contemporaries

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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Just a few days after the first balloon flight by the relatively primitive Montgolfier hot-air balloon, a design for a sophisticated steerable or "dirigible" balloon was proposed by a young French army officer. On 3 December 1783, Lieutenant (later General) Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier of the Corps of Engineers presented to the Académie des Sciences a paper entitled Mémoire sur l'équilibre des machines aérostatiques. This outlined Meusnier's ideas and so impressed the learned members of the Academy that they commissioned him to make a more complete study. This was published in 1784 and contained sixteen water-colour drawings of the proposed airship, which are preserved by the Musée de l'Air in Paris.

Meusnier's "machine aérostatique" was ellipsoidal in shape, in contrast to those of his unsuccessful contemporaries who tried to make spherical balloons steerable, often using oars for propulsion. Meusnier's proposed airship was 79.2 m (260 ft) long with the crew in a slim boat slung below the envelope (in case of a landing on water); it was steered by a large sail-like rudder at the rear end. Between the envelope and the boat were three propellers, which were to be manually driven as there was no suitable engine available; this was the first design for a propeller-driven aircraft. The most important innovation was a ballonnet, a balloon within the main envelope that was pressurized with air supplied by bellows in the boat. Varying the amount of air in the ballonnet would compensate for changes in the volume of hydrogen gas in the main envelope when the airship changed altitude. The ballonnet would also help to maintain the external shape of the main envelope.

General Meusnier was killed in action in 1793 and it was almost one hundred years from the date of his publication that his idea of ballonnets was put into practice, by Dupuy de Lome in 1872, and later by Renard and Krebs.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Mies van der Rohe was the son of a stonemason and his early constructional training came from his father. As a young man he gained experience of the modern school from study of the architecture of the earlier leaders, notably Peter Behrens, Hendrik Berlage and Frank Lloyd Wright. He commenced architectural practice in 1913 and soon after the First World War was establishing his own version of modern architecture. His building materials were always of the highest quality, of marble, stone, glass and, especially, steel. He stripped his designs of all extraneous decoration: more than any of his contemporaries he followed the theme of elegance, functionalism and an ascetic concentration on essentials. He believed that architectural design should not look backwards but should reflect the contemporary achievement of advanced technology in both its construction and the materials used, and he began early in his career to act upon these beliefs. Typical was his early concrete and glass office building of 1922, after which, more importantly, came his designs for the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exposition of 1929. These designs included his famous Barcelona chair, made from chrome steel and leather in a geometrical design, one which has survived as a classic and is still in production. Another milestone was his Tugendhat House in Brno (1930), a long, low, rectilinear structure in glass and steel that set a pattern for many later buildings of this type. In 1930 Mies followed his colleagues as third Director of the Bauhaus, but due to the rise of National Socialism in Germany it was closed in 1933. He finally left Germany for the USA in 1937, and the following year he took up his post as Director of Architecture in Chicago at what is now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology and where he remained for twenty years. In America Mies van der Rohe continued to develop his work upon his original thesis. His buildings are always recognizable for their elegance, fine proportions, high-quality materials and clean, geometrical forms; nearly all are of glass and steel in rectangular shapes. The structure and design evolved according to the individual needs of each commission, and there were three fundamental types of design. One type was the single or grouped high-rise tower, built for apartments for the wealthy, as in his Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago (1948–51), or for city-centre offices, as in his Seagram Building in New York (1954–8, with Philip Johnson) or his Chicago Federal Centre (1964). Another form was the long, low rectangle based upon the earlier Tugendhat House and seen again in the New National Gallery in Berlin (1965–8). Third, there were the grouped schemes when the commission called for buildings of varied purpose on a single, large site. Here Mies van der Rohe achieved a variety and interest in the different shapes and heights of buildings set out in spatial harmony of landscape. Some examples of this type of scheme were housing estates (Lafayette Park Housing Development in Detroit, 1955–6), while others were for educational, commercial or shopping requirements, as at the Toronto Dominion Centre (1963–9).

