Web site details Pa. science efforts

Harrisburg — “Science and Invention in Pennsylvania,” is the 29th story to be posted on the award-winning Web site, ExplorePahistory.com. The Web site is a service of WITF public radio. “Science and Invention in Pennsylvania” provides a sweeping history of inventions, scientific breakthroughs, and technological innovations in the Commonwealth, from colonial times to the present, through four chapter overviews and essays on 75 state historical markers, supplemented by more than 250 images and illustrations, 37 documents, a timeline, and an annotated bibliography. It tells the story of the first iron bridge and steel rails, oil tank cars and commercial radio, the steamboat and the jeep, commercial nuclear reactors and the digital computer — all of which were born in Pennsylvania, as were the roller coaster, Ferris wheel, Flexible Flyer sled, and Slinky, invented by curious Pennsylvanians who put their skills to work in the development of new forms of play. It explains how the Commonwealth emerged as an international center of scientific and technological innovation, and the professionalization of science and technological innovation, as amateur inventors and scientists like Benjamin Franklin, astronomer William Rittenhouse, and lawyer Joshua Pusey — the inventor of the safety match — gave way to university, corporation, and museum-based professionals. It charts, for example, how the Westinghouse research laboratories in Pittsburgh made critical innovations in the development of radio, television, and nuclear energy, and how scientists and doctors at Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute, the nation’s first independent medical-research facility, contributed to the development of vaccines for rabies and German measles, and developed the first standardized laboratory animal, the Wistar rat. The new story also includes three lesson plans: on “Becoming Pennsylvania’s Next Great Inventor” for elementary schools classes; the early days of paleontology for middle school teachers; and the history of TIROS 1, the first successful weather satellite launched into space, for high school classrooms. Eight writers contributed to Science and Invention, led by Charles Hardy III, a Professor of History at West Chester University. Marie Brown Wilson led the search for the images, many of them published here for the first time, from more than 80 archives and repositories.