I was born in April

   / Partido Comunista Portugues

(PCP)

   The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) has evolved from its early anarcho-syndicalist roots at its formation in 1921. This evolution included the undisciplined years of the 1920s, during which bolshevization began and continued into the 1930s, then through the years of clandestine existence during the Estado Novo, the Stalinization of the 1940s, the "anarcho-liberal shift" of the 1950s, the emergence of Maoist and Trotskyist splinter groups of the 1960s, to legalization after the Revolution of 25 April 1974 as the strongest and oldest political party in Portugal. Documents from the Russian archives have shown that the PCP's history is not a purely "domestic" one. While the PCP was born on its own without Soviet assistance, once it joined the Communist International (CI), it lost a significant amount of autonomy as CI officials increasingly meddled in PCP internal politics by dictating policy, manipulating leadership elections, and often financing party activities.

   Early Portuguese communism was a mix of communist ideological strands accustomed to a spirited internal debate, a lively external debate with its rivals, and a loose organizational structure. The PCP, during its early years, was weak in grassroots membership and was basically a party of "notables." It was predominantly a male organization, with minuscule female participation. It was also primarily an urban party concentrated in Lisbon. The PCP membership declined from 3,000 in 1923 to only 40 in 1928.

   In 1929, the party was reorganized so that it could survive clandestinely. As its activity progressed in the 1930s, a long period of instability dominated its leadership organs as a result of repression, imprisonments, and disorganization. The CI continued to intervene in party affairs through the 1930s, until the PCP was expelled from the CI in 1938-39, apparently because of its conduct during police arrests.

   The years of 1939-41 were difficult ones for the party, not only because of increased domestic repression but also because of internal party splits provoked by the Nazi-Soviet pact and other foreign actions. From 1940 to 1941, two Communist parties struggled to attract the support of the CI and accused each other of "revisionism." The CI was disbanded in 1943, and the PCP was not accepted back into the international communist family until its recognition by the Cominform in 1947.

   The reorganization of 1940-41 finally put the PCP under the firm control of orthodox communists who viewed socialism from a Soviet perspective. Although Soviet support was denied the newly reorganized party at first, the new leaders continued its Stalinization. The enforcement of "democratic centralism" and insistence upon the "dictatorship of the proletariat" became entrenched. The 1940s brought increased growth, as the party reached its membership apex of the clandestine era with 1,200 members in 1943, approximately 4,800 in 1946, and 7,000 in 1947.

   The party fell on hard times in the 1950s. It developed a bad case of paranoia, which led to a witch hunt for infiltrators, informers, and spies in all ranks of the party. The lower membership figures who followed the united antifascist period were reduced further through expulsions of the "traitors." By 1951, the party had been reduced to only 1,000 members. It became a closed, sectarian, suspicious, and paranoiac organization, with diminished strength in almost every region, except in the Alentejo, where the party, through propaganda and ideology more than organizational strength, was able to mobilize strikes of landless peasants in the early 1950s.

   On 3 January 1960, Álvaro Cunhal and nine other political prisoners made a spectacular escape from the Peniche prison and fled the country. Soon after this escape, Cunhal was elected secretary-general and, with other top leaders, directed the PCP from exile. Trotskyite and Maoist fractions emerged within the party in the 1960s, strengthened by the ideological developments in the international communist movement, such as in China and Cuba. The PCP would not tolerate dissent or leftism and began purging the extreme left fractions.

   The PCP intensified its control of the labor movement after the more liberal syndical election regulations under Prime Minister Mar- cello Caetano allowed communists to run for leadership positions in the corporative unions. By 1973, there was general unrest in the labor movement due to deteriorating economic conditions brought on by the colonial wars, as well as by world economic pressures including the Arab oil boycott.

   After the Revolution of 25 April 1974, the PCP enjoyed a unique position: it was the only party to have survived the Estado Novo. It emerged from clandestinity as the best organized political party in Portugal with a leadership hardened by years in jail. Since then, despite the party's stubborn orthodoxy, it has consistently played an important role as a moderating force. As even the Socialist Party (PS) was swept up by the neoliberal tidal wave, albeit a more compassionate variant, increasingly the PCP has played a crucial role in ensuring that interests and perspectives of the traditional Left are aired.

   One of the most consistent planks of the PCP electoral platform has been opposition to every stage of European integration. The party has regularly resisted Portuguese membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) and, following membership beginning in 1986, the party has regularly resisted further integration through the European Union (EU). A major argument has been that EU membership would not resolve Portugal's chronic economic problems but would only increase its dependence on the world. Ever since, the PCP has argued that its opposition to membership was correct and that further involvement with the EU would only result in further economic dependence and a consequent loss of Portuguese national sovereignty. Further, the party maintained that as Portugal's ties with the EU increased, the vulnerable agrarian sector in Portugal would risk further losses.

   Changes in PCP leadership may or may not alter the party's electoral position and role in the political system. As younger generations forget the uniqueness of the party's resistance to the Estado Novo, public images of PCP leadership will change. As the image of Álvaro Cunhal and other historical communist leaders slowly recedes, and the stature of Carlos Carvalhas (general secretary since 1992) and other moderate leaders is enhanced, the party's survival and legitimacy have strengthened. On 6 March 2001, the PCP celebrated its 80th anniversary.

    See also Left Bloc.

SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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He was born Edward Muggeridge, but later changed his name, taking the Saxon spelling of his first name and altering his surname, first to Muygridge and then to Muybridge. He emigrated to America in 1851, working in New York in bookbinding and selling as a commission agent for the London Printing and Publishing Company. Through contact with a New York daguerreotypist, Silas T.Selleck, he acquired an interest in photography that developed after his move to California in 1855. On a visit to England in 1860 he learned the wet-collodion process from a friend, Arthur Brown, and acquired the best photographic equipment available in London before returning to America. In 1867, under his trade pseudonym "Helios", he set out to record the scenery of the Far West with his mobile dark-room, christened "The Flying Studio".

His reputation as a photographer of the first rank spread, and he was commissioned to record the survey visit of Major-General Henry W.Halleck to Alaska and also to record the territory through which the Central Pacific Railroad was being constructed. Perhaps because of this latter project, he was approached by the President of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford, to attempt to photograph a horse trotting at speed. There was a long-standing controversy among racing men as to whether a trotting horse had all four hooves off the ground at any point; Stanford felt that it did, and hoped than an "instantaneous" photograph would settle the matter once and for all. In May 1872 Muybridge photographed the horse "Occident", but without any great success because the current wet-collodion process normally required many seconds, even in a good light, for a good result. In April 1873 he managed to produce some better negatives, in which a recognizable silhouette of the horse showed all four feet above the ground at the same time.

Soon after, Muybridge left his young wife, Flora, in San Francisco to go with the army sent to put down the revolt of the Modoc Indians. While he was busy photographing the scenery and the combatants, his wife had an affair with a Major Harry Larkyns. On his return, finding his wife pregnant, he had several confrontations with Larkyns, which culminated in his shooting him dead. At his trial for murder, in February 1875, Muybridge was acquitted by the jury on the grounds of justifiable homicide; he left soon after on a long trip to South America.

He again took up his photographic work when he returned to North America and Stanford asked him to take up the action-photography project once more. Using a new shutter design he had developed while on his trip south, and which would operate in as little as 1/1,000 of a second, he obtained more detailed pictures of "Occident" in July 1877. He then devised a new scheme, which Stanford sponsored at his farm at Palo Alto. A 50 ft (15 m) long shed was constructed, containing twelve cameras side by side, and a white background marked off with vertical, numbered lines was set up. Each camera was fitted with Muybridge's highspeed shutter, which was released by an electromagnetic catch. Thin threads stretched across the track were broken by the horse as it moved along, closing spring electrical contacts which released each shutter in turn. Thus, in about half a second, twelve photographs were obtained that showed all the phases of the movement.

Although the pictures were still little more than silhouettes, they were very sharp, and sequences published in scientific and photographic journals throughout the world excited considerable attention. By replacing the threads with an electrical commutator device, which allowed the release of the shutters at precise intervals, Muybridge was able to take series of actions by other animals and humans. From 1880 he lectured in America and Europe, projecting his results in motion on the screen with his Zoopraxiscope projector. In August 1883 he received a grant of $40,000 from the University of Pennsylvania to carry on his work there. Using the vastly improved gelatine dry-plate process and new, improved multiple-camera apparatus, during 1884 and 1885 he produced over 100,000 photographs, of which 20,000 were reproduced in Animal Locomotion in 1887. The subjects were animals of all kinds, and human figures, mostly nude, in a wide range of activities. The quality of the photographs was extremely good, and the publication attracted considerable attention and praise.

Muybridge returned to England in 1894; his last publications were Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901). His influence on the world of art was enormous, over-turning the conventional representations of action hitherto used by artists. His work in pioneering the use of sequence photography led to the science of chronophotography developed by Marey and others, and stimulated many inventors, notably Thomas Edison to work which led to the introduction of cinematography in the 1890s.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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Cayley was born into a well-to-do Yorkshire family living at Brompton Hall. He was encouraged to study mathematics, navigation and mechanics, particularly by his mother. In 1792 he succeeded to the baronetcy and took over the daunting task of revitalizing the run-down family estate.