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Born in Belgium of German stock, Monckhoven spoke German and French with equal fluency. He originally studied chemistry, but devoted the greater part of his working life to photography. His improved solar enlarger of 1864 was seen by his contemporaries as one of the significant innovations of the day. In 1867 he moved to Vienna, where he became involved in portrait photography, but returned to Ghent in 1870. In 1871 he announced his discovery of a practicable collodion dry-plate process, and later in the decade he conducted research into the carbon printing process. In 1879 Monckhoven constructed a comprehensively equipped laboratory where he commenced a series of experiments on gelatine dry-plate emulsions, including some which yielded the discovery that the ripening of silver bromide was greatly accelerated by ammonia; this allowed the production of emulsions of much greater sensitivity. He was a prolific author, and his 1852 book on photography, Traité général de photographie, published when he was only 18, became one of the standard texts of his day.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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In the last decade of the nineteenth century and in the first of the twentieth, Poelzig did not, like most of his colleagues in Germany and Austria, follow the Jugendstil theme or the eclectic or fundamentalist lines: he set a path to individualism. In 1898 he began a teaching career at the Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) Academy of Arts and Crafts, remaining there until 1916. He early introduced workshop practice into the curriculum, presaging Gropius's Bauhaus ideas by many years; the school's workshop produced much of the artisan needs for a number of his buildings. From Breslau Poelzig moved to Dresden, where he was appointed City Architect. It was there that he launched his Expressionist line: which was particularly evident in the town hall and concert hall in the city. The structure for which Poelzig is best known and with which his name will always be associated is the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin; he had returned to his native city after the First World War and this great theatre was his first commission there. Using modern materials, he created a fabulous interior to seat 5,000 spectators. It was in the form of a vast amphitheatre with projecting stage and with the curving area roofed by a cavernous, stalactited dome, the Arabic-style stalactites of which were utilized by Poelzig for acoustic purposes. In the 1920s Poelzig went on to design cinemas, a field for which Expressionism was especially suited; these included the Capitol Cinema in Berlin and the Deli in Breslau. For his later industrial commissions—for example, the administrative building for the chemical firm I.G.Far ben in Frankfurt—he had perforce to design in more traditional modern manner.

Poelzig died in 1936, which spared him, unlike many of his contemporaries, the choice of emigrating or working for National Socialism.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Thomas Rickman trained first in medicine and then, after practising for a short while, became an insurance clerk. During his thirties, having taught himself draughtsmanship, he travelled the country drawing, and recording some 3,000 medieval churches. He became deeply interested in and knowledgeable about ecclesiastical medieval architecture and in 1817 he began architectural practice. Rickman was responsible for a great deal of collegiate and ecclesiastical building. His understanding of true medieval materials and construction was much greater than that of his contemporaries, but like them he saw nothing incongruous about using modern materials such as plaster and cast iron for vault supports and tracery, so changing the structural proportions from medieval precepts. Characteristic of his work was St George Edgbaston (1819–22; demolished 1960) and Hartlebury Church (1836–7). Rickman is known primarily for his book An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation, in which he suggested classifying periods of architecture as Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular. These terms are still largely accepted even today.

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SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

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He studied at Bologna University and took his degree in medicine at the age of 24. He was later appointed Professor of Surgery and of Anatomy. In his writings he appears to have preceded some of the work of Paré and gives a detailed account of rhinoplasty facilitated by the deployment of strips of skin. He also described a type of artificial eye resembling Paré's ekblepharon. His surgical skill appears to have been highly regarded by his contemporaries.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Educated at Harrow, where he first showed an interest in science, and at Cambridge, Talbot was an outstanding scholar and a formidable mathematician. He published over fifty scientific papers and took out twelve English patents. His interests outside the field of science were also wide and included Assyriology, etymology and the classics. He was briefly a Member of Parliament, but did not pursue a parliamentary career.

Talbot's invention of photography arose out of his frustrating attempts to produce acceptable pencil sketches using popular artist's aids, the camera discura and camera lucida. From his experiments with the former he conceived the idea of placing on the screen a paper coated with silver salts so that the image would be captured chemically. During the spring of 1834 he made outline images of subjects such as leaves and flowers by placing them on sheets of sensitized paper and exposing them to sunlight. No camera was involved and the first images produced using an optical system were made with a solar microscope. It was only when he had devised a more sensitive paper that Talbot was able to make camera pictures; the earliest surviving camera negative dates from August 1835. From the beginning, Talbot noticed that the lights and shades of his images were reversed. During 1834 or 1835 he discovered that by placing this reversed image on another sheet of sensitized paper and again exposing it to sunlight, a picture was produced with lights and shades in the correct disposition. Talbot had discovered the basis of modern photography, the photographic negative, from which could be produced an unlimited number of positives. He did little further work until the announcement of Daguerre's process in 1839 prompted him to publish an account of his negative-positive process. Aware that his photogenic drawing process had many imperfections, Talbot plunged into further experiments and in September 1840, using a mixture incorporating a solution of gallic acid, discovered an invisible latent image that could be made visible by development. This improved calotype process dramatically shortened exposure times and allowed Talbot to take portraits. In 1841 he patented the process, an exercise that was later to cause controversy, and between 1844 and 1846 produced The Pencil of Nature, the world's first commercial photographically illustrated book.

Concerned that some of his photographs were prone to fading, Talbot later began experiments to combine photography with printing and engraving. Using bichromated gelatine, he devised the first practicable method of photo engraving, which was patented as Photoglyphic engraving in October 1852. He later went on to use screens of gauze, muslin and finely powdered gum to break up the image into lines and dots, thus anticipating modern photomechanical processes.

