late-developing

adj. på efterkälken, efterbliven; bakåtriktad; blyg; tveksam

adv. bakåt

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1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) bakåtriktad, bakåtvänd

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) efterbliven, sen

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) efterbliven, på efterkälken

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- backwardness

bloom·er [ʼblu:məʳ, Am -ɚ] n

1) ( flowering plant) Blühpflanze f;

an early spring \bloomer ein Frühblüher

2) (Am) ( developing person)

to be a late \bloomer ein Spätentwickler sein

3) ( Brit) ((dated) fam: blunder) Fehler m;

to make a \bloomer einen Bock schießen ( fam)

1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) obrácený zpět, směřující vzad

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) opožděný (ve vývoji)

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) zaostalý

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1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) obrátiť sa späť

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) zaostalý

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) zaostalý

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- backwardness

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1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) înapoi, îndărăt

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) retardat

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) înapoiat

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- backwardness

1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) προς τα πίσω

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) καθυστερημένος

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) υπανάπτυκτος

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- backwardness

1) Если инфинитивный оборот выступает в качестве сложного дополнения при переходном глаголе, или при глаголе, управляющим каким-либо предлогом, то логическое подлежащее такого оборота стоит в общем падеже (в случае существительных) или в объектной форме (в случае личных местоимений) (см. Complex object)

2) Если инфинитивный оборот является подлежащим или определением при прилагательном или существительном и имеет выраженное подлежащее, то перед подлежащим инфинитивного оборота ставится предлог for.

3) Если инфинитивный оборот является подлежащим, то он часто ставится в конце предложения, а место подлежащего заполняется местоимением it (см. Empty subject: "it" and "there", 1б).

4) Инфинитивный оборот, вводимый предлогом for, может стоять после неопределенных и отрицательных местоимений-квантификаторов (somebody, anything, nowhere и т.д.)

5) В американском варианте английского языка инфинитивный оборот, вводимый предлогом for, может стоять после некоторых глаголов, которые в британском варианте допускают при себе сложное дополнение. К таким глаголам относятся: like - нравиться, hate - ненавидеть, mean - иметь в виду, intend - планировать и подобные им по значению

1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) en arrière, vers l'arrière

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) arriéré

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) arriéré

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- backwardness

1) (aimed or directed backwards: He left without a backward glance.) para trás

2) (less advanced in mind or body than is normal for one's age: a backward child.) retardado

3) (late in developing a modern culture, mechanization etc: That part of Britain is still very backward; the backward peoples of the world.) atrasado

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- backwardness

(1415-1975)

   Portugal was the first Western European state to establish an early modern overseas empire beyond the Mediterranean and perhaps the last colonial power to decolonize. A vast subject of complexity that is full of myth as well as debatable theories, the history of the Portuguese overseas empire involves the story of more than one empire, the question of imperial motives, the nature of Portuguese rule, and the results and consequences of empire, including the impact on subject peoples as well as on the mother country and its society, Here, only the briefest account of a few such issues can be attempted.

   There were various empires or phases of empire after the capture of the Moroccan city of Ceuta in 1415. There were at least three Portuguese empires in history: the First empire (1415-1580), the Second empire (1580-1640 and 1640-1822), and the Third empire (1822-1975).

   With regard to the second empire, the so-called Phillipine period (1580-1640), when Portugal's empire was under Spanish domination, could almost be counted as a separate era. During that period, Portugal lost important parts of its Asian holdings to England and also sections of its colonies of Brazil, Angola, and West Africa to Holland's conquests. These various empires could be characterized by the geography of where Lisbon invested its greatest efforts and resources to develop territories and ward off enemies.

   The first empire (1415-1580) had two phases. First came the African coastal phase (1415-97), when the Portuguese sought a foothold in various Moroccan cities but then explored the African coast from Morocco to past the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. While colonization and sugar farming were pursued in the Atlantic islands, as well as in the islands in the Gulf of Guinea like São Tomé and Príncipe, for the most part the Portuguese strategy was to avoid commitments to defending or peopling lands on the African continent. Rather, Lisbon sought a seaborne trade empire, in which the Portuguese could profit from exploiting trade and resources (such as gold) along the coasts and continue exploring southward to seek a sea route to Portuguese India. The second phase of the first empire (1498-1580) began with the discovery of the sea route to Asia, thanks to Vasco da Gama's first voyage in 1497-99, and the capture of strong points, ports, and trading posts in order to enforce a trade monopoly between Asia and Europe. This Asian phase produced the greatest revenues of empire Portugal had garnered, yet ended when Spain conquered Portugal and commanded her empire as of 1580.