The first aeronautical device made by Cayley was a copy of the toy helicopter invented by the Frenchmen Launoy and Bienvenu in 1784. Cayley's version, made in 1796, convinced him that a machine could "rise in the air by mechanical means", as he later wrote. He studied the aerodynamics of flight and broke away from the unsuccessful ornithopters of his predecessors. In 1799 he scratched two sketches on a silver disc: one side of the disc showed the aerodynamic force on a wing resolved into lift and drag, and on the other side he illustrated his idea for a fixed-wing aeroplane; this disc is preserved in the Science Museum in London. In 1804 he tested a small wing on the end of a whirling arm to measure its lifting power. This led to the world's first model glider, which consisted of a simple kite (the wing) mounted on a pole with an adjustable cruciform tail. A full-size glider followed in 1809 and this flew successfully unmanned. By 1809 Cayley had also investigated the lifting properties of cambered wings and produced a low-drag aerofoil section. His aim was to produce a powered aeroplane, but no suitable engines were available. Steam-engines were too heavy, but he experimented with a gunpowder motor and invented the hot-air engine in 1807. He published details of some of his aeronautical researches in 1809–10 and in 1816 he wrote a paper on airships. Then for a period of some twenty-five years he was so busy with other activities that he largely neglected his aeronautical researches. It was not until 1843, at the age of 70, that he really had time to pursue his quest for flight. The Mechanics' Magazine of 8 April 1843 published drawings of "Sir George Cayley's Aerial Carriage", which consisted of a helicopter design with four circular lifting rotors—which could be adjusted to become wings—and two pusher propellers. In 1849 he built a full-size triplane glider which lifted a boy off the ground for a brief hop. Then in 1852 he proposed a monoplane glider which could be launched from a balloon. Late in 1853 Cayley built his "new flyer", another monoplane glider, which carried his coachman as a reluctant passenger across a dale at Brompton, Cayley became involved in public affairs and was MP for Scarborough in 1832. He also took a leading part in local scientific activities and was co-founder of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831 and of the Regent Street Polytechnic Institution in 1838.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Dickson was born in France of English and Scottish parents. As a young man of almost 19 years, he wrote in 1879 to Thomas Edison in America, asking for a job. Edison replied that he was not taking on new staff at that time, but Dickson, with his mother and sisters, decided to emigrate anyway. In 1883 he contacted Edison again, and was given a job at the Goerk Street laboratory of the Edison Electric Works in New York. He soon assumed a position of responsibility as Superintendent, working on the development of electric light and power systems, and also carried out most of the photography Edison required. In 1888 he moved to the Edison West Orange laboratory, becoming Head of the ore-milling department. When Edison, inspired by Muybridge's sequence photographs of humans and animals in motion, decided to develop a motion picture apparatus, he gave the task to Dickson, whose considerable skills in mechanics, photography and electrical work made him the obvious choice. The first experiments, in 1888, were on a cylinder machine like the phonograph, in which the sequence pictures were to be taken in a spiral. This soon proved to be impractical, and work was delayed for a time while Dickson developed a new ore-milling machine. Little progress with the movie project was made until George Eastman's introduction in July 1889 of celluloid roll film, which was thin, tough, transparent and very flexible. Dickson returned to his experiments in the spring of 1891 and soon had working models of a film camera and viewer, the latter being demonstrated at the West Orange laboratory on 20 May 1891. By the early summer of 1892 the project had advanced sufficiently for commercial exploitation to begin. The Kinetograph camera used perforated 35 mm film (essentially the same as that still in use in the late twentieth century), and the kinetoscope, a peep-show viewer, took fifty feet of film running in an endless loop. Full-scale manufacture of the viewers started in 1893, and they were demonstrated on a number of occasions during that year. On 14 April 1894 the first kinetoscope parlour, with ten viewers, was opened to the public in New York. By the end of that year, the kinetoscope was seen by the public all over America and in Europe. Dickson had created the first commercially successful cinematograph system. Dickson left Edison's employment on 2 April 1895, and for a time worked with Woodville Latham on the development of his Panoptikon projector, a projection version of the kinetoscope. In December 1895 he joined with Herman Casier, Henry N.Marvin and Elias Koopman to form the American Mutoscope Company. Casier had designed the Mutoscope, an animated-picture viewer in which the sequences of pictures were printed on cards fixed radially to a drum and were flipped past the eye as the drum rotated. Dickson designed the Biograph wide-film camera to produce the picture sequences, and also a projector to show the films directly onto a screen. The large-format images gave pictures of high quality for the period; the Biograph went on public show in America in September 1896, and subsequently throughout the world, operating until around 1905. In May 1897 Dickson returned to England and set up as a producer of Biograph films, recording, among other subjects, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897, Pope Leo XIII in 1898, and scenes of the Boer War in 1899 and 1900. Many of the Biograph subjects were printed as reels for the Mutoscope to produce the "what the butler saw" machines which were a feature of fairgrounds and seaside arcades until modern times. Dickson's contact with the Biograph Company, and with it his involvement in cinematography, ceased in 1911.

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(1935-)

   Career army officer who played an important part in the Armed Forces Movement that organized the Revolution of 25 April 1974, a key figure in the defeat of a leftist military coup in 25 November 1975, and president of the republic during two terms. Eanes was born near Castelo Branco and entered the army school in 1953, at age 18. After promotion to lieutenant in 1957, he served for a period in Portuguese India. He served several tours in Portugal's African wars including Mozambique (1961-64 and 1966-68), Guinea (1969-71), and Angola (January 1974 until 25 April 1974). He participated in the Armed Forces Movement's conspiracy to topple the Estado Novo and later held important posts when the military governed Portugal during the period 1974-75. One key post was as head of the Portuguese Radio and Television system, an important position in the revolution's intense war of words and debates. In the failed leftist coup attempt on 25 November 1975, Eanes, now promoted to lieutenant colonel, played a pivotal role in the triumph of the moderate military party. In December 1975, he was named army chief of staff. General Ramalho Eanes was twice elected and served two full terms as president of the republic, in 1976-81 and 1981-86. In the 1976 presidential elections, Eanes received about 61 percent of the vote and in that of December 1980, 56.4 percent.

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Automotive engineering, Electricity, Electronics and information technology, Metallurgy, Photography, film and optics, Public utilities, Recording, Telecommunications

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He was the son of Samuel Edison, who was in the timber business. His schooling was delayed due to scarlet fever until 1855, when he was 8½ years old, but he was an avid reader. By the age of 14 he had a job as a newsboy on the railway from Port Huron to Detroit, a distance of sixty-three miles (101 km). He worked a fourteen-hour day with a stopover of five hours, which he spent in the Detroit Free Library. He also sold sweets on the train and, later, fruit and vegetables, and was soon making a profit of $20 a week. He then started two stores in Port Huron and used a spare freight car as a laboratory. He added a hand-printing press to produce 400 copies weekly of The Grand Trunk Herald, most of which he compiled and edited himself. He set himself to learn telegraphy from the station agent at Mount Clements, whose son he had saved from being run over by a freight car.

