Welcome to Spring Time

by Bob Welland, Kids Section Editor

Everyone loves Spring Time, when we appreciate the bouncy coils inside mattresses, pogo sticks and cars’ suspensions. Squeeze them or stretch them, they always come back, like a season of the year. Let’s expand our minds and celebrate springs big and small.

Big Springs

The famous spring toy, the Slinky, was invented 83 years ago. The world’s largest Slinky, located in Oaks, Pennsylvania, is 4 f

eet in diameter and can stretch to 100 feet long.

Skyscrapers are so tall that side-to-side motion from wind or earthquakes can cause major damage or even collapse. One solution is mass dampeners. On a high floor, a block weighing hundreds of tons is attached to big springs. If the building sways one direction, the springs let the heavy block stay mostly in place. This creates an opposite force that reduces the building’s movement.

Small Springs

Click! Retractable ballpoint pens were a big hit when they came out in the 1950s because you didn’t need to fiddle with a cap. There’s a little spring inside that’s only an inch long. But can we go smaller? Yes.

Your phone knows when you hold it in portrait or landscape because of a tiny device called an accelerometer. A microscopic weight is held by elastic silicon beams. The beams are not coiled, but they are springs that bend when you move your phone. They’re 30 times thinner than a human hair.

Let’s go 1,000 times even smaller! The DNA inside your cells are in a shape called a double-helix. That’s a spring! This saves a lot of space. If you straightened out a chromosome, it would be 10,000 times longer. Its springiness allows it to be unzipped as needed to keep your cells working. With trillions of them in your body, it’s Spring Time all year round.