-Good morning, everyone.
Or -- I'm sorry -- good afternoon.
It's 12:00, and welcome to our student webinar today,
World War II Innovation and Problem Solving.
And before we get started,
y'all know I like to do a quick technology review.
So I'm actually gonna go ahead
and share my screen with you
so you can see exactly what I'm talking about.
So what you're seeing is what your window should look like,
or it should look very similar
to what you're seeing on the screen now,
and there are two very important things I want to highlight.
The first one is that box
that looks kind of like a little piece of paper.
That's our handouts section.
So before this webinar,
I did send to all registrants a copy of the teacher guide,
and that includes a really good essay
that was written by Rob here
and also some post-visit activities.
So if you didn't receive that --
If you maybe registered a little late,
or some of the e-mails bounced back to me
because I think they might have been typed in wrong
in the registration form, if you didn't receive that,
go ahead and click on the handouts box,
and you can download a copy of that now.
You can also e-mail me after the webinar
if you forget to do that before this is over,
and I can e-mail a copy to you.
The second big thing I want to point out
is the question section,
and this is actually what we're gonna use
for you all to communicate with us.
So anytime we ask a question, if you have a response,
we would love for you to type it in the "ask a question" box.
If you want to ask a question of us,
you can type that in there, as well,
and we also have someone behind the scenes
who's helping us with all of our technology inquiries.
So if you're having any issues with your connection,
you can type those into that box, as well,
and she will assist you to the best of her abilities,
but I can say the best way
to have the GoToWebinar software run
is to make sure that you have any extra windows
on your computer closed out.
And should you have issues --
I know everybody hates hearing this,
it's like a broken record from IT departments --
but usually if you restart,
turn your computer off or restart your computer
or simply log out of the GoToWebinar app and log back in,
that usually solves any issues that you may come across.
But again, any questions,
go ahead and type them into that "ask a question" box.
And I didn't introduce today's guest here,
but this is actually Rob Wallace,
and he is our STEM specialist
here at the National World War II Museum.
He knows all things science and engineering and technology.
Thank you for joining us today, Rob.
-I'm really super excited to be here.
-Yes, thanks,
and we're really excited about combining these two topics --
the history, the social studies,
and also that science that was used in World War II.
But are you ready to get started?
-Ready. -Okay.
So we want to start first with this question
that I'm going to throw up on your screens now.
And I apologize. My computer is moving very slowly today.
The question is, "What can we learn
from how people solved problems in the past?"
And, teachers, I would like for you
to get answers from your students,
and, again, you can go ahead
and type these into that question box,
because we would like to hear some of the responses
and read some of them live,
and right now it looks like
we're having some responses come in to us.
So let's go ahead and start taking a look at those.
So, we have some eighth-grade students who said,
"We can learn from people's mistakes."
That's a really --
-Mistakes are a very important way
that scientists and engineers learn.
If you don't make mistakes, you don't learn.
-Yes. I agree.
We always learn from our mistakes.
And, let's see, we have another class that said,
"We can learn how technology has changed over time."
And we're actually gonna talk
about some changes of technology next.
We have another group that is saying,
"We can see how society has changed."
That's a really great answer,
because as societies change,
so are the things that the societies are using.
-Yeah. Their technologies tell you
about the problems they were trying to solve.
So by looking at their technologies,
you can tell what kind of things they were trying to do.
-Yeah.
And let's see. We have another one.
"We can evolve through engineering."
That's a good answer. Yeah.
And we have another one coming in that says,
"We can see how people adapted to their environments."
That's another really good one.
These were great responses.
Thank y'all so much for sending these in.
The next slide I want to show you,
these are actually some objects that may be familiar to you,
because we know that we can learn so many things
from how people solved problems in the past,
but when we're talking about World War II,
we can also see how people used scientific inquiry
to make modifications to objects
in order to make them useful for the war effort.
And, Rob, what does that word "modification" actually mean?
-It's when you take something and you test it,
and then you change it based on the results of your testing.
So that's how scientists and engineers, especially engineers,
work through this circular process.
You make something.
You test it out, and you improve it.
-And I've actually put three modification examples
up on the screen here,
and I chose these three things because I felt like
they would be pretty familiar to students.
So I want to start with the biggest one,
the most colorful one there in the middle,
and those are actually track shoes.
And, Rob, can you tell us what the modification is here?
-Yeah, that's a shoe from 1968.
It was the first shoe that used Velcro as a closure,
and they were used in the 1968 Olympics by American athletes.
-And why was this modification so important or helpful?
-Well, I mean, if you're a sprinter or a runner,
you don't want to trip over your laces as they come undone.
You know, they're doing --
You can see they've got spikes on them.
Those are pretty intense shoes.
So if you're doing a high jump
or you're going over the hurdles,
you know, you want your shoes on really tight.
You want to be able to, maybe, change them fast.
So the Velcro closures were an adaptation for those purposes.
-And these shoes actually have a World War II connection.
These are actually made by the Puma company,
which is a German company.
There were two brothers who owned a shoe company in Germany,
and not that long after the war ended,
they actually had some infighting,
and they split up into two separate companies.
So Puma and another one y'all may be familiar with -- Adidas.
Okay. Let's take a look at the object
on the right-hand side of these shoes,
and that is a ballpoint pen.
So, Rob, can you talk to us about the modification here?
-So back at that time, they called that a Biro pen.
It was a ballpoint pen, and they called it a Biro pen because,
during World War II, a Hungarian guy named Biro
figured out how to make a ballpoint pen.