At the age of 16 he became a telegraphist at Port Huron. In 1863 he became railway telegraphist at the busy Stratford Junction of the Grand Trunk Railroad, arranging a clock with a notched wheel to give the hourly signal which was to prove that he was awake and at his post! He left hurriedly after failing to hold a train which was nearly involved in a head-on collision. He usually worked the night shift, allowing himself time for experiments during the day. His first invention was an arrangement of two Morse registers so that a high-speed input could be decoded at a slower speed. Moving from place to place he held many positions as a telegraphist. In Boston he invented an automatic vote recorder for Congress and patented it, but the idea was rejected. This was the first of a total of 1180 patents that he was to take out during his lifetime. After six years he resigned from the Western Union Company to devote all his time to invention, his next idea being an improved ticker-tape machine for stockbrokers. He developed a duplex telegraphy system, but this was turned down by the Western Union Company. He then moved to New York.

Edison found accommodation in the battery room of Law's Gold Reporting Company, sleeping in the cellar, and there his repair of a broken transmitter marked him as someone of special talents. His superior soon resigned, and he was promoted with a salary of $300 a month. Western Union paid him $40,000 for the sole rights on future improvements on the duplex telegraph, and he moved to Ward Street, Newark, New Jersey, where he employed a gathering of specialist engineers. Within a year, he married one of his employees, Mary Stilwell, when she was only 16: a daughter, Marion, was born in 1872, and two sons, Thomas and William, in 1876 and 1879, respectively.

He continued to work on the automatic telegraph, a device to send out messages faster than they could be tapped out by hand: that is, over fifty words per minute or so. An earlier machine by Alexander Bain worked at up to 400 words per minute, but was not good over long distances. Edison agreed to work on improving this feature of Bain's machine for the Automatic Telegraph Company (ATC) for $40,000. He improved it to a working speed of 500 words per minute and ran a test between Washington and New York. Hoping to sell their equipment to the Post Office in Britain, ATC sent Edison to England in 1873 to negotiate. A 500-word message was to be sent from Liverpool to London every half-hour for six hours, followed by tests on 2,200 miles (3,540 km) of cable at Greenwich. Only confused results were obtained due to induction in the cable, which lay coiled in a water tank. Edison returned to New York, where he worked on his quadruplex telegraph system, tests of which proved a success between New York and Albany in December 1874. Unfortunately, simultaneous negotiation with Western Union and ATC resulted in a lawsuit.

Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for a telephone in March 1876 while Edison was still working on the same idea. His improvements allowed the device to operate over a distance of hundreds of miles instead of only a few miles. Tests were carried out over the 106 miles (170 km) between New York and Philadelphia. Edison applied for a patent on the carbon-button transmitter in April 1877, Western Union agreeing to pay him $6,000 a year for the seventeen-year duration of the patent. In these years he was also working on the development of the electric lamp and on a duplicating machine which would make up to 3,000 copies from a stencil. In 1876–7 he moved from Newark to Menlo Park, twenty-four miles (39 km) from New York on the Pennsylvania Railway, near Elizabeth. He had bought a house there around which he built the premises that would become his "inventions factory". It was there that he began the use of his 200- page pocket notebooks, each of which lasted him about two weeks, so prolific were his ideas. When he died he left 3,400 of them filled with notes and sketches.

Late in 1877 he applied for a patent for a phonograph which was granted on 19 February 1878, and by the end of the year he had formed a company to manufacture this totally new product. At the time, Edison saw the device primarily as a business aid rather than for entertainment, rather as a dictating machine. In August 1878 he was granted a British patent. In July 1878 he tried to measure the heat from the solar corona at a solar eclipse viewed from Rawlins, Wyoming, but his "tasimeter" was too sensitive.

Probably his greatest achievement was "The Subdivision of the Electric Light" or the "glow bulb". He tried many materials for the filament before settling on carbon. He gave a demonstration of electric light by lighting up Menlo Park and inviting the public. Edison was, of course, faced with the problem of inventing and producing all the ancillaries which go to make up the electrical system of generation and distribution-meters, fuses, insulation, switches, cabling—even generators had to be designed and built; everything was new. He started a number of manufacturing companies to produce the various components needed.

In 1881 he built the world's largest generator, which weighed 27 tons, to light 1,200 lamps at the Paris Exhibition. It was later moved to England to be used in the world's first central power station with steam engine drive at Holborn Viaduct, London. In September 1882 he started up his Pearl Street Generating Station in New York, which led to a worldwide increase in the application of electric power, particularly for lighting. At the same time as these developments, he built a 1,300yd (1,190m) electric railway at Menlo Park.

On 9 August 1884 his wife died of typhoid. Using his telegraphic skills, he proposed to 19-year-old Mina Miller in Morse code while in the company of others on a train. He married her in February 1885 before buying a new house and estate at West Orange, New Jersey, building a new laboratory not far away in the Orange Valley.

Edison used direct current which was limited to around 250 volts. Alternating current was largely developed by George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla, using transformers to step up the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission. The use of AC gradually overtook the Edison DC system.

In autumn 1888 he patented a form of cinephotography, the kinetoscope, obtaining film-stock from George Eastman. In 1893 he set up the first film studio, which was pivoted so as to catch the sun, with a hinged roof which could be raised. In 1894 kinetoscope parlours with "peep shows" were starting up in cities all over America. Competition came from the Latham Brothers with a screen-projection machine, which Edison answered with his "Vitascope", shown in New York in 1896. This showed pictures with accompanying sound, but there was some difficulty with synchronization. Edison also experimented with captions at this early date.