   Portugal's second overseas empire began with Spanish domination and ran to 1822, when Brazil won her independence from Portugal. This phase was characterized largely by Brazilian dominance of imperial commitment, wealth in minerals and other raw materials from Brazil, and the loss of a significant portion of her African and Asian coastal empire to Holland and Great Britain. A sketch of Portugal's imperial losses either to native rebellions or to imperial rivals like Britain and Holland follows:

   • Morocco (North Africa) (sample only)

   Arzila—Taken in 1471; evacuated in 1550s; lost to Spain in 1580, which returned city to a sultan.

   Ceuta—Taken in 1415; lost to Spain in 1640 (loss confirmed in 1668 treaty with Spain).

   • Tangiers—Taken in 15th century; handed over to England in 1661 as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry to King Charles II.

   • West Africa

   • Fort/Castle of São Jorge da Mina, Gold Coast (in what is now Ghana)—Taken in 1480s; lost to Holland in 1630s.

   • Middle East

   Socotra-isle—Conquered in 1507; fort abandoned in 1511; used as water resupply stop for India fleet.

   Muscat—Conquered in 1501; lost to Persians in 1650.

   Ormuz—Taken, 1505-15 under Albuquerque; lost to England, which gave it to Persia in the 17th century.

   Aden (entry to Red Sea) — Unsuccessfully attacked by Portugal (1513-30); taken by Turks in 1538.

   • India

   • Ceylon (Sri Lanka)—Taken by 1516; lost to Dutch after 1600.

   • Bombay—Taken in 16th century; given to England in 1661 treaty as part of Catherine of Braganza's dowry for Charles II.

   • East Indies

   • Moluccas—Taken by 1520; possession confirmed in 1529 Saragossa treaty with Spain; lost to Dutch after 1600; only East Timor remaining.

   After the restoration of Portuguese independence from Spain in 1640, Portugal proceeded to revive and strengthen the Anglo- Portuguese Alliance, with international aid to fight off further Spanish threats to Portugal and drive the Dutch invaders out of Brazil and Angola. While Portugal lost its foothold in West Africa at Mina to the Dutch, dominion in Angola was consolidated. The most vital part of the imperial economy was a triangular trade: slaves from West Africa and from the coasts of Congo and Angola were shipped to plantations in Brazil; raw materials (sugar, tobacco, gold, diamonds, dyes) were sent to Lisbon; Lisbon shipped Brazil colonists and hardware. Part of Portugal's War of Restoration against Spain (1640-68) and its reclaiming of Brazil and Angola from Dutch intrusions was financed by the New Christians (Jews converted to Christianity after the 1496 Manueline order of expulsion of Jews) who lived in Portugal, Holland and other low countries, France, and Brazil. If the first empire was mainly an African coastal and Asian empire, the second empire was primarily a Brazilian empire.

   Portugal's third overseas empire began upon the traumatic independence of Brazil, the keystone of the Lusitanian enterprise, in 1822. The loss of Brazil greatly weakened Portugal both as a European power and as an imperial state, for the scattered remainder of largely coastal, poor, and uncolonized territories that stretched from the bulge of West Africa to East Timor in the East Indies and Macau in south China were more of a financial liability than an asset. Only two small territories balanced their budgets occasionally or made profits: the cocoa islands of São Tomé and Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea and tiny Macau, which lost much of its advantage as an entrepot between the West and the East when the British annexed neighboring Hong Kong in 1842. The others were largely burdens on the treasury. The African colonies were strapped by a chronic economic problem: at a time when the slave trade and then slavery were being abolished under pressures from Britain and other Western powers, the economies of Guinea- Bissau, São Tomé/Príncipe, Angola, and Mozambique were totally dependent on revenues from the slave trade and slavery. During the course of the 19th century, Lisbon began a program to reform colonial administration in a newly rejuvenated African empire, where most of the imperial efforts were expended, by means of replacing the slave trade and slavery, with legitimate economic activities.

