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Grade 9 ELAPre-Assessment

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GRADE 9 | ELA | Pre-Assessment

Argument Essay: The Ingredients of a Successful InventionContext: Thousands of inventions are patented each year, but only a few achieve lasting success. Most fade quickly from memory or are replaced, in time, by something bigger, better, faster, or cheaper—if they even make it out of the inventor’s workshop and into the marketplace and the world.

Task: Read Therese Oneill’s article “Don’t Change a Thing” about timeless inventions, and Jessica Guynn’s obituary of Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse and envisioned the desktop computer environment. As you read, consider possible elements of a successful invention; for example, usefulness. Using evidence from the texts to support your answer, write an argument essay responding to the prompt below.

What are the top two criteria for a successful invention?

Prompt

In your essay, be sure to

• establish a precise and credible position that responds appropriately to the prompt.

• explain your position with claim(s), reasons, and evidence from the texts.

• analyze explicit ideas/information from texts and interpret the authors’ meaning and purpose.

• refer to sources when appropriate.

• discuss and respond to counterclaim(s) or alternate claims and/or evidence.

• represent content from reading materials accurately.

• order ideas and information within and across paragraphs and use appropriate transitional words/phrases in a way that allows the audience to follow the argument.

• include a conclusion that supports the position.

• use language and tone appropriate to the audience and purpose.

• demonstrate a command of standard English conventions.

Guidelines

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Text 1

aesthetic (adjective) relating to beauty or what is beautiful laminated (adjective) covered in a thin layer of material, usually thin plastic

from “Don’t Change a Thing: 6 Inventions That Never Needed Updating”

by Therese Oneill

If someone presented you with an original 1868 Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, and told you to write your senior thesis using it, you’d be in for a world of pain. The speed you type with on your close-set keys would be gone, and most of your fingers would be too weak to give the keys the sharp strike they required. Plus, you couldn’t even see the paper. The machine you use to type today, even if it’s not a computer, has been so greatly improved over the original invention that they are no longer the same device.

Constant improvement is what we do. So how amazing is it that there exist a handful of objects that, though they be 100 years old or more, are still perfect? Sure, there may have been aesthetic changes over time; maybe you can buy a version made of plastic or enhanced with new manufacturing technology. But if you were given the original product, you’d still be able to use it for the job it was made for. Here are six inventions done so well the first time that they never needed improving.

1. BUBBLE WRAPIn the late 1950s, Alfred Fielding and Marc

Chavannes had a brilliant idea, perfectly suited to the aesthetic of Space Age design: plastic, three-dimensional, tactile wallpaper! For only the heppest of cats to decorate their swinging pads with! Sadly, sealing together two plastic shower curtains with air trapped inside just didn’t have the trendsetting effect they were hoping for. So, like many good innovators, they turned their bust into brilliance by simply changing their goal. Forget wallpaper. In 1964 they patented their “Method for Making Laminated Cushioning Material.”

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provenance (noun) origin, source

2. ROCKING CHAIRSRocking chairs are not as old as you may think. They are an American invention, though

probably not invented by Ben Franklin, as some people say. They started showing up in the early 18th century, and were popular with people suffering maladies, like bad backs or “a toucha the rheumatiz.” It wasn’t just the soothing rocking motion that made people feel better. Rocking chairs automatically adjust their center of balance to whoever sits in them, bringing each sitter to a uniquely comfortable position.

3. THE PAPER CLIPThe advent of easily manipulated wire blessed the world with enough prospective paper

clip designs to create a new hieroglyphic language. The designs that flooded the patent office at the end of the 19th century included swirls, wings, triangles, pretzels, and every imaginable shape you can think of. All of them were patented, except the one we’ve been using for 100 years. The standard oblong “Gem” design, of arguable provenance, was the one that took hold, banishing all other designs to the junk drawer of history.

4. THE TEAPOTArcheologists think teapots were developed during the Yuan Dynasty, which started in

1279. They were made of clay and likely evolved as a kind of drinking multi-tool. You could heat, brew, keep warm, and drink the tea with the same object. (It’s thought that original teapots were single serving, with the drinker sipping directly from the spout.) Today you can buy a teapot made of paper (don’t) or titanium, but that simple, perfect design of handle, lid, and spout has remained unchanged.

5. FLYSWATTERA stick. A mesh square. A brain-damaged fly who has hit

its head on the window so many times it is now slow enough that you can actually hit it. Perfection. The “Fly Killer” was patented in 1900 by Robert Montgomery, but he didn’t do much with it. It was a public health worker, Dr. Samuel Crumbine, who popularized it in 1905. He was trying to encourage people in Kansas to kill flies whenever possible to stop the spread of disease. So he borrowed the Topeka softball team’s “swat the ball!” chant and changed it to “swat the fly!” No poorly made bug sucker gun or gross flypaper strip has ever rivaled the popularity of the flyswatter. Because people never outgrow the thrill of smacking things with a stick.

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Text 1

6. THE MOUSETRAPI am a woman made of stern stuff. But show

me a squashed mouse inside a spring-loaded trap and I will fall to pieces, flapping my hands and making mewling noises that linger somewhere between pity and disgust. There was a time that the luxury of freaking out over a mouse didn’t exist. They were vermin: a threat to health, children, and food supplies. William C. Hooker’s invention of the spring-loaded mousetrap in 1894 was a blessing upon all of civilized man, superior even to a housecat because no chase or chance was involved. In 1903, John Mast improved on Hooker’s design by making it safer to load and less finger fracturing. It’s his design we still use today.