In 1880 he filed a patent for a magnetic ore separator, the first of nearly sixty. He bought up deposits of low-grade iron ore which had been developed in the north of New Jersey. The process was a commercial success until the discovery of iron-rich ore in Minnesota rendered it uneconomic and uncompetitive. In 1898 cement rock was discovered in New Village, west of West Orange. Edison bought the land and started cement manufacture, using kilns twice the normal length and using half as much fuel to heat them as the normal type of kiln. In 1893 he met Henry Ford, who was building his second car, at an Edison convention. This started him on the development of a battery for an electric car on which he made over 9,000 experiments. In 1903 he sold his patent for wireless telegraphy "for a song" to Guglielmo Marconi.

In 1910 Edison designed a prefabricated concrete house. In December 1914 fire destroyed three-quarters of the West Orange plant, but it was at once rebuilt, and with the threat of war Edison started to set up his own plants for making all the chemicals that he had previously been buying from Europe, such as carbolic acid, phenol, benzol, aniline dyes, etc. He was appointed President of the Navy Consulting Board, for whom, he said, he made some forty-five inventions, "but they were pigeonholed, every one of them". Thus did Edison find that the Navy did not take kindly to civilian interference.

In 1927 he started the Edison Botanic Research Company, founded with similar investment from Ford and Firestone with the object of finding a substitute for overseas-produced rubber. In the first year he tested no fewer than 3,327 possible plants, in the second year, over 1,400, eventually developing a variety of Golden Rod which grew to 14 ft (4.3 m) in height. However, all this effort and money was wasted, due to the discovery of synthetic rubber.

In October 1929 he was present at Henry Ford's opening of his Dearborn Museum to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the incandescent lamp, including a replica of the Menlo Park laboratory. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and was elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He died in 1931 at his home, Glenmont; throughout the USA, lights were dimmed temporarily on the day of his funeral.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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George Stephenson was the son of the fireman of the pumping engine at Wylam colliery, and horses drew wagons of coal along the wooden rails of the Wylam wagonway past the house in which he was born and spent his earliest childhood. While still a child he worked as a cowherd, but soon moved to working at coal pits. At 17 years of age he showed sufficient mechanical talent to be placed in charge of a new pumping engine, and had already achieved a job more responsible than that of his father. Despite his position he was still illiterate, although he subsequently learned to read and write. He was largely self-educated.

In 1801 he was appointed Brakesman of the winding engine at Black Callerton pit, with responsibility for lowering the miners safely to their work. Then, about two years later, he became Brakesman of a new winding engine erected by Robert Hawthorn at Willington Quay on the Tyne. Returning collier brigs discharged ballast into wagons and the engine drew the wagons up an inclined plane to the top of "Ballast Hill" for their contents to be tipped; this was one of the earliest applications of steam power to transport, other than experimentally.

In 1804 Stephenson moved to West Moor pit, Killingworth, again as Brakesman. In 1811 he demonstrated his mechanical skill by successfully modifying a new and unsatisfactory atmospheric engine, a task that had defeated the efforts of others, to enable it to pump a drowned pit clear of water. The following year he was appointed Enginewright at Killingworth, in charge of the machinery in all the collieries of the "Grand Allies", the prominent coal-owning families of Wortley, Liddell and Bowes, with authorization also to work for others. He built many stationary engines and he closely examined locomotives of John Blenkinsop's type on the Kenton \& Coxlodge wagonway, as well as those of William Hedley at Wylam.

It was in 1813 that Sir Thomas Liddell requested George Stephenson to build a steam locomotive for the Killingworth wagonway: Blucher made its first trial run on 25 July 1814 and was based on Blenkinsop's locomotives, although it lacked their rack-and-pinion drive. George Stephenson is credited with building the first locomotive both to run on edge rails and be driven by adhesion, an arrangement that has been the conventional one ever since. Yet Blucher was far from perfect and over the next few years, while other engineers ignored the steam locomotive, Stephenson built a succession of them, each an improvement on the last.

During this period many lives were lost in coalmines from explosions of gas ignited by miners' lamps. By observation and experiment (sometimes at great personal risk) Stephenson invented a satisfactory safety lamp, working independently of the noted scientist Sir Humphry Davy who also invented such a lamp around the same time.

In 1817 George Stephenson designed his first locomotive for an outside customer, the Kilmarnock \& Troon Railway, and in 1819 he laid out the Hetton Colliery Railway in County Durham, for which his brother Robert was Resident Engineer. This was the first railway to be worked entirely without animal traction: it used inclined planes with stationary engines, self-acting inclined planes powered by gravity, and locomotives.

On 19 April 1821 Stephenson was introduced to Edward Pease, one of the main promoters of the Stockton \& Darlington Railway (S \& DR), which by coincidence received its Act of Parliament the same day. George Stephenson carried out a further survey, to improve the proposed line, and in this he was assisted by his 18-year-old son, Robert Stephenson, whom he had ensured received the theoretical education which he himself lacked. It is doubtful whether either could have succeeded without the other; together they were to make the steam railway practicable.

At George Stephenson's instance, much of the S \& DR was laid with wrought-iron rails recently developed by John Birkinshaw at Bedlington Ironworks, Morpeth. These were longer than cast-iron rails and were not brittle: they made a track well suited for locomotives. In June 1823 George and Robert Stephenson, with other partners, founded a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne to build locomotives and rolling stock and to do general engineering work: after its Managing Partner, the firm was called Robert Stephenson \& Co.

