Перевод: со всех языков на английский

с английского на все языки

it was not until 1970 that

  • 1 только в 1970 г

    Универсальный русско-английский словарь > только в 1970 г

  • 2 Gabor, Dennis (Dénes)

    [br]
    b. 5 June 1900 Budapest, Hungary
    d. 9 February 1979 London, England
    [br]
    Hungarian (naturalized British) physicist, inventor of holography.
    [br]
    Gabor became interested in physics at an early age. Called up for military service in 1918, he was soon released when the First World War came to an end. He then began a mechanical engineering course at the Budapest Technical University, but a further order to register for military service prompted him to flee in 1920 to Germany, where he completed his studies at Berlin Technical University. He was awarded a Diploma in Engineering in 1924 and a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering in 1927. He then went on to work in the physics laboratory of Siemens \& Halske. He returned to Hungary in 1933 and developed a new kind of fluorescent lamp called the plasma lamp. Failing to find a market for this device, Gabor made the decision to abandon his homeland and emigrate to England. There he joined British Thompson-Houston (BTH) in 1934 and married a colleague from the company in 1936. Gabor was also unsuccessful in his attempts to develop the plasma lamp in England, and by 1937 he had begun to work in the field of electron optics. His work was interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939, although as he was not yet a British subject he was barred from making any significant contribution to the British war effort. It was only when the war was near its end that he was able to return to electron optics and begin the work that led to the invention of holography. The theory was developed during 1947 and 1948; Gabor went on to demonstrate that the theories worked, although it was not until the invention of the laser in 1960 that the full potential of his invention could be appreciated. He coined the term "hologram" from the Greek holos, meaning complete, and gram, meaning written. The three-dimensional images have since found many applications in various fields, including map making, medical imaging, computing, information technology, art and advertising. Gabor left BTH to become an associate professor at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1949, a position he held until his retirement in 1967. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on holography.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Royal Society Rumford Medal 1968. Franklin Institute Michelson Medal 1968. CBE 1970. Nobel Prize for Physics 1971.
    Bibliography
    1948. "A new microscopic principle", Nature 161:777 (Gabor's earliest publication on holography).
    1949. "Microscopy by reconstructed wavefronts", Proceedings of the Royal Society A197: 454–87.
    1951, "Microscopy by reconstructed wavefronts II", Proc. Phys. Soc. B, 64:449–69. 1966, "Holography or the “Whole Picture”", New Scientist 29:74–8 (an interesting account written after laser beams were used to produce optical holograms).
    Further Reading
    T.E.Allibone, 1980, contribution to Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 26: 107–47 (a full account of Gabor's life and work).
    JW

    Biographical history of technology > Gabor, Dennis (Dénes)

  • 3 Cai Lun (Tsai Lun)

    SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing
    [br]
    b. c.57 AD China
    d. c.121 AD China
    [br]
    Chinese Director of Imperial Workshops who is usually credited with the invention of paper.
    [br]
    He was a confidential secretary to the Emperor. He became Director of the Imperial Workshops and he is said to have invented, or sponsored the invention of, paper around the year 105 AD. Recent studies, however, suggest that paper was already known in China two centuries earlier. The method of making it has hardly varied in principle since that time. The raw materials, then usually old fishing nets and clothing rags, were boiled with water, to which alkali in the form of wood ash was sometimes added. The resulting pulp was then beaten in a stone mortar with a stone or a wooden mallet. The pulp was then mixed and stirred with a large amount of water, and a sieve or mould (formed on a wooden frame carrying a mat of thin reeds sewn together) was dipped into it and was shaken to help the fibres in the layer of pulp to interlock and thus form a sheet of paper. The rest of the process consisted, then as now, of getting rid of the water: the sheets of paper were dried and bleached by leaving them to lie in the sun.
    Some of China's many inventions were achieved independently in Western Europe, but it seems that Europe's knowledge of papermaking stems from the Chinese. It was not until the eighth century that it passed into the Islamic world and so, first by contact with the Moors in Spain in the twelfth century, into Western Europe.
    Cai Lun was later made a marquis. Further promotion followed when he was regarded as the god of papermaking.
    [br]
    Further Reading
    J.Needham, 1985, Science and Civilisation in China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Vol. V (1): Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West, 1970.
    LRD

    Biographical history of technology > Cai Lun (Tsai Lun)

