Technology.
	Shannon Matilda Lucid served as a mission specialist on four Space Shuttle flights, and was the only American woman to ever serve aboard the Soviet Space Station Mir. Thomas Alva Edison was granted 1,093 patents in his lifetime, with the best known being for the phonograph, the incandescent lightbulb, and the Kinetoscope. His lesser-known inventions include a stock ticker, an improved typewriter, and an electric vote-recording machine. The Kinetoscope was a motion picture viewing device developed by The Edison Laboratory and patented in 1891. It consisted of a wooden cabinet in which a loop of film passed through an electric lamp, shutter, and lens assembly that projected a series of still images in such a way as to give the appearance of motion. Alexander Graham Bell became interested in the electrical transmission of speech due to an interest in helping deaf people learn to speak. His experiments led to development of the telephone, for which he received a patent on March 7, 1876. Elias Howe patented a lockstitch sewing machine on September 10, 1846, and then spent ten years first trying to find a market for his machine and then fighting patent infringements. Floyd Bennett was the co-pilot on Richard Byrd's 1926 flight to the North Pole and back. He was helping to plan Byrd's flight to the South Pole when he died in 1928. The Eskimo Pie was invented by Christian K. Nelson in 1920, after he watched a boy have to choose between ice cream and a chocolate bar because he couldn't afford to buy both. Initially called an "I-Scream Bar," it was renamed "Eskimo Pie" by chocolate maker Russell Stover. The Vitascope was an early film projector developed by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat and demonstrated publicly for the first time in September of 1895 (the men called the machine a Phantoscope at the time). SPAM was created in 1937 as a way for Hormel to use leftover pork shoulder. By prominently featuring the brand name on the packaging and spending lavishly on advertising, it had achieved an 18 percent market share within a year. Its biggest boost came with World War II, during which American soldiers came to either love it or hate it. Henry Drushel Perky was a lawyer by training who developed a machine that could shred wheat and "weave" it into a "biscuit." Unable to interest anyone in his machine, he decided to sell the "biscuits" instead, and the Shredded Wheat cereal brand was born. Othmar Ammann earned great recognition as the designer and builder of the George Washington Bridge. He went on to design several other notable bridges, including the Triborough, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano-Narrows, as well as to oversee construction of the Hudson Tunnel. John Stevens demonstrated the first steamship built in America in 1804, and the first steam locomotive built in America in 1825. He also designed a bridge and underwater tunnel from Hoboken to New York, as well as an elevated railroad system for New York City. Hermann Julius Oberth became interested in rocketry at the age of 11, after reading Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon. By the time he was 14 he had developed a theoretical model for a "recoil rocket" that could propel itself through space by expelling exhaust gases from its base, as well as the concept of multi-stage rockets. William Congreve invented war rockets for Britain that helped inspire The Star-Spangled Banner. A very busy inventor, he also received patents for a canal lock and sluice, a method for manufacturing gunpowder, counterfeit-resistant bank-note paper, a steam engine, and many, many other devices. The Suez Canal is a 101-mile-long manmade waterway that connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea (via the Gulf of Suez), beginning at Port Said on the Mediterranean and ending at Suez on the Gulf. It averages 984 feet in width and can accomodate ships with a draft of up to 66 feet.