   Portugal participated in its own early version of the "Scramble" for Africa's interior during 1850-69, but discovered that the costs of imperial expansion were too high to allow effective occupation of the hinterlands. After 1875, Portugal participated in the international "Scramble for Africa" and consolidated its holdings in west and southern Africa, despite the failure of the contra-costa (to the opposite coast) plan, which sought to link up the interiors of Angola and Mozambique with a corridor in central Africa. Portugal's expansion into what is now Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe (eastern section) in 1885-90 was thwarted by its oldest ally, Britain, under pressure from interest groups in South Africa, Scotland, and England. All things considered, Portugal's colonizing resources and energies were overwhelmed by the African empire it possessed after the frontier-marking treaties of 1891-1906. Lisbon could barely administer the massive area of five African colonies, whose total area comprised about 8 percent of the area of the colossal continent. The African territories alone were many times the size of tiny Portugal and, as of 1914, Portugal was the third colonial power in terms of size of area possessed in the world.

   The politics of Portugal's empire were deceptive. Lisbon remained obsessed with the fear that rival colonial powers, especially Germany and Britain, would undermine and then dismantle her African empire. This fear endured well into World War II. In developing and keeping her potentially rich African territories (especially mineral-rich Angola and strategically located Mozambique), however, the race against time was with herself and her subject peoples. Two major problems, both chronic, prevented Portugal from effective colonization (i.e., settling) and development of her African empire: the economic weakness and underdevelopment of the mother country and the fact that the bulk of Portuguese emigration after 1822 went to Brazil, Venezuela, the United States, and France, not to the colonies. These factors made it difficult to consolidate imperial control until it was too late; that is, until local African nationalist movements had organized and taken the field in insurgency wars that began in three of the colonies during the years 1961-64.

   Portugal's belated effort to revitalize control and to develop, in the truest sense of the word, Angola and Mozambique after 1961 had to be set against contemporary events in Europe, Africa, and Asia. While Portugal held on to a backward empire, other European countries like Britain, France, and Belgium were rapidly decolonizing their empires. Portugal's failure or unwillingness to divert the large streams of emigrants to her empire after 1850 remained a constant factor in this question. Prophetic were the words of the 19th-century economist Joaquim Oliveira Martins, who wrote in 1880 that Brazil was a better colony for Portugal than Africa and that the best colony of all would have been Portugal itself. As of the day of the Revolution of 25 April 1974, which sparked the final process of decolonization of the remainder of Portugal's third overseas empire, the results of the colonization program could be seen to be modest compared to the numbers of Portuguese emigrants outside the empire. Moreover, within a year, of some 600,000 Portuguese residing permanently in Angola and Mozambique, all but a few thousand had fled to South Africa or returned to Portugal.

   In 1974 and 1975, most of the Portuguese empire was decolonized or, in the case of East Timor, invaded and annexed by a foreign power before it could consolidate its independence. Only historic Macau, scheduled for transfer to the People's Republic of China in 1999, remained nominally under Portuguese control as a kind of footnote to imperial history. If Portugal now lacked a conventional overseas empire and was occupied with the challenges of integration in the European Union (EU), Lisbon retained another sort of informal dependency that was a new kind of empire: the empire of her scattered overseas Portuguese communities from North America to South America. Their numbers were at least six times greater than that of the last settlers of the third empire.

    See also Luso-Tropicalism; Rose-colored map; Ultimatum, English.

activities undertaken out of doors and away from the everyday work environment with a view to developing the skills and abilities of participants. Adventure training often takes place at a residential outdoor activity center and may include physically challenging activities such as climbing and rappelling or group exercises and games. The activities are designed to promote experiential learning in areas such as interpersonal communication, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork, and to develop self-confidence and leadership skills. Adventure training has its origins in the work of Kurt Hahn, the founder of Gordonstoun School in Scotland, who developed the Outward Bound program of outdoor activities during World War II. Adventure training programs for organizational personnel became popular during the late 1970s and 1980s, although some have doubted their value and effectiveness.

