ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

same way when you blow into the WindTube. It pulls some of the room air with it, so that you are able to fi ll the
entire bag with only one breath.
Daniel Bernoulli was a Swiss physicist who lived from 1700 to 1782 and did pioneering work on the motions of
fl uids (“hydrodynamics”). A modern application of Bernoulli’s Principle is the shape of airplane wings, which
in part generate “lift” by making the air on the top of the wing move faster than the air under the wing.
For more examples of applications of Bernoulli’s Principle, with good explanations, see http://www.nasm.
si.edu/exhibitions/gal109/LESSONS/TEXT/TEASERS.HTM
Find this experiment online at: http://scifun.org/HomeExpts/bernoulli.htm
Warren M. Washington - Video Clip Transcription
Clip 1 - Early interest in science: I was very curious about science…I had done reasonably good in mathematics
like algebra…I just liked trying to fi gure out how things worked…and how to do things. And so often the
books I would get would be on people like Einstein or George Washington Carver. You know, it would be…a
mixture of black and white scientists and even women scientists. I was just impressed with the biographical
stories…Madam Curie…on the story of her life, and I think that was impressive to me, how she was involved in
the use of radium and early sort of understanding of…nuclear physics.
Clip 2 - Most infl uential science teacher: I think that…the most profound one was…a lady chemistry teacher
who actually kind of got me started in science, I think, because she was not the type of teacher that would lecture.
She would demonstrate. For example, she would put…a tennis ball into liquid nitrogen and throw it on the
fl oor, and it would shatter. And I think I asked her, and this was probably what started me into science, [which]
was I asked her why were egg yolks yellow, okay. And she says, “Find out.” Now she may have known the
answer, but she… So that started me reading in the area of chemistry.
Clip 3 - Disappointment in high school: Even when I was taking science courses at Jefferson High School,
algebra, trigonometry, chemistry…that many of the black students who were bright didn’t take those classes.
They kind of felt, oh, that’s too hard, I don’t think, you know, they felt that they couldn’t succeed. And so I
think that was a missed opportunity. I think that the teachers were there to help and work with you but some of
the students just felt they didn’t have much of a dream about what they might do with their lives, and I did have
that dream. I thought I could be a scientist, even in high school. And that’s why I went into physics…at college.
Everybody knew physics was a hard subject to go into, but I felt I could do it, I mean, I had that kind of confi -
dence, and it was kind of disappointing to me to see so many of my friends who didn’t have the feeling that they
could succeed and do something…positive with their lives.
Clip 4 - Discovering physics: The thing that kind of clinched it for me was my senior year, and I can remember
the teacher’s name was Mr. Wood. He was a physics major, I mean a physics teacher. And I just really ate up
physics even more than the chemistry, because it explained how energy works. How forces work. How levers
work. How the mechanical things work. How, you know, the basic things that are in our physical universe work.
You can explain a lot from sort of physics principles. And in fact, I was so much impressed by physics that
when I did go to college, I went as a physics major.
Clip 5 - Oregon State University: I went to Oregon State University, and there couldn’t have been more than
about ten black students on the campus. I’d say seven or eight of those were on the football team. And I was living
in a town called Corvallis, and Corvallis had only one black family living in that city. So you can see that it
was a situation where there wasn’t…a large number of black people to interact with. So I had to kind of deal
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Earth Science