Inventors, Mathematicians, Engineers and Scientists
“I was brought up in the Cherokee tradition of equal education for boys and girls.”
Born in 1908, Mary Golda Ross grew up in Park Hill, Okla. Her great-great grandfather was Cherokee Chief John Ross, who led the Cherokee Nation during the traumatic and turbulent Indian Removal era of the 1830s that resulted in the forced relocation of thousands of Cherokee people to west of the Mississippi River in present-day Oklahoma.
Ross attributed her successes to the rich heritage of her Cherokee people and the importance of tribal emphasis on education. “I was brought up in the Cherokee tradition of equal education for boys and girls,” she said. “It did not bother me to be the only girl in the math class.” Her home town was the original site of the famed Cherokee Female Seminary, the first women’s institution of higher education west of the Mississippi. Its cornerstone was placed by Chief Ross in 1847, and it opened in 1851. The curriculum emphasized science, with courses in botany, chemistry and physics.
At age 96, Mary Ross marched in the procession of 25,000 Native people at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. She died four years later, but lived long enough to see her work help launch an American Indian astronaut into orbit.
There is a U.S. dollar coin with Mary Ross’s image and a Google Doodle to commemorate her work on a variety of aerospace projects like the P-38 airplane (the fastest airplane of its time) and the Agena Rocket. She also conducted some of the first research on interplanetary space travel.
"If you just put a thruster under the chair all the thrust is below the centre of gravity so you rotate," she said. "It was certainly much more acrobatic than I anticipated."
Ms. Austin, who has been a wheelchair user since 1996, developed the chair with help from dive experts and academics.
The model is powered by two dive propulsion vehicles and steered with a bespoke fin and foot-operated acrylic strip.
"When we started talking to people about it, engineers were saying it wouldn't work, the wheelchair would go into a spin, it was not designed to go through water - but I was sure it would," she told the BBC.
"If you just put a thruster under the chair all the thrust is below the centre of gravity so you rotate," she said. "It was certainly much more acrobatic than I anticipated."
Ms. Austin, who has been a wheelchair user since 1996, developed the chair with help from dive experts and academics.
The model is powered by two dive propulsion vehicles and steered with a bespoke fin and foot-operated acrylic strip.
"When we started talking to people about it, engineers were saying it wouldn't work, the wheelchair would go into a spin, it was not designed to go through water - but I was sure it would," she told the BBC.
“In electrical engineering if I blow up something, I can buy another one and it’s no problem,” Hernandez-Rebollar says.
Watch these videos to see in more detail what Mr. Hernandez-Rebollar invented and how it went from being an invention where you can see the "guts" of the device to a slick product that has many applications.
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For Hernandez-Rebollar, this research is the combination of two of his passions: helping others and inventing new devices by experimenting with electronics. In high school, he was actually more interested in being a doctor or a lawyer. However, as time passed, he realized the benefits of an engineering career. “In electrical engineering if I blow up something, I can buy another one and it’s no problem,” Hernandez-Rebollar says. “It also doesn’t hurt to get paid to do something you enjoy,” he chuckles.(https://www2.gwu.edu/~bygeorge/041503/aslglove.html)
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Click here for a video of the inventor showing and explaining how the glove works. He was a Fulbright Scholar at George Washington University. He has worked as a professor at MU and at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics.
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