Now, the oldest pens were reeds that the Egyptians put ink in
and wrote on papyrus,
and in later years, people used pens
like you see in "Harry Potter."
They used a quill, but you have to dip it in the ink, right?
And then they made steel pens
also that you had to dip in the ink.
They made a modification to that called a fountain pen,
where you still had that little nib of a pen,
but you carried the ink along with you.
That was called a fountain pen,
but those have a habit of blowing up in your pocket
and making a big mess, ruining your shirts and your pants.
So that was big problem.
So the ballpoint pen is all enclosed.
There's no leakage, and so it was really a big innovation.
If you're in an airplane and you're a pilot
and you've got to add notes to a map, you know,
you can't be dipping your pen in ink, you know?
So it was a big innovation for World War II.
Now, of course, today there are all these fancy pens
that we use, but they're pretty much
all just different versions of ballpoint pens.
-And I have to say, I am biased.
I think that this is the most important one
that we have up on the screen for my life
because y'all can't see my desk right now,
but I probably have about 30 pens all over the place.
Rob can see them. I love pens.
-I'm a pen-obsessed person, too.
-I am a pen collector.
All right, let's take a look at the last object
that I know all of you students are very familiar with,
and this is a smartphone.
Rob, can you tell us what the modification is here?
-Well, it's in a long line of modifications.
I mean, the first iPhone was amazing, you know?
And I have an iPhone 8 now, and people complain
that it's not different enough to be cool,
but, you know, you think about, like, how much that has changed.
And so the first iPhone was really just an iPod,
a music player,
and a phone stuck together,
but if you go all the way back,
if you guys have seen an old, old movie --
I'm not talking old like I was a kid.
I'm talking old like it was old to me.
You know, you see those phones where you talk into it
and you go chka-chka-chka, hang the thing up, you know?
And you have to ask the operator to call the number for you,
and then later we dial with the rotary,
and then there's the cordless phones at home
and, you know, flip phones.
So the first cellphones,
you know, in the cars, they were huge.
So there's been a constant string of modifications,
and every time, you know, we build one better,
but the thing is, it's like we think about innovation
as a brand-new,
came-from-nowhere sort of thing, and it's not, really.
It's usually something that we've modified.
-And another really great thing
about the smartphone modification
is that now it's not just a phone.
Now it's like having a computer in your purse
or in your pocket.
-Yeah, before, a lot of people don't remember this
'cause they're not old like me,
but there used to be a thing called the PalmPilot,
and it didn't have a phone in it,
but it did all of that other stuff.
It had maps in it and it organized everything for you.
It had your calendar, but it didn't have a phone.
-Thank you, Rob.
So now that we've kind of discussed what modification is
and we've looked at some examples
that we're familiar with when it comes to modification,
I want to move on to the three A's
that we're gonna be discussing today,
because we're gonna be focusing
on three different types of modification
that were used during World War II,
and the first one is "adopt."
Rob, can you tell us what adopt means?
-Yeah, adopt means that you take something
that was made for one purpose and you use it for another.
So in this case, with World War II,
we're talking about civilian technologies,
things that people used in the regular world
that were adapted for military use, adopted for military use.
-And so to summarize that, when we adopt something,
we're just modifying the use of an object.
So we're taking something that has a use, right,
and we're just kind of using it for something else.
-Using it in a different way, yeah.
-Okay. So our next "A" is going to be "adapt."
-Adapt. -Tell us more about adapt.
-So adapt is when you're making more changes to it.
So you have an idea
or you have something that you start with,
but then you change it quite a bit.
You change it up so that it fits your purpose better.
-So when we adapt something, we're taking an object.
We're making modifications to its design
so that it's useful for another purpose.
-Right. -Okay, and then our last "A,"
our third "A," is "apply."
Tell us more about that one.
-So that's when we take knowledge that we've gained
by doing some basic research
and we make something useful from it.
So we learn something,
and then we use what we learned to make something.
-So when we apply, we're applying what we know
to make an object even more useful than it already is.
-Right, and these aren't mutually exclusive,
that, you know, a lot of things are gonna be blurred
in between the two or parts of two or more of these.
-And, Rob, we have a really good question
that came in from Kelly.
Kelly wants to know,
"Since they didn't have smartphones back then,
what did they use?"
-Well, that was one of the biggest changes
from World War I to World War II.
In World War I, if they wanted to send a message,
they actually used pigeons or something,
you know, or a guy on a horse.
And in World War II, they had radios that were reliable,
but they were really big.
I mean, a radio back then was the size of a generator today.
Or they also had phones that they could use
within a short range.
They could have a -- make a little phone network
that would go about 7 miles,
but they had to have actual wires
going from one phone to the other,
but other than that, it was radio.
-And before we move on, we have another
really good question about the ballpoint pens.
Vanessa wants to know if the ballpoint pens
that the soldiers were using to write letters home,
if the ink was waterproof.
-Yes, so, it was. And they actually used --
You know, it's a whole other topic,
but you can get into V-Mail,
where the soldiers would write the letters,
and then we would take photographs of it
and shrink it down onto film really small
and send that overseas 'cause it took a lot less energy
to send that film overseas and make a new letter
than to send the whole letter overseas.
-Thank you. All right.
So we just talked about the three A's,
adopt, adapt, and apply,
and what we are going to do with those three A's
is we're gonna take a trip
into some of the exhibits here at the museum
and we're gonna look at some of our macro artifacts,
and macro artifacts are big artifacts,
those huge things, okay?
