or mechanical appliances, a trait he doubtless inherited from his father, who was himself something of a mechanic’.
T Appelby, Truro, Cornwall.
QUESTION
Who coined the term couch potato? FEW terms have an origin as precise as couch potato. A phrase derived from a pun, it means a lazy, inactive person who does little else in leisure time except lie on the settee watching TV.
The term was derived from the US term boob tube – boob meaning a foolish person and tube as the slang term for television. Anyone who watched too much TV was a boob tuber.
The phrase couch potato was coined on July 15, 1976, by Tom Iacino of Pasadena, California, when he phoned a friend.
When the friend’s girlfriend answered, off the top of his head he said: ‘Hey, is the couch potato there?’ Iacino was a member of a Southern California group that poked fun at the fad for exercise and healthy diets by claiming to be in favour of vegetating before the TV and eating junk food.
Since the edible part of a potato plant is a tuber, boob tuber suggested the idea of a potato.
Soon after his inventive punning, Iacino and his friends formed a club called the Couch Potatoes, which appeared in the Pasadena Doo Dah parade. Members lay on sofas watching TV as their float was pulled through the streets.
Iacino’s friend, cartoonist Robert Armstrong, came up with the image of a couch potato in a series of comics and later books. Though he trademarked the phrase in 1979, its sheer ubiquity meant he could not claim exclusivity.
John Buxton, Chesterfield, Derbys.
QUESTION
It’s been said that bacteriophages could be the solution to our overuse of antibiotics. What are they? BACTERIOPHAGES – phages for short – are viruses that infect bacteria cells. They are by far the most abundant and diverse biological entities on the planet.
There are ten billion times more phages than there are grains of sand on earth. They were discovered independently in the 1900s by British scientist Frederick Twort and French-Canadian scientist Felix d’Herelle, who noticed clear circles called plaques were forming on petri dishes growing bacteria – suggesting the bacteria was being killed. It was Herelle who named them bacteriophages, which means bacteria eaters.
Such viruses are host specific, only infecting certain species of bacteria cells by recognising specific receptors on the surface, and rely on random encounters with the bacteria that they infect.
Once they have come into contact with their host, they attach to the surface of the cell with tail proteins and begin to degrade the cell wall, injecting their DNA into the cell. Depending on the virus, the cell does one of two things.
If the phage is a lytic virus – which is replicated in its host – then the cell will begin to make viral proteins that are coded in the newly integrated viral DNA within minutes.
The cell continues making phage progeny until eventually it bursts open and hundreds of newly created bacterio-phages are released, looking to infect more bacteria.
However, if the phage is lysogenic, the genetic information is replicated along with the rest of the cell’s genome and remains dormant. Only once conditions are right does the viral replication initiate and the cell burst open.
Bacteriophages have been neglected because of the success of antibiotics. However, their potential medical capabilities are astounding.
Phages could offer a quick and inexpensive way to solve the growing immunity to antibiotics and modern superbugs. Bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy could be eradicated by introducing phages infecting that specific bacterial strain. There is a huge reservoir of untapped and unsequenced gene information that could potentially lead to the next big scientific discovery. Emilie Lamplough, Trowbridge, Wilts.
QUESTION
What is the greatest amount of brothers – or sisters – to have played in a county GAA team? FURTHER to earlier answers, there has been no mention so far of multiple sisters playing GAA on the same county team.
The most numerous sisters in camogie are the three McGrath sisters in Co. Galway – Orlaith, Clodagh and Niamh.
Niamh, the eldest, was the top scorer in Galway’s first senior AllIreland win in 2013, while Orlaith managed to play in two All-Ireland finals on the one afternoon, in 2013. The three sisters played for their club, Sarsfields, in last year’s All-Ireland camogie final, but they lost to the Slaughtneil team from Derry.
The three McGraths also have two younger sisters, Ciara and Laoise, and it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that all five sisters could end up playing in the same team, which would be a record.
Angela and Ann Downey of Co. Kilkenny have won the most AllIreland camogie titles between them – 24. Angela is one of the best camogie players of all time. Pat Murphy, Dublin.