Vienna Institute for Development

1) Военный термин: Vietcong Infantry Division, very important document, video image display, Visual Identification (Canadian)

2) Техника: see, vide

3) Дипломатический термин: Vienna Institute for Development

4) Сокращение: Vehicle Integrated Defense, Virtual Image Display, video (adjective)

5) Электроника: VIDeo

6) Вычислительная техника: Voltage IDentification (CPU)

7) Деловая лексика: Vector Of Improving Directions

8) Образование: Virtual Information Desk

9) Сетевые технологии: VLAN IDentifier

10) Расширение файла: Screen Video Device Driver, YUV12C M- Motion Frame Buffer Video file Bitmap graphics, Graphic format (Word&Deed)

11) Правительство: District Court of the Virgin Islands

12) НАСА: Vehicle Identification Number

1) Военный термин: Vietcong Infantry Division, very important document, video image display, Visual Identification (Canadian)

2) Техника: see, vide

3) Дипломатический термин: Vienna Institute for Development

4) Сокращение: Vehicle Integrated Defense, Virtual Image Display, video (adjective)

5) Электроника: VIDeo

6) Вычислительная техника: Voltage IDentification (CPU)

7) Деловая лексика: Vector Of Improving Directions

8) Образование: Virtual Information Desk

9) Сетевые технологии: VLAN IDentifier

10) Расширение файла: Screen Video Device Driver, YUV12C M- Motion Frame Buffer Video file Bitmap graphics, Graphic format (Word&Deed)

11) Правительство: District Court of the Virgin Islands

12) НАСА: Vehicle Identification Number

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

He graduated in medicine from Vienna in 1891 and spent the next five years at various European universities. In 1923 he began to work at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. In 1900, while investigating the disintegration of red blood cells, he discovered the reaction of one person's cells to the serum of another. By 1909 he had developed the classification of four main blood groups, which has proved to be of fundamental importance, particularly in relation to the development of blood-transfusion techniques and blood banks, despite the later discovery of many subgroups as well as of the rhesus factor (1940) and its relation to miscarriages and neonatal disease.

He was involved in research in many other fields, including syphilis, thyroid disease, scarlet fever and typhus, but his main studies were centred on the chemistry of immunology and its significance in allergy.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

Kompfner obtained a degree in engineering from the Vienna Technische Hochschule in 1931 and qualified as a Diplom-Ingenieur in Architecture two years later. The following year, with a worsening political situation in Austria, he moved to England and became an architectural apprentice. In 1936 he became Managing Director of a building firm owned by a relative, but at the same time he was avidly studying physics and electronics. His first patent, for a television pick-up device, was filed in 1935 and granted in 1937, but was not in fact taken up. In June 1940 he was interned on the Isle of Man, but as a result of a paper previously sent by him to the Editor of Wireless Engineer he was released the following December and sent to join the group at Birmingham University working on centimetric radar. There he worked on klystrons, with little success, but as a result of the experience gained he eventually invented the travelling-wave tube (TWT), which was based on a helical transmission line. After disbandment of the Birmingham team, in 1946 Kompfner moved to the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford and in 1947 he became a British subject. At the Clarendon Laboratory he met J.R. Pierce of Bell Laboratories, who worked out the theory of operation of the TWT. After gaining his DPhil at Oxford in 1951, Kompfner accepted a post as Principal Scientific Officer at Signals Electronic Research Laboratories, Baldock, but very soon after that he was invited by Pierce to work at Bell on microwave tubes. There, in 1952, he invented the backward-wave oscillator (BWO). He was appointed Director of Electronics Research in 1955 and Director of Communications Research in 1962, having become a US citizen in 1957. In 1958, with Pierce, he designed Echo 1, the first (passive) satellite, which was launched in August 1960. He was also involved with the development of Telstar, the first active communications satellite, which was launched in 1962. Following his retirement from Bell in 1973, he continued to pursue research, alternately at Stanford, California, and Oxford, England.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electricity, Metallurgy

[br]

[br]

[br]