In 1824 the promoters of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway (L \& MR) invited George Stephenson to resurvey their proposed line in order to reduce opposition to it. William James, a wealthy land agent who had become a visionary protagonist of a national railway network and had seen Stephenson's locomotives at Killingworth, had promoted the L \& MR with some merchants of Liverpool and had carried out the first survey; however, he overreached himself in business and, shortly after the invitation to Stephenson, became bankrupt. In his own survey, however, George Stephenson lacked the assistance of his son Robert, who had left for South America, and he delegated much of the detailed work to incompetent assistants. During a devastating Parliamentary examination in the spring of 1825, much of his survey was shown to be seriously inaccurate and the L \& MR's application for an Act of Parliament was refused. The railway's promoters discharged Stephenson and had their line surveyed yet again, by C.B. Vignoles.

The Stockton \& Darlington Railway was, however, triumphantly opened in the presence of vast crowds in September 1825, with Stephenson himself driving the locomotive Locomotion, which had been built at Robert Stephenson \& Co.'s Newcastle works. Once the railway was at work, horse-drawn and gravity-powered traffic shared the line with locomotives: in 1828 Stephenson invented the horse dandy, a wagon at the back of a train in which a horse could travel over the gravity-operated stretches, instead of trotting behind.

Meanwhile, in May 1826, the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway had successfully obtained its Act of Parliament. Stephenson was appointed Engineer in June, and since he and Vignoles proved incompatible the latter left early in 1827. The railway was built by Stephenson and his staff, using direct labour. A considerable controversy arose c. 1828 over the motive power to be used: the traffic anticipated was too great for horses, but the performance of the reciprocal system of cable haulage developed by Benjamin Thompson appeared in many respects superior to that of contemporary locomotives. The company instituted a prize competition for a better locomotive and the Rainhill Trials were held in October 1829.

Robert Stephenson had been working on improved locomotive designs since his return from America in 1827, but it was the L \& MR's Treasurer, Henry Booth, who suggested the multi-tubular boiler to George Stephenson. This was incorporated into a locomotive built by Robert Stephenson for the trials: Rocket was entered by the three men in partnership. The other principal entrants were Novelty, entered by John Braithwaite and John Ericsson, and Sans Pareil, entered by Timothy Hackworth, but only Rocket, driven by George Stephenson, met all the organizers' demands; indeed, it far surpassed them and demonstrated the practicability of the long-distance steam railway. With the opening of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway in 1830, the age of railways began.

Stephenson was active in many aspects. He advised on the construction of the Belgian State Railway, of which the Brussels-Malines section, opened in 1835, was the first all-steam railway on the European continent. In England, proposals to link the L \& MR with the Midlands had culminated in an Act of Parliament for the Grand Junction Railway in 1833: this was to run from Warrington, which was already linked to the L \& MR, to Birmingham. George Stephenson had been in charge of the surveys, and for the railway's construction he and J.U. Rastrick were initially Principal Engineers, with Stephenson's former pupil Joseph Locke under them; by 1835 both Stephenson and Rastrick had withdrawn and Locke was Engineer-in-Chief. Stephenson remained much in demand elsewhere: he was particularly associated with the construction of the North Midland Railway (Derby to Leeds) and related lines. He was active in many other places and carried out, for instance, preliminary surveys for the Chester \& Holyhead and Newcastle \& Berwick Railways, which were important links in the lines of communication between London and, respectively, Dublin and Edinburgh.

He eventually retired to Tapton House, Chesterfield, overlooking the North Midland. A man who was self-made (with great success) against colossal odds, he was ever reluctant, regrettably, to give others their due credit, although in retirement, immensely wealthy and full of honour, he was still able to mingle with people of all ranks.

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SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Photography, film and optics, Recording, Telecommunications

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De Forest was born into the family of a Congregational minister that moved to Alabama in 1879 when the father became President of a college for African-Americans; this was a position that led to the family's social ostracism by the white community. By the time he was 13 years old, De Forest was already a keen mechanical inventor, and in 1893, rejecting his father's plan for him to become a clergyman, he entered the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University. Following his first degree, he went on to study the propagation of electromagnetic waves, gaining a PhD in physics in 1899 for his thesis on the "Reflection of Hertzian Waves from the Ends of Parallel Wires", probably the first US thesis in the field of radio.

He then joined the Western Electric Company in Chicago where he helped develop the infant technology of wireless, working his way up from a modest post in the production area to a position in the experimental laboratory. There, working alone after normal working hours, he developed a detector of electromagnetic waves based on an electrolytic device similar to that already invented by Fleming in England. Recognizing his talents, a number of financial backers enabled him to set up his own business in 1902 under the name of De Forest Wireless Telegraphy Company; he was soon demonstrating wireless telegraphy to interested parties and entering into competition with the American Marconi Company.

Despite the failure of this company because of fraud by his partners, he continued his experiments; in 1907, by adding a third electrode, a wire mesh, between the anode and cathode of the thermionic diode invented by Fleming in 1904, he was able to produce the amplifying device now known as the triode valve and achieve a sensitivity of radio-signal reception much greater than possible with the passive carborundum and electrolytic detectors hitherto available. Patented under the name Audion, this new vacuum device was soon successfully used for experimental broadcasts of music and speech in New York and Paris. The invention of the Audion has been described as the beginning of the electronic era. Although much development work was required before its full potential was realized, the Audion opened the way to progress in all areas of sound transmission, recording and reproduction. The patent was challenged by Fleming and it was not until 1943 that De Forest's claim was finally recognized.