  • 4 Historical Portugal

       Before Romans described western Iberia or Hispania as "Lusitania," ancient Iberians inhabited the land. Phoenician and Greek trading settlements grew up in the Tagus estuary area and nearby coasts. Beginning around 202 BCE, Romans invaded what is today southern Portugal. With Rome's defeat of Carthage, Romans proceeded to conquer and rule the western region north of the Tagus, which they named Roman "Lusitania." In the fourth century CE, as Rome's rule weakened, the area experienced yet another invasion—Germanic tribes, principally the Suevi, who eventually were Christianized. During the sixth century CE, the Suevi kingdom was superseded by yet another Germanic tribe—the Christian Visigoths.
       A major turning point in Portugal's history came in 711, as Muslim armies from North Africa, consisting of both Arab and Berber elements, invaded the Iberian Peninsula from across the Straits of Gibraltar. They entered what is now Portugal in 714, and proceeded to conquer most of the country except for the far north. For the next half a millennium, Islam and Muslim presence in Portugal left a significant mark upon the politics, government, language, and culture of the country.
       Islam, Reconquest, and Portugal Created, 714-1140
       The long frontier struggle between Muslim invaders and Christian communities in the north of the Iberian peninsula was called the Reconquista (Reconquest). It was during this struggle that the first dynasty of Portuguese kings (Burgundian) emerged and the independent monarchy of Portugal was established. Christian forces moved south from what is now the extreme north of Portugal and gradually defeated Muslim forces, besieging and capturing towns under Muslim sway. In the ninth century, as Christian forces slowly made their way southward, Christian elements were dominant only in the area between Minho province and the Douro River; this region became known as "territorium Portu-calense."
       In the 11th century, the advance of the Reconquest quickened as local Christian armies were reinforced by crusading knights from what is now France and England. Christian forces took Montemor (1034), at the Mondego River; Lamego (1058); Viseu (1058); and Coimbra (1064). In 1095, the king of Castile and Léon granted the country of "Portu-cale," what became northern Portugal, to a Burgundian count who had emigrated from France. This was the foundation of Portugal. In 1139, a descendant of this count, Afonso Henriques, proclaimed himself "King of Portugal." He was Portugal's first monarch, the "Founder," and the first of the Burgundian dynasty, which ruled until 1385.
       The emergence of Portugal in the 12th century as a separate monarchy in Iberia occurred before the Christian Reconquest of the peninsula. In the 1140s, the pope in Rome recognized Afonso Henriques as king of Portugal. In 1147, after a long, bloody siege, Muslim-occupied Lisbon fell to Afonso Henriques's army. Lisbon was the greatest prize of the 500-year war. Assisting this effort were English crusaders on their way to the Holy Land; the first bishop of Lisbon was an Englishman. When the Portuguese captured Faro and Silves in the Algarve province in 1248-50, the Reconquest of the extreme western portion of the Iberian peninsula was complete—significantly, more than two centuries before the Spanish crown completed the Reconquest of the eastern portion by capturing Granada in 1492.
       Consolidation and Independence of Burgundian Portugal, 1140-1385
       Two main themes of Portugal's early existence as a monarchy are the consolidation of control over the realm and the defeat of a Castil-ian threat from the east to its independence. At the end of this period came the birth of a new royal dynasty (Aviz), which prepared to carry the Christian Reconquest beyond continental Portugal across the straits of Gibraltar to North Africa. There was a variety of motives behind these developments. Portugal's independent existence was imperiled by threats from neighboring Iberian kingdoms to the north and east. Politics were dominated not only by efforts against the Muslims in
       Portugal (until 1250) and in nearby southern Spain (until 1492), but also by internecine warfare among the kingdoms of Castile, Léon, Aragon, and Portugal. A final comeback of Muslim forces was defeated at the battle of Salado (1340) by allied Castilian and Portuguese forces. In the emerging Kingdom of Portugal, the monarch gradually gained power over and neutralized the nobility and the Church.
       The historic and commonplace Portuguese saying "From Spain, neither a good wind nor a good marriage" was literally played out in diplomacy and war in the late 14th-century struggles for mastery in the peninsula. Larger, more populous Castile was pitted against smaller Portugal. Castile's Juan I intended to force a union between Castile and Portugal during this era of confusion and conflict. In late 1383, Portugal's King Fernando, the last king of the Burgundian dynasty, suddenly died prematurely at age 38, and the Master of Aviz, Portugal's most powerful nobleman, took up the cause of independence and resistance against Castile's invasion. The Master of Aviz, who became King João I of Portugal, was able to obtain foreign assistance. With the aid of English archers, Joao's armies defeated the Castilians in the crucial battle of Aljubarrota, on 14 August 1385, a victory that assured the independence of the Portuguese monarchy from its Castilian nemesis for several centuries.
       Aviz Dynasty and Portugal's First Overseas Empire, 1385-1580
       The results of the victory at Aljubarrota, much celebrated in Portugal's art and monuments, and the rise of the Aviz dynasty also helped to establish a new merchant class in Lisbon and Oporto, Portugal's second city. This group supported King João I's program of carrying the Reconquest to North Africa, since it was interested in expanding Portugal's foreign commerce and tapping into Muslim trade routes and resources in Africa. With the Reconquest against the Muslims completed in Portugal and the threat from Castile thwarted for the moment, the Aviz dynasty launched an era of overseas conquest, exploration, and trade. These efforts dominated Portugal's 15th and 16th centuries.
       The overseas empire and age of Discoveries began with Portugal's bold conquest in 1415 of the Moroccan city of Ceuta. One royal member of the 1415 expedition was young, 21-year-old Prince Henry, later known in history as "Prince Henry the Navigator." His part in the capture of Ceuta won Henry his knighthood and began Portugal's "Marvelous Century," during which the small kingdom was counted as a European and world power of consequence. Henry was the son of King João I and his English queen, Philippa of Lancaster, but he did not inherit the throne. Instead, he spent most of his life and his fortune, and that of the wealthy military Order of Christ, on various imperial ventures and on voyages of exploration down the African coast and into the Atlantic. While mythology has surrounded Henry's controversial role in the Discoveries, and this role has been exaggerated, there is no doubt that he played a vital part in the initiation of Portugal's first overseas empire and in encouraging exploration. He was naturally curious, had a sense of mission for Portugal, and was a strong leader. He also had wealth to expend; at least a third of the African voyages of the time were under his sponsorship. If Prince Henry himself knew little science, significant scientific advances in navigation were made in his day.
       What were Portugal's motives for this new imperial effort? The well-worn historical cliche of "God, Glory, and Gold" can only partly explain the motivation of a small kingdom with few natural resources and barely 1 million people, which was greatly outnumbered by the other powers it confronted. Among Portuguese objectives were the desire to exploit known North African trade routes and resources (gold, wheat, leather, weaponry, and other goods that were scarce in Iberia); the need to outflank the Muslim world in the Mediterranean by sailing around Africa, attacking Muslims en route; and the wish to ally with Christian kingdoms beyond Africa. This enterprise also involved a strategy of breaking the Venetian spice monopoly by trading directly with the East by means of discovering and exploiting a sea route around Africa to Asia. Besides the commercial motives, Portugal nurtured a strong crusading sense of Christian mission, and various classes in the kingdom saw an opportunity for fame and gain.
       By the time of Prince Henry's death in 1460, Portugal had gained control of the Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and Madeiras, begun to colonize the Cape Verde Islands, failed to conquer the Canary Islands from Castile, captured various cities on Morocco's coast, and explored as far as Senegal, West Africa, down the African coast. By 1488, Bar-tolomeu Dias had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and thereby discovered the way to the Indian Ocean.
       Portugal's largely coastal African empire and later its fragile Asian empire brought unexpected wealth but were purchased at a high price. Costs included wars of conquest and defense against rival powers, manning the far-flung navel and trade fleets and scattered castle-fortresses, and staffing its small but fierce armies, all of which entailed a loss of skills and population to maintain a scattered empire. Always short of capital, the monarchy became indebted to bankers. There were many defeats beginning in the 16th century at the hands of the larger imperial European monarchies (Spain, France, England, and Holland) and many attacks on Portugal and its strung-out empire. Typically, there was also the conflict that arose when a tenuously held world empire that rarely if ever paid its way demanded finance and manpower Portugal itself lacked.
       The first 80 years of the glorious imperial era, the golden age of Portugal's imperial power and world influence, was an African phase. During 1415-88, Portuguese navigators and explorers in small ships, some of them caravelas (caravels), explored the treacherous, disease-ridden coasts of Africa from Morocco to South Africa beyond the Cape of Good Hope. By the 1470s, the Portuguese had reached the Gulf of Guinea and, in the early 1480s, what is now Angola. Bartolomeu Dias's extraordinary voyage of 1487-88 to South Africa's coast and the edge of the Indian Ocean convinced Portugal that the best route to Asia's spices and Christians lay south, around the tip of southern Africa. Between 1488 and 1495, there was a hiatus caused in part by domestic conflict in Portugal, discussion of resources available for further conquests beyond Africa in Asia, and serious questions as to Portugal's capacity to reach beyond Africa. In 1495, King Manuel and his council decided to strike for Asia, whatever the consequences. In 1497-99, Vasco da Gama, under royal orders, made the epic two-year voyage that discovered the sea route to western India (Asia), outflanked Islam and Venice, and began Portugal's Asian empire. Within 50 years, Portugal had discovered and begun the exploitation of its largest colony, Brazil, and set up forts and trading posts from the Middle East (Aden and Ormuz), India (Calicut, Goa, etc.), Malacca, and Indonesia to Macau in China.
       By the 1550s, parts of its largely coastal, maritime trading post empire from Morocco to the Moluccas were under siege from various hostile forces, including Muslims, Christians, and Hindi. Although Moroccan forces expelled the Portuguese from the major coastal cities by 1550, the rival European monarchies of Castile (Spain), England, France, and later Holland began to seize portions of her undermanned, outgunned maritime empire.
       In 1580, Phillip II of Spain, whose mother was a Portuguese princess and who had a strong claim to the Portuguese throne, invaded Portugal, claimed the throne, and assumed control over the realm and, by extension, its African, Asian, and American empires. Phillip II filled the power vacuum that appeared in Portugal following the loss of most of Portugal's army and its young, headstrong King Sebastião in a disastrous war in Morocco. Sebastiao's death in battle (1578) and the lack of a natural heir to succeed him, as well as the weak leadership of the cardinal who briefly assumed control in Lisbon, led to a crisis that Spain's strong monarch exploited. As a result, Portugal lost its independence to Spain for a period of 60 years.
       Portugal under Spanish Rule, 1580-1640
       Despite the disastrous nature of Portugal's experience under Spanish rule, "The Babylonian Captivity" gave birth to modern Portuguese nationalism, its second overseas empire, and its modern alliance system with England. Although Spain allowed Portugal's weakened empire some autonomy, Spanish rule in Portugal became increasingly burdensome and unacceptable. Spain's ambitious imperial efforts in Europe and overseas had an impact on the Portuguese as Spain made greater and greater demands on its smaller neighbor for manpower and money. Portugal's culture underwent a controversial Castilianization, while its empire became hostage to Spain's fortunes. New rival powers England, France, and Holland attacked and took parts of Spain's empire and at the same time attacked Portugal's empire, as well as the mother country.
       Portugal's empire bore the consequences of being attacked by Spain's bitter enemies in what was a form of world war. Portuguese losses were heavy. By 1640, Portugal had lost most of its Moroccan cities as well as Ceylon, the Moluccas, and sections of India. With this, Portugal's Asian empire was gravely weakened. Only Goa, Damão, Diu, Bombay, Timor, and Macau remained and, in Brazil, Dutch forces occupied the northeast.
       On 1 December 1640, long commemorated as a national holiday, Portuguese rebels led by the duke of Braganza overthrew Spanish domination and took advantage of Spanish weakness following a more serious rebellion in Catalonia. Portugal regained independence from Spain, but at a price: dependence on foreign assistance to maintain its independence in the form of the renewal of the alliance with England.
       Restoration and Second Empire, 1640-1822
       Foreign affairs and empire dominated the restoration era and aftermath, and Portugal again briefly enjoyed greater European power and prestige. The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance was renewed and strengthened in treaties of 1642, 1654, and 1661, and Portugal's independence from Spain was underwritten by English pledges and armed assistance. In a Luso-Spanish treaty of 1668, Spain recognized Portugal's independence. Portugal's alliance with England was a marriage of convenience and necessity between two monarchies with important religious, cultural, and social differences. In return for legal, diplomatic, and trade privileges, as well as the use during war and peace of Portugal's great Lisbon harbor and colonial ports for England's navy, England pledged to protect Portugal and its scattered empire from any attack. The previously cited 17th-century alliance treaties were renewed later in the Treaty of Windsor, signed in London in 1899. On at least 10 different occasions after 1640, and during the next two centuries, England was central in helping prevent or repel foreign invasions of its ally, Portugal.
       Portugal's second empire (1640-1822) was largely Brazil-oriented. Portuguese colonization, exploitation of wealth, and emigration focused on Portuguese America, and imperial revenues came chiefly from Brazil. Between 1670 and 1740, Portugal's royalty and nobility grew wealthier on funds derived from Brazilian gold, diamonds, sugar, tobacco, and other crops, an enterprise supported by the Atlantic slave trade and the supply of African slave labor from West Africa and Angola. Visitors today can see where much of that wealth was invested: Portugal's rich legacy of monumental architecture. Meanwhile, the African slave trade took a toll in Angola and West Africa.
       In continental Portugal, absolutist monarchy dominated politics and government, and there was a struggle for position and power between the monarchy and other institutions, such as the Church and nobility. King José I's chief minister, usually known in history as the marquis of Pombal (ruled 1750-77), sharply suppressed the nobility and the
       Church (including the Inquisition, now a weak institution) and expelled the Jesuits. Pombal also made an effort to reduce economic dependence on England, Portugal's oldest ally. But his successes did not last much beyond his disputed time in office.
       Beginning in the late 18th century, the European-wide impact of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon placed Portugal in a vulnerable position. With the monarchy ineffectively led by an insane queen (Maria I) and her indecisive regent son (João VI), Portugal again became the focus of foreign ambition and aggression. With England unable to provide decisive assistance in time, France—with Spain's consent—invaded Portugal in 1807. As Napoleon's army under General Junot entered Lisbon meeting no resistance, Portugal's royal family fled on a British fleet to Brazil, where it remained in exile until 1821. In the meantime, Portugal's overseas empire was again under threat. There was a power vacuum as the monarch was absent, foreign armies were present, and new political notions of liberalism and constitutional monarchy were exciting various groups of citizens.
       Again England came to the rescue, this time in the form of the armies of the duke of Wellington. Three successive French invasions of Portugal were defeated and expelled, and Wellington succeeded in carrying the war against Napoleon across the Portuguese frontier into Spain. The presence of the English army, the new French-born liberal ideas, and the political vacuum combined to create revolutionary conditions. The French invasions and the peninsular wars, where Portuguese armed forces played a key role, marked the beginning of a new era in politics.
       Liberalism and Constitutional Monarchy, 1822-1910
       During 1807-22, foreign invasions, war, and civil strife over conflicting political ideas gravely damaged Portugal's commerce, economy, and novice industry. The next terrible blow was the loss of Brazil in 1822, the jewel in the imperial crown. Portugal's very independence seemed to be at risk. In vain, Portugal sought to resist Brazilian independence by force, but in 1825 it formally acknowledged Brazilian independence by treaty.
       Portugal's slow recovery from the destructive French invasions and the "war of independence" was complicated by civil strife over the form of constitutional monarchy that best suited Portugal. After struggles over these issues between 1820 and 1834, Portugal settled somewhat uncertainly into a moderate constitutional monarchy whose constitution (Charter of 1826) lent it strong political powers to exert a moderating influence between the executive and legislative branches of the government. It also featured a new upper middle class based on land ownership and commerce; a Catholic Church that, although still important, lived with reduced privileges and property; a largely African (third) empire to which Lisbon and Oporto devoted increasing spiritual and material resources, starting with the liberal imperial plans of 1836 and 1851, and continuing with the work of institutions like the Lisbon Society of Geography (established 1875); and a mass of rural peasants whose bonds to the land weakened after 1850 and who began to immigrate in increasing numbers to Brazil and North America.
       Chronic military intervention in national politics began in 19th-century Portugal. Such intervention, usually commencing with coups or pronunciamentos (military revolts), was a shortcut to the spoils of political office and could reflect popular discontent as well as the power of personalities. An early example of this was the 1817 golpe (coup) attempt of General Gomes Freire against British military rule in Portugal before the return of King João VI from Brazil. Except for a more stable period from 1851 to 1880, military intervention in politics, or the threat thereof, became a feature of the constitutional monarchy's political life, and it continued into the First Republic and the subsequent Estado Novo.
       Beginning with the Regeneration period (1851-80), Portugal experienced greater political stability and economic progress. Military intervention in politics virtually ceased; industrialization and construction of railroads, roads, and bridges proceeded; two political parties (Regenerators and Historicals) worked out a system of rotation in power; and leading intellectuals sparked a cultural revival in several fields. In 19th-century literature, there was a new golden age led by such figures as Alexandre Herculano (historian), Eça de Queirós (novelist), Almeida Garrett (playwright and essayist), Antero de Quental (poet), and Joaquim Oliveira Martins (historian and social scientist). In its third overseas empire, Portugal attempted to replace the slave trade and slavery with legitimate economic activities; to reform the administration; and to expand Portuguese holdings beyond coastal footholds deep into the African hinterlands in West, West Central, and East Africa. After 1841, to some extent, and especially after 1870, colonial affairs, combined with intense nationalism, pressures for economic profit in Africa, sentiment for national revival, and the drift of European affairs would make or break Lisbon governments.
       Beginning with the political crisis that arose out of the "English Ultimatum" affair of January 1890, the monarchy became discredtted and identified with the poorly functioning government, political parties splintered, and republicanism found more supporters. Portugal participated in the "Scramble for Africa," expanding its African holdings, but failed to annex territory connecting Angola and Mozambique. A growing foreign debt and state bankruptcy as of the early 1890s damaged the constitutional monarchy's reputation, despite the efforts of King Carlos in diplomacy, the renewal of the alliance in the Windsor Treaty of 1899, and the successful if bloody colonial wars in the empire (1880-97). Republicanism proclaimed that Portugal's weak economy and poor society were due to two historic institutions: the monarchy and the Catholic Church. A republic, its stalwarts claimed, would bring greater individual liberty; efficient, if more decentralized government; and a stronger colonial program while stripping the Church of its role in both society and education.
       As the monarchy lost support and republicans became more aggressive, violence increased in politics. King Carlos I and his heir Luís were murdered in Lisbon by anarchist-republicans on 1 February 1908. Following a military and civil insurrection and fighting between monarchist and republican forces, on 5 October 1910, King Manuel II fled Portugal and a republic was proclaimed.
       First Parliamentary Republic, 1910-26
       Portugal's first attempt at republican government was the most unstable, turbulent parliamentary republic in the history of 20th-century Western Europe. During a little under 16 years of the republic, there were 45 governments, a number of legislatures that did not complete normal terms, military coups, and only one president who completed his four-year term in office. Portuguese society was poorly prepared for this political experiment. Among the deadly legacies of the monarchy were a huge public debt; a largely rural, apolitical, and illiterate peasant population; conflict over the causes of the country's misfortunes; and lack of experience with a pluralist, democratic system.
       The republic had some talented leadership but lacked popular, institutional, and economic support. The 1911 republican constitution established only a limited democracy, as only a small portion of the adult male citizenry was eligible to vote. In a country where the majority was Catholic, the republic passed harshly anticlerical laws, and its institutions and supporters persecuted both the Church and its adherents. During its brief disjointed life, the First Republic drafted important reform plans in economic, social, and educational affairs; actively promoted development in the empire; and pursued a liberal, generous foreign policy. Following British requests for Portugal's assistance in World War I, Portugal entered the war on the Allied side in March 1916 and sent armies to Flanders and Portuguese Africa. Portugal's intervention in that conflict, however, was too costly in many respects, and the ultimate failure of the republic in part may be ascribed to Portugal's World War I activities.
       Unfortunately for the republic, its time coincided with new threats to Portugal's African possessions: World War I, social and political demands from various classes that could not be reconciled, excessive military intervention in politics, and, in particular, the worst economic and financial crisis Portugal had experienced since the 16th and 17th centuries. After the original Portuguese Republican Party (PRP, also known as the "Democrats") splintered into three warring groups in 1912, no true multiparty system emerged. The Democrats, except for only one or two elections, held an iron monopoly of electoral power, and political corruption became a major issue. As extreme right-wing dictatorships elsewhere in Europe began to take power in Italy (1922), neighboring Spain (1923), and Greece (1925), what scant popular support remained for the republic collapsed. Backed by a right-wing coalition of landowners from Alentejo, clergy, Coimbra University faculty and students, Catholic organizations, and big business, career military officers led by General Gomes da Costa executed a coup on 28 May 1926, turned out the last republican government, and established a military government.
       The Estado Novo (New State), 1926-74
       During the military phase (1926-32) of the Estado Novo, professional military officers, largely from the army, governed and administered Portugal and held key cabinet posts, but soon discovered that the military possessed no magic formula that could readily solve the problems inherited from the First Republic. Especially during the years 1926-31, the military dictatorship, even with its political repression of republican activities and institutions (military censorship of the press, political police action, and closure of the republic's rowdy parliament), was characterized by similar weaknesses: personalism and factionalism; military coups and political instability, including civil strife and loss of life; state debt and bankruptcy; and a weak economy. "Barracks parliamentarism" was not an acceptable alternative even to the "Nightmare Republic."
       Led by General Óscar Carmona, who had replaced and sent into exile General Gomes da Costa, the military dictatorship turned to a civilian expert in finance and economics to break the budget impasse and bring coherence to the disorganized system. Appointed minister of finance on 27 April 1928, the Coimbra University Law School professor of economics Antônio de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) first reformed finance, helped balance the budget, and then turned to other concerns as he garnered extraordinary governing powers. In 1930, he was appointed interim head of another key ministry (Colonies) and within a few years had become, in effect, a civilian dictator who, with the military hierarchy's support, provided the government with coherence, a program, and a set of policies.
       For nearly 40 years after he was appointed the first civilian prime minister in 1932, Salazar's personality dominated the government. Unlike extreme right-wing dictators elsewhere in Europe, Salazar was directly appointed by the army but was never endorsed by a popular political party, street militia, or voter base. The scholarly, reclusive former Coimbra University professor built up what became known after 1932 as the Estado Novo ("New State"), which at the time of its overthrow by another military coup in 1974, was the longest surviving authoritarian regime in Western Europe. The system of Salazar and the largely academic and technocratic ruling group he gathered in his cabinets was based on the central bureaucracy of the state, which was supported by the president of the republic—always a senior career military officer, General Óscar Carmona (1928-51), General Craveiro Lopes (1951-58), and Admiral Américo Tómaz (1958-74)—and the complicity of various institutions. These included a rubber-stamp legislature called the National Assembly (1935-74) and a political police known under various names: PVDE (1932-45), PIDE (1945-69),
       and DGS (1969-74). Other defenders of the Estado Novo security were paramilitary organizations such as the National Republican Guard (GNR); the Portuguese Legion (PL); and the Portuguese Youth [Movement]. In addition to censorship of the media, theater, and books, there was political repression and a deliberate policy of depoliticization. All political parties except for the approved movement of regime loyalists, the União Nacional or (National Union), were banned.
       The most vigorous and more popular period of the New State was 1932-44, when the basic structures were established. Never monolithic or entirely the work of one person (Salazar), the New State was constructed with the assistance of several dozen top associates who were mainly academics from law schools, some technocrats with specialized skills, and a handful of trusted career military officers. The 1933 Constitution declared Portugal to be a "unitary, corporative Republic," and pressures to restore the monarchy were resisted. Although some of the regime's followers were fascists and pseudofascists, many more were conservative Catholics, integralists, nationalists, and monarchists of different varieties, and even some reactionary republicans. If the New State was authoritarian, it was not totalitarian and, unlike fascism in Benito Mussolini's Italy or Adolf Hitler's Germany, it usually employed the minimum of violence necessary to defeat what remained a largely fractious, incoherent opposition.