And we're gonna look at how World War II innovators
used these three A's to achieve victory for the Allied powers,
and these three artifacts that we're gonna be looking at,
they actually represent some of the best innovations
for use on the land, in the sea, and also in the air.
And I want y'all to take a look at these three artifacts
and be thinking about which of the three A's
you think applies to each,
and you can go ahead
and type those responses into the question box,
and we'll be looking at them
while we're going through the next couple of segments, okay?
But we're gonna get started with this macro artifact here.
And we are actually going to go
into the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion
to learn a little bit more about it.
-Hey, guys, we're back in the museum
in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion.
Behind me is the C-47 Skytrain.
Now, this plane is actually pretty similar
to the commercial aircraft the DC-3.
The major additions were a cargo door,
strengthened floor, and hooks to pull gliders.
They were used during the war
for transport of troops and cargo.
About 10,000 were made by Douglas Aircraft during the war.
They typically had a crew of four and could carry 27 others.
This very aircraft flew paratroopers to France
on and just after D-Day.
C-47s delivered around 50,000 paratroopers
for the invasion of Normandy.
It also pulled the gliders that were very important
on D-Day and other actions.
The C-47 was powered by two of the famous
Pratt & Whitney Twin Wasp engines.
These radial engines have 14 cylinders
with 1,200 horsepower each.
The plane had a cruising speed of 160 miles per hour,
could fly at 26,000 feet
and go as far as 1,600 miles before refueling.
Like almost all other World War II aircraft,
it didn't have a pressurized cabin.
So it was very cold on board,
and the crew and passengers had to use oxygen masks.
-Okay, everyone.
So we're back, and we just took a look at --
Chrissy was telling us about that C-47 aircraft, okay?
And that C-47 aircraft, as she told us,
was a modified version of a commercial plane,
and when we're talking about -- Oop.
Looks like my screen is not sharing.
Let me pull that back up. Okay.
When we're talking about a commercial aircraft,
we're talking about those planes
that were used to transport average citizens just like us.
So think about whenever you go to the airport
with your families and you're going on a trip.
That's a commercial aircraft,
but what you're seeing in this picture here,
this is actually one of the commercial aircraft
that the C-47 was a modified version of.
This is that Douglas DC-3,
and in this picture, we actually see
that it's being used in a war film in 1943,
so while the war was actually going on.
And, Rob, can you discuss how this plane
was actually modified?
-There was very little that was changed about it.
They changed the seating inside
so that it could accommodate paratroopers
lined up along the two walls.
They changed the door so that it was a cargo door
instead of a swinging door like that,
and they put a hook at the back of it
so that it could pull gliders,
but other than that, it really didn't change very much at all.
They pretty much just used the same plane
for a different purpose.
-And this plane is very important.
These planes are most well-known, probably,
for being used in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.
-You come in the museum,
this is the first thing you see, pretty much,
when you come in the museum.
-So let's take a look at some of the people
who were actually on these planes.
So we actually had two American paratrooper groups
that were involved in the D-Day invasion of Normandy,
and their job was to parachute behind German lines
between midnight and about 3:00 a.m. on June 6th of 1944,
and they were instructed
to attempt to take roads and bridges
so that when the beach invasion started,
the Germans couldn't send out any reinforcements.
And one of those two American groups
was the 82nd Airborne Division,
and you can see that they're actually all standing
in front of a C-47.
And this isn't all of them.
This is just a very small group of them
because these planes, I mean, they're only so big.
They can only hold so many people.
-They held about 26 people.
-And let's take a look at the other American paratrooper group
that was out there, the 101st Airborne Division,
and in this photo, we're seeing that
they are actually sitting inside of that C-47,
and you talked about that modification that was --
-They're sitting on the side, so it's --
If you've got a 90-pound pack and a parachute,
you can't really sit in chairs like that.
So they put them like this.
-So in the question box,
I would like for y'all to type in how many of these C-47 planes
you think were actually used in the D-Day invasion of Normandy,
and I'll give you a little bit of background information.
So all in all, there were over 13,000 American paratroopers
who were dropped in to Normandy early morning
on June 6th of 1944.
So how many aircraft do you think were needed?
I'll give you a second here,
and then, Rob, can you go ahead and reveal the answer?
How many of these C-47s were actually used?
-These, over 1,000 of them.
So it seems like, if you do the math, they wouldn't need 1,000,
but remember that they had to drop all these guys
just in three hours,
and it took them a long time to fly back to England,
but also, some of them were using --
were pulling the gliders that dropped supplies
and Jeeps and big guns behind them, too.
So they used over 1,000 of these planes
just on that one day.
-So explain to us
why modification was so important
when we need over 1,000 planes.
-Well, I mean, in this case
we needed to make a lot really fast,
and so making it perfect,
making a lot of changes to it, starting from the ground up,
that would take a lot of time.
So, instead, finding a plane
that's really pretty much what you need
and making a couple tweaks to it --
That's a lot faster and easier.
-And the next image that I'm going to share with you all,
this is actually what all of these paratroopers dropping...
-That's a lot of parachutes. -...on D-Day
would have actually looked like,
and this is obviously not a D-Day picture
because those drops were made when it was dark outside,
but this is a really great example
of what people would have seen
if they looked up into the sky that night.
And if you look up at the top of this picture here,
you can actually see the silhouette of planes flying out.
And in the D-Day invasion of Normandy,
those planes were gonna have to fly out
and head back to the airfield
to collect even more paratroopers.
-Yeah, they picked guys up in England
and flew across the Channel and dropped them off
and then had to go back.