Also known as outdoor training, outward bound training

SUBJECT AREA: Textiles

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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.

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SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

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Born into a poor family in the Bronx, New York City, Berezin first majored in business studies but transferred her interest to physics. She graduated in 1946 and then, with the aid of an Atomic Energy Commission fellowship, she obtained her PhD in cosmic ray physics at New York University. When the fellowship expired, opportunities in the developing field of electronic data processing seemed more promising than thise in physics. Berezin entered the firm of Electronic Computer Corporation in 1951 and was asked to "build a computer", although few at that time had actually seen one; the result was the Elecom 200. In 1953, for Underwood Corporation, she designed the first office computer, although it was never marketed, as Underwood sold out to Olivetti.

Berezin's next position was as head of logic design for Teleregister Corporation in the late 1950s. Here, she led a team specializing in the design of on-line systems. Her most notable achievement was the design of a nationwide online computer reservation system for United Airlines, the first system of this kind and the precursor of similar on-line systems. It was installed in the early 1960s and was the first large non-military on-line interactive system.

In the 1960s Berezin moved to the Digitronics Corporation as manager of logic design, her work here resulted in the first high-speed commercial digital communications terminal. Also in the 1960s, her involvement in Data Secretary, a challenger to the IBM editing typewriter, makes it possible to regard her as one of the pioneers of word processing. In 1976 Berezin transferred from the electronic data and computing field to that of financial management.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Fourdrinier's father was a paper manufacturer and stationer of London, from a family of French Protestant origin. Henry took up the same trade and, with his brother Sealy (d. 1847), devoted many years to developing the papermaking machine. Their first patent was taken out in 1801, but success was still far off. A machine for making paper had been invented a few years previously by Nicolas Robert at the Didot's mill at Essonnes, south of Paris. Robert quarrelled with the Didots, who then contacted their brother-in-law in England, John Gamble, in an attempt to raise capital for a larger machine. Gamble and the Fourdriniers called in the engineer Bryan Donkin, and between them they patented a much improved machine in 1807. In the new machine, the paper pulp flowed on to a moving continuous woven wire screen and was then squeezed between rollers to remove much of the water. The paper thus formed was transferred to a felt blanket and passed through a second press to remove more water, before being wound while still wet on to a drum. For the first time, a continuous sheet of paper could be made. Other inventors soon made further improvements: in 1817 John Dickinson obtained a patent for sizing baths to improve the surface of the paper; while in 1820 Thomas Crompton patented a steam-heated drum round which the paper was passed to speed up the drying process. The development cost of £60,000 bankrupted the brothers. Although Parliament extended the patent for fourteen years, and the machine was widely adopted, they never reaped much profit from it. Tsar Alexander of Russia became interested in the papermaking machine while on a visit to England in 1814 and promised Henry Fourdrinier £700 per year for ten years for super-intending the erection of two machines in Russia; Henry carried out the work, but he received no payment. At the age of 72 he travelled to St Petersburg to seek recompense from the Tsar's successor Nicholas I, but to no avail. Eventually, on a motion in the House of Commons, the British Government awarded Fourdrinier a payment of £7,000. The paper trade, sensing the inadequacy of this sum, augmented it with a further sum which they subscribed so that an annuity could be purchased for Henry, then the only surviving brother, and his two daughters, to enable them to live in modest comfort. From its invention in ancient China (see Cai Lun), its appearance in the Middle Ages in Europe and through the first three and a half centuries of printing, every sheet of paper had to made by hand. The daily output of a hand-made paper mill was only 60–100 lb (27–45 kg), whereas the new machine increased that tenfold. Even higher speeds were achieved, with corresponding reductions in cost; the old mills could not possibly have kept pace with the new mechanical printing presses. The Fourdrinier machine was thus an essential element in the technological developments that brought about the revolution in the production of reading matter of all kinds during the nineteenth century. The high-speed, giant paper-making machines of the late twentieth century work on the same principle as the Fourdrinier of 1807.