Overcoming the near failure of his new company, the De Forest Radio Telephone Company, as well as unsuccessful charges of fraudulent promotion of the Audion, he continued to exploit the potential of his invention. By 1912 he had used transformer-coupling of several Audion stages to achieve high gain at radio frequencies, making long-distance communication a practical proposition, and had applied positive feedback from the Audion output anode to its input grid to realize a stable transmitter oscillator and modulator. These successes led to prolonged patent litigation with Edwin Armstrong and others, and he eventually sold the manufacturing rights, in retrospect often for a pittance.

During the early 1920s De Forest began a fruitful association with T.W.Case, who for around ten years had been working to perfect a moving-picture sound system. De Forest claimed to have had an interest in sound films as early as 1900, and Case now began to supply him with photoelectric cells and primitive sound cameras. He eventually devised a variable-density sound-on-film system utilizing a glow-discharge modulator, the Photion. By 1926 De Forest's Phonofilm had been successfully demonstrated in over fifty theatres and this system became the basis of Movietone. Though his ideas were on the right lines, the technology was insufficiently developed and it was left to others to produce a system acceptable to the film industry. However, De Forest had played a key role in transforming the nature of the film industry; within a space of five years the production of silent films had all but ceased.

In the following decade De Forest applied the Audion to the development of medical diathermy. Finally, after spending most of his working life as an independent inventor and entrepreneur, he worked for a time during the Second World War at the Bell Telephone Laboratories on military applications of electronics.

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SUBJECT AREA: Horology

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Huygens was born into a cultured and privileged class. His father, Constantijn, was a poet and statesman who had wide interests. Constantijn exerted a strong influence on his son, who was educated at home until he reached the age of 16. Christiaan studied law and mathematics at Ley den University from 1645 to 1647, and continued his studies at the Collegium Arausiacum in Breda until 1649. He then lived at The Hague, where he had the means to devote his time entirely to study. In 1666 he became a Member of the Académie des Sciences in Paris and settled there until his return to The Hague in 1681. He also had a close relationship with the Royal Society and visited London on three occasions, meeting Newton on his last visit in 1689. Huygens had a wide range of interests and made significant contributions in mathematics, astronomy, optics and mechanics. He also made technical advances in optical instruments and horology.

Despite the efforts of Burgi there had been no significant improvement in the performance of ordinary clocks and watches from their inception to Huygens's time, as they were controlled by foliots or balances which had no natural period of oscillation. The pendulum appeared to offer a means of improvement as it had a natural period of oscillation that was almost independent of amplitude. Galileo Galilei had already pioneered the use of a freely suspended pendulum for timing events, but it was by no means obvious how it could be kept swinging and used to control a clock. Towards the end of his life Galileo described such a. mechanism to his son Vincenzio, who constructed a model after his father's death, although it was not completed when he himself died in 1642. This model appears to have been copied in Italy, but it had little influence on horology, partly because of the circumstances in which it was produced and possibly also because it differed radically from clocks of that period. The crucial event occurred on Christmas Day 1656 when Huygens, quite independently, succeeded in adapting an existing spring-driven table clock so that it was not only controlled by a pendulum but also kept it swinging. In the following year he was granted a privilege or patent for this clock, and several were made by the clockmaker Salomon Coster of The Hague. The use of the pendulum produced a dramatic improvement in timekeeping, reducing the daily error from minutes to seconds, but Huygens was aware that the pendulum was not truly isochronous. This error was magnified by the use of the existing verge escapement, which made the pendulum swing through a large arc. He overcame this defect very elegantly by fitting cheeks at the pendulum suspension point, progressively reducing the effective length of the pendulum as the amplitude increased. Initially the cheeks were shaped empirically, but he was later able to show that they should have a cycloidal shape. The cheeks were not adopted universally because they introduced other defects, and the problem was eventually solved more prosaically by way of new escapements which reduced the swing of the pendulum. Huygens's clocks had another innovatory feature: maintaining power, which kept the clock going while it was being wound.

Pendulums could not be used for portable timepieces, which continued to use balances despite their deficiencies. Robert Hooke was probably the first to apply a spring to the balance, but his efforts were not successful. From his work on the pendulum Huygens was well aware of the conditions necessary for isochronism in a vibrating system, and in January 1675, with a flash of inspiration, he realized that this could be achieved by controlling the oscillations of the balance with a spiral spring, an arrangement that is still used in mechanical watches. The first model was made for Huygens in Paris by the clockmaker Isaac Thuret, who attempted to appropriate the invention and patent it himself. Huygens had for many years been trying unsuccessfully to adapt the pendulum clock for use at sea (in order to determine longitude), and he hoped that a balance-spring timekeeper might be better suited for this purpose. However, he was disillusioned as its timekeeping proved to be much more susceptible to changes in temperature than that of the pendulum clock.

