When Harry was in his fourth year, Minerva had once played music on a gramophone to teach the students how to dance. Even for wizards, it had been an antique. It had a huge horn, whereas Remus's gramophone was much more compact, and the sound it produced was not only loud but clear. It had been a birthday gift from James and Sirius to Remus, and supposedly cost quite a lot.
It was one of the few valuable things Remus owned, yet Pomona had not expected him to be so destitute that he had not even pawned it.
When Remus first received the gift, he had not refused it because it was too expensive. Perhaps to that group of boys, it was like the merchandise at Zonko's Joke Shop—simply a prop that could bring them joy.
Though the dense forest blocked the wind, the speed at which the horse raced forward made the falling snow sting when it struck her face.
The snowflakes kept circling before Georgiana, forming curves like Archimedean spirals. Those lines happened to match the tracks on a record. The motor drove the turntable at a constant speed, while the needle moved steadily outward along the track. Though the grooves were densely packed, they looked like a series of concentric circles.
Besides discovering the spiral and using it to make pumps for irrigation, Archimedes had made other discoveries as well.
One day, while taking a bath, he discovered the relationship between the volume of water displaced from a bathtub and buoyancy. He used this discovery to solve the problem of the golden crown, determining its volume without melting it down and thus deciding whether the crown was pure gold.
Many, many years later, people used Archimedes' principle to prove that iron ships could float on water too;