On May 24, 1883, The Brooklyn Bridge was opened to the public. It took 14 years, $15 million and many lives to link Brooklyn and Manhattan. Before work was begun, its designer, John A. Roebling, was making final surveys of the site. A docking ferryboat nudged a piling near him, driving a dirty nail into his foot. He died of tetanus 24 days later. His son, Washington Roebling took over the engineering project. To sink the bridge tower foundations down to bedrock, workers excavated river silt inside two open-bottomed 3000 ton iron bases, caissons. High-pressure air pumps kept river water out. As the caissons were dug deeper beneath the river surface, air pressure grew higher; work became more dangerous. When they were digging near seventy feet deep, a few workers walked through the caisson air-lock at the surface, across the street to the tavern, and dropped down dead. The cause: nitrogen embolism—gas dissolved in blood under high pressure expanding rapidly at normal pressure. Scuba divers call it “the bends.” Washington Roebling, himself, was crippled this way but monitored the project through a telescope from his bed upriver. His brilliant wife, Emily Warren Roebling, managed construction on-site. Twenty to 30 bridge workers were killed in construction from nitrogen embolism, being struck by falling material, and by falls from the towers. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world, with a river-span of 1595.5 feet. Anyone could cross: 1¢ for a pedestrian, 5¢ for a horse and rider, 10¢ for a horse and wagon, 5¢ for cows, 2¢ for sheep or hogs. Only six days after its opening, the bridge was crowded with walkers when a rumor started that the bridge was collapsing! Strollers stampeded, killing 12, injuring 35 in the panic. Was the great bridge safe? Months later, May 17, 1884, the great huckster and self-promoter P. T. Barnum set out to prove the solidity of the bridge “in the interest of the dear public.” Across the broad bridge paraded 21 elephants with Barnum’s famous African elephant Jumbo in the rear. They were followed by seven Bactrian camels (two-hump) and ten dromedaries (one-hump). Since elephant and camel fares had never been specified, no tolls were paid. The New York Times reported “…it seemed as if Noah’s Ark were emptying itself over on Long Island.” If any doubts remained, Barnum’s ballyhoo proof put them to rest.  Bird's-eye view of the grand display of fireworks on the Brooklyn Bridge's opening night. Brooklyn Museum
 Workers cut away part of the steel fencing allowing panic-stricken citizens to escape from the bridge's promenade to the trolley tracks that went down the center of the bridge.  The story of how Jumbo was brought from Africa to the United States is a fascinating one -- Google it. In the meantime, you might want to have a look at Jan Adkin's fascinating description of how people often have to use brains rather than brawn to move heavy items. Jan Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Adkins, Jan. "Proof Positive: Ballyhoo Confirms the Safety of the Brooklyn Bridge." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 7 June 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ Proof-Positive-Ballyhoo-Confirms-the-Safety-of-the-Brooklyn-Bridge. 
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Russian pilot Marina Raskova was famous for her long-distance flying records. In WW II, she gathered the Soviet Army’s first female pilots into the 588th Women’s Night Bombardment Regiment. They wore hand-me-down pilots’ uniforms and, even worse, they had to cut their long hair to a regulation two inches. Major Raskova worried about her girls. “Don’t you know the Germans will shoot at you?” she asked her new regiment. A woman yelled from the back, “Not if we shoot them first, Major Raskova!” They flew Polikarpov U-2’s, fabric-covered wood and wire biplanes. The only way they could carry a load of six 50 pound bombs was to leave the weight of their parachutes behind. They attacked in threes, cutting their engines and gliding down over German camps before dropping the bombs, only restarting their engines to head for home. The sleepless ground soldiers were especially upset when they learned that they were being bombed by women! The gliding whoosh just before the bombs reminded Germans of broom-sweeping, so they called them Nachthexen, “night witches.” A German captain said, “We simply couldn't grasp that the Soviet airmen that caused us the greatest trouble were in fact women. These women feared nothing. They … wouldn't give us any sleep at all.” The Luftwaffe was ordered to shoot the Night Witches down. Not easily done. The PoU2s flew slower than German fighters could fly without crashing. The cloth-and-wood biplanes didn’t appear clearly on radar, and they could maneuver more quickly than fast fighters. Ground troops surrounded their camps with searchlights and antiaircraft cannon but the Witches outwitted them. Two PoU2s roared in under power to attract the searchlights and cannon, then separated, turning and jinking to escape, while the third biplane glided in quietly— bombs away! The Witches would join up and switch places until all three Witches had dropped their loads. They were persistent witches: they sometimes flew 18 missions every night. Twenty-three of the brave women of the 588th received the USSR’s highest medal: Hero of the Soviet Union. A more tender award of flowers was given to them by admiring Free French pilots who flew from their airfields. The French pilots said: Even if it were possible to gather and place at your feet all the flowers on earth, this would not constitute sufficient tribute to your valour  The Night Witches flew in wood and canvas Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes similar to the one shown here. A 1928 design intended for use as a training aircraft and for crop-dusting, to this day it is the most-produced biplane in all of aviation history. Wikimedia Commons
 Jan Adkins is a superb storyteller as well as a talented illustrator and he is now available for classroom visits throughout the country. He is a member of INK's Authors on Call which uses Field Trip Zoom, a technology that requires only a computer, wifi, a webcam, and a roomful of enthusiastic children. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Adkins, Jan. "The Night Witches: Dangerous Women." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 24 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ The-Night-Witches-Dangerous-Women.  