       With the tumultuous Second Republic and the subsequent civil war in nearby Spain, the regime felt threatened and reinforced its defenses. During what Salazar rightly perceived as a time of foreign policy crisis for Portugal (1936-45), he assumed control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From there, he pursued four basic foreign policy objectives: supporting the Nationalist rebels of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) and concluding defense treaties with a triumphant Franco; ensuring that General Franco in an exhausted Spain did not enter World War II on the Axis side; maintaining Portuguese neutrality in World War II with a post-1942 tilt toward the Allies, including granting Britain and the United States use of bases in the Azores Islands; and preserving and protecting Portugal's Atlantic Islands and its extensive, if poor, overseas empire in Africa and Asia.
       During the middle years of the New State (1944-58), many key Salazar associates in government either died or resigned, and there was greater social unrest in the form of unprecedented strikes and clandestine Communist activities, intensified opposition, and new threatening international pressures on Portugal's overseas empire. During the earlier phase of the Cold War (1947-60), Portugal became a steadfast, if weak, member of the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance and, in 1955, with American support, Portugal joined the United Nations (UN). Colonial affairs remained a central concern of the regime. As of 1939, Portugal was the third largest colonial power in the world and possessed territories in tropical Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and São Tomé and Príncipe Islands) and the remnants of its 16th-century empire in Asia (Goa, Damão, Diu, East Timor, and Macau). Beginning in the early 1950s, following the independence of India in 1947, Portugal resisted Indian pressures to decolonize Portuguese India and used police forces to discourage internal opposition in its Asian and African colonies.
       The later years of the New State (1958-68) witnessed the aging of the increasingly isolated but feared Salazar and new threats both at home and overseas. Although the regime easily overcame the brief oppositionist threat from rival presidential candidate General Humberto Delgado in the spring of 1958, new developments in the African and Asian empires imperiled the authoritarian system. In February 1961, oppositionists hijacked the Portuguese ocean liner Santa Maria and, in following weeks, African insurgents in northern Angola, although they failed to expel the Portuguese, gained worldwide media attention, discredited the New State, and began the 13-year colonial war. After thwarting a dissident military coup against his continued leadership, Salazar and his ruling group mobilized military repression in Angola and attempted to develop the African colonies at a faster pace in order to ensure Portuguese control. Meanwhile, the other European colonial powers (Britain, France, Belgium, and Spain) rapidly granted political independence to their African territories.
       At the time of Salazar's removal from power in September 1968, following a stroke, Portugal's efforts to maintain control over its colonies appeared to be successful. President Americo Tomás appointed Dr. Marcello Caetano as Salazar's successor as prime minister. While maintaining the New State's basic structures, and continuing the regime's essential colonial policy, Caetano attempted wider reforms in colonial administration and some devolution of power from Lisbon, as well as more freedom of expression in Lisbon. Still, a great deal of the budget was devoted to supporting the wars against the insurgencies in Africa. Meanwhile in Asia, Portuguese India had fallen when the Indian army invaded in December 1961. The loss of Goa was a psychological blow to the leadership of the New State, and of the Asian empire only East Timor and Macau remained.
       The Caetano years (1968-74) were but a hiatus between the waning Salazar era and a new regime. There was greater political freedom and rapid economic growth (5-6 percent annually to late 1973), but Caetano's government was unable to reform the old system thoroughly and refused to consider new methods either at home or in the empire. In the end, regime change came from junior officers of the professional military who organized the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) against the Caetano government. It was this group of several hundred officers, mainly in the army and navy, which engineered a largely bloodless coup in Lisbon on 25 April 1974. Their unexpected action brought down the 48-year-old New State and made possible the eventual establishment and consolidation of democratic governance in Portugal, as well as a reorientation of the country away from the Atlantic toward Europe.
       Revolution of Carnations, 1974-76
       Following successful military operations of the Armed Forces Movement against the Caetano government, Portugal experienced what became known as the "Revolution of Carnations." It so happened that during the rainy week of the military golpe, Lisbon flower shops were featuring carnations, and the revolutionaries and their supporters adopted the red carnation as the common symbol of the event, as well as of the new freedom from dictatorship. The MFA, whose leaders at first were mostly little-known majors and captains, proclaimed a three-fold program of change for the new Portugal: democracy; decolonization of the overseas empire, after ending the colonial wars; and developing a backward economy in the spirit of opportunity and equality. During the first 24 months after the coup, there was civil strife, some anarchy, and a power struggle. With the passing of the Estado Novo, public euphoria burst forth as the new provisional military government proclaimed the freedoms of speech, press, and assembly, and abolished censorship, the political police, the Portuguese Legion, Portuguese Youth, and other New State organizations, including the National Union. Scores of political parties were born and joined the senior political party, the Portuguese Community Party (PCP), and the Socialist Party (PS), founded shortly before the coup.
       Portugal's Revolution of Carnations went through several phases. There was an attempt to take control by radical leftists, including the PCP and its allies. This was thwarted by moderate officers in the army, as well as by the efforts of two political parties: the PS and the Social Democrats (PPD, later PSD). The first phase was from April to September 1974. Provisional president General Antonio Spínola, whose 1974 book Portugal and the Future had helped prepare public opinion for the coup, met irresistible leftist pressures. After Spinola's efforts to avoid rapid decolonization of the African empire failed, he resigned in September 1974. During the second phase, from September 1974 to March 1975, radical military officers gained control, but a coup attempt by General Spínola and his supporters in Lisbon in March 1975 failed and Spínola fled to Spain.
       In the third phase of the Revolution, March-November 1975, a strong leftist reaction followed. Farm workers occupied and "nationalized" 1.1 million hectares of farmland in the Alentejo province, and radical military officers in the provisional government ordered the nationalization of Portuguese banks (foreign banks were exempted), utilities, and major industries, or about 60 percent of the economic system. There were power struggles among various political parties — a total of 50 emerged—and in the streets there was civil strife among labor, military, and law enforcement groups. A constituent assembly, elected on 25 April 1975, in Portugal's first free elections since 1926, drafted a democratic constitution. The Council of the Revolution (CR), briefly a revolutionary military watchdog committee, was entrenched as part of the government under the constitution, until a later revision. During the chaotic year of 1975, about 30 persons were killed in political frays while unstable provisional governments came and went. On 25 November 1975, moderate military forces led by Colonel Ramalho Eanes, who later was twice elected president of the republic (1976 and 1981), defeated radical, leftist military groups' revolutionary conspiracies.
       In the meantime, Portugal's scattered overseas empire experienced a precipitous and unprepared decolonization. One by one, the former colonies were granted and accepted independence—Guinea-Bissau (September 1974), Cape Verde Islands (July 1975), and Mozambique (July 1975). Portugal offered to turn over Macau to the People's Republic of China, but the offer was refused then and later negotiations led to the establishment of a formal decolonization or hand-over date of 1999. But in two former colonies, the process of decolonization had tragic results.
       In Angola, decolonization negotiations were greatly complicated by the fact that there were three rival nationalist movements in a struggle for power. The January 1975 Alvor Agreement signed by Portugal and these three parties was not effectively implemented. A bloody civil war broke out in Angola in the spring of 1975 and, when Portuguese armed forces withdrew and declared that Angola was independent on 11 November 1975, the bloodshed only increased. Meanwhile, most of the white Portuguese settlers from Angola and Mozambique fled during the course of 1975. Together with African refugees, more than 600,000 of these retornados ("returned ones") went by ship and air to Portugal and thousands more to Namibia, South Africa, Brazil, Canada, and the United States.
       The second major decolonization disaster was in Portugal's colony of East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. Portugal's capacity to supervise and control a peaceful transition to independence in this isolated, neglected colony was limited by the strength of giant Indonesia, distance from Lisbon, and Portugal's revolutionary disorder and inability to defend Timor. In early December 1975, before Portugal granted formal independence and as one party, FRETILIN, unilaterally declared East Timor's independence, Indonesia's armed forces invaded, conquered, and annexed East Timor. Indonesian occupation encountered East Timorese resistance, and a heavy loss of life followed. The East Timor question remained a contentious international issue in the UN, as well as in Lisbon and Jakarta, for more than 20 years following Indonesia's invasion and annexation of the former colony of Portugal. Major changes occurred, beginning in 1998, after Indonesia underwent a political revolution and allowed a referendum in East Timor to decide that territory's political future in August 1999. Most East Timorese chose independence, but Indonesian forces resisted that verdict until
       UN intervention in September 1999. Following UN rule for several years, East Timor attained full independence on 20 May 2002.
       Consolidation of Democracy, 1976-2000
       After several free elections and record voter turnouts between 25 April 1975 and June 1976, civil war was averted and Portugal's second democratic republic began to stabilize. The MFA was dissolved, the military were returned to the barracks, and increasingly elected civilians took over the government of the country. The 1976 Constitution was revised several times beginning in 1982 and 1989, in order to reempha-size the principle of free enterprise in the economy while much of the large, nationalized sector was privatized. In June 1976, General Ram-alho Eanes was elected the first constitutional president of the republic (five-year term), and he appointed socialist leader Dr. Mário Soares as prime minister of the first constitutional government.
       From 1976 to 1985, Portugal's new system featured a weak economy and finances, labor unrest, and administrative and political instability. The difficult consolidation of democratic governance was eased in part by the strong currency and gold reserves inherited from the Estado Novo, but Lisbon seemed unable to cope with high unemployment, new debt, the complex impact of the refugees from Africa, world recession, and the agitation of political parties. Four major parties emerged from the maelstrom of 1974-75, except for the Communist Party, all newly founded. They were, from left to right, the Communists (PCP); the Socialists (PS), who managed to dominate governments and the legislature but not win a majority in the Assembly of the Republic; the Social Democrats (PSD); and the Christian Democrats (CDS). During this period, the annual growth rate was low (l-2 percent), and the nationalized sector of the economy stagnated.
       Enhanced economic growth, greater political stability, and more effective central government as of 1985, and especially 1987, were due to several developments. In 1977, Portugal applied for membership in the European Economic Community (EEC), now the European Union (EU) since 1993. In January 1986, with Spain, Portugal was granted membership, and economic and financial progress in the intervening years has been significantly influenced by the comparatively large investment, loans, technology, advice, and other assistance from the EEC. Low unemployment, high annual growth rates (5 percent), and moderate inflation have also been induced by the new political and administrative stability in Lisbon. Led by Prime Minister Cavaco Silva, an economist who was trained abroad, the PSD's strong organization, management, and electoral support since 1985 have assisted in encouraging economic recovery and development. In 1985, the PSD turned the PS out of office and won the general election, although they did not have an absolute majority of assembly seats. In 1986, Mário Soares was elected president of the republic, the first civilian to hold that office since the First Republic. In the elections of 1987 and 1991, however, the PSD was returned to power with clear majorities of over 50 percent of the vote.
       Although the PSD received 50.4 percent of the vote in the 1991 parliamentary elections and held a 42-seat majority in the Assembly of the Republic, the party began to lose public support following media revelations regarding corruption and complaints about Prime Minister Cavaco Silva's perceived arrogant leadership style. President Mário Soares voiced criticism of the PSD's seemingly untouchable majority and described a "tyranny of the majority." Economic growth slowed down. In the parliamentary elections of 1995 and the presidential election of 1996, the PSD's dominance ended for the time being. Prime Minister Antônio Guterres came to office when the PS won the October 1995 elections, and in the subsequent presidential contest, in January 1996, socialist Jorge Sampaio, the former mayor of Lisbon, was elected president of the republic, thus defeating Cavaco Silva's bid. Young and popular, Guterres moved the PS toward the center of the political spectrum. Under Guterres, the PS won the October 1999 parliamentary elections. The PS defeated the PSD but did not manage to win a clear, working majority of seats, and this made the PS dependent upon alliances with smaller parties, including the PCP.
       In the local elections in December 2001, the PSD's criticism of PS's heavy public spending allowed the PSD to take control of the key cities of Lisbon, Oporto, and Coimbra. Guterres resigned, and parliamentary elections were brought forward from 2004 to March 2002. The PSD won a narrow victory with 40 percent of the votes, and Jose Durão Barroso became prime minister. Having failed to win a majority of the seats in parliament forced the PSD to govern in coalition with the right-wing Popular Party (PP) led by Paulo Portas. Durão Barroso set about reducing government spending by cutting the budgets of local authorities, freezing civil service hiring, and reviving the economy by accelerating privatization of state-owned enterprises. These measures provoked a 24-hour strike by public-sector workers. Durão Barroso reacted with vows to press ahead with budget-cutting measures and imposed a wage freeze on all employees earning more than €1,000, which affected more than one-half of Portugal's work force.
       In June 2004, Durão Barroso was invited by Romano Prodi to succeed him as president of the European Commission. Durão Barroso accepted and resigned the prime ministership in July. Pedro Santana Lopes, the leader of the PSD, became prime minister. Already unpopular at the time of Durão Barroso's resignation, the PSD-led government became increasingly unpopular under Santana Lopes. A month-long delay in the start of the school year and confusion over his plan to cut taxes and raise public-sector salaries, eroded confidence even more. By November, Santana Lopes's government was so unpopular that President Jorge Sampaio was obliged to dissolve parliament and hold new elections, two years ahead of schedule.
       Parliamentary elections were held on 20 February 2005. The PS, which had promised the electorate disciplined and transparent governance, educational reform, the alleviation of poverty, and a boost in employment, won 45 percent of the vote and the majority of the seats in parliament. The leader of the PS, José Sôcrates became prime minister on 12 March 2005. In the regularly scheduled presidential elections held on 6 January 2006, the former leader of the PSD and prime minister, Aníbal Cavaco Silva, won a narrow victory and became president on 9 March 2006. With a mass protest, public teachers' strike, and street demonstrations in March 2008, Portugal's media, educational, and social systems experienced more severe pressures. With the spreading global recession beginning in September 2008, Portugal's economic and financial systems became more troubled.
       Owing to its geographic location on the southwestern most edge of continental Europe, Portugal has been historically in but not of Europe. Almost from the beginning of its existence in the 12th century as an independent monarchy, Portugal turned its back on Europe and oriented itself toward the Atlantic Ocean. After carving out a Christian kingdom on the western portion of the Iberian peninsula, Portuguese kings gradually built and maintained a vast seaborne global empire that became central to the way Portugal understood its individuality as a nation-state. While the creation of this empire allows Portugal to claim an unusual number of "firsts" or distinctions in world and Western history, it also retarded Portugal's economic, social, and political development. It can be reasonably argued that the Revolution of 25 April 1974 was the most decisive event in Portugal's long history because it finally ended Portugal's oceanic mission and view of itself as an imperial power. After the 1974 Revolution, Portugal turned away from its global mission and vigorously reoriented itself toward Europe. Contemporary Portugal is now both in and of Europe.
       The turn toward Europe began immediately after 25 April 1974. Portugal granted independence to its African colonies in 1975. It was admitted to the European Council and took the first steps toward accession to the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1976. On 28 March 1977, the Portuguese government officially applied for EEC membership. Because of Portugal's economic and social backwardness, which would require vast sums of EEC money to overcome, negotiations for membership were long and difficult. Finally, a treaty of accession was signed on 12 June 1985. Portugal officially joined the EEC (the European Union [EU] since 1993) on 1 January 1986. Since becoming a full-fledged member of the EU, Portugal has been steadily overcoming the economic and social underdevelopment caused by its imperial past and is becoming more like the rest of Europe.
       Membership in the EU has speeded up the structural transformation of Portugal's economy, which actually began during the Estado Novo. Investments made by the Estado Novo in Portugal's economy began to shift employment out of the agricultural sector, which, in 1950, accounted for 50 percent of Portugal's economically active population. Today, only 10 percent of the economically active population is employed in the agricultural sector (the highest among EU member states); 30 percent in the industrial sector (also the highest among EU member states); and 60 percent in the service sector (the lowest among EU member states). The economically active population numbers about 5,000,000 employed, 56 percent of whom are women. Women workers are the majority of the workforce in the agricultural and service sectors (the highest among the EU member states). The expansion of the service sector has been primarily in health care and education. Portugal has had the lowest unemployment rates among EU member states, with the overall rate never being more than 10 percent of the active population. Since joining the EU, the number of employers increased from 2.6 percent to 5.8 percent of the active population; self-employed from 16 to 19 percent; and employees from 65 to 70 percent. Twenty-six percent of the employers are women. Unemployment tends to hit younger workers in industry and transportation, women employed in domestic service, workers on short-term contracts, and poorly educated workers. Salaried workers earn only 63 percent of the EU average, and hourly workers only one-third to one-half of that earned by their EU counterparts. Despite having had the second highest growth of gross national product (GNP) per inhabitant (after Ireland) among EU member states, the above data suggest that while much has been accomplished in terms of modernizing the Portuguese economy, much remains to be done to bring Portugal's economy up to the level of the "average" EU member state.
       Membership in the EU has also speeded up changes in Portuguese society. Over the last 30 years, coastalization and urbanization have intensified. Fully 50 percent of Portuguese live in the coastal urban conurbations of Lisbon, Oporto, Braga, Aveiro, Coimbra, Viseu, Évora, and Faro. The Portuguese population is one of the oldest among EU member states (17.3 percent are 65 years of age or older) thanks to a considerable increase in life expectancy at birth (77.87 years for the total population, 74.6 years for men, 81.36 years for women) and one of the lowest birthrates (10.59 births/1,000) in Europe. Family size averages 2.8 persons per household, with the strict nuclear family (one or two generations) in which both parents work being typical. Common law marriages, cohabitating couples, and single-parent households are more and more common. The divorce rate has also increased. "Youth Culture" has developed. The young have their own meeting places, leisure-time activities, and nightlife (bars, clubs, and discos).
       All Portuguese citizens, whether they have contributed or not, have a right to an old-age pension, invalidity benefits, widowed persons' pension, as well as payments for disabilities, children, unemployment, and large families. There is a national minimum wage (€385 per month), which is low by EU standards. The rapid aging of Portugal's population has changed the ratio of contributors to pensioners to 1.7, the lowest in the EU. This has created deficits in Portugal's social security fund.
       The adult literacy rate is about 92 percent. Illiteracy is still found among the elderly. Although universal compulsory education up to grade 9 was achieved in 1980, only 21.2 percent of the population aged 25-64 had undergone secondary education, compared to an EU average of 65.7 percent. Portugal's higher education system currently consists of 14 state universities and 14 private universities, 15 state polytechnic institutions, one Catholic university, and one military academy. All in all, Portugal spends a greater percentage of its state budget on education than most EU member states. Despite this high level of expenditure, the troubled Portuguese education system does not perform well. Early leaving and repetition rates are among the highest among EU member states.
       After the Revolution of 25 April 1974, Portugal created a National Health Service, which today consists of 221 hospitals and 512 medical centers employing 33,751 doctors and 41,799 nurses. Like its education system, Portugal's medical system is inefficient. There are long waiting lists for appointments with specialists and for surgical procedures.
       Structural changes in Portugal's economy and society mean that social life in Portugal is not too different from that in other EU member states. A mass consumption society has been created. Televisions, telephones, refrigerators, cars, music equipment, mobile phones, and personal computers are commonplace. Sixty percent of Portuguese households possess at least one automobile, and 65 percent of Portuguese own their own home. Portuguese citizens are more aware of their legal rights than ever before. This has resulted in a trebling of the number of legal proceeding since 1960 and an eight-fold increase in the number of lawyers. In general, Portuguese society has become more permissive and secular; the Catholic Church and the armed forces are much less influential than in the past. Portugal's population is also much more culturally, religiously, and ethnically diverse, a consequence of the coming to Portugal of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mainly from former African colonies.
       Portuguese are becoming more cosmopolitan and sophisticated through the impact of world media, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. A prime case in point came in the summer and early fall of 1999, with the extraordinary events in East Timor and the massive Portuguese popular responses. An internationally monitored referendum in East Timor, Portugal's former colony in the Indonesian archipelago and under Indonesian occupation from late 1975 to summer 1999, resulted in a vote of 78.5 percent for rejecting integration with Indonesia and for independence. When Indonesian prointegration gangs, aided by the Indonesian military, responded to the referendum with widespread brutality and threatened to reverse the verdict of the referendum, there was a spontaneous popular outpouring of protest in the cities and towns of Portugal. An avalanche of Portuguese e-mail fell on leaders and groups in the UN and in certain countries around the world as Portugal's diplomats, perhaps to compensate for the weak initial response to Indonesian armed aggression in 1975, called for the protection of East Timor as an independent state and for UN intervention to thwart Indonesian action. Using global communications networks, the Portuguese were able to mobilize UN and world public opinion against Indonesian actions and aided the eventual independence of East Timor on 20 May 2002.
       From the Revolution of 25 April 1974 until the 1990s, Portugal had a large number of political parties, one of the largest Communist parties in western Europe, frequent elections, and endemic cabinet instability. Since the 1990s, the number of political parties has been dramatically reduced and cabinet stability increased. Gradually, the Portuguese electorate has concentrated around two larger parties, the right-of-center Social Democrats (PSD) and the left-of-center Socialist (PS). In the 1980s, these two parties together garnered 65 percent of the vote and 70 percent of the seats in parliament. In 2005, these percentages had risen to 74 percent and 85 percent, respectively. In effect, Portugal is currently a two-party dominant system in which the two largest parties — PS and PSD—alternate in and out of power, not unlike the rotation of the two main political parties (the Regenerators and the Historicals) during the last decades (1850s to 1880s) of the liberal constitutional monarchy. As Portugal's democracy has consolidated, turnout rates for the eligible electorate have declined. In the 1970s, turnout was 85 percent. In Portugal's most recent parliamentary election (2005), turnout had fallen to 65 percent of the eligible electorate.
       Portugal has benefited greatly from membership in the EU, and whatever doubts remain about the price paid for membership, no Portuguese government in the near future can afford to sever this connection. The vast majority of Portuguese citizens see membership in the EU as a "good thing" and strongly believe that Portugal has benefited from membership. Only the Communist Party opposed membership because it reduces national sovereignty, serves the interests of capitalists not workers, and suffers from a democratic deficit. Despite the high level of support for the EU, Portuguese voters are increasingly not voting in elections for the European Parliament, however. Turnout for European Parliament elections fell from 40 percent of the eligible electorate in the 1999 elections to 38 percent in the 2004 elections.
       In sum, Portugal's turn toward Europe has done much to overcome its backwardness. However, despite the economic, social, and political progress made since 1986, Portugal has a long way to go before it can claim to be on a par with the level found even in Spain, much less the rest of western Europe. As Portugal struggles to move from underde-velopment, especially in the rural areas away from the coast, it must keep in mind the perils of too rapid modern development, which could damage two of its most precious assets: its scenery and environment. The growth and future prosperity of the economy will depend on the degree to which the government and the private sector will remain stewards of clean air, soil, water, and other finite resources on which the tourism industry depends and on which Portugal's world image as a unique place to visit rests. Currently, Portugal is investing heavily in renewable energy from solar, wind, and wave power in order to account for about 50 percent of its electricity needs by 2010. Portugal opened the world's largest solar power plant and the world's first commercial wave power farm in 2006.
       An American documentary film on Portugal produced in the 1970s described this little country as having "a Past in Search of a Future." In the years after the Revolution of 25 April 1974, it could be said that Portugal is now living in "a Present in Search of a Future." Increasingly, that future lies in Europe as an active and productive member of the EU.

