Marlana and I just got back from a short camping trip. In our kit we had a propane lantern, and Marlana and I were wondering exactly how the mantle in such a lantern works. What we knew was that the mantles start as silk mesh bags. We'd been told that when you light them they turn to ash and that that ash is what glows and produces the light. But we weren't convinced.

I just learned how they really work. The silk is impregnated with various metal oxides; the most common is a mixture of thorium oxide, cerium oxide, and magnesium oxide. When you light the mantle initially, the silk burns away, leaving the oxides as a fine ceramic mesh. When heated by the burning propane, the ceramic glows; because it's such a fine mesh it has lots of surface area, so it glows extremely bright.

I thought that that was kind of, you'll forgive the expression, cool!

So . . . have any of y'all learned how something works that you found really interesting? If so, please enlighten us! (Sorry.)

I love learning stuff like that. I also love the TV show "How Things are Made."

Thanks for the info....

It amazes me how people ever come up with this kind of invention in the first place.

All I know is how a couple of card tricks work but if I told you I would have to kill you.

I just fitting some new lights in the kitchen and they are not working yet.

Have you considered propane lanterns?

They work.

I'm fascinated by the human body from conception to death. There are statistics almost impossible to fathom. An example is the heart beats 100,000 times per day and pumps 2,000 gallons of blood daily.

Speaking of the heart, I was fascinated to discover recently that a hummingbird’s heart rate varies from about 250 beats per minute (when at rest), to over 1200 beats per minute when feeding. That’s compared to the human heart rate of about 60 - 100 bpm when resting.

Last night my wife watched a program on Amazon about hummingbirds, narrated by David Attenborough. He said that their resting heartbeat was 400 bpm (though I suspect that it varies amongst species), that it went up to 1,200 bpm when in flight, and down to 40 bpm at night when they're in torpor (essentially, short-term hibernation). He also said that in flight their hearts increase in size, and that a heart-to-lungs-to-heart-to-muscles-to-heart round-trip takes only one second.

Wow!

Once upon a time fellows knew their car engines.

I've never once looked under the hood of my last two cars and for both of them I would also have to check the manual to find and use the spare tire.

No matter what goes wrong with my car, when I get it back from the mechanic the cost is always $467.92.

Last time I traded in my car at my dealer for a newer model, I actually completely forgot to look under the hood! Only realized it a few days after making the purchase.

After you drove it home from the dealership, and finally looked under the hood, did it have an engine?

Believe it or not, yes!

Since I know nothing about engines, and I have a service plan with my car dealer, I’ve never had occasion to lift the hoods of my cars. Although when buying or trading (upgrading to a newer model) in the past, I have always looked under the hood before driving my new purchase off the premises. That is, until the last time!

These days, peeking under the hood, I wouldn't even know what I was looking at.

Although I’ve never understood motor car engines, combustion, etc., it seemed simple enough in the Hippie Days to be able to improvise some minor repairs on my Volkswagen Combi (with the VW sign on the front reshaped into a Peace sign). Nowadays I don’t have a clue.

It is a mystery to me how hippies worked because they never did.

In an attempt to steer this thread back to what I hope S2000magician’s original concept was:

I remember how amazed I was when MIDI technology was released in the early 1980’s. MIDI (which is an acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol which connects electronic musical instruments, computers & audio devices for playing, editing and recording music.

A single MIDI link through a MIDI cable could carry up to sixteen channels of information, each of which could be routed to a separate device or instrument. This could be sixteen different digital instruments, for example. MIDI also carries event messages; data that specify the instructions for music, including a note's pitch, velocity, duration, vibrato, panning, and so on.

Although I confess I still don’t quite understand how it works, MIDI forever changed the way music was created, especially for composer/arrangers like myself.

"The iPhone in your pocket has over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago".

Virtually every single atom in your body came from a star that exploded.

Ron

That’s one way of looking at it. Some people believe we, and the material universe, were created by an all-powerful Omniscient Being. Others believe that our souls descended from far subtler planes of consciousness, where atoms do not exist.