Here are some more interesting questions from last week.
On Monday a young man from Gregory Terrace asked about a rubbish tip in Mexico that can be seen from outer space.
There is a rubbish dump in mexico (see picture) which is eight miles long and one mile wide and is home to hundreds of foragers called pepenadores (garbage people). These people live work and play there and they even have a church built on the rubbish. However, it is not visible from space.
One of the biggest rubbish dumps in the world was the rubbish dump of New York known as the Fresh Kills Rubbish Dump located on Staten Island. The dump is now closed but not before it had accumulated over 100 years worth of rubbish. A lot of the rubble from 9/11 was dumped there and unfortunately it has become the last resting ground for many of the victims whose bodies were not recovered. Families of these people have been fighting for years to have the rubbish searched for remains. The rubbish dump area is the size of Wales and 30 metres high and could be seen from space. It is now being turned into parkland (3 times the size of central park) with a memorial for the 9/11 victims.
The world's largest rubbish dump isn't a conventional rubbish dump like those mentioned above, but it is a soup of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean. It stretches from Hawaii to Japan and the plastic debris is held in place by swirling ocean currents. This plastic soup sea is twice the size of the USA. Gross!!
On Friday Emily asked us about the very first vacuum cleaner. She wanted to know if it was so big it had to be pulled by horses, just how big exactly was it?
Nice question! This vacuum cleaner, invented by Hubert Cecil Booth in 1901 was so large that it's vacuum, pump and motor were housed in a horse drawn cart from which a 100 foot hose was extended and snaked into the house. See picture to the right. It was the size of a horse drawn milk float and took 4-6 people to operate it. See a picture of a milk float below.
The reason it was so large is because many homes at that time were not wired for electricity and the machine had a coal or oil powered generator which had to travel with it. As you can imagine it would have been very loud. Thankfully with the progression of electricity into homes, smaller vacuum cleaners were invented.
Queen Victoria used to have her carpets cleaned with one of these machines and the upper class would invite their friends over for vacuum parties. Amazing the things they did before tupperware!
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