    Historical dictionary of Portugal > Historical Portugal

  • 5 Huygens, Christiaan

    SUBJECT AREA: Horology
    [br]
    b. 14 April 1629 The Hague, the Netherlands
    d. 8 June 1695 The Hague, the Netherlands
    [br]
    Dutch scientist who was responsible for two of the greatest advances in horology: the successful application of both the pendulum to the clock and the balance spring to the watch.
    [br]
    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.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    FRS 1663. Member of the Académie Royale des Sciences 1666.
    Bibliography
    For his complete works, see Oeuvres complètes de Christian Huygens, 1888–1950, 22 vols, The Hague.
    1658, Horologium, The Hague; repub., 1970, trans. E.L.Edwardes, Antiquarian
    Horology 7:35–55 (describes the pendulum clock).
    1673, Horologium Oscillatorium, Paris; repub., 1986, The Pendulum Clock or Demonstrations Concerning the Motion ofPendula as Applied to Clocks, trans.
    R.J.Blackwell, Ames.
    Further Reading
    H.J.M.Bos, 1972, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C.C.Gillispie, Vol. 6, New York, pp. 597–613 (for a fuller account of his life and scientific work, but note the incorrect date of his death).
    R.Plomp, 1979, Spring-Driven Dutch Pendulum Clocks, 1657–1710, Schiedam (describes Huygens's application of the pendulum to the clock).
    S.A.Bedini, 1991, The Pulse of Time, Florence (describes Galileo's contribution of the pendulum to the clock).
    J.H.Leopold, 1982, "L"Invention par Christiaan Huygens du ressort spiral réglant pour les montres', Huygens et la France, Paris, pp. 154–7 (describes the application of the balance spring to the watch).
    A.R.Hall, 1978, "Horology and criticism", Studia Copernica 16:261–81 (discusses Hooke's contribution).
    DV

    Biographical history of technology > Huygens, Christiaan

  • 6 Salazar, Antônio de Oliveira

    (1889-1970)
       The Coimbra University professor of finance and economics and one of the founders of the Estado Novo, who came to dominate Western Europe's longest surviving authoritarian system. Salazar was born on 28 April 1889, in Vimieiro, Beira Alta province, the son of a peasant estate manager and a shopkeeper. Most of his first 39 years were spent as a student, and later as a teacher in a secondary school and a professor at Coimbra University's law school. Nine formative years were spent at Viseu's Catholic Seminary (1900-09), preparing for the Catholic priesthood, but the serious, studious Salazar decided to enter Coimbra University instead in 1910, the year the Braganza monarchy was overthrown and replaced by the First Republic. Salazar received some of the highest marks of his generation of students and, in 1918, was awarded a doctoral degree in finance and economics. Pleading inexperience, Salazar rejected an invitation in August 1918 to become finance minister in the "New Republic" government of President Sidónio Pais.
       As a celebrated academic who was deeply involved in Coimbra University politics, publishing works on the troubled finances of the besieged First Republic, and a leader of Catholic organizations, Sala-zar was not as modest, reclusive, or unknown as later official propaganda led the public to believe. In 1921, as a Catholic deputy, he briefly served in the First Republic's turbulent congress (parliament) but resigned shortly after witnessing but one stormy session. Salazar taught at Coimbra University as of 1916, and continued teaching until April 1928. When the military overthrew the First Republic in May 1926, Salazar was offered the Ministry of Finance and held office for several days. The ascetic academic, however, resigned his post when he discovered the degree of disorder in Lisbon's government and when his demands for budget authority were rejected.
       As the military dictatorship failed to reform finances in the following years, Salazar was reinvited to become minister of finances in April 1928. Since his conditions for acceptance—authority over all budget expenditures, among other powers—were accepted, Salazar entered the government. Using the Ministry of Finance as a power base, following several years of successful financial reforms, Salazar was named interim minister of colonies (1930) and soon garnered sufficient prestige and authority to become head of the entire government. In July 1932, Salazar was named prime minister, the first civilian to hold that post since the 1926 military coup.
       Salazar gathered around him a team of largely academic experts in the cabinet during the period 1930-33. His government featured several key policies: Portuguese nationalism, colonialism (rebuilding an empire in shambles), Catholicism, and conservative fiscal management. Salazar's government came to be called the Estado Novo. It went through three basic phases during Salazar's long tenure in office, and Salazar's role underwent changes as well. In the early years (1928-44), Salazar and the Estado Novo enjoyed greater vigor and popularity than later. During the middle years (1944—58), the regime's popularity waned, methods of repression increased and hardened, and Salazar grew more dogmatic in his policies and ways. During the late years (1958-68), the regime experienced its most serious colonial problems, ruling circles—including Salazar—aged and increasingly failed, and opposition burgeoned and grew bolder.
       Salazar's plans for stabilizing the economy and strengthening social and financial programs were shaken with the impact of the civil war (1936-39) in neighboring Spain. Salazar strongly supported General Francisco Franco's Nationalist rebels, the eventual victors in the war. But, as the civil war ended and World War II began in September 1939, Salazar's domestic plans had to be adjusted. As Salazar came to monopolize Lisbon's power and authority—indeed to embody the Estado Novo itself—during crises that threatened the future of the regime, he assumed ever more key cabinet posts. At various times between 1936 and 1944, he took over the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of War (Defense), until the crises passed. At the end of the exhausting period of World War II, there were rumors that the former professor would resign from government and return to Coimbra University, but Salazar continued as the increasingly isolated, dominating "recluse of São Bento," that part of the parliament's buildings housing the prime minister's offices and residence.
       Salazar dominated the Estado Novo's government in several ways: in day-to-day governance, although this diminished as he delegated wider powers to others after 1944, and in long-range policy decisions, as well as in the spirit and image of the system. He also launched and dominated the single party, the União Nacional. A lifelong bachelor who had once stated that he could not leave for Lisbon because he had to care for his aged mother, Salazar never married, but lived with a beloved housekeeper from his Coimbra years and two adopted daughters. During his 36-year tenure as prime minister, Salazar engineered the important cabinet reshuffles that reflect the history of the Estado Novo and of Portugal.
       A number of times, in connection with significant events, Salazar decided on important cabinet officer changes: 11 April 1933 (the adoption of the Estado Novo's new 1933 Constitution); 18 January 1936 (the approach of civil war in Spain and the growing threat of international intervention in Iberian affairs during the unstable Second Spanish Republic of 1931-36); 4 September 1944 (the Allied invasion of Europe at Normandy and the increasing likelihood of a defeat of the Fascists by the Allies, which included the Soviet Union); 14 August 1958 (increased domestic dissent and opposition following the May-June 1958 presidential elections in which oppositionist and former regime stalwart-loyalist General Humberto Delgado garnered at least 25 percent of the national vote, but lost to regime candidate, Admiral Américo Tomás); 13 April 1961 (following the shock of anticolonial African insurgency in Portugal's colony of Angola in January-February 1961, the oppositionist hijacking of a Portuguese ocean liner off South America by Henrique Galvão, and an abortive military coup that failed to oust Salazar from office); and 19 August 1968 (the aging of key leaders in the government, including the now gravely ill Salazar, and the defection of key younger followers).
       In response to the 1961 crisis in Africa and to threats to Portuguese India from the Indian government, Salazar assumed the post of minister of defense (April 1961-December 1962). The failing leader, whose true state of health was kept from the public for as long as possible, appointed a group of younger cabinet officers in the 1960s, but no likely successors were groomed to take his place. Two of the older generation, Teotónio Pereira, who was in bad health, and Marcello Caetano, who preferred to remain at the University of Lisbon or in private law practice, remained in the political wilderness.
       As the colonial wars in three African territories grew more costly, Salazar became more isolated from reality. On 3 August 1968, while resting at his summer residence, the Fortress of São João do Estoril outside Lisbon, a deck chair collapsed beneath Salazar and his head struck the hard floor. Some weeks later, as a result, Salazar was incapacitated by a stroke and cerebral hemorrhage, was hospitalized, and became an invalid. While hesitating to fill the power vacuum that had unexpectedly appeared, President Tomás finally replaced Salazar as prime minister on 27 September 1968, with his former protégé and colleague, Marcello Caetano. Salazar was not informed that he no longer headed the government, but he never recovered his health. On 27 July 1970, Salazar died in Lisbon and was buried at Santa Comba Dão, Vimieiro, his village and place of birth.

