This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Steve Mursky. Got a minute?

Quote, it was destined to be the mother of machines, end quote Daniel Borston talks about in his 1983 book The Discoverers is the Clock.

Borston, who served as the director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution,

went on to write, quote,

The clock broke down the walls between kinds of knowledge, ingenuity, and skill,

and clockmakers were the first consciously to apply the theories of mechanics and physics

to the making of machines.

Clockmakers became the pioneer scientific instrument makers."

End quote.

It's therefore particularly ironic that 14-year-old Ahmed Muhammad got yanked out of his Texas

ninth grade classroom September 14th, handcuffed, interrogated, and eventually suspended

for having brought to school a clock he'd built himself,

because the adults present thought it could be a bomb.

Hey, it was sticking, wasn't it, this recapitulation of the work that helped make the modern science-driven world?

Of course, things have worked out okay.

Muhammad is going to transfer to a less easily startled school.

The president invited him to the White House, and he's been asked to attend the Google

Science Fair taking place during the next few days in California.

Scientific American is one of the sponsors.

Back to Borston. He concludes his 1973 book The Americans the Democratic

experience with these lines quote the atomic bomb along with the space

adventure and a thousand lesser daily demonstrations,

...