Rainbows Are All Around Us. Water Droplets Bring Out the Colors

Rainbows are the thing of fairy tales, songs, legends and mythology. They’re impossible to ignore when they fill a horizon with brightly curved arcs of red, green and blue. Ironically, they surround us all the time, but they need the moisture of rainy weather to reveal themselves.

The sun bathes the earth in what’s called white light. It contains all colors of the spectrum. We see approximately 100 various shades of the basic six colors in the white light spectrum. The scientist responsible for discovering the colors inside sunlight died 289 years ago this month.

Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician who identified the basic colors carried by light. Newton first identified red, orange, blue, yellow and green. By 1672 he added two more colors to the spectrum—indigo and violet. That amounted to seven basic colors in the light spectrum, but the scientific community discounted indigo as being simply a dark blue. The six recognized colors are what make up rainbows.

Newton based his idea of seven colors on the ancient Greek philosophy that the musical scale of seven notes and the existence of seven days in a week were important influences in scientific knowledge. A brilliant man who lived beyond the average age of his day, Newton died at 84 on March 20, 1726.    

Newton studied light refraction through prisms and concluded that rainbows are the result of light passing through droplets of rain water. The drops of water act like prisms that separate the white light into the primary colors. Each drop of water bends the white light into primary colors. The colors of light have different wavelengths. Red, with the longest wavelength, always shows up at the top of a rainbow. Violet has a comparatively short wavelength and it usually is at the bottom of a rainbow. The curved effect of a rainbow is the result of the different colors bending as they pass through the water droplets.

The main colors in a rainbow are red, green and blue. Red is the dominant color of a rainbow at 38 percent. Green is 22 percent, and blue is 11 percent of a rainbow’s colors. The remaining three colors make up the remainder of any rainbow.   

We see a rainbow when we are between the sun and the water droplets. Usually we see a rainbow against a rain shower. But rainbows show up on the mists of waterfalls, bodies of water and even against thick fog. 

The angle between the sun and the water droplets is critical. In order to see a rainbow, our line of sight must be 42 degrees from the sun to the source of moisture. That’s a critical angle, and that’s why every person sees a particular rainbow differently. If we move only a slight distance, the angle and view of a rainbow changes. While driving in the direction of a rainbow you’ll see that it seems to keep moving.  That’s because our perspective of the light reflection keeps changing as we move.  Rainbows, after all, are just reflections of light and aren’t three dimensional.

Rainbows have mystical stories attached to them. An ancient fable of finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow is a make-believe fable based on Irish folklore involving leprechauns. . We never can see the end or beginning of a rainbow because our view is constantly changing by the 42-degree angle from the sun. No matter how far or fast you drive, you’ll never find that leprechaun’s pot filled with gold pieces.

A rainbow is part of a well-known story in the Bible’s Old Testament. In Genesis, we can read the story of a great flood God put upon the earth to punish a sinful population. Noah, our hero, built a large boat, an arc, to save his family. Male and female animals of all the species on earth were contained inside the arc to save them from drowning in the deep water.  At the end of the forty day and forty night flood, the arc landed on dry land, and Noah celebrated with his surviving family.

God promised Noah that the world’s people would never be destroyed by floods again. As a reminder of His promise, God put a rainbow in the sky.

“Never again,” God said, “shall flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood. Never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

Then God told Noah, “I set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for the sign of the covenant between Me and the earth.”

We can always remember God’s promise whenever we see a rainbow. Its significance is great, but the cause of a rainbow is basic physics. Only three things are needed for a rainbow to appear: One, the sun must be behind you; two, the moisture or rain must be in front of you; and three, the sun has to be shinning.

Thanks for reading this blog. Come back to this space later this month for another interesting subject. Go to my website www.joevlatino.com to learn about my book of short stories, “The Device.”

Production Lines Increased Efficiency and Lowered Prices

The first Model T Ford car sold for $950.00 in October, 1908. Four years later the price dropped to $575.00. By the end of the Model T’s 19 year run the car sold for $490.

Henry Ford

Mass production, a manufacturing technique from the Industrial Revolution, made the Model T less expensive to build.  Laborers worked on a particular part of the car, installing interchangeable parts.  As the cost of production dropped, so did the selling price and the reduced selling price increased sales. Using this method, Henry Ford’s profit per car was less, but the increased volume of sales made his company the biggest car manufacturer in the world. Ford’s competitors had to copy his manufacturing techniques to keep their companies in business.

The Industrial Revolution ran from approximately 1760 until 1840 in England and the United States. An agrarian society gave way to people living and working inside cities. Processes of making things on farms and using hand tools were replaced by manufacturing inside factories where workers used special-purpose machinery to produce products. The idea of a product being assembled by one person was replaced with the efficient method of mass production.   

Four important parts of mass production consist of interchangeable parts, continuous flow, division of labor and eliminating wasted effort. Henry Ford studied successful manufacturers who made fortunes during the Industrial Revolution and applied these techniques in his car company.

Eli Whitney

A mass production pioneer was Eli Terry who owned a clock manufacturing business in Connecticut. By 1800, Terry’s company produced 20 clocks a day using the interchangeable-parts technique on a short assembly line.

Eli Terry

Eli Whitney, the man credited with inventing a workable cotton gin, was manufacturing firearms in 1798. He also used interchangeable parts with an assembly line of workers to build muskets, rifles and handguns.

Samuel Colt, another firearms manufacturer, used interchangeable parts that were strategically placed on long tables. Each worker completed a specific stage of assembling a firearm. Colt began his company in 1855.

Colt Revolvers

Historians credit Henry Ford for studying the manufacturing pioneers Terry, Whitney and Colt and using their knowledge to help his company. Ford was known as a delegator who hired people who were experts in their fields. He then used their knowledge to improve his car company.

One critical tweak Ford added to his car assembly was to use a moving belt that traveled at six feet per minute. Ford, or probably one of his engineers, got the idea of a moving assembly belt from a Chicago meat packing company.

Model T Assembly Line

The car assembly line was divided into 84 steps. Each worker accomplished one of the steps as the partially assembled car moved past them on the belt. Ford hired efficiency experts who studied the motions of the workers as the parts were used. The laborers were instructed how to install each part with the least amount of effort and movement. That’s how the number of cars produced increased and the price went down.

Ford manufactured a car that was affordable to average workers. He accomplished this by using business principles established nearly 50 years prior. He added a moving assembly line that became the standard feature in every mass produced product. In 1908 a Model T was built every 12 hours. After Ford modernized his assembly line with a moving belt, the time to build one car was reduced to two and one half hours. The last Model T was number 15,000,000. The Model A, an improved version, replaced the Model T.

The system of a moving assembly line dominates car manufacturing today. Recent changes include the use of automated tools or robots that do much of the precision work such as spot welding. 

Further, modern car companies use a parts delivery system called just-in-time or last-minute delivery. Outside manufactures deliver their required parts as they are needed. This eliminates the expense of stockpiling and storing parts ahead of time.

Thank you for reading this blog. A new one will be in this space at the middle of the month. Review my website at www.joevlatino.com