    Historical dictionary of Portugal > Salazar, Antônio de Oliveira

  • 7 Creativity

       Put in this bald way, these aims sound utopian. How utopian they areor rather, how imminent their realization-depends on how broadly or narrowly we interpret the term "creative." If we are willing to regard all human complex problem solving as creative, then-as we will point out-successful programs for problem solving mechanisms that simulate human problem solvers already exist, and a number of their general characteristics are known. If we reserve the term "creative" for activities like discovery of the special theory of relativity or the composition of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, then no example of a creative mechanism exists at the present time. (Simon, 1979, pp. 144-145)
       Among the questions that can now be given preliminary answers in computational terms are the following: how can ideas from very different sources be spontaneously thought of together? how can two ideas be merged to produce a new structure, which shows the influence of both ancestor ideas without being a mere "cut-and-paste" combination? how can the mind be "primed," so that one will more easily notice serendipitous ideas? why may someone notice-and remember-something fairly uninteresting, if it occurs in an interesting context? how can a brief phrase conjure up an entire melody from memory? and how can we accept two ideas as similar ("love" and "prove" as rhyming, for instance) in respect of a feature not identical in both? The features of connectionist AI models that suggest answers to these questions are their powers of pattern completion, graceful degradation, sensitization, multiple constraint satisfaction, and "best-fit" equilibration.... Here, the important point is that the unconscious, "insightful," associative aspects of creativity can be explained-in outline, at least-by AI methods. (Boden, 1996, p. 273)
       There thus appears to be an underlying similarity in the process involved in creative innovation and social independence, with common traits and postures required for expression of both behaviors. The difference is one of product-literary, musical, artistic, theoretical products on the one hand, opinions on the other-rather than one of process. In both instances the individual must believe that his perceptions are meaningful and valid and be willing to rely upon his own interpretations. He must trust himself sufficiently that even when persons express opinions counter to his own he can proceed on the basis of his own perceptions and convictions. (Coopersmith, 1967, p. 58)
       he average level of ego strength and emotional stability is noticeably higher among creative geniuses than among the general population, though it is possibly lower than among men of comparable intelligence and education who go into administrative and similar positions. High anxiety and excitability appear common (e.g. Priestley, Darwin, Kepler) but full-blown neurosis is quite rare. (Cattell & Butcher, 1970, p. 315)
       he insight that is supposed to be required for such work as discovery turns out to be synonymous with the familiar process of recognition; and other terms commonly used in the discussion of creative work-such terms as "judgment," "creativity," or even "genius"-appear to be wholly dispensable or to be definable, as insight is, in terms of mundane and well-understood concepts. (Simon, 1989, p. 376)
       From the sketch material still in existence, from the condition of the fragments, and from the autographs themselves we can draw definite conclusions about Mozart's creative process. To invent musical ideas he did not need any stimulation; they came to his mind "ready-made" and in polished form. In contrast to Beethoven, who made numerous attempts at shaping his musical ideas until he found the definitive formulation of a theme, Mozart's first inspiration has the stamp of finality. Any Mozart theme has completeness and unity; as a phenomenon it is a Gestalt. (Herzmann, 1964, p. 28)
       Great artists enlarge the limits of one's perception. Looking at the world through the eyes of Rembrandt or Tolstoy makes one able to perceive aspects of truth about the world which one could not have achieved without their aid. Freud believed that science was adaptive because it facilitated mastery of the external world; but was it not the case that many scientific theories, like works of art, also originated in phantasy? Certainly, reading accounts of scientific discovery by men of the calibre of Einstein compelled me to conclude that phantasy was not merely escapist, but a way of reaching new insights concerning the nature of reality. Scientific hypotheses require proof; works of art do not. Both are concerned with creating order, with making sense out of the world and our experience of it. (Storr, 1993, p. xii)
       The importance of self-esteem for creative expression appears to be almost beyond disproof. Without a high regard for himself the individual who is working in the frontiers of his field cannot trust himself to discriminate between the trivial and the significant. Without trust in his own powers the person seeking improved solutions or alternative theories has no basis for distinguishing the significant and profound innovation from the one that is merely different.... An essential component of the creative process, whether it be analysis, synthesis, or the development of a new perspective or more comprehensive theory, is the conviction that one's judgment in interpreting the events is to be trusted. (Coopersmith, 1967, p. 59)
       In the daily stream of thought these four different stages [preparation; incubation; illumination or inspiration; and verification] constantly overlap each other as we explore different problems. An economist reading a Blue Book, a physiologist watching an experiment, or a business man going through his morning's letters, may at the same time be "incubating" on a problem which he proposed to himself a few days ago, be accumulating knowledge in "preparation" for a second problem, and be "verifying" his conclusions to a third problem. Even in exploring the same problem, the mind may be unconsciously incubating on one aspect of it, while it is consciously employed in preparing for or verifying another aspect. (Wallas, 1926, p. 81)
       he basic, bisociative pattern of the creative synthesis [is] the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or matrices of thought. (Koestler, 1964, p. 121)
        11) The Earliest Stages in the Creative Process Involve a Commerce with Disorder
       Even to the creator himself, the earliest effort may seem to involve a commerce with disorder. For the creative order, which is an extension of life, is not an elaboration of the established, but a movement beyond the established, or at least a reorganization of it and often of elements not included in it. The first need is therefore to transcend the old order. Before any new order can be defined, the absolute power of the established, the hold upon us of what we know and are, must be broken. New life comes always from outside our world, as we commonly conceive that world. This is the reason why, in order to invent, one must yield to the indeterminate within him, or, more precisely, to certain illdefined impulses which seem to be of the very texture of the ungoverned fullness which John Livingston Lowes calls "the surging chaos of the unexpressed." (Ghiselin, 1985, p. 4)
       New life comes always from outside our world, as we commonly conceive our world. This is the reason why, in order to invent, one must yield to the indeterminate within him, or, more precisely, to certain illdefined impulses which seem to be of the very texture of the ungoverned fullness which John Livingston Lowes calls "the surging chaos of the unexpressed." Chaos and disorder are perhaps the wrong terms for that indeterminate fullness and activity of the inner life. For it is organic, dynamic, full of tension and tendency. What is absent from it, except in the decisive act of creation, is determination, fixity, and commitment to one resolution or another of the whole complex of its tensions. (Ghiselin, 1952, p. 13)
       [P]sychoanalysts have principally been concerned with the content of creative products, and with explaining content in terms of the artist's infantile past. They have paid less attention to examining why the artist chooses his particular activity to express, abreact or sublimate his emotions. In short, they have not made much distinction between art and neurosis; and, since the former is one of the blessings of mankind, whereas the latter is one of the curses, it seems a pity that they should not be better differentiated....
       Psychoanalysis, being fundamentally concerned with drive and motive, might have been expected to throw more light upon what impels the creative person that in fact it has. (Storr, 1993, pp. xvii, 3)
       A number of theoretical approaches were considered. Associative theory, as developed by Mednick (1962), gained some empirical support from the apparent validity of the Remote Associates Test, which was constructed on the basis of the theory.... Koestler's (1964) bisociative theory allows more complexity to mental organization than Mednick's associative theory, and postulates "associative contexts" or "frames of reference." He proposed that normal, non-creative, thought proceeds within particular contexts or frames and that the creative act involves linking together previously unconnected frames.... Simonton (1988) has developed associative notions further and explored the mathematical consequences of chance permutation of ideas....
       Like Koestler, Gruber (1980; Gruber and Davis, 1988) has based his analysis on case studies. He has focused especially on Darwin's development of the theory of evolution. Using piagetian notions, such as assimilation and accommodation, Gruber shows how Darwin's system of ideas changed very slowly over a period of many years. "Moments of insight," in Gruber's analysis, were the culminations of slow long-term processes.... Finally, the information-processing approach, as represented by Simon (1966) and Langley et al. (1987), was considered.... [Simon] points out the importance of good problem representations, both to ensure search is in an appropriate problem space and to aid in developing heuristic evaluations of possible research directions.... The work of Langley et al. (1987) demonstrates how such search processes, realized in computer programs, can indeed discover many basic laws of science from tables of raw data.... Boden (1990a, 1994) has stressed the importance of restructuring the problem space in creative work to develop new genres and paradigms in the arts and sciences. (Gilhooly, 1996, pp. 243-244; emphasis in original)

    Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Creativity

  • 8 Language

       Philosophy is written in that great book, the universe, which is always open, right before our eyes. But one cannot understand this book without first learning to understand the language and to know the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other figures. Without these, one cannot understand a single word of it, and just wanders in a dark labyrinth. (Galileo, 1990, p. 232)
       It never happens that it [a nonhuman animal] arranges its speech in various ways in order to reply appropriately to everything that may be said in its presence, as even the lowest type of man can do. (Descartes, 1970a, p. 116)
       It is a very remarkable fact that there are none so depraved and stupid, without even excepting idiots, that they cannot arrange different words together, forming of them a statement by which they make known their thoughts; while, on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect and fortunately circumstanced it may be, which can do the same. (Descartes, 1967, p. 116)
       Human beings do not live in the object world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built on the language habits of the group.... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1921, p. 75)
       It powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes.... No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached. (Sapir, 1985, p. 162)
       [A list of language games, not meant to be exhaustive:]
       Giving orders, and obeying them- Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements- Constructing an object from a description (a drawing)Reporting an eventSpeculating about an eventForming and testing a hypothesisPresenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagramsMaking up a story; and reading itPlay actingSinging catchesGuessing riddlesMaking a joke; and telling it
       Solving a problem in practical arithmeticTranslating from one language into another
       LANGUAGE Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, and praying-. (Wittgenstein, 1953, Pt. I, No. 23, pp. 11 e-12 e)
       We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.... The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.... No individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free. (Whorf, 1956, pp. 153, 213-214)
       We dissect nature along the lines laid down by our native languages.
       The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.... We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar or can in some way be calibrated. (Whorf, 1956, pp. 213-214)
       9) The Forms of a Person's Thoughts Are Controlled by Unperceived Patterns of His Own Language
       The forms of a person's thoughts are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious. These patterns are the unperceived intricate systematizations of his own language-shown readily enough by a candid comparison and contrast with other languages, especially those of a different linguistic family. (Whorf, 1956, p. 252)
       It has come to be commonly held that many utterances which look like statements are either not intended at all, or only intended in part, to record or impart straightforward information about the facts.... Many traditional philosophical perplexities have arisen through a mistake-the mistake of taking as straightforward statements of fact utterances which are either (in interesting non-grammatical ways) nonsensical or else intended as something quite different. (Austin, 1962, pp. 2-3)
       In general, one might define a complex of semantic components connected by logical constants as a concept. The dictionary of a language is then a system of concepts in which a phonological form and certain syntactic and morphological characteristics are assigned to each concept. This system of concepts is structured by several types of relations. It is supplemented, furthermore, by redundancy or implicational rules..., representing general properties of the whole system of concepts.... At least a relevant part of these general rules is not bound to particular languages, but represents presumably universal structures of natural languages. They are not learned, but are rather a part of the human ability to acquire an arbitrary natural language. (Bierwisch, 1970, pp. 171-172)
       In studying the evolution of mind, we cannot guess to what extent there are physically possible alternatives to, say, transformational generative grammar, for an organism meeting certain other physical conditions characteristic of humans. Conceivably, there are none-or very few-in which case talk about evolution of the language capacity is beside the point. (Chomsky, 1972, p. 98)
       [It is] truth value rather than syntactic well-formedness that chiefly governs explicit verbal reinforcement by parents-which renders mildly paradoxical the fact that the usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech is highly grammatical but not notably truthful. (R. O. Brown, 1973, p. 330)
       he conceptual base is responsible for formally representing the concepts underlying an utterance.... A given word in a language may or may not have one or more concepts underlying it.... On the sentential level, the utterances of a given language are encoded within a syntactic structure of that language. The basic construction of the sentential level is the sentence.
       The next highest level... is the conceptual level. We call the basic construction of this level the conceptualization. A conceptualization consists of concepts and certain relations among those concepts. We can consider that both levels exist at the same point in time and that for any unit on one level, some corresponding realizate exists on the other level. This realizate may be null or extremely complex.... Conceptualizations may relate to other conceptualizations by nesting or other specified relationships. (Schank, 1973, pp. 191-192)
       The mathematics of multi-dimensional interactive spaces and lattices, the projection of "computer behavior" on to possible models of cerebral functions, the theoretical and mechanical investigation of artificial intelligence, are producing a stream of sophisticated, often suggestive ideas.
       But it is, I believe, fair to say that nothing put forward until now in either theoretic design or mechanical mimicry comes even remotely in reach of the most rudimentary linguistic realities. (Steiner, 1975, p. 284)
       The step from the simple tool to the master tool, a tool to make tools (what we would now call a machine tool), seems to me indeed to parallel the final step to human language, which I call reconstitution. It expresses in a practical and social context the same understanding of hierarchy, and shows the same analysis by function as a basis for synthesis. (Bronowski, 1977, pp. 127-128)
        t is the language donn eґ in which we conduct our lives.... We have no other. And the danger is that formal linguistic models, in their loosely argued analogy with the axiomatic structure of the mathematical sciences, may block perception.... It is quite conceivable that, in language, continuous induction from simple, elemental units to more complex, realistic forms is not justified. The extent and formal "undecidability" of context-and every linguistic particle above the level of the phoneme is context-bound-may make it impossible, except in the most abstract, meta-linguistic sense, to pass from "pro-verbs," "kernals," or "deep deep structures" to actual speech. (Steiner, 1975, pp. 111-113)
       A higher-level formal language is an abstract machine. (Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 113)
       Jakobson sees metaphor and metonymy as the characteristic modes of binarily opposed polarities which between them underpin the two-fold process of selection and combination by which linguistic signs are formed.... Thus messages are constructed, as Saussure said, by a combination of a "horizontal" movement, which combines words together, and a "vertical" movement, which selects the particular words from the available inventory or "inner storehouse" of the language. The combinative (or syntagmatic) process manifests itself in contiguity (one word being placed next to another) and its mode is metonymic. The selective (or associative) process manifests itself in similarity (one word or concept being "like" another) and its mode is metaphoric. The "opposition" of metaphor and metonymy therefore may be said to represent in effect the essence of the total opposition between the synchronic mode of language (its immediate, coexistent, "vertical" relationships) and its diachronic mode (its sequential, successive, lineal progressive relationships). (Hawkes, 1977, pp. 77-78)
       It is striking that the layered structure that man has given to language constantly reappears in his analyses of nature. (Bronowski, 1977, p. 121)
       First, [an ideal intertheoretic reduction] provides us with a set of rules"correspondence rules" or "bridge laws," as the standard vernacular has it-which effect a mapping of the terms of the old theory (T o) onto a subset of the expressions of the new or reducing theory (T n). These rules guide the application of those selected expressions of T n in the following way: we are free to make singular applications of their correspondencerule doppelgangers in T o....
       Second, and equally important, a successful reduction ideally has the outcome that, under the term mapping effected by the correspondence rules, the central principles of T o (those of semantic and systematic importance) are mapped onto general sentences of T n that are theorems of Tn. (P. Churchland, 1979, p. 81)
       If non-linguistic factors must be included in grammar: beliefs, attitudes, etc. [this would] amount to a rejection of the initial idealization of language as an object of study. A priori such a move cannot be ruled out, but it must be empirically motivated. If it proves to be correct, I would conclude that language is a chaos that is not worth studying.... Note that the question is not whether beliefs or attitudes, and so on, play a role in linguistic behavior and linguistic judgments... [but rather] whether distinct cognitive structures can be identified, which interact in the real use of language and linguistic judgments, the grammatical system being one of these. (Chomsky, 1979, pp. 140, 152-153)
        23) Language Is Inevitably Influenced by Specific Contexts of Human Interaction
       Language cannot be studied in isolation from the investigation of "rationality." It cannot afford to neglect our everyday assumptions concerning the total behavior of a reasonable person.... An integrational linguistics must recognize that human beings inhabit a communicational space which is not neatly compartmentalized into language and nonlanguage.... It renounces in advance the possibility of setting up systems of forms and meanings which will "account for" a central core of linguistic behavior irrespective of the situation and communicational purposes involved. (Harris, 1981, p. 165)
       By innate [linguistic knowledge], Chomsky simply means "genetically programmed." He does not literally think that children are born with language in their heads ready to be spoken. He merely claims that a "blueprint is there, which is brought into use when the child reaches a certain point in her general development. With the help of this blueprint, she analyzes the language she hears around her more readily than she would if she were totally unprepared for the strange gabbling sounds which emerge from human mouths. (Aitchison, 1987, p. 31)
       Looking at ourselves from the computer viewpoint, we cannot avoid seeing that natural language is our most important "programming language." This means that a vast portion of our knowledge and activity is, for us, best communicated and understood in our natural language.... One could say that natural language was our first great original artifact and, since, as we increasingly realize, languages are machines, so natural language, with our brains to run it, was our primal invention of the universal computer. One could say this except for the sneaking suspicion that language isn't something we invented but something we became, not something we constructed but something in which we created, and recreated, ourselves. (Leiber, 1991, p. 8)

    Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Language

  • 9 Robinson, George J.

    SUBJECT AREA: Textiles
    [br]
    b. 1712 Scotland
    d. 1798 England
    [br]
    Scottish manufacturer who installed the first Boulton \& Watt rotative steam-engine in a textile mill.
    [br]
    George Robinson is said to have been a Scots migrant who settled at Burwell, near Nottingham, in 1737, but there is no record of his occupation until 1771, when he was noticed as a bleacher. By 1783 he and his son were describing themselves as "merchants and thread manufacturers" as well as bleachers. For their thread, they were using the system of spinning on the waterframe, but it is not known whether they held a licence from Arkwright. Between 1776 and 1791, the firm G.J. \& J.Robinson built a series of six cotton mills with a complex of dams and aqueducts to supply them in the relatively flat land of the Leen valley, near Papplewick, to the north of Nottingham. By careful conservation they were able to obtain considerable power from a very small stream. Castle mill was not only the highest one owned by the Robinsons, but it was also the highest mill on the stream and was fed from a reservoir. The Robinsons might therefore have expected to have enjoyed uninterrupted use of the water, but above them lived Lord Byron in his estate of Newstead Priory. The fifth Lord Byron loved making ornamental ponds on his property so that he could have mock naval battles with his servants, and this tampered with the water supplies so much that the Robinsons found they were unable to work their mills.
    In 1785 they decided to order a rotative steam engine from the firm of Boulton \& Watt. It was erected by John Rennie; however, misfortune seemed to dog this engine, for parts went astray to Manchester and when the engine was finally running at the end of February 1786 it was found to be out of alignment so may not have been very successful. At about the same time, the lawsuit against Lord Byron was found in favour of the Robinsons, but the engine continued in use for at least twelve years and was the first of the type which was to power virtually all steamdriven mills until the 1850s to be installed in a textile mill. It was a low-pressure double-acting condensing beam engine, with a vertical cylinder, parallel motion connecting the piston toone end of a rocking beam, and a connecting rod at the other end of the beam turning the flywheel. In this case Watt's sun and planet motion was used in place of a crank.
    [br]
    Further Reading
    R.L.Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester (for an account of the installation of this engine).
    D.M.Smith, 1965, Industrial Archaeology of the East Midlands, Newton Abbot (describes the problems which the Robinsons had with the water supplies to power their mills).
    S.D.Chapman, 1967, The Early Factory Masters, Newton Abbot (provides details of the business activities of the Robinsons).
    J.D.Marshall, 1959, "Early application of steam power: the cotton mills of the Upper Leen", Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 60 (mentions the introduction of this steam-engine).
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Robinson, George J.