For us “Doodlebug” is a name for a “roly-poly” or “pill bug.” During World War II, however, it meant a flying bomb. Putting a silly name on such a wicked object was characteristic of Britain’s plucky humor during a devastating war. Adolph Hitler gave it an official name: Vergeltungwaffe 1 or the V1, “first vengeance weapon.” It was also called the buzz bomb, because it was powered by a pulse jet with metal shutters that opened and closed over its intake fifty times a second to direct the force of its jet-fuel combustion to the rear. This noisy but simple jet engine made a loud, stuttering buzz. You could hear a buzz bomb 10 miles away, and you hoped to keep hearing that buzz as it passed overhead. Attached to the nose of the buzz bomb’s body was a propeller that measured the miles it had traveled. Once the mile counter reached a preset distance, the engine stopped. That was the worst sound: sudden silence. It meant that the doodlebug was plunging to earth near you carrying almost a ton of high explosive. A doodle bug was only about 26 feet long. The body and engine were metal, the stubby wings were mostly plywood. They were cheap to build; they didn’t put a German pilot at risk. In war terms, they were a bargain. Doodlebugs were also fast, about 400 miles an hour. Most airplanes couldn’t catch them. Even when the fastest fighters closed in on a buzz bomb, bringing it down wasn’t easy. Machine gun slugs bounced off the sleek metal body. Fighters with cannons were effective but the ton of explosive in the doodlebug could destroy the fighter if it got too close. Intrepid fighter pilots found another way. They flew right beside the flying bomb and slipped the tip of their wing under the doodlebug’s wing. Airflow over the fighter’s wing flipped the V-1 over in a roll from which its autopilot couldn’t recover. Hundreds of doodlebugs crashed into fields far short of London. With Britain’s improved anti-aircraft shells and enormous lines of anti-aircraft cannon, most of the doodlebugs launched from the European coast were shot down but they still kept coming. Before Allied forces stopped the bombs in late 1944, more than 8,000 had hurtled toward England, damaging more than 1,125,000 buildings in London, and killing almost 23,000 Britons.  This is a German propaganda photograph showing the "V1" being rolled to its launch site . In their caption, the Nazis bragged, "this first German reprisal weapon is an excellent creation of our air defense." Wikimedia Commons
Jan Adkins is excited by things tiny and by enormous concepts. He’s published about forty-five books but they seem to be only excuses to find new stories and learn new facts. He’s been called “The Explainer General” because most of his work unsnarls complicated knots of confusion and re-builds them as simple paths to understanding. He explains bright bits of the world in pictures and words, often to young people. He’s written about sandcastles, bridges, pirates, knights, cowboys, maps, sailing, knots, coal, oil and gold. He’s got a long list of things he still wants to figure out and explain. Adkins (this is what his grandsons call him) believes real history and real science are ten or twelve times cooler than fairy tales and magic. Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Adkins, Jan. "Doodlebugs: Evil Robots in the Skies." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 10 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ Doodlebugs-Evil-Robots-in-the-Skies.  