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   Lawyer, staunch oppositionist to the Estado Novo, a founder of Portugal's Socialist Party (PS), key leader of post-1974 democratic Portugal, and twice-elected president of the republic (1986-91; 1991-96). Mário Soares was born on 7 December 1924, in Lisbon, the son of an educator and former cabinet officer of the ill-fated First Republic. An outstanding student, Soares received a degree in history and philosophy from the University of Lisbon (1951) and his law degree from the same institution (1957). A teacher and a lawyer, the young Soares soon became active in various organizations that opposed the Estado Novo, starting in his student days and continuing into his association with the PS. He worked with the organizations of several oppositionist candidates for the presidency of the republic in 1949 and 1958 and, as a lawyer, defended a number of political figures against government prosecution in court. Soares was the family attorney for the family of General Humberto Delgado, murdered on the Spanish frontier by the regime's political police in 1965. Soares was signatory and editor of the "Program for the Democratization of the Republic" in 1961, and, in 1968, he was deported by the regime to São Tomé, one of Portugal's African colonies.

   In 1969, following the brief liberalization under the new prime minister Marcello Caetano, Soares returned from exile in Africa and participated as a member of the opposition in general elections for the National Assembly. Although harassed by the PIDE, he was courageous in attacking the government and its colonial policies in Africa. After the rigged election results were known, and no oppositionist deputy won a seat despite the Caetano "opening," Soares left for exile in France. From 1969 to 1974, he resided in France, consulted with other political exiles, and taught at a university. In 1973, at a meeting in West Germany, Soares participated in the (re)founding of the (Portuguese) Socialist Party.

   The exciting, unexpected news of the Revolution of 25 April 1974 reached Soares in France, and soon he was aboard a train bound for Lisbon, where he was to play a major role in the difficult period of revolutionary politics (1974-75). During a most critical phase, the "hot summer" of 1975, when a civil war seemed in the offing, Soares's efforts to steer Portugal away from a communist dictatorship and sustained civil strife were courageous and effective. He found allies in the moderate military and large sectors of the population. After the abortive leftist coup of 25 November 1975, Soares played an equally vital role in assisting the stabilization of a pluralist democracy.

   Prime minister on several occasions during the era of postrevolu-tionary adjustment (1976-85), Soares continued his role as the respected leader of the PS. Following 11 hectic years of the Lusitanian political hurly-burly, Soares was eager for a change and some rest. Prepared to give up leadership of the factious PS and become a senior statesman in the new Portugal, Mário Soares ran for the presidency of the republic. After serving twice as elected president of the republic, he established the Mário Soares Foundation, Lisbon, and was elected to the European Parliament.

    See also Political parties.

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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Bigelow was born in West Boyleston, Massachusetts, where his father struggled as a farmer, wheelwright, and chairmaker. Before he was 20, Bigelow had many different jobs, among them farm labourer, clerk, violin player and cotton-mill employee. In 1830, he went to Leicester Academy, Massachusetts, but he could not afford to go on to Harvard. He sought work in Boston, New York and elsewhere, making various inventions.

The most important of his early inventions was the power loom of 1837 for making coach lace. This loom contained all the essential features of his carpet looms, which he developed and patented two years later. He formed the Clinton Company for manufacturing carpets at Leicester, Massachusetts, but the factory became so large that its name was adopted for the town. The next twenty years saw various mechanical discoveries, while his range of looms was extended to cover Brussels, Wilton, tapestry and velvet carpets. Bigelow has been justly described as the originator of every fundamental device in these machines, which were amongst the largest textile machines of their time. The automatic insertion and withdrawal of strong wires with looped ends was the means employed to raise the looped pile of the Brussels carpets, while thinner wires with a knife blade at the end raised and then severed the loops to create the rich Wilton pile. At the Great Exhibition in 1851, it was declared that his looms made better carpets than any from hand looms. He also developed other looms for special materials.

He became a noted American economist, writing two books about tariff problems, advocating that the United States should not abandon its protectionist policies. In 1860 he was narrowly defeated in a Congress election. The following year he was a member of the committee that established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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   The ill-fated Alvor Agreement was signed in Alvor, Algarve province, in January 1975. The purpose of the agreement was to facilitate the peaceful, lawful decolonization of Portugal's former colony of Angola. The conference that worked out and signed this instrument was hosted by Portugal's provisional government, and backed by the Armed Forces Movement, which had overthrown the dictatorship on 25 April 1974, and which had called for rapid decolonization of Portugal's African colonies after a truce in the colonial war. Decolonization negotiations proceeded fairly smoothly in the other African territories, but in Angola, rather than one African nationalist movement or party, three were struggling for power. They were the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), led by Holden Roberto; the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), led by Agostinho Neto, who had trained as a physician in Portugal; and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. By the Alvor Agreement, which was signed by four parties — Portugal, FNLA, MPLA, and UNITA—the decolonization process would be realized in several stages, ending in November 1975, following free elections with the three nationalist parties participating, Portugal overseeing the elections, and the new army of Angola comprised of elements of the three African parties' armies, which had fought Portuguese forces off and on since 1961. Portugal's government in Lisbon and its government and forces in Angola attempted, but failed, to put the Alvor Agreement into full effect. A civil war broke out in the spring of 1975 in Angola among the three nationalist forces, eventually with the FNLA and UNITA entering an alliance against the MPLA. No all-Angola army was ever constituted, and a power struggle among the three armed movements ensued. The MPLA won control of the Luanda region. As the Portuguese forces and commissioner withdrew, Portugal did not hand over power to any one group. On 11 November 1975, with the Alvor Agreement a dead letter and no elections having been organized, the MPLA declared the independence of Angola and the civil war continued. Angola's independent beginnings were unique in African history: the colonial power suddenly withdrew without handing over power officially to a nationalist party, but "to the people of Angola," and Angola was born as a free state embroiled in a bloody civil war that lasted until 2002.