  • 10 Kay (of Bury), John

    SUBJECT AREA: Textiles
    [br]
    b. 16 July 1704 Walmersley, near Bury, Lancashire, England
    d. 1779 France
    [br]
    English inventor of the flying shuttle.
    [br]
    John Kay was the youngest of five sons of a yeoman farmer of Walmersley, near Bury, Lancashire, who died before his birth. John was apprenticed to a reedmaker, and just before he was 21 he married a daughter of John Hall of Bury and carried on his trade in that town until 1733. It is possible that his first patent, taken out in 1730, was connected with this business because it was for an engine that made mohair thread for tailors and twisted and dressed thread; such thread could have been used to bind up the reeds used in looms. He also improved the reeds by making them from metal instead of cane strips so they lasted much longer and could be made to be much finer. His next patent in 1733, was a double one. One part of it was for a batting machine to remove dust from wool by beating it with sticks, but the patent is better known for its description of the flying shuttle. Kay placed boxes to receive the shuttle at either end of the reed or sley. Across the open top of these boxes was a metal rod along which a picking peg could slide and drive the shuttle out across the loom. The pegs at each end were connected by strings to a stick that was held in the right hand of the weaver and which jerked the shuttle out of the box. The shuttle had wheels to make it "fly" across the warp more easily, and ran on a shuttle race to support and guide it. Not only was weaving speeded up, but the weaver could produce broader cloth without any aid from a second person. This invention was later adapted for the power loom. Kay moved to Colchester and entered into partnership with a baymaker named Solomon Smith and a year later was joined by William Carter of Ballingdon, Essex. His shuttle was received with considerable hostility in both Lancashire and Essex, but it was probably more his charge of 15 shillings a year for its use that roused the antagonism. From 1737 he was much involved with lawsuits to try and protect his patent, particularly the part that specified the method of winding the thread onto a fixed bobbin in the shuttle. In 1738 Kay patented a windmill for working pumps and an improved chain pump, but neither of these seems to have been successful. In 1745, with Joseph Stell of Keighley, he patented a narrow fabric loom that could be worked by power; this type may have been employed by Gartside in Manchester soon afterwards. It was probably through failure to protect his patent rights that Kay moved to France, where he arrived penniless in 1747. He went to the Dutch firm of Daniel Scalongne, woollen manufacturers, in Abbeville. The company helped him to apply for a French patent for his shuttle, but Kay wanted the exorbitant sum of £10,000. There was much discussion and eventually Kay set up a workshop in Paris, where he received a pension of 2,500 livres. However, he was to face the same problems as in England with weavers copying his shuttle without permission. In 1754 he produced two machines for making card clothing: one pierced holes in the leather, while the other cut and sharpened the wires. These were later improved by his son, Robert Kay. Kay returned to England briefly, but was back in France in 1758. He was involved with machines to card both cotton and wool and tried again to obtain support from the French Government. He was still involved with developing textile machines in 1779, when he was 75, but he must have died soon afterwards. As an inventor Kay was a genius of the first rank, but he was vain, obstinate and suspicious and was destitute of business qualities.
    [br]
    Bibliography
    1730, British patent no. 515 (machine for making mohair thread). 1733, British patent no. 542 (batting machine and flying shuttle). 1738, British patent no. 561 (pump windmill and chain pump). 1745, with Joseph Stell, British patent no. 612 (power loom).
    Further Reading
    B.Woodcroft, 1863, Brief Biographies of Inventors or Machines for the Manufacture of Textile Fabrics, London.
    J.Lord, 1903, Memoir of John Kay, (a more accurate account).
    Descriptions of his inventions may be found in A.Barlow, 1878, The History and Principles of Weaving by Hand and by Power, London; R.L. Hills, 1970, Power in the
    Industrial Revolution, Manchester; and C.Singer (ed.), 1957, A History of
    Technology, Vol. III, Oxford: Clarendon Press. The most important record, however, is in A.P.Wadsworth and J. de L. Mann, 1931, The Cotton Trade and Industrial
    Lancashire, Manchester.
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Kay (of Bury), John

  • 11 Costa Gomes, Francisco da

    (1914-2001)
       Career military officer, key personality, and authority in transition from dictatorship to democracy, and president of the republic. Born in the remote, poor, Trás-Os-Montes district, Costa Gomes was trained as an army officer and gained experience and promotions in many postings in Portugal's overseas empire from Macau, China, to Angola and Mozambique. As a lieutenant colonel in the post of undersecretary of the army in April 1961, he was implicated in a military coup plot to overthrow Prime Minister Antônio de Oliveira Salazar. Although he was fired, Costa Gomes rebuilt his bridges, was promoted to brigadier general in 1964, and soon was appointed to important commands in the colonial wars in Portuguese Africa: first in Mozambique (1965-69) and then in Angola (1970-72). In September 1972, he returned to Portugal as head of the joint chiefs of staff, a post he kept until he broke with Prime Minister Marcello Caetano in early 1974.
       During the last part of Caetano's governance, General Costa Gomes, in tandem with his senior, more famous and charismatic colleague in arms, General Antônio de Spínola, was involved in activities that led to the organization of a successful military coup on 25 April 1974, which overthrew the 48-year-old Estado Novo. Although younger officers did most of the work organizing this action, Costa Gomes played a key role, including authorizing the publication of the sensational book by General Spínola, Portugal e o Futuro, published only two months before the Revolution of Carnations in February 1974. Spinola's book acknowledged that Portugal had to find a political not a military solution to the wars in her African colonies, and the public reception of the work helped prepare the atmosphere for a bloodless coup.
       After the successful coup by the Armed Forces Movement and the Revolution of 25 April 1974, Costa Gomes was appointed chief of defense staff. When General Spínola resigned in September 1974, Costa Gomes became president, a post he ably filled until June 1976, when General Ramalho Eanes was elected president of the republic. Costa Gomes soon withdrew from the public eye, but in 1981 was promoted to Portugal's highest military rank of marshal.

    Historical dictionary of Portugal > Costa Gomes, Francisco da

  • 12 Tideman, Bruno Joannes

    SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping
    [br]
    b. 7 August 1834 Amsterdam, The Netherlands
    d. 11 February 1883 Amsterdam, The Netherlands
    [br]
    Dutch naval architect and constructor, early hydrodyna midst.
    [br]
    The first thirty years of Tideman's life followed the normal pattern for a naval architect: study at the Breda Military Academy, work in the Royal Dockyards of Vlissingen as a constructor and then experience in the United Kingdom "standing by" an armoured vessel being built for the Dutch at Birkenhead. Tideman took the opportunity to acquaint himself with current developments in British shipyards and to study the work of Macquorn Rankine at Glasgow University.
    On his return to the Netherlands he was given the task of adapting the Royal Dockyard of Amsterdam for ironclad construction and from 1870 iron ships were built there. From 1868 until 1873 he taught shipbuilding at what was then the Delft Polytechnic, but resigned on his appointment as Chief Naval Constructor of Holland.
    Through representations to appropriate authority he assisted in founding the great shipyard Koninklijke Maatschappij "De Schelde" and in the setting up of Dutch ferry services across the North Sea. His interest in ship design and in the pioneering work of William Froude led to the founding of the world's second ship model test tank in 1876 in a sheltered part of the Royal Amsterdam Dockyard. The design was based on Froude's Torquay Tank.
    As Scotland's first tank was not opened until 1883, he attracted work from the Clyde, including the testing of the Russian Imperial Yacht Livadia built by Elder's of Glasgow. This contract was so critical that it was agreed that a quartersize model be tested on Loch Lomond. Throughout his life he was respected as an all-round engineer and consultancy work flowed in, the vast bulk of it from Britain. Continual trying to improve standards, Tideman was working on a development plan for Dutch shipbuilding at the time of his death.
    [br]
    Further Reading
    J.M.Dirkzwager, 1970, Bruno Joannes Tideman 1834–1883. Grondlegger van de Moderne Scheepsbouw in Nederland, Leiden.
    FMW

    Biographical history of technology > Tideman, Bruno Joannes

  • 13 Strutt, Jedediah

    SUBJECT AREA: Textiles
    [br]
    b. 26 July 1726 South Normanton, near Alfreton, Derbyshire, England
    d. 7 May 1797 Derby, England
    [br]
    English inventor of a machine for making ribbed knitting.
    [br]
    Jedediah Strutt was the second of three sons of William, a small farmer and maltster at South Normanton, near Alfreton, Derbyshire, where the only industry was a little framework knitting. At the age of 14 Jedediah was apprenticed to Ralph Massey, a wheelwright near Derby, and lodged with the Woollats, whose daughter Elizabeth he later married in 1755. He moved to Leicester and in 1754 started farming at Blackwell, where an uncle had died and left him the stock on his farm. It was here that he made his knitting invention.
    William Lee's knitting machine remained in virtually the same form as he left it until the middle of the eighteenth century. The knitting industry moved away from London into the Midlands and in 1730 a Nottingham workman, using Indian spun yarn, produced the first pair of cotton hose ever made by mechanical means. This industry developed quickly and by 1750 was providing employment for 1,200 frameworkers using both wool and cotton in the Nottingham and Derby areas. It was against this background that Jedediah Strutt obtained patents for his Derby rib machine in 1758 and 1759.
    The machine was a highly ingenious mechanism, which when placed in front of an ordinary stocking frame enabled the fashionable ribbed stockings to be made by machine instead of by hand. To develop this invention, he formed a partnership first with his brother-in-law, William Woollat, and two leading Derby hosiers, John Bloodworth and Thomas Stamford. This partnership was dissolved in 1762 and another was formed with Woollat and the Nottingham hosier Samuel Need. Strutt's invention was followed by a succession of innovations which enabled framework knitters to produce almost every kind of mesh on their machines. In 1764 the stocking frame was adapted to the making of eyelet holes, and this later lead to the production of lace. In 1767 velvet was made on these frames, and two years later brocade. In this way Strutt's original invention opened up a new era for knitting. Although all these later improvements were not his, he was able to make a fortune from his invention. In 1762 he was made a freeman of Nottingham, but by then he was living in Derby. His business at Derby was concerned mainly with silk hose and he had a silk mill there.
    It was partly his need for cotton yarn and partly his wealth which led him into partnership with Richard Arkwright, John Smalley and David Thornley to exploit Arkwright's patent for spinning cotton by rollers. Together with Samuel Need, they financed the Arkwright partnership in 1770 to develop the horse-powered mill in Nottingham and then the water-powered mill at Cromford. Strutt gave advice to Arkwright about improving the machinery and helped to hold the partnership together when Arkwright fell out with his first partners. Strutt was also involved, in London, where he had a house, with the parliamentary proceedings over the passing of the Calico Act in 1774, which opened up the trade in British-manufactured all-cotton cloth.
    In 1776 Strutt financed the construction of his own mill at Helper, about seven miles (11 km) further down the Derwent valley below Cromford. This was followed by another at Milford, a little lower on the river. Strutt was also a partner with Arkwright and others in the mill at Birkacre, near Chorley in Lancashire. The Strutt mills were developed into large complexes for cotton spinning and many experiments were later carried out in them, both in textile machinery and in fireproof construction for the mills themselves. They were also important training schools for engineers.
    Elizabeth Strutt died in 1774 and Jedediah never married again. The family seem to have lived frugally in spite of their wealth, probably influenced by their Nonconformist background. He had built a house near the mills at Milford, but it was in his Derby house that Jedediah died in 1797. By the time of his death, his son William had long been involved with the business and became a more important cotton spinner than Jedediah.
    [br]
    Bibliography
    1758. British patent no. 722 (Derby rib machine). 1759. British patent no. 734 (Derby rib machine).
    Further Reading
    For the involvement of Strutt in Arkwright's spinning ventures, there are two books, the earlier of which is R.S.Fitton and A.P.Wadsworth, 1958, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830, Manchester, which has most of the details about Strutt's life. This has been followed by R.S.Fitton, 1989, The Arkwrights, Spinners of Fortune, Manchester.
    R.L.Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester (for a general background to the textile industry of the period).
    W.Felkin, 1967, History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, reprint, Newton Abbot (orig. pub. 1867) (covers Strutt's knitting inventions).
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Strutt, Jedediah

  • 14 Hargreaves, James

    SUBJECT AREA: Textiles
    [br]
    b. c.1720–1 Oswaldtwistle, near Blackburn, England
    d. April 1778 Nottingham, England
    [br]
    English inventor of the first successful machine to spin more than a couple of yarns of cotton or wool at once.
    [br]
    James Hargreaves was first a carpenter and then a hand-loom weaver at Stanhill, Blackburn, probably making Blackburn Checks or Greys from linen warps and cotton weft. An invention ascribed to him doubled production in the preparatory carding process before spinning. Two or three cards were nailed to the same stock and the upper one was suspended from the ceiling by a cord and counterweight. Around 1762 Robert Peel (1750–1830) sought his assistance in constructing a carding engine with cylinders that may have originated with Daniel Bourn, but this was not successful. In 1764, inspired by seeing a spinning wheel that continued to revolve after it had been knocked over accidentally, Hargreaves invented his spinning jenny. The first jennies had horizontal wheels and could spin eight threads at once. To spin on this machine required a great deal of skill. A length of roving was passed through the clamp or clove. The left hand was used to close this and draw the roving away from the spindles which were rotated by the spinner turning the horizontal wheel with the right hand. The spindles twisted the fibres as they were being drawn out. At the end of the draw, the spindles continued to be rotated until sufficient twist had been put into the fibres to make the finished yarn. This was backed off from the tips of the spindles by reversing them and then, with the spindles turning in the spinning direction once more, the yarn was wound on by the right hand rotating the spindles, the left hand pushing the clove back towards them and one foot operating a pedal which guided the yarn onto the spindles by a faller wire. A piecer was needed to rejoin the yarns when they broke. At first Hargreaves's jenny was worked only by his family, but then he sold two or three of them, possibly to Peel. In 1768, local opposition and a riot in which his house was gutted forced him to flee to Nottingham. He entered into partnership there with Thomas James and established a cotton mill. In 1770 he followed Arkwright's example and sought to patent his machine and brought an action for infringement against some Lancashire manufacturers, who offered £3,000 in settlement. Hargreaves held out for £4,000, but he was unable to enforce his patent because he had sold jennies before leaving Lancashire. Arkwright's "water twist" was more suitable for the Nottingham hosiery industry trade than jenny yarn and in 1777 Hargreaves replaced his own machines with Arkwright's. When he died the following year, he is said to have left property valued at £7,000 and his widow received £400 for her share in the business. Once the jenny had been made public, it was quickly improved by other inventors and the number of spindles per machine increased. In 1784, there were reputed to be 20,000 jennies of 80 spindles each at work. The jenny greatly eased the shortage of cotton weft for weavers.
    [br]
    Bibliography
    1770, British patent no. 962 (spinning jenny).
    Further Reading
    C.Aspin and S.D.Chapman, 1964, James Hargreaves and the Spinning Jenny, Helmshore Local History Society (the fullest account of Hargreaves's life and inventions).
    For descriptions of his invention, see W.English, 1969, The Textile Industry, London; R.L. Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester; and W.A.Hunter, 1951–3, "James Hargreaves and the invention of the spinning jenny", Transactions of
    the Newcomen Society 28.
    A.P.Wadsworth and J. de L.Mann, 1931, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, Manchester (a good background to the whole of this period).
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Hargreaves, James