 Albert Einstein’s work wasn’t done in a laboratory but in his marvelous mind, and he thought big. His thoughts about enormous speeds and giant masses changed the way we think of science and nature. Einstein established a new approach to science: Relativity, in which the mass and speed of objects are stable only in relation to their surroundings. One inescapable part of relativity is that space and time are parts of the same fabric. Very big masses and very fast speeds can warp that fabric. One surprise discovery: there is a limit to how fast anything may travel. Anything approaching the speed of light requires more and more energy to push it only a little closer, until it can’t be pushed more. Unless we solve this problem, c (the symbol for the speed of light) is as fast as we’re going to get. But if you travel close to c, unusual things happen. Two twins, Bill and Will, plan to make a fast trip to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, on their twentieth birthday. The distance is about four light years away from Earth (light year = distance light travels in a vacuum in one year, about 5,865,696,000,000 miles). Will is stuck in a traffic jam and misses the blast off. Bill goes alone. He travels very close to the speed of light, .9999999 c, whips around Alpha Centauri and returns at the same speed. When he lands he asks for his brother Will. Bill has been traveling for a bit over eight years; he’s 28 years old. But at this speed, his spaceship time has played out sloooooowly in relation to earth time. To Will on Earth, Bill’s trip took 49 years. Will is now 69 years old. If the spaceship had traveled a little bit faster, say .99999999 c, Bill would still have aged 8 years. But when he returned to Earth, Will and everyone else he knew would be dead, since 155 years would have passed. Recently, with fantastically accurate clocks, we’ve proved Einstein’s theories: astronauts traveling at thousands of miles an hour on space stations age a few seconds slower for every year of Earth-time. Can we ever travel to distant stars? Not unless we find a way around Einstein’s shifting nature of space and time. Easy for Star Trek. So far, it’s impossible for us.  Jan Adkins is excited by things tiny and by enormous concepts. He’s published about forty-five books but they seem to be only excuses to find new stories and learn new facts. He’s been called “The Explainer General” because most of his work unsnarls complicated knots of confusion and re-builds them as simple paths to understanding. He explains bright bits of the world in pictures and words, often to young people. He’s written about sandcastles, bridges, pirates, knights, cowboys, maps, sailing, knots, coal, oil and gold. He’s got a long list of things he still wants to figure out and explain. Adkins (this is what his grandsons call him) believes real history and real science are ten or twelve times cooler than fairy tales and magic. Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Adkins, Jan. "The Not-So Twins: Space Travel Discouraged." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 16 Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/The-Not-So-Twins-Space-Travel-Discouraged.  
Where am I? This was a cruel question for sailors before John Harrison.
In 1707 a fleet of British warships mistook their location and sailed onto the rocky Scilly Islands. Two thousand men drowned. The Royal Navy offered a prize of £20,000 (3 to 4 million dollars in today’s money) for anyone who could provide a way for ships to find their position. North and south latitude wasn’t the problem. Tables gave the positions of the sun, moon and stars above or below the equator. Navigators could use a sextant (it measures angles between the ocean horizon and a celestial body) to find a ship’s position north or south. But the only way of knowing your position on the spinning earth, east or west, is to know what time it is, within seconds, at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England—0° longitude. Sailors needed a seagoing clock! Clocks in the 1700’s were slow or fast by several minutes a week. Not good enough. And they measured seconds with a pendulum, which wouldn’t work on a rocking, rolling ship. John Harrison was a fine carpenter who became fascinated by accurate timekeeping. He built big clocks for houses, barns and churches. Bit by bit he made them more accurate. He set out to win the longitude prize. He invented ways for a clock to compensate for temperature, so they wouldn’t run slower when it got warmer. He invented a nearly frictionless escapement (the mechanism that “counts” the tick-tocks with the clock’s hands). He overcame the pendulum problem with pivoted “dumbells” that rocked back and forth with springs. Harrison worked for five years to construct the large and beautiful Sea Clock #1. In 1736 Harrison and his clock took a trip on HMS Centurion to Lisbon, Portugal, and back. Harrison was terribly seasick. His clock was not. It was a great success. But the Royal Navy wouldn’t award the prize. It dithered for the next 37 years. Harrison worked on, making his sea clocks smaller and more accurate. In 1761 he sent his son William on a trial run with Sea Watch #1 to Jamaica and back. The smaller clock worked beautifully. The Navy kept dithering. Not until Harrison was 80 years old was part of the prize awarded to him. He died three years later but he knew that he had changed the world, solving one of our most important, most perplexing problems: where are we?
Harrison's first sea clock (H1) can be seen on display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England. Phantom Photographer via Wikimedia
An important part of Jan Adkins' considerable output is books of non-fiction for young people, his special audience. He also writes humor and feature articles for several magazines. He has illustrated most of his books and contributes illustrations to dozens of mainstream magazines, especially on marine and technical subjects. Have a look at his Wooden Ship: The Building of a Wooden Sailing Vessel in 1870, a chronicle of a fictional whale ship describing and illustrating the details of her building from design to launching.
Jan Adkins is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.
MLA 8 Citation
Adkins, Jan. "Tick Tock: A Carpenter Solves an Ocean Riddle." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 19 Mar. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/Tick-Tock-A-Carpenter-Solves-an-Ocean-Riddle. 
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The NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Committee is pleased to inform you that 30 People Who Changed the World has been selected for Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2018, a cooperative project of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) & the Children’s Book Council Categories
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