-All right, so now that we have discussed
the C-47 and the modifications,
we need to figure out which of the three A's
we think applies here,
and I'm gonna go back over what these mean.
So adopt is when we are modifying the use of an object,
and y'all can be typing in which one you think it is
into the box while I discuss these,
but when we adopt something,
we're taking something that already has a use, right,
and we're just using it for another purpose.
-Right. -Adapt.
When we adapt something, we're taking an object,
we're making some modifications to its design,
and we're making it useful for another purpose.
And apply.
When we apply, we're applying what we know
to make an object even more useful than it already is,
and I'm seeing some "adopts" coming in.
Let's see, "adapt," and then "apply" just came in.
Rob, can you reveal the answer to us?
-I could see where adapt is coming from,
but I would say adopt
because there is very little change
to the commercial aircraft.
It's pretty much just the DC-3 with a paint job
and some different seats.
-Okay. -So, pretty much,
we just used a commercial plane for another purpose.
-Okay. All right.
So we're going with adopt.
We are using a commercial plane for a military purpose now,
but I think we can definitely make an argument
for the other ones, like you said.
-Because you did some -- You made some adaptations.
You changed the seats.
You changed the door, but mostly --
I mean, like I said, they aren't mutually exclusive.
But it's primarily just taking a commercial plane,
and that's one of the reasons
why we can make these changes so quickly.
-All right, so we have discussed our first macro artifact,
the C-47.
Let's move on to our next macro artifact.
This is our second artifact of the day,
and I'm not gonna reveal what it is
'cause we're gonna have Chrissy
in the John E. Kushner Restoration Pavilion
STEM and Innovation Gallery explain that to us.
What a mouthful there with that name.
-Hey, guys.
We're back in the STEM Innovation Gallery,
and I'm standing by -- Well, you guessed it.
This is a World War II ambulance.
This was actually based on a Dodge truck,
and it could fit a driver, of course, a medic,
and up to seven patients.
It had a six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive,
and a four-speed transmission.
About 23,000 of these ambulances were made between 1942 and 1945.
Many were given to Allied militaries for use.
One thing that made this vehicle different
from all other World War II vehicles --
It had a heater.
During the 1930s,
medical scientists learned a lot about shock and trauma.
One of the things they learned was that patients in shock
needed to be kept warm.
That's why the ambulance has a heater and insulated sidewalls.
Other things medical scientists developed
in the years leading up to World War II
were antibiotics and freeze-dried blood plasma.
Medics on these ambulances
carried sulfa powder to fight infections
and freeze-dried plasma
that they can mix with bottles of sterile water to make I.V.s.
Toward the end of the war,
patients could also be treated with penicillin.
-The PowerPoint back up here for you.
So you can actually see an example of the Dodge truck
that this was actually modified from.
So we see that this is a civilian series
Dodge truck here from the 1940s,
and Dodge was really the biggest manufacturer
of those ambulances, right?
-Yeah. They were the only ones that made the ambulances.
-And we see that a lot of companies
during the World War II years,
they kind of halted what we call peacetime production,
which is the things that they were producing
while we weren't at war,
and they started making thing
specifically for the war effort, right?
-If you wanted a new car in 1942, you were out of luck.
They didn't make them anymore.
-So talk to us about the modifications
that were made to this vehicle to get it to that ambulance.
-So the main thing is, is that it was a panel truck.
So it had the whole back closed in,
and then, really importantly,
they added a heater and insulated sidewalls
so that it would stay warm in the back of that ambulance.
Now, in the 1930s, they had figured out
that when somebody's hurt really badly from trauma,
they are going into shock, and what we need to do to treat them
is we need to keep them warm, and we need to give them --
replace the blood that they've lost,
because what happens is they've lost blood
and so all their circulation stays in the core of their body.
They get really cold, and they have really low blood pressure.
So, by keeping them warm and by replacing the blood fluids,
we can help them out.
-So you talked about replacing blood fluids,
and that's actually what we see happening in the next image
that I'm gonna pull up on the screen here.
So what's actually happening in this image here?
-So he's actually giving him plasma, blood plasma.
So there's a lot of problems
with using blood in the battlefield.
One is that blood has to be typed,
so you have to know the soldier's type,
and you need to know the type of blood
and you need to have a whole bunch
of different kinds of types of blood
to make sure that you have a match,
and then blood has to be refrigerated
to be kept preserved,
and then you have to warm it up
because you can't give it to them refrigerated.
So that's just a big pain.
Now, they discovered in the 1930s
that you could give somebody plasma,
and so if you spin blood down
so that all the blood's on the bottom,
the top liquid,
the clear, kind of yellowish liquid at the top is plasma.
And they found that if you gave somebody blood plasma,
it was almost as good as blood,
and then they discovered that they could freeze-dry plasma.
So freeze-dried, it didn't have to be refrigerated.
So they shipped kits, medic kits over
that would have freeze-dried plasma.
-And I actually have a picture of those kits that,
while you're talking, I'll pull that up so they can see it.
-Okay. So they have a picture there of it,
and so you would open that up,
and so in one can was a glass jar --
they put them inside of cans so they wouldn't break --
of blood plasma, freeze-dried,
and one of sterile water.
They'd mix them together, shake it up just like Kool-Aid,
and then they could give a lifesaving blood transfusion.
-So you brought up a good point.
You said that one of these glass jars had water in it,
and that brings me back to that heater
that you said is inside the ambulance
because the European theater of the war,
it was fought in wintry conditions, right?
-Yeah. It's very cold a lot of times.