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punch card (noun) a card in which holes are punched in designated positions to represent data

Text 2

from “Douglas Engelbart Dies at Age 88; Computer Visionary”

by Jessica Guynn

Douglas Carl Engelbart, who in the 1960s envisioned the power of interconnected computers to accelerate the pursuit of knowledge and solve the world’s increasingly complex problems, laying the foundation for the modern computing age and the Internet, died in his sleep at his home in Atherton, Calif., on Tuesday night. He was 88.

For years, many in the scientific community dismissed Engelbart’s revolutionary vision that would bring computers—then bulky machines operated by engineers and fed data on punch cards—into the digital age and into homes and offices the world over. His team of researchers toiled in relative obscurity until 1968, when Engelbart gave an hour-long presentation to leading technologists in San Francisco that telegraphed the future of computing.

In what technology author Steven Levy dubbed “the mother of all demos,” Engelbart demonstrated what could happen when computers talk to one another, showcasing innovations such as word processing, collaborative editing, hypertext links, video conferencing, and desktop windows—13 years before the IBM personal computer and 15 years before the Macintosh.

It was also the world debut of the computer mouse, an idea driven by Engelbart’s own desire for a handy device to interact with his computer screen. He and William English, a fellow engineer at the Stanford Research Institute, devised a wooden contraption that rolled on metal wheels and connected to the desktop with a cord that resembled the tail of a mouse. Apple’s Steve Jobs would later turn the mouse into a huge commercial success, rolling it out to the masses in 1983 with the Lisa computer.

Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak credits Engelbart and his landmark 1962 paper, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework”—a blueprint for how technology can harness information and help people collaborate with one another—“for everything we have in the way computers work today.” The paper earned Engelbart funding from the Defense Department.

“What he did was absolutely brilliant and so far ahead of its time back then,” Wozniak said. “He saw where the future was going to go.”

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Engelbart’s work inspired generations of scientists and was deployed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Jobs to power their companies and fortunes.

Yet Engelbart never shared in those riches, nor did he ever become a household name. He did not receive royalties for the mouse, which the research institute patented and later licensed to Apple, and, in later years, he struggled to get funding for his research, fading into the annals of computing history.

Levy, author of Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything, remembers visiting Engelbart in small offices half a block from where Apple was developing the Lisa and Macintosh computers.

“He was in the shadow of the people who would get credit for his ideas and make billions of dollars from them,” Levy said.

Longtime friend Howard Rheingold said he paid a visit to Engelbart after a contractor had botched the remodel of his home near Stanford University. For years Engelbart, who lived next door to some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest, could not afford to fix the pervasive damage. Thick metal cables bolted to the studs stretched across the living room to hold up the walls, and some parts of the house could not be used.

Yet it was his struggles to get funding for his research that troubled Engelbart.

“He wanted to help people solve problems, and he saw the world as having very significant problems. That is not something you can get a patent on, start a company or make a fortune on,” said Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. “Bill Gates’s vision was a computer on every desk running Microsoft software. Doug had a much larger humanitarian vision.”

Engelbart was born Jan. 30, 1925, in Portland, Ore. He enrolled at Oregon State University but was drafted into the Navy before he graduated. While stationed as a radar technician in the Philippines in 1945, he read an article in the Atlantic Monthly by presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush that urged scientists to make knowledge more accessible. Inspired, Engelbart resolved to pursue a career in computer science.

After the war, he returned to Oregon State and received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1948. In 1955, he got a doctorate in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

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Text 2

domain name (noun) the characters (such as Whitehouse.gov) that form the main part of an Internet address

Engelbart joined the Stanford Research Institute in 1957 as a researcher. In the early 1960s, he led a team developing tools for interactive computing. Within SRI, he founded the Augmentation Research Center, which was funded by the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the Defense Department.

In the early 1970s, his laboratory was one of those that hosted the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet. It also hosted the Network Information Center, which would eventually become officially responsible for doling out Internet domain names.

For all of his work to promote collaboration, Engelbart was known in the industry as a control freak, and many of his colleagues eventually moved on to new research centers such as Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and to companies such as Apple to develop his ideas for the mainstream.

DARPA funding began to dry up, and, in the late 1970s, Engelbart’s research group was bought by a company called Tymshare. It was sold again in the early 1980s to defense contractor McDonnell Douglas.

In 1989, Engelbart created the Bootstrap Institute with his daughter Christina. The organization gave management seminars and received DARPA funding to do some work for the military. In 2000, Engelbart received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Engelbart retired in 2008, and the organization is now known as the Doug Engelbart Institute.

Friends say he never lost his playful sense of humor, even after his first wife, Ballard, died in 1997 after 46 years of marriage. It was a long-running family joke that he used to give her science lectures when she had trouble sleeping. He also made up science-fiction stories to entertain his kids.

He is survived by his second wife, writer and producer Karen O’Leary Engelbart, whom he married in 2008; daughters Gerda, Diana, and Christina; a son, Norman; and nine grandchildren.

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