Coolidge obtained his BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1896, and his PhD (physics) from the University of Leipzig in 1899. He was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT in 1904, and in 1905 he joined the staff of the General Electric Company's research laboratory at Schenectady. In 1905 Schenectady was trying to make tungsten-filament lamps to counter the competition of the tantalum-filament lamps then being produced by their German rival Siemens. The first tungsten lamps made by Just and Hanaman in Vienna in 1904 had been too fragile for general use. Coolidge and his life-long collaborator, Colin G. Fink, succeeded in 1910 by hot-working directly dense sintered tungsten compacts into wire. This success was the result of a flash of insight by Coolidge, who first perceived that fully recrystallized tungsten wire was always brittle and that only partially work-hardened wire retained a measure of ductility. This grasped, a process was developed which induced ductility into the wire by hot-working at temperatures below those required for full recrystallization, so that an elongated fibrous grain structure was progressively developed. Sintered tungsten ingots were swaged to bar at temperatures around 1,500°C and at the end of the process ductile tungsten filament wire was drawn through diamond dies around 550°C. This process allowed General Electric to dominate the world lamp market. Tungsten lamps consumed only one-third the energy of carbon lamps, and for the first time the cost of electric lighting was reduced to that of gas. Between 1911 and 1914, manufacturing licences for the General Electric patents had been granted for most of the developed work. The validity of the General Electric monopoly was bitterly contested, though in all the litigation that followed, Coolidge's fibering principle was upheld. Commercial arrangements between General Electric and European producers such as Siemens led to the name "Osram" being commonly applied to any lamp with a drawn tungsten filament. In 1910 Coolidge patented the use of thoria as a particular additive that greatly improved the high-temperature strength of tungsten filaments. From this development sprang the technique of "dispersion strengthening", still being widely used in the development of high-temperature alloys in the 1990s. In 1913 Coolidge introduced the first controllable hot-cathode X-ray tube, which had a tungsten target and operated in vacuo rather than in a gaseous atmosphere. With this equipment, medical radiography could for the first time be safely practised on a routine basis. During the First World War, Coolidge developed portable X-ray units for use in field hospitals, and between the First and Second World Wars he introduced between 1 and 2 million X-ray machines for cancer treatment and for industrial radiography. He became Director of the Schenectady laboratory in 1932, and from 1940 until 1944 he was Vice-President and Director of Research. After retirement he was retained as an X-ray consultant, and in this capacity he attended the Bikini atom bomb trials in 1946. Throughout the Second World War he was a member of the National Defence Research Committee.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of a physician, Oberth originally studied medicine in Munich, but his education was interrupted by the First World War and service in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Wounded, he passed the time by studying astronautics. He apparently simulated weightlessness and worked out the design for a long-range liquid-propelled rocket, but his ideas were rejected by the War Office; after the war he submitted them as a dissertation for a PhD at Heidelberg University, but this was also rejected. Consequently, in 1923, whilst still an unknown mathematics teacher, he published his ideas at his own expense in the book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. These included a description of how rockets could achieve a sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational field of the earth. As a result he gained international prestige almost overnight and learned of the work of Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. After correspondence with the Goddard and Tsiolkovsky, Oberth published a further work in 1929, The Road to Space Travel, in which he acknowledged the priority of Goddard's and Tsiolkovski's calculations relating to space travel; he went on to anticipate by more than thirty years the development of electric and ionic propulsion and to propose the use of giant mirrors to control the weather. For this he was awarded the annual Hirsch Prize of 10,000 francs. From 1925 to 1938 he taught at a college in Mediasch, Transylvania, where he carried out experiments with petroleum and liquid-air rockets. He then obtained a lecturing post at Vienna Technical University, moving two years later to Dresden University and becoming a German citizen. In 1941 he became assistant to the German rocket engineer Werner von Braun at the rocket development centre at Peenemünde, and in 1943 he began work on solid propellants. After the Second World War he spent a year in Switzerland as a consultant, then in 1950 he moved to Italy to develop solid-propellant anti-aircraft rockets for the Italian Navy. Five years later he moved to the USA to carry out advanced rocket research for the US Army at Huntsville, Alabama, and in 1958 he retired to Feucht, near Nuremberg, Germany, where he wrote his autobiography.

[br]

KF / IMcN