Talbot was described by contemporaries as the "Father of Photography" primarily in recognition of his discovery of the negative-positive process, but he also produced the first photomicrographs, took the first high-speed photographs with the aid of a spark from a Leyden jar, and is credited with proposing infra-red photography. He was a shy man and his misguided attempts to enforce his calotype patent made him many enemies. It was perhaps for this reason that he never received the formal recognition from the British nation that his family felt he deserved.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Railways and locomotives

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Vignoles, who was of Huguenot descent, was orphaned in infancy and brought up in the family of his grandfather, Dr Charles Hutton FRS, Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. After service in the Army he travelled to America, arriving in South Carolina in 1817. He was appointed Assistant to the state's Civil Engineer and surveyed much of South Carolina and subsequently Florida. After his return to England in 1823 he established himself as a civil engineer in London, and obtained work from the brothers George and John Rennie.

In 1825 the promoters of the Liverpool \& Manchester Railway (L \& MR) lost their application for an Act of Parliament, discharged their engineer George Stephenson and appointed the Rennie brothers in his place. They in turn employed Vignoles to resurvey the railway, taking a route that would minimize objections. With Vignoles's route, the company obtained its Act in 1826 and appointed Vignoles to supervise the start of construction. After Stephenson was reappointed Chief Engineer, however, he and Vignoles proved incompatible, with the result that Vignoles left the L \& MR early in 1827.

Nevertheless, Vignoles did not sever all connection with the L \& MR. He supported John Braithwaite and John Ericsson in the construction of the locomotive Novelty and was present when it competed in the Rainhill Trials in 1829. He attended the opening of the L \& MR in 1830 and was appointed Engineer to two railways which connected with it, the St Helens \& Runcorn Gap and the Wigan Branch (later extended to Preston as the North Union); he supervised the construction of these.

After the death of the Engineer to the Dublin \& Kingstown Railway, Vignoles supervised construction: the railway, the first in Ireland, was opened in 1834. He was subsequently employed in surveying and constructing many railways in the British Isles and on the European continent; these included the Eastern Counties, the Midland Counties, the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyme \& Manchester (which proved for him a financial disaster from which he took many years to recover), and the Waterford \& Limerick. He probably discussed rail of flat-bottom section with R.L. Stevens during the winter of 1830–1 and brought it into use in the UK for the first time in 1836 on the London \& Croydon Railway: subsequently rail of this section became known as "Vignoles rail". He considered that a broader gauge than 4 ft 8½ in. (1.44 m) was desirable for railways, although most of those he built were to this gauge so that they might connect with others. He supported the atmospheric system of propulsion during the 1840s and was instrumental in its early installation on the Dublin \& Kingstown Railway's Dalkey extension. Between 1847 and 1853 he designed and built the noted multi-span suspension bridge at Kiev, Russia, over the River Dnieper, which is more than half a mile (800 m) wide at that point.

Between 1857 and 1863 he surveyed and then supervised the construction of the 155- mile (250 km) Tudela \& Bilbao Railway, which crosses the Cantabrian Pyrenees at an altitude of 2,163 ft (659 m) above sea level. Vignoles outlived his most famous contemporaries to become the grand old man of his profession.

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See also: Samuda, Joseph d'Aguilar

contemporaries

contemporaries

generation, as lineage of direct descendents; contemporaries.

Νινευίτης, ου, ὁ (-είτης) Ninevite pl., people of Nineveh as examples of penitence, contrasted w. the contemporaries of Jesus Mt 12:41; Lk 11:32. τοῖς Νινευίταις vs. 30. Jonah’s preaching of repentance among them 1 Cl 7:7.

   1) Beyond Psychophysiology and Sociology and History of Science There Is Nothing for Epistemology to Do

   If we have psychophysiology to cover causal mechanisms, and the sociology and history of science to note the occasions on which observation sentences are invoked or dodged in constructing and dismantling theories, then epistemology has nothing to do. (Rorty, 1979, p. 225)

   2) Epistemology Is a Chapter in Psychology or Natural Science

   But I think that at this point it may be more useful to say rather that epistemology still goes on, though in a new setting and a clarified status. Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz, a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input-certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance-and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence. (Quine, quoted in Royce & Rozeboom, 1972, p. 18)

   3) The Assumption That Cognitive Psychology Has Epistemological Import Can Be Challenged

   Only the assumption, that one day the various taxonomies put together by, for example, Chomsky, Piaget, Leґvi-Strauss, Marx, and Freud will all flow together and spell out one great Universal Language of Nature... would suggest that cognitive psychology had epistemological import. But that suggestion would still be as misguided as the suggestion that, since we may predict everything by knowing enough about matter in motion, a completed neurophysiology will help us demonstrate Galileo's superiority to his contemporaries. The gap between explaining ourselves and justifying ourselves is just as great whether a programming language or a hardware language is used in the explanations. (Rorty, 1979, p. 249)