-If that water that was used to reconstitute the plasma
was frozen, what would happen?
-Right. They would --
You couldn't use it because you have to --
The injection, the transfusion
has to be really close to body temperature,
or you could make shock worse.
You could give the person hypothermia.
So, yeah, so the heated ambulance
would keep the patient warm,
but it could also keep the blood plasma warm.
-So the ambulance was really good for preventing shock
in two ways, really,
because it could keep your patients warm
while they're being transported,
but it could also prevent that water for your plasma kits
from freezing.
-Or getting really cold, yeah.
-And we have a question from Megan B.
Megan wants to know, "If you receive plasma,
would they still need a blood transfusion after that?"
-Yes, probably.
It depends on how bad things were,
but it gets up your blood fluid
so that you could still circulate it all around,
but it doesn't have blood cells in it,
and it doesn't have the platelets
that are gonna help you stop bleeding.
-And before we move on,
we have another really good question from Kelly again.
Kelly wants to know, "What would happen
if the wounded didn't receive the right type of blood?
How would it affect their system?
Would nothing happen, or would something happen?"
-Yeah, if you get a transfusion of the wrong type of blood,
you'll have a severe immune reaction,
and your body will attack those cells,
and you'd likely die.
-But this wasn't the case with plasma, right?
'Cause all the red blood cells were removed from the plasma.
-All the stuff that you could be allergic to
is down here in the bottom. -Okay.
-The blood cells and the platelets.
-And the next thing I want to share
is a picture of this doctor.
He's really important to this whole story.
Can you tell us more about who this is and why he's important?
-This is Dr. Charles Drew,
and when we were getting ready for the war --
We weren't in it yet,
but England was getting bombed every night in 1940.
We were collecting blood to send over there, blood drives,
'cause tens of thousands of British people in the cities
were killed, and many more were injured,
and so we're sending blood over there,
and Charles Drew was in charge of that effort
to get that blood and preserve it and send it over there,
so when we were getting ready
for getting into the war ourselves,
they put Charles Drew in charge of the process
of freeze-drying the blood and making these kits.
We couldn't have, like, every state doing it a different way.
We had to have one centralized way to collect the blood,
to process the blood into freeze-dried plasma,
and then to package it together,
and he was the guy in charge of all that huge effort,
and he was later in charge of the United States Red Cross,
and he actually resigned from that very important position
after the war because he was African-American,
and he was very concerned that the Red Cross
had a policy of giving blood
only to the same race as the person who gave it,
so if you were black, they would look for a black person's blood.
Now, biologically, it doesn't make a difference.
-Yeah, and that seems kind of counterproductive,
if you're trying to save lives, to separate the blood.
It is, so he said, "This is wrong," and he resigned.
It was a very honorable thing to do.
-And we have some -- Let me pull these questions out.
We're getting some really good questions about plasma,
so the first one that I saw here was from Jack,
and Jack wants to know how they get the plasma into the body.
So, Jack, I'm gonna share again this image of a soldier
actually in the European theater of the war
giving that plasma transfusion,
so it would be similar to a blood transfusion, right?
-Yeah. It's an I.V., just like a blood transfusion would be,
but it's just an I.V.
They stick it into a vein, and then they hang it,
and gravity pulls it down into your blood.
-And Aiden wants to know
if there are different types of plasma
just like there are different types of blood.
-Nowadays, we do have different types of plasma.
They might be enriched in this thing or that thing,
but back then, they just had one kind of plasma,
and they ended up stopping the use of plasma for a while
after World War II because they found
that they were accidentally transmitting hepatitis that way.
Hepatitis is a virus that, among other things,
attacks your liver.
They didn't know that much about viruses back then,
and they didn't know that this was gonna happen,
so when they found that it was happening,
they stopped using plasma transfusions for a while,
but they've found ways to take care of that now.
-And that actually answers Laurie's question a little bit,
who wanted to know, "Do we still use plasma today?"
And, Laurie, I can tell you that after World War II,
the United States military stopped using plasma
for the reasons Rob just told us.
They discovered that hepatitis was being transmitted to people,
but we saw that other countries, as science improved,
they started using plasma again,
and now I've seen quite a few articles
popping up within the past few years
where our military has actually started
using dried plasma again,
but right now I think the donations are still coming
from foreign countries.
But that brings us to another question that was,
"Where did the donated plasma come from?"
And it actually came from the people
that were here on the home front,
just regular Americans like you and me.
And we still see today
that people go out to the blood center,
and they donate blood to help their communities,
and that blood donation,
that's where the actual plasma comes from.
And whenever I was in college,
when all of my friends needed a little extra money,
they would donate their plasma, too.
-Yeah, they use plasma
for special medical conditions and stuff, too,
but, yeah, every time there's a big,
you know, natural disaster or something,
people go, and there's a blood drive, you know,
because injured people need the blood and blood products.
-And before we get to our adopt, adapt, apply,
which I'm gonna throw that up on the screen
so y'all can be typing in
what you think the ambulance is while I'm still talking,
we had one last question about plasma from Nathan,
who wanted know, "What color is the plasma?"
-It's kind of a clear, yellowish liquid.
You can --
We do a thing that looks just like plasma here.
We put tomato juice, and if you use V8 juice
and you spin it in a centrifuge, it looks a lot like blood,
and the stuff at the top looks a lot like plasma,
so we do that as a demonstration here.
-So let's go back to our adopt, adapt, apply,
so we want to hear --
We're talking about that Dodge ambulance,
and we want to hear whether you think it is adopt.
