History of Woodworking

[HeyBub]

Ever know a cat that didn't want to get on the other side of a closed door?

While trying to avoid the plague of 1666, Isaac Newton decamped to Woolsthorpe. While there, he developed the Calculus but his work was continually interrupted by his cat fussing to be on the other side of the door to Newton's study.

Newton summoned a carpenter and had him cut a hole in the door which Newton covered with a piece of canvas.

So, in addition to inventing the Calculus, discovering the Law of Universal Gravitation and the Three Laws of Motion, inventing the first refracting telescope, and being responsible for many other scientific advancements, we can all be grateful for his contribution to human and animal tranquillity:

THE CAT DOOR

Thank you Sir Isaac.

[Gerald Ross]

When I was growing up on the farm, we had a cat hole in the kitchen door. Or we did until the day my Mom discovered a huge rat snake reclining on the kitchen cabinet. Hard to say which was the most surprised, but Mom was the loudest.

[Leon]

Yeah, he got the idea after seeing the "doggy door".

[willshak]

HeyBub wrote the following:

Not just for cats.

[GROVER]

Newton invented the "reflecting" telescope, not the "refracting" type. I built a 6" Newtonian (reflecting) telescope at the Hayen Planetarium (In NYC)many moons ago. It was a not to be forgotten experience, polishing the mirror blank and parabolizing it using the wave lengths of light. I haul it out on rare occasions and look at the moons of Jupiter (as per Galileo) and the rings of Saturn. JoeG

[J. Clarke]

I put the cat door in a window with a couple of long steps needing a long jump that a cat could negotiate with ease but that were beyond snakes and the like. Worked fine--only critters other than cats that ever came through it were carried by the cats, and they were usually but not always hors d'combat by the time they came in.

[HeyBub]

Arghhh! My bad. My really bad. Inexcusable for someone who used to be a proctor in the Astronomy department.

Now the observatory at the University of Texas had the world's seventh-largest REFRACTING (finally got it right) telescope. Some years back, the grad students fixed the mounts so it would point below the horizon. We couldn't see the girl's dorm because the Home Ec building was in the way, but the Villa Capri Motor Hotel, seven miles away was a different story.

[whit3rd]

But the most visible of his contributions is on the rims of the dimes and quarters in your pocket: milled coin edges was a Newton invention, too.