  • 15 Lee, Revd William

    SUBJECT AREA: Textiles
    [br]
    d. c. 1615
    [br]
    English inventor of the first knitting machine, called the stocking frame.
    [br]
    It would seem that most of the stories about Lee's invention of the stocking frame cannot be verified by any contemporary evidence, and the first written accounts do not appear until the second half of the seventeenth century. The claim that he was Master of Arts from St John's College, Cambridge, was first made in 1607 but cannot be checked because the records have not survived. The date for the invention of the knitting machine as being 1589 was made at the same time, but again there is no supporting evidence. There is no evidence that Lee was Vicar of Calverton, nor that he was in Holy Orders at all. Likewise there is no evidence for the existence of the woman, whether she was girlfriend, fiancée or wife, who is said to have inspired the invention, and claims regarding the involvement of Queen Elizabeth I and her refusal to grant a patent because the stockings were wool and not silk are also without contemporary foundation. Yet the first known reference shows that Lee was the inventor of the knitting machine, for the partnership agreement between him and George Brooke dated 6 June 1600 states that "William Lee hath invented a very speedy manner of making works usually wrought by knitting needles as stockings, waistcoats and such like". This agreement was to last for twenty-two years, but terminated prematurely when Brooke was executed for high treason in 1603. Lee continued to try and exploit his invention, for in 1605 he described himself as "Master of Arts" when he petitioned the Court of Aldermen of the City of London as the first inventor of an engine to make silk stockings. In 1609 the Weavers' Company of London recorded Lee as "a weaver of silk stockings by engine". These petitions suggest that he was having difficulty in establishing his invention, which may be why in 1612 there is a record of him in Rouen, France, where he hoped to have better fortune. If he had been invited there by Henry IV, his hopes were dashed by the assassination of the king soon afterwards. He was to supply four knitting machines, and there is further evidence that he was in France in 1615, but it is thought that he died in that country soon afterwards.
    The machine Lee invented was probably the most complex of its day, partly because the need to use silk meant that the needles were very fine. Henson (1970) in 1831 took five pages in his book to describe knitting on a stocking frame which had over 2,066 pieces. To knit a row of stitches took eleven separate stages, and great care and watchfulness were required to ensure that all the loops were equal and regular. This shows how complex the machines were and points to Lee's great achievement in actually making one. The basic principles of its operation remained unaltered throughout its extraordinarily long life, and a few still remained in use commercially in the early 1990s.
    [br]
    Further Reading
    J.T.Millington and S.D.Chapman (eds), 1989, Four Centuries of Machine Knitting, Commemorating William Lee's Invention of the Stocking Frame in 1589, Leicester (N.Harte examines the surviving evidence for the life of William Lee and this must be considered as the most up-to-date biographical information).
    Dictionary of National Biography (this contains only the old stories).
    Earlier important books covering Lee's life and invention are G.Henson, 1970, History of the Framework Knitters, reprint, Newton Abbot (orig. pub. 1831); and W.Felkin, 1967, History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, reprint, Newton Abbot (orig. pub. 1867).
    M.Palmer, 1984, Framework Knitting, Aylesbury (a simple account of the mechanism of the stocking frame).
    R.L.Hills, "William Lee and his knitting machine", Journal of the Textile Institute 80(2) (a more detailed account).
    M.Grass and A.Grass, 1967, Stockings for a Queen. The Life of William Lee, the Elizabethan Inventor, London.
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Lee, Revd William

  • 16 Introduction

       Portugal is a small Western European nation with a large, distinctive past replete with both triumph and tragedy. One of the continent's oldest nation-states, Portugal has frontiers that are essentially unchanged since the late 14th century. The country's unique character and 850-year history as an independent state present several curious paradoxes. As of 1974, when much of the remainder of the Portuguese overseas empire was decolonized, Portuguese society appeared to be the most ethnically homogeneous of the two Iberian states and of much of Europe. Yet, Portuguese society had received, over the course of 2,000 years, infusions of other ethnic groups in invasions and immigration: Phoenicians, Greeks, Celts, Romans, Suevi, Visigoths, Muslims (Arab and Berber), Jews, Italians, Flemings, Burgundian French, black Africans, and Asians. Indeed, Portugal has been a crossroads, despite its relative isolation in the western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, between the West and North Africa, Tropical Africa, and Asia and America. Since 1974, Portugal's society has become less homogeneous, as there has been significant immigration of former subjects from its erstwhile overseas empire.
       Other paradoxes should be noted as well. Although Portugal is sometimes confused with Spain or things Spanish, its very national independence and national culture depend on being different from Spain and Spaniards. Today, Portugal's independence may be taken for granted. Since 1140, except for 1580-1640 when it was ruled by Philippine Spain, Portugal has been a sovereign state. Nevertheless, a recurring theme of the nation's history is cycles of anxiety and despair that its freedom as a nation is at risk. There is a paradox, too, about Portugal's overseas empire(s), which lasted half a millennium (1415-1975): after 1822, when Brazil achieved independence from Portugal, most of the Portuguese who emigrated overseas never set foot in their overseas empire, but preferred to immigrate to Brazil or to other countries in North or South America or Europe, where established Portuguese overseas communities existed.
       Portugal was a world power during the period 1415-1550, the era of the Discoveries, expansion, and early empire, and since then the Portuguese have experienced periods of decline, decadence, and rejuvenation. Despite the fact that Portugal slipped to the rank of a third- or fourth-rate power after 1580, it and its people can claim rightfully an unusual number of "firsts" or distinctions that assure their place both in world and Western history. These distinctions should be kept in mind while acknowledging that, for more than 400 years, Portugal has generally lagged behind the rest of Western Europe, although not Southern Europe, in social and economic developments and has remained behind even its only neighbor and sometime nemesis, Spain.
       Portugal's pioneering role in the Discoveries and exploration era of the 15th and 16th centuries is well known. Often noted, too, is the Portuguese role in the art and science of maritime navigation through the efforts of early navigators, mapmakers, seamen, and fishermen. What are often forgotten are the country's slender base of resources, its small population largely of rural peasants, and, until recently, its occupation of only 16 percent of the Iberian Peninsula. As of 1139—10, when Portugal emerged first as an independent monarchy, and eventually a sovereign nation-state, England and France had not achieved this status. The Portuguese were the first in the Iberian Peninsula to expel the Muslim invaders from their portion of the peninsula, achieving this by 1250, more than 200 years before Castile managed to do the same (1492).
       Other distinctions may be noted. Portugal conquered the first overseas empire beyond the Mediterranean in the early modern era and established the first plantation system based on slave labor. Portugal's empire was the first to be colonized and the last to be decolonized in the 20th century. With so much of its scattered, seaborne empire dependent upon the safety and seaworthiness of shipping, Portugal was a pioneer in initiating marine insurance, a practice that is taken for granted today. During the time of Pombaline Portugal (1750-77), Portugal was the first state to organize and hold an industrial trade fair. In distinctive political and governmental developments, Portugal's record is more mixed, and this fact suggests that maintaining a government with a functioning rule of law and a pluralist, representative democracy has not been an easy matter in a country that for so long has been one of the poorest and least educated in the West. Portugal's First Republic (1910-26), only the third republic in a largely monarchist Europe (after France and Switzerland), was Western Europe's most unstable parliamentary system in the 20th century. Finally, the authoritarian Estado Novo or "New State" (1926-74) was the longest surviving authoritarian system in modern Western Europe. When Portugal departed from its overseas empire in 1974-75, the descendants, in effect, of Prince Henry the Navigator were leaving the West's oldest empire.
       Portugal's individuality is based mainly on its long history of distinc-tiveness, its intense determination to use any means — alliance, diplomacy, defense, trade, or empire—to be a sovereign state, independent of Spain, and on its national pride in the Portuguese language. Another master factor in Portuguese affairs deserves mention. The country's politics and government have been influenced not only by intellectual currents from the Atlantic but also through Spain from Europe, which brought new political ideas and institutions and novel technologies. Given the weight of empire in Portugal's past, it is not surprising that public affairs have been hostage to a degree to what happened in her overseas empire. Most important have been domestic responses to imperial affairs during both imperial and internal crises since 1415, which have continued to the mid-1970s and beyond. One of the most important themes of Portuguese history, and one oddly neglected by not a few histories, is that every major political crisis and fundamental change in the system—in other words, revolution—since 1415 has been intimately connected with a related imperial crisis. The respective dates of these historical crises are: 1437, 1495, 1578-80, 1640, 1820-22, 1890, 1910, 1926-30, 1961, and 1974. The reader will find greater detail on each crisis in historical context in the history section of this introduction and in relevant entries.
       LAND AND PEOPLE
       The Republic of Portugal is located on the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula. A major geographical dividing line is the Tagus River: Portugal north of it has an Atlantic orientation; the country to the south of it has a Mediterranean orientation. There is little physical evidence that Portugal is clearly geographically distinct from Spain, and there is no major natural barrier between the two countries along more than 1,214 kilometers (755 miles) of the Luso-Spanish frontier. In climate, Portugal has a number of microclimates similar to the microclimates of Galicia, Estremadura, and Andalusia in neighboring Spain. North of the Tagus, in general, there is an Atlantic-type climate with higher rainfall, cold winters, and some snow in the mountainous areas. South of the Tagus is a more Mediterranean climate, with hot, dry, often rainless summers and cool, wet winters. Lisbon, the capital, which has a fifth of the country's population living in its region, has an average annual mean temperature about 16° C (60° F).
       For a small country with an area of 92,345 square kilometers (35,580 square miles, including the Atlantic archipelagos of the Azores and the Madeiras), which is about the size of the state of Indiana in the United States, Portugal has a remarkable diversity of regional topography and scenery. In some respects, Portugal resembles an island within the peninsula, embodying a unique fusion of European and non-European cultures, akin to Spain yet apart. Its geography is a study in contrasts, from the flat, sandy coastal plain, in some places unusually wide for Europe, to the mountainous Beira districts or provinces north of the Tagus, to the snow-capped mountain range of the Estrela, with its unique ski area, to the rocky, barren, remote Trás-os-Montes district bordering Spain. There are extensive forests in central and northern Portugal that contrast with the flat, almost Kansas-like plains of the wheat belt in the Alentejo district. There is also the unique Algarve district, isolated somewhat from the Alentejo district by a mountain range, with a microclimate, topography, and vegetation that resemble closely those of North Africa.
       Although Portugal is small, just 563 kilometers (337 miles) long and from 129 to 209 kilometers (80 to 125 miles) wide, it is strategically located on transportation and communication routes between Europe and North Africa, and the Americas and Europe. Geographical location is one key to the long history of Portugal's three overseas empires, which stretched once from Morocco to the Moluccas and from lonely Sagres at Cape St. Vincent to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is essential to emphasize the identity of its neighbors: on the north and east Portugal is bounded by Spain, its only neighbor, and by the Atlantic Ocean on the south and west. Portugal is the westernmost country of Western Europe, and its shape resembles a face, with Lisbon below the nose, staring into the
       Atlantic. No part of Portugal touches the Mediterranean, and its Atlantic orientation has been a response in part to turning its back on Castile and Léon (later Spain) and exploring, traveling, and trading or working in lands beyond the peninsula. Portugal was the pioneering nation in the Atlantic-born European discoveries during the Renaissance, and its diplomatic and trade relations have been dominated by countries that have been Atlantic powers as well: Spain; England (Britain since 1707); France; Brazil, once its greatest colony; and the United States.
       Today Portugal and its Atlantic islands have a population of roughly 10 million people. While ethnic homogeneity has been characteristic of it in recent history, Portugal's population over the centuries has seen an infusion of non-Portuguese ethnic groups from various parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Between 1500 and 1800, a significant population of black Africans, brought in as slaves, was absorbed in the population. And since 1950, a population of Cape Verdeans, who worked in menial labor, has resided in Portugal. With the influx of African, Goan, and Timorese refugees and exiles from the empire—as many as three quarters of a million retornados ("returned ones" or immigrants from the former empire) entered Portugal in 1974 and 1975—there has been greater ethnic diversity in the Portuguese population. In 2002, there were 239,113 immigrants legally residing in Portugal: 108,132 from Africa; 24,806 from Brazil; 15,906 from Britain; 14,617 from Spain; and 11,877 from Germany. In addition, about 200,000 immigrants are living in Portugal from eastern Europe, mainly from Ukraine. The growth of Portugal's population is reflected in the following statistics:
       1527 1,200,000 (estimate only)
       1768 2,400,000 (estimate only)
       1864 4,287,000 first census
       1890 5,049,700
       1900 5,423,000
       1911 5,960,000
       1930 6,826,000
       1940 7,185,143
       1950 8,510,000
       1960 8,889,000
       1970 8,668,000* note decrease
       1980 9,833,000
       1991 9,862,540
       1996 9,934,100
       2006 10,642,836
       2010 10,710,000 (estimated)

    Historical dictionary of Portugal > Introduction

  • 17 Science

       It is a common notion, or at least it is implied in many common modes of speech, that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of sentient beings are not a subject of science.... This notion seems to involve some confusion of ideas, which it is necessary to begin by clearing up. Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of science, which follow one another according to constant laws; although those laws may not have been discovered, nor even to be discoverable by our existing resources. (Mill, 1900, B. VI, Chap. 3, Sec. 1)
       One class of natural philosophers has always a tendency to combine the phenomena and to discover their analogies; another class, on the contrary, employs all its efforts in showing the disparities of things. Both tendencies are necessary for the perfection of science, the one for its progress, the other for its correctness. The philosophers of the first of these classes are guided by the sense of unity throughout nature; the philosophers of the second have their minds more directed towards the certainty of our knowledge. The one are absorbed in search of principles, and neglect often the peculiarities, and not seldom the strictness of demonstration; the other consider the science only as the investigation of facts, but in their laudable zeal they often lose sight of the harmony of the whole, which is the character of truth. Those who look for the stamp of divinity on every thing around them, consider the opposite pursuits as ignoble and even as irreligious; while those who are engaged in the search after truth, look upon the other as unphilosophical enthusiasts, and perhaps as phantastical contemners of truth.... This conflict of opinions keeps science alive, and promotes it by an oscillatory progress. (Oersted, 1920, p. 352)
       Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone. (Einstein & Infeld, 1938, p. 27)
       A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Planck, 1949, pp. 33-34)
       [Original quotation: "Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, dass ihre Gegner ueberzeugt werden und sich as belehrt erklaeren, sondern vielmehr dadurch, dass die Gegner allmaehlich aussterben und dass die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist." (Planck, 1990, p. 15)]
       I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science. (Planck, 1949, p. 46)
       If you cannot-in the long run-tell everyone what you have been doing, your doing has been worthless. (SchroЁdinger, 1951, pp. 7-8)
       Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached. (Heisenberg, 1958, p. 168)
       The old scientific ideal of episteґmeґ-of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge-has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever. It may indeed be corroborated, but every corroboration is relative to other statements which, again, are tentative. Only in our subjective experiences of conviction, in our subjective faith, can we be "absolutely certain." (Popper, 1959, p. 280)
       The layman, taught to revere scientists for their absolute respect for the observed facts, and for the judiciously detached and purely provisional manner in which they hold scientific theories (always ready to abandon a theory at the sight of any contradictory evidence) might well have thought that, at Miller's announcement of this overwhelming evidence of a "positive effect" [indicating that the speed of light is not independent from the motion of the observer, as Einstein's theory of relativity demands] in his presidential address to the American Physical Society on December 29th, 1925, his audience would have instantly abandoned the theory of relativity. Or, at the very least, that scientists-wont to look down from the pinnacle of their intellectual humility upon the rest of dogmatic mankind-might suspend judgment in this matter until Miller's results could be accounted for without impairing the theory of relativity. But no: by that time they had so well closed their minds to any suggestion which threatened the new rationality achieved by Einstein's world-picture, that it was almost impossible for them to think again in different terms. Little attention was paid to the experiments, the evidence being set aside in the hope that it would one day turn out to be wrong. (Polanyi, 1958, pp. 12-13)
       The practice of normal science depends on the ability, acquired from examplars, to group objects and situations into similarity sets which are primitive in the sense that the grouping is done without an answer to the question, "Similar with respect to what?" (Kuhn, 1970, p. 200)
       Science in general... does not consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists in fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it. (Collingwood, 1972, p. 9)
       Scientific fields emerge as the concerns of scientists congeal around various phenomena. Sciences are not defined, they are recognized. (Newell, 1973a, p. 1)
       This is often the way it is in physics-our mistake is not that we take our theories too seriously, but that we do not take them seriously enough. I do not think it is possible really to understand the successes of science without understanding how hard it is-how easy it is to be led astray, how difficult it is to know at any time what is the next thing to be done. (Weinberg, 1977, p. 49)
       Science is wonderful at destroying metaphysical answers, but incapable of providing substitute ones. Science takes away foundations without providing a replacement. Whether we want to be there or not, science has put us in a position of having to live without foundations. It was shocking when Nietzsche said this, but today it is commonplace; our historical position-and no end to it is in sight-is that of having to philosophize without "foundations." (Putnam, 1987, p. 29)