And remember, when we adopt something,
we're taking an object that has a use,
but we're using it for another purpose.
Adapt -- Adapt is when we take an object
and we make modifications to its design
to make it useful for another purpose.
And apply -- When we we apply,
we're applying what we know to make an object
even more useful than it already is.
And, oh, look, Tony said apply
with an exclamation point behind it.
We're getting a mix of everything.
We're getting, well, mostly "adapts" and "applies" here,
but, Rob, can you tell us what the answer is?
-So, I mean, I could see all of them, again,
but this is, like, use your ELA skills.
Like, what's the main point of this story?
And to me, the main point of this story is apply.
We learned about shock and trauma and how to treat people,
and we turned that into a new ambulance
and a system for getting people
the blood plasma that they needed,
so I would say apply
is what I would say is the label for this story.
-But again, like you said with the last -- the C-47 --
-I mean, we kind of adopted a truck,
and we adapted it to work,
but, like I said, the main theme is apply.
-Thank you very much, Rob,
and thank you all for your responses and --
-You guys are doing great. -Yeah.
Y'all are doing a great job, and I want to shout out
Betsy Almerico's students.
Hey. Thank y'all for watching.
All right, let's go on to our third
and final macro artifact for the day,
and it's this big behemoth that we see in front of us.
-It's a fun thing.
-So we're gonna go back into the STEM and Innovation Gallery
to hear from Chrissy one last time
about this particular innovation here.
-Hey, guys, this is Chrissy
in the STEM Innovation Gallery in the museum.
I'm standing here next to the LVT-4 Water Buffalo.
This is an amphibious armored vehicle
that was used to bring troops ashore
in the Pacific theater during World War II.
This version weighs about 16 1/2 tons and carries about 30.
It rides low in the water,
propelled only by the cups on the metal tracks.
In water, it goes no more than five miles per hour.
On land, it can go up to 25.
The original design for this came from
a hurricane rescue vehicle
designed by an inventor in Florida.
He called it the Alligator,
and the military version was often given that nickname.
It was modified for military use
and made by the Food Machinery Corporation,
who made agriculture equipment before the war.
About 8,500 of this model were made.
The tracks on these allowed them to cross the coral reefs
surrounding volcanic islands in the Pacific,
like Saipan and Iwo Jima,
and crawl ashore under fire with soldiers protected inside.
It has a door in the back so they can exit under cover.
-Chrissy brought up something very important
about this macro artifact that we call the LVT.
She said that it was originally designed
as a hurricane rescue vehicle,
so I want to talk a little bit about that
because we are actually here
on the Gulf Coast of the United States,
where we deal with the hurricane season
from June all the way through November, okay,
so this is a major weather issue affecting the entire Gulf Coast,
and, actually, the guy who invented the Alligator,
he was from Florida,
and I believe his grandfather
or his great-grandfather was also --
-Both his grandparents worked on building the Brooklyn Bridge.
-Yeah, so this was in his blood,
but he was living in Florida,
and he saw Florida get hit with terrible hurricanes
in 1926, 1928, 1932, and 1935.
So in 1933, this inventor, whose name was Donald Roebling,
he started working to design an amphibious tractor --
and amphibious, that means that it can go on the land
and also in the water --
to rescue victims of Florida's hurricanes
who were trapped in swampy areas,
and like Chrissy told us,
he called this invention the Alligator,
and I want to show y'all
what the Alligator actually looked like.
It was pretty cool, so it looks pretty similar to the LVT
that we showed you,
but the U.S. Marine Corps,
they actually came across this invention,
right, Rob, when they were searching
for a vehicle that could do what?
-Right. In 1935, there was a terrible hurricane.
They call it the Labor Day Hurricane of Florida,
and it killed hundreds of people,
and people got stuck, and some of them died
just 'cause they couldn't get rescued,
and so when they used this to rescue people,
they made a page of Life magazine,
which was the magazine everybody read back then.
It was a big magazine with pretty pictures.
They had lots of pictures of this.
This actually comes from that magazine,
and the military saw it and said,
"Hey, I think we can use something like that."
Now, they had landing vehicles, of course,
but the landing vehicles were wood,
so they knew if they needed to get across a coral reef
that the wood would get ripped apart by the coral.
Now, this thing gets propelled only by the tracks.
There's those cups on the tracks,
like Chrissy said, that push it through the water.
There's no propeller, so it was really good
for crawling across those coral reefs
and then getting to the rest of those islands,
because those islands are volcanoes
with the coral reef around it in a ring.
-Okay, so before we move on,
we just got a really good question from Alan,
who wants to know the difference between the Higgins boat
and the Alligator or the LVT.
-I'm so glad you asked.
So, a Higgins boat is like this,
and so it's actually a modified fishing boat,
so it's got a similar situation
where it's modified from a fishing boat.
The first one didn't have a door.
The second one, they put a door in it,
so the LVT is similar except that this gets the --
We don't have a propeller on it,
but the Higgins boat has a big propeller on it
that pushes it through the water,
and the LVT, it's those tracks going around
that scoop with their little cups
and push it through the water.
This is wood, and the LVT is steel.
-And I imagine the Higgins boat
went a little bit faster than the LVT.
-Went quite a bit faster.
This goes, like, up to 20, 25 miles an hour in the water.
That went five, you know?
This is pretty heavy, but the LVT weighs 16 1/2 tons.
-Wow, and that brings us to David's question.
David actually wants to know, "If it's so heavy,
how does it float in the water?"
-Do we have a picture of how low it floats?
-We don't. -Okay.