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SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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For the first twenty-five years of his life, Gestetner was a rolling stone and accordingly gathered no moss. Leaving school in 1867, he began working for an uncle in Sopron, making sausages. Four years later he apprenticed himself to another uncle, a stockbroker, in Vienna. The financial crisis of 1873 prompted a move to a restaurant, also in the family, but tiring of a menial existence, he emigrated to the USA, travelling steerage. He began to earn a living by selling Japanese kites: these were made of strong Japanese paper coated with lacquer, and he noted their long fibres and great strength, an observation that was later to prove useful when he was searching for a suitable medium for stencil duplicating. However, he did not prosper in the USA and he returned to Europe, first to Vienna and finally to London in 1879. He took a job with Fairholme \& Co., stationers in Shoe Lane, off Holborn; at last Gestetner found an outlet for his inventive genius and he began his life's work in developing stencil duplicating. His first patent was in 1879 for an application of the hectograph, an early method of duplicating documents. In 1881, he patented the toothed-wheel pen, or Cyclostyle, which made good ink-passing perforations in the stencil paper, with which he was able to pioneer the first practicable form of stencil duplicating. He then adopted a better stencil tissue of Japanese paper coated with wax, and later an improved form of pen. This assured the success of Gestetner's form of stencil duplicating and it became established practice in offices in the late 1880s. Gestetner began to manufacture the apparatus in premises in Sun Street, at first under the name of Fairholme, since they had defrayed the patent expenses and otherwise supported him financially, in return for which Gestetner assigned them his patent rights. In 1882 he patented the wheel pen in the USA and appointed an agent to sell the equipment there. In 1884 he moved to larger premises, and three years later to still larger premises. The introduction of the typewriter prompted modifications that enabled stencil duplicating to become both the standard means of printing short runs of copy and an essential piece of equipment in offices. Before the First World War, Gestetner's products were being sold around the world; in fact he created one of the first truly international distribution networks. He finally moved to a large factory to the north-east of London: when his company went public in 1929, it had a share capital of nearly £750,000. It was only with the development of electrostatic photocopying and small office offset litho machines that stencil duplicating began to decline in the 1960s. The firm David Gestetner had founded adapted to the new conditions and prospers still, under the direction of his grandson and namesake.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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The name of Le Corbusier is synonymous with the International style of modern architecture and city planning, one utilizing functionalist designs carried out in twentieth-century materials with modern methods of construction. Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, born in the watch-making town of La Chaux-de-Fonds in the Jura mountain region, was the son of a watch engraver and dial painter. In the years before 1918 he travelled widely, studying building in many countries. He learned about the use of reinforced concrete in the studio of Auguste Perret and about industrial construction under Peter Behrens. In 1917 he went to live in Paris and spent the rest of his life in France; in 1920 he adopted the name of Le Corbusier, one derived from that of his ancestors (Le Corbesier), and ten years later became a French citizen.