    Historical dictionary of quotations in cognitive science > Science

  • 18 Arkwright, Sir Richard

    SUBJECT AREA: Textiles
    [br]
    b. 23 December 1732 Preston, England
    d. 3 August 1792 Cromford, England
    [br]
    English inventor of a machine for spinning cotton.
    [br]
    Arkwright was the youngest of thirteen children and was apprenticed to a barber; when he was about 18, he followed this trade in Bol ton. In 1755 he married Patients Holt, who bore him a son before she died, and he remarried in 1761, to Margaret Biggins. He prospered until he took a public house as well as his barber shop and began to lose money. After this failure, he travelled around buying women's hair for wigs.
    In the late 1760s he began spinning experiments at Preston. It is not clear how much Arkwright copied earlier inventions or was helped by Thomas Highs and John Kay but in 1768 he left Preston for Nottingham, where, with John Smalley and David Thornley as partners, he took out his first patent. They set up a mill worked by a horse where machine-spun yarn was produced successfully. The essential part of this process lay in drawing out the cotton by rollers before it was twisted by a flyer and wound onto the bobbin. The partners' resources were not sufficient for developing their patent so Arkwright found new partners in Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, hosiers of Nottingham and Derby. Much experiment was necessary before they produced satisfactory yarn, and in 1771 a water-driven mill was built at Cromford, where the spinning process was perfected (hence the name "waterframe" was given to his spinning machine); some of this first yarn was used in the hosiery trade. Sales of all-cotton cloth were initially limited because of the high tax on calicoes, but the tax was lowered in 1774 by Act of Parliament, marking the beginning of the phenomenal growth of the cotton industry. In the evidence for this Act, Arkwright claimed that he had spent £12,000 on his machine. Once Arkwright had solved the problem of mechanical spinning, a bottleneck in the preliminary stages would have formed but for another patent taken out in 1775. This covered all preparatory processing, including some ideas not invented by Arkwright, with the result that it was disputed in 1783 and finally annulled in 1785. It contained the "crank and comb" for removing the cotton web off carding engines which was developed at Cromford and solved the difficulty in carding. By this patent, Arkwright had mechanized all the preparatory and spinning processes, and he began to establish water-powered cotton mills even as far away as Scotland. His success encouraged many others to copy him, so he had great difficulty in enforcing his patent Need died in 1781 and the partnership with Strutt ended soon after. Arkwright became very rich and financed other spinning ventures beyond his immediate control, such as that with Samuel Oldknow. It was estimated that 30,000 people were employed in 1785 in establishments using Arkwright's patents. In 1786 he received a knighthood for delivering an address of thanks when an attempt to assassinate George III failed, and the following year he became High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He purchased the manor of Cromford, where he died in 1792.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Knighted 1786.
    Bibliography
    1769, British patent no. 931.
    1775, British patent no. 1,111.
    Further Reading
    R.S.Fitton, 1989, The Arkwrights, Spinners of Fortune, Manchester (a thorough scholarly work which is likely to remain unchallenged for many years).
    R.L.Hills, 1973, Richard Arkwright and Cotton Spinning, London (written for use in schools and concentrates on Arkwright's technical achievements).
    R.S.Fitton and A.P.Wadsworth, 1958, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, Manchester (concentrates on the work of Arkwright and Strutt).
    A.P.Wadsworth and J.de L.Mann, 1931, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, Manchester (covers the period leading up to the Industrial Revolution).
    F.Nasmith, 1932, "Richard Arkwright", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 13 (looks at the actual spinning invention).
    R.L.Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester (discusses the technical problems of Arkwright's invention).
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Arkwright, Sir Richard

  • 19 Cartwright, Revd Edmund

    [br]
    b. 24 April 1743 Marnham, Nottingham, England
    d. 30 October 1823 Hastings, Sussex, England
    [br]
    English inventor of the power loom, a combing machine and machines for making ropes, bread and bricks as well as agricultural improvements.
    [br]
    Edmund Cartwright, the fourth son of William Cartwright, was educated at Wakefield Grammar School, and went to University College, Oxford, at the age of 14. By special act of convocation in 1764, he was elected Fellow of Magdalen College. He married Alice Whitaker in 1772 and soon after was given the ecclesiastical living of Brampton in Derbyshire. In 1779 he was presented with the living of Goadby, Marwood, Leicestershire, where he wrote poems, reviewed new works, and began agricultural experiments. A visit to Matlock in the summer of 1784 introduced him to the inventions of Richard Arkwright and he asked why weaving could not be mechanized in a similar manner to spinning. This began a remarkable career of inventions.
    Cartwright returned home and built a loom which required two strong men to operate it. This was the first attempt in England to develop a power loom. It had a vertical warp, the reed fell with the weight of at least half a hundredweight and, to quote Gartwright's own words, "the springs which threw the shuttle were strong enough to throw a Congreive [sic] rocket" (Strickland 19.71:8—for background to the "rocket" comparison, see Congreve, Sir William). Nevertheless, it had the same three basics of weaving that still remain today in modern power looms: shedding or dividing the warp; picking or projecting the shuttle with the weft; and beating that pick of weft into place with a reed. This loom he proudly patented in 1785, and then he went to look at hand looms and was surprised to see how simply they operated. Further improvements to his own loom, covered by two more patents in 1786 and 1787, produced a machine with the more conventional horizontal layout that showed promise; however, the Manchester merchants whom he visited were not interested. He patented more improvements in 1788 as a result of the experience gained in 1786 through establishing a factory at Doncaster with power looms worked by a bull that were the ancestors of modern ones. Twenty-four looms driven by steam-power were installed in Manchester in 1791, but the mill was burned down and no one repeated the experiment. The Doncaster mill was sold in 1793, Cartwright having lost £30,000, However, in 1809 Parliament voted him £10,000 because his looms were then coming into general use.
    In 1789 he began working on a wool-combing machine which he patented in 1790, with further improvements in 1792. This seems to have been the earliest instance of mechanized combing. It used a circular revolving comb from which the long fibres or "top" were. carried off into a can, and a smaller cylinder-comb for teasing out short fibres or "noils", which were taken off by hand. Its output equalled that of twenty hand combers, but it was only relatively successful. It was employed in various Leicestershire and Yorkshire mills, but infringements were frequent and costly to resist. The patent was prolonged for fourteen years after 1801, but even then Cartwright did not make any profit. His 1792 patent also included a machine to make ropes with the outstanding and basic invention of the "cordelier" which he communicated to his friends, including Robert Fulton, but again it brought little financial benefit. As a result of these problems and the lack of remuneration for his inventions, Cartwright moved to London in 1796 and for a time lived in a house built with geometrical bricks of his own design.
    Other inventions followed fast, including a tread-wheel for cranes, metallic packing for pistons in steam-engines, and bread-making and brick-making machines, to mention but a few. He had already returned to agricultural improvements and he put forward suggestions in 1793 for a reaping machine. In 1801 he received a prize from the Board of Agriculture for an essay on husbandry, which was followed in 1803 by a silver medal for the invention of a three-furrow plough and in 1805 by a gold medal for his essay on manures. From 1801 to 1807 he ran an experimental farm on the Duke of Bedford's estates at Woburn.
    From 1786 until his death he was a prebendary of Lincoln. In about 1810 he bought a small farm at Hollanden near Sevenoaks, Kent, where he continued his inventions, both agricultural and general. Inventing to the last, he died at Hastings and was buried in Battle church.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Board of Agriculture Prize 1801 (for an essay on agriculture). Society of Arts, Silver Medal 1803 (for his three-furrow plough); Gold Medal 1805 (for an essay on agricultural improvements).
    Bibliography
    1785. British patent no. 1,270 (power loom).
    1786. British patent no. 1,565 (improved power loom). 1787. British patent no. 1,616 (improved power loom).
    1788. British patent no. 1,676 (improved power loom). 1790, British patent no. 1,747 (wool-combing machine).
    1790, British patent no. 1,787 (wool-combing machine).
    1792, British patent no. 1,876 (improved wool-combing machine and rope-making machine with cordelier).
    Further Reading
    M.Strickland, 1843, A Memoir of the Life, Writings and Mechanical Inventions of Edmund Cartwright, D.D., F.R.S., London (remains the fullest biography of Cartwright).
    Dictionary of National Biography (a good summary of Cartwright's life). For discussions of Cartwright's weaving inventions, see: A.Barlow, 1878, The History and Principles of Weaving by Hand and by Power, London; R.L. Hills, 1970, Power in the Industrial Revolution, Manchester. F.Nasmith, 1925–6, "Fathers of machine cotton manufacture", Transactions of the
    Newcomen Society 6.
    H.W.Dickinson, 1942–3, "A condensed history of rope-making", Transactions of the Newcomen Society 23.
    W.English, 1969, The Textile Industry, London (covers both his power loom and his wool -combing machine).
    RLH

    Biographical history of technology > Cartwright, Revd Edmund

  • 20 Pilkington, Sir Lionel Alexander Bethune (Alastair)

    SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology
    [br]
    b. 7 January 1920 Calcutta, India
    [br]
    English inventor of the float-glass process.
    [br]
    Pilkington was educated at Sherborne School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in mechanical science. He spent one year at Cambridge followed by war service, which lasted until 1945. He returned to complete his degree and then joined Pilkington, the well-known glass manufacturer at St Helens' Lancashire, in 1947. Sir Alastair is not, however, related to the Pilkington family of glassmakers.
    The forming of perfectly flat glass that retained its fire finish had eluded glassmakers for centuries. Until the 1950s the only way of making really flat glass was to form plate glass by continuous casting between steel rollers. This destroyed the fire finish, which had to be restored by expensive grinding and polishing. The process entailed the loss of 20 per cent of good glass. The idea of floating glass on molten metal occurred to Sir Alastair in October 1952, and thereafter he remained in charge of development until commercial success had been achieved. The idea of floating molten glass on molten tin had been patented in the United States as early as 1902, but had never been pursued. The Pilkington process in essence was to float a ribbon of molten glass on a bath of molten tin in an inert atmosphere of nitrogen, to prevent oxidation of the tin. It was patented in Britain in 1957 and in the USA two years later. The first production glass issued from the plant in May 1957, although the first good glass did not appear until July 1958. The process was publicly announced the following year and was quickly taken up by the industry. It is now the universal method for manufacturing high quality flat glass.
    Having seen through the greatest single advance in glassmaking and one of the most important technological developments this century, Sir Alastair became Chairman of Pilkingtons until 1980 and President thereafter.
    [br]
    Principal Honours and Distinctions
    Knighted 1970. FRS 1969. Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1991.
    Bibliography
    1969, "Float glass process—the review lecture", Royal Society (13 February). 1975, "Floating windows", Proceedings of the Royal Institution, Vol. 48.
    1976, "Float glass—evolution and revolution over 60 years", Glass Technology, Vol. 17, no. 5.
    1963, "The development of float glass", Glass Industry, (February).
    Further Reading
    J.Jewkes et al., 1969, The Sources of Invention, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan.
    LRD

    Biographical history of technology > Pilkington, Sir Lionel Alexander Bethune (Alastair)

См. также в других словарях:

  • 1970 in baseball — Year in baseball this year = 1970 ChampionsMajor LeaguesBaseballplayoffsbracket1969 1993 | RD1=League Championship Series NBC| RD2=World Series NBC RD1 seed1=| RD1 seed2=| RD1 seed3=| RD1 seed4= RD1 seed1=East RD1 team1=Baltimore Orioles RD1… …   Wikipedia

  • 1970 FIFA World Cup — Mexico 70 1970 FIFA World Cup official logo Tournament details Host country …   Wikipedia

  • History of the British penny (1901–1970) — The penny of King Edward VII (1901 ndash;1910) is of the same technical standards as the late Victorian issues. The head on the obverse is by George William de Saulles (1862 ndash;1903), facing right, with the inscription EDWARDVS VII DEI GRA… …   Wikipedia

  • That Obscure Object of Desire — Directed by Luis Buñuel Produced by Serge Silberman …   Wikipedia

  • Not Fade Away (song) — Not Fade Away B side to Oh, Boy! by The Crickets from the album The Chirping Crickets Released October 27, 1957 (1957 10 27) Recorded May 27, 1957 in Clovis, New Mexico …   Wikipedia

  • Not Guilty (song) — Not Guilty Song by George Harrison from the album George Harrison Released 23 February 1979 Recorded July November 1978 Genre Rock …   Wikipedia

  • Not One Less — Not One Less …   Wikipedia

  • That '80s Show — Series intertitle Genre Sitcom Created by Mark Brazill Terry Turner …   Wikipedia

  • 1970 Bhola cyclone — Infobox Hurricane Name=1970 Bhola Cyclone Basin=NIO Year=1970 Image location=November 1970 Bhola Cyclone.jpg November 11, 1970, at 0858 UTC. Type=tropical cyclone Formed=November 7, 1970 Dissipated=November 13, 1970 1 min winds=112 10 min… …   Wikipedia

  • 1970 Major League Baseball All-Star Game — MLB All Star Game year=1970 visitor=American League top1=0 top2=0 top3=0 top4=0 top5=0 top6=1 top7=1 top8=2 top9=0 top10=0 top11=0 top12=0 visitor r=4 visitor h=12 visitor e=0 home=National League bot1=0 bot2=0 bot3=0 bot4=0 bot5=0 bot6=0 bot7=1… …   Wikipedia

  • 1970 college football season — The 1970 college football season was marked by tragedy. On October 2, one of the planes carrying the Wichita State football team crashed on the way to a game against Utah State, killing 31 people onboard, including 14 players. Then, on November… …   Wikipedia

Поделиться ссылкой на выделенное

Прямая ссылка:
Нажмите правой клавишей мыши и выберите «Копировать ссылку»