-You can kind of see it in that other shot, I think.
-In this one here, let's take a look.
-Yeah. Go back.
So they float really low,
and I think they showed it in the video.
-Yeah.
-So it floats really low in the water, like,
right at the top of the tracks,
and it's kind of a wet experience.
Since you're so low, it splashes a lot.
There's a little bit of leakage through that door
because it's metal on metal,
so it's kind of a wet experience,
but it does float even though it weighs 16 1/2 tons.
-It's a monster. -Yeah.
-I understand why they call it the Water Buffalo.
-If you want to know why it floats,
we have an old webinar called "What Floats Your Boat?"
You can look that one up.
-So this picture that I put up on the screen,
this one is actually pretty important to the LVT story
and also the World War II story as a whole because the Marines,
they actually used LVTs
to invade this island called Iwo Jima.
And Iwo had about three airfields,
and it was only about 700 miles from Japan,
and we were gonna launch some aerial attacks on Japan.
We needed our B-29 bombers to be able to head over there
and drop bombs,
so it was a really big deal
to get control of this teeny tiny little island
that was surrounded by coral and was a volcanic island, right?
-Yep, so we would say that the volcano,
Mount Suribachi there, was dormant,
which means it wasn't active,
but the whole island itself was active.
I mean, it's got this black sand that's from volcanic rock,
and so if you're coming up on the beach,
it's this black coarse sand, and the beach is hot.
This volcano produces steam.
It's got a lot of water coming up through it,
so it's, like, this foggy, hot, wet.
So imagine being some 19-year-old guy
from Kansas or Massachusetts,
and you're crawling up that beach.
Back then, they didn't know where volcanoes came from
or what caused them,
so that would've been really weird.
-And Rob mentioned Mount Suribachi,
which is that mountain kind of in the distance there,
and that was the highest point on this teeny tiny little island
that was only four miles long at its longest point
and about two miles wide at its widest point.
Mount Suribachi was about 528 feet high,
and the reason why I wanted to point this out
is because many of you have probably seen this image.
This image is actually on top of Mount Suribachi.
This was taken on February 23rd of 1945,
and we see six Marines raising the United States flag,
and this was taken by a photographer
named Joe Rosenthal.
And to give you a little perspective,
the Battle of Iwo Jima,
these LVTs start pulling in on about February 19th.
This flag was raised on February 23rd.
But the battle did not completely end.
Like, we didn't take this full island until March 26th,
so this battle was, like, a month long, right?
And this image is so important because it became kind of, like,
a rallying cry here in the United States of America.
This was actually a propaganda poster
that was used to raise money for war bonds,
but people, they saw this image here in the United States,
and they became more motivated,
and they got excited 'cause they were like,
"The war feels like it's almost over."
And just interesting fact about this image,
there are six guys who were identified as raising this flag,
but one had actually been misidentified
until not that long ago.
We originally thought that John Bradley was a part of this,
but some history buffs, like,
I think they were just amateur researchers doing it for fun,
they realized that the sixth guy
was actually a man named Harold Schultz.
So let's see if we have any more questions about the LVT here.
I think we had one. Somebody --
Sophia asked if we still use these today in hurricanes.
I haven't seen that.
-We don't use them in hurricanes.
The military uses something today they call an AMTRAC,
which is basically the same thing,
or a Bradley they used in Vietnam.
They're actually made by the same company,
the Food Manufacturing Corporation
that Chrissy mentioned in the video.
They still made those for Vietnam War.
-Okay, so maybe, like, a modified version of the LVT
still being used today.
And that brings us back to the three A's here,
so type in your answers
while I'm reviewing what these mean.
Remember, adopt is when we take something that has a use
but we use it for another purpose.
Adapt -- When we adapt something,
we are taking an object
and making modifications to its design
to make it useful for another purpose.
And apply -- When we apply,
we're applying what we know to make an object
even more useful than it already is.
And we're getting some answers in,
and it's looks like right now everybody is saying adapt.
So, Rob, can you reveal the answer?
-Yeah, I would definitely say adapt
'cause we took this idea of the thing that Roebling made,
and we said, "That concept works,
but we really need to make some changes to it.
Roebling's thing was made of aluminum.
We need to make it heavier and stronger,"
and so that's what they did.
They adapted it, so I think you guys get the concept
really, really good.
-And to wrap this up
before we go to our final Q&A session,
Rob, I'd like you to really elaborate on why modification
was so important for the United States,
for us to be successful in this war.
-Right, so first of all,
modification is just what engineers and scientists do.
You come up with an idea. You test it out.
You make it better. You test it out.
You make it better until you run out of money.
It's just what you do, but second of all,
like we say in the essay,
we had to get ready for this war really, really quickly.
We were starting in 1939, 1940 to get ready but very slowly.
You know, when we got into the war,
when the Japanese kind of
pulled us into the war with Pearl Harbor,
we definitely were not prepared for what was to come,
but we won, and we did it
because we just made a lot of stuff,
and that's a big part of it.
There were brave people, and people worked hard,
but a lot of it was that we just made a lot of stuff,
and we did it by being really smart about production,
and part of that means not starting from scratch,
but taking what you have
and modifying it or making it better.
-Thank you, Rob, and the last thing I want to discuss
before we answer the rest of these questions that we have,
we do have two activities
that Rob has prepared for your students.
And can you tell us a little bit more about what they are?
-Yeah, so one of them is just practicing
that iterative process
of testing and modifying and testing and modifying.
You're gonna make paper airplanes,
and you're gonna test them, and then you're gonna decide,
"Do I want to make it go further?