Le Corbusier's long working life spanned a career divided into three distinct parts. Between 1905 and 1916 he designed a number of simple and increasingly modern houses; the years 1921 to 1940 were ones of research and debate; and the twenty years from 1945 saw the blossoming of his genius. After 1917 Le Corbusier gained a reputation in Paris as an architect of advanced originality. He was particularly interested in low-cost housing and in improving accommodation for the poor. In 1923 he published Vers une architecture, in which he planned estates of mass-produced houses where all extraneous and unnecessary features were stripped away and the houses had flat roofs and plain walls: his concept of "a machine for living in". These white boxes were lifted up on stilts, his pilotis, and double-height living space was provided internally, enclosed by large areas of factory glazing. In 1922 Le Corbusier exhibited a city plan, La Ville contemporaine, in which tall blocks made from steel and concrete were set amongst large areas of parkland, replacing the older concept of city slums with the light and air of modern living. In 1925 he published Urbanisme, further developing his socialist ideals. These constituted a major reform of the industrial-city pattern, but the ideas were not taken up at that time. The Depression years of the 1930s severely curtailed architectural activity in France. Le Corbusier designed houses for the wealthy there, but most of his work prior to 1945 was overseas: his Centrosoyus Administration Building in Moscow (1929–36) and the Ministry of Education Building in Rio de Janeiro (1943) are examples. Immediately after the end of the Second World War Le Corbusier won international fame for his Unité d'habitation theme, the first example of which was built in the boulevard Michelet in Marseille in 1947–52. His answer to the problem of accommodating large numbers of people in a small space at low cost was to construct an immense all-purpose block of pre-cast concrete slabs carried on a row of massive central supports. The Marseille Unité contains 350 apartments in eight double storeys, with a storey for shops half-way up and communal facilities on the roof. In 1950 he published Le Modular, which described a system of measurement based upon the human male figure. From this was derived a relationship of human and mathematical proportions; this concept, together with the extensive use of various forms of concrete, was fundamental to Le Corbusier's later work. In the world-famous and highly personal Pilgrimage Church of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp (1950–5), Le Corbusier's work was in Expressionist form, a plastic design in massive rough-cast concrete, its interior brilliantly designed and lit. His other equally famous, though less popular, ecclesiastical commission showed a contrasting theme, of "brutalist" concrete construction with uncompromisingly stark, rectangular forms. This is the Dominican Convent of Sainte Marie de la Tourette at Eveux-sur-l'Arbresle near Lyon, begun in 1956. The interior, in particular, is carefully worked out, and the lighting, from both natural and artificial sources, is indirect, angled in many directions to illuminate vistas and planes. All surfaces are carefully sloped, the angles meticulously calculated to give optimum visual effect. The crypt, below the raised choir, is painted in bright colours and lit from ceiling oculi.

One of Le Corbusier's late works, the Convent is a tour de force.

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SUBJECT AREA: Photography, film and optics

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Edwin Land's career began when, as a Harvard undergraduate in the late 1920s, he became interested in the possibility of developing a polarizing filter in the form of a thin sheet, to replace the crystal and stacked-glass devices then in use, which were expensive, cumbersome and limited in size. He succeeded in creating a material in which minute anisotropic iodine crystals were oriented in line, producing an efficient polarizer that was patented in 1929. After presenting the result of his researches in a Physics Department colloquium at Harvard, he left to form a partnership with George Wheelwright to manufacture the new material, which was seen to have applications as diverse as anti-glare car headlights, sunglasses, and viewing filters for stereoscopic photographs and films. In 1937 he founded the Polaroid Corporation and developed the Vectograph process, in which self-polarized photographic images could be printed, giving a stereoscopic image when viewed through polarizing viewers. Land's most significant invention, the instant picture, was stimulated by his three-year-old daughter. As he took a snapshot of her, she asked why she could not see the picture at once. He began to research the possibility, and on 21 February 1947 he demonstrated a system of one-step photography at a meeting of the Optical Society of America. Using the principle of diffusion transfer of the image, it produced a photograph in one minute. The Polaroid Land camera was launched on 26 November 1948. The original sepia-coloured images were soon replaced by black and white and, in 1963, by Polacolor instant colour film. The original peel-apart "wet" process was superseded in 1972 with the introduction of the SX-70 camera with dry picture units which developed in the light. The instant colour movie system Polavision, introduced in 1978, was less successful and was one of his few commercial failures.

Land died in March 1991, after a career in which he had been honoured by countless scien-tific and academic bodies and had received the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in America.

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SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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Hiram Moore was the son of a New England stonemason. In 1831 he moved to West Michigan to farm, and he and his two brothers settled in Climax in Kalamazoo County.

Stimulated by a conversation with his neighbour, John Hascall, Moore made a model harvesting machine, which he patented in 1834. By the following year he had built a full-scale machine, but it broke down very quickly. In 1835 he successfully harvested 3 acres left standing for the purpose. Each year alterations and additions were made to the machine, and by 1839 over 50 acres were successfully harvested and threshed in the one operation by the Moore-Hascall machine.

During further developments which took place in the 1840s, Moore sold much of his interest to Senator Lucius Lyon. By the late 1840s this source of funding was no longer available, and attempts to extend the patent became embroiled in similar attempts by McCormick and Hussey and were blocked by rural pressures stemming from the fear that high machinery prices would ensue if the patents continued.

Discouraged, Moore moved to Brandon, Wisconsin, where he farmed 600 