What is the Principle of Leverage?

Who said, "Give me a lever and I will move the world"?

Archimedes!

Actually, I think he said, "Give me a fulcrum, not a lever"!

Don't you think the lever is an interesting device? 

When I was a child, we used to use seesaws in the playgrounds, there was a type of lever with equal arms, I don't know if they are in the playgrounds now, they probably do it now.

How easily we can move the weights that we normally cannot move with the help of a lever, we can even lift them from their places.

In fact, the formula of the event is simple, the forces applied to the ends of the force arms and the force arms in the levers are inversely proportional, the longer the arm, the less force you spend, the shorter the arm, the more load you lift.

What I call the force arm is the name given to the distance from the support, that is, the fulcrum, to which the force is applied.

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I wonder if nature uses a leverage system?

Yes, we do. 

All our joints work on this principle. 

However, in many of our joints, the system has evolved to work in reverse. In other words, we apply force from the short arm part, not from the long arm part, in many of our joints.

For example, in our legs, the muscles attached to our thigh bone have to produce a lot of force in order to move our leg. Because the distance where the muscles are connected to the bone is the short end of the lever. 

But our anatomical structure is forced to do this, otherwise it would not be possible to move a limb that extends further away from the body.

But look at the jawbone, it's the other way round. 

With our teeth we can exert a lot of force to break food into pieces. This is because the connection of our jaw muscles to the jawbone is in a much more favourable position according to the lever rule.

5 tonnes! Yes, a healthy adult can exert this amount of force on food with their teeth. In other words, the impact of a tight bite on the food by the teeth is quite high.

The working principle of muscles is very complicated, but I can say that a lever-like system works in muscles. The contraction movement is carried out by electrical stimulation and some chemical reactions through the sliding fibres in the structure of the muscles.

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Let's look at movements that don't involve muscles as we know them. The world of insects.

A grasshopper can jump quite high, how is that possible?

Actually, I say that insects don't have muscles as we know them, but insects have muscles of their own. 

Their joints have evolved as an exoskeleton with muscle connections from the inside, instead of a skeleton surrounded by muscles from the outside as in the animal kingdom.

The joints of the exoskeleton developed with this chitin main substance move with a lever-like principle with strong muscles, especially in locusts. 

However, especially in grasshoppers, these contractions are like a spring with a sudden power discharge, so a grasshopper can jump quite high.

In fact, the insect world contains many species and the insect family is the oldest family in the living world. Many insects have remained the same since ancient times.

So their evolution is quite slow compared to other living things. 

Because of their exoskeletons that protect them from external factors and their high reproductive capacity, it seems that they do not need to evolve differently. 

Moreover, they are a good source of food for many creatures on the planet. 

Therefore, in order to preserve their species, they have evolved to a certain extent and many different species have evolved in the insect world.

Since our subject is leverage and leverage applications in nature, I will briefly close the subject of insects by stating that leverage is also in use in the insect world.

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Yes, as a civil engineer, I have enough knowledge on structural statics due to my education. Leverage systems are also systems compatible with static calculations.

Although civil engineering is considered more as static calculation work because buildings seem to stand where they stand, in fact, nothing in nature, including buildings, does not stand where it stands. Naturally, lever systems are not static systems, they are dynamic systems.

Dynamic, that is, systems associated with movement are time-related systems.

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In other words, when Archimedes said, "Give me a fulcrum and I will move the earth," he did not say how long it would take.

Moreover, he did not know exactly how much power was needed at that time to move a mass like the earth.

I don't know if he found the lever in the bathhouse, but it is known that the lever was already used in Ancient Egypt long before 287 BC - 212 BC. 

It is not possible to build those gigantic pyramids by stacking huge stones of so much weight on top of each other in any other way.

What Archimedes did was actually only to put forward the calculation principles of the system. 

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By the way, Archimedes was actually a philosopher and engineer famous for his discovery of buoyancy while bathing in a public bath. 

Another little known invention of his, but very useful in his time, is the ability of sunlight reflected by a concave mirror to burn distant objects. Archimedes discovered that it was possible to burn enemy ships by this means and this invention was very useful for the protection of the city in his time.

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Today, the principle of leverage, which we use in many hand tools such as pliers, scissors, pliers, has entered our lives even in the financial world. Leverage is present in almost every aspect of our lives, including its applications in the financial world known as leveraged transactions. Even in our nature, we use the principle of leverage in every action we take.

I would like to end today's article with the wish that you discover leverage in your life that will increase your happiness many times over.

Love and respect to everyone from Moscow.