Do I want to make it go faster?
Do I want to make it carry more?"
And you're gonna try to make some tweaks to it
and test it out to see how it does
and keep doing that over and over again
until you get a better airplane.
The second one is about the assembly-line process.
Now, we think of modifying things,
but we don't always think about modifying processes.
The assembly-line process is a thing itself
that could be modified,
and so in this case, what you're gonna do
is you're gonna use ballpoint pens to make an assembly line.
You're gonna take these clickable ballpoint pens apart
and see if you can put them together quickly
with an assembly line,
and then you're gonna modify your assembly line
and try faster and faster to put it together,
and so those two are provided
with the lessons that we handed out.
-And, teachers, if y'all do the activities,
we would love for you to tweet pictures to us,
and I have that included in the teacher guide,
but our Twitter handle is @wwiieducation,
and again, that's included in your guide,
so you don't have to write that down now.
And then this is for the teachers.
If you liked Rob
and you found him informative and entertaining,
you need sign up for Real World Science.
Rob, tell them what that is.
-So if you are here, close by in Louisiana,
you can bring your students on a STEM field trip
into the STEM Innovation Gallery,
but whether you are or are not, if you are a fifth-,
sixth-, seventh-, or eighth-grade teacher,
you can come to Real World Science.
If part of your day is teaching science,
I want you to come be one of 28 people to come to the museum.
You're gonna spend a week
learning how to do hands-on activities like this,
figuring out why boats float using Higgins boats
and going to LIGO,
which is where they figured out
how to measure gravitational waves.
It's a great week, and we pretty much pay for everything.
Come down here, spend a week, have a great time,
get 200 pages of lessons
and activities and readings for your students.
-And you can find the information for this
on our website.
If you can't find it, just send me an e-mail,
and I can e-mail the direct link to you.
-It's nationalww2museum.org /realworldscience,
all one word.
-Okay, so we have a few minutes left.
I want to get to some of these last questions.
Mike wants to know if you have a favorite book
about World War II problem solving.
-You know, there's a lot of great books.
One book that's good for students at this age level
that I really like is "Bomb" by Steve Sheinkin,
and we actually did a webinar last year with him,
and he talks about all the problems that they solved to --
This is the book. It's a great book.
It has really good descriptions of nuclear power
and how it worked and how the bomb worked.
It's very kind of exciting because there's at the same time
this espionage story
about people stealing the Manhattan Project story.
You can go back in history
and see the recording of that webinar if you want,
but that's a really good book.
I give it to all the teachers,
a copy to all the teachers in Real World Science.
I think for this age level, that's my favorite book
about World War II problem solving.
-Okay. Devin wants to know if the United States
had better technology than other countries.
-You know, to some extent, I would say that yes and no.
Our radar was way better than the German or the Japanese,
but, like, for example, their tanks were way better than ours.
-And the British and the Germans,
they had jet aircraft, right?
-They had jet aircraft. We still had that --
So one of our solutions, again, was that, you know --
Sometimes they had better tech than we did, but we made --
Like, with the Panzers,
people like to talk about their Panzer tanks,
the German Panzer tanks were way better than ours,
but we made a lot more of them.
-All right, Rainier High School wants to know
about any additional plane technology from World War II,
and I just mentioned the jet engines,
but was there anything else?
-Superchargers, so for planes to be able to go up
really high in the atmosphere,
there's not a lot of air pressure up there,
and so a supercharger takes the exhaust
and uses it to drive a fan to blow air into your engine.
Today, you'll see cars that are turbocharged.
That's a modification of a supercharger.
That was one.
The B-29 had a pressurized cabin.
Everybody else, you know, they were just up there really cold
and breathing through an air mask.
Is that Rainier in, like, Washington?
-I thought they said they were Oregon.
Let me see. -In Oregon? Okay.
-Well, while we wait for Chrissy to get us that answer,
let's see -- Kelly with another really good question.
"Were women allowed to join the war?
Did they help build these weapons?"
-Well, definitely women were involved in building.
You know, Rosie was famous,
but lots and lots of women were on assembly lines,
but also, there were women that trained pilots
because they were really good.
They were really good pilots themselves,
and they weren't necessarily able to fly in combat,
but they flew planes to and from landing strips,
you know, to transport them around,
and they also trained pilots,
and they learned how to do radar,
and then they turned around and taught pilots
and other guys how to do radar.
-All right, and our last question,
'cause I see we have people leaving the room,
and it is about one minute after our time.
This one comes from Emily, and Emily wants to know
what recycled product the military used the most,
and I don't know if we know the exact answer.
But if I had to make a guess,
I would think that rubber was probably really big on the list
because we didn't have access
to the rubber plants out in the Pacific
because our enemy, Japan,
they had control of all the islands in the Pacific.
They were kind of controlling the seas out there.
-We also made a lot of gunpowder
from recycled waste fats,
so that might be a big one, too, 'cause all those munitions,
a lot of them were made from recycled waste fats.
-Yeah, so -- -But everything was recycled.
I mean, the boxes that they put bombs in, the paper,
like, we were really into recycling back then.
Let's do it again.
-Well, thank y'all so much for joining us today.
This was a lot of fun.
Thank you for, you know, interacting with us so much.
It made it that much better.
-We were really busy.
-And, Rob, thank you so much for being here
and sharing your expertise.
Thank you, Chrissy, for giving us that information
in the galleries,
and thank you again to everyone.
We hope you enjoy the rest of your week,
and we'll see you next time.
-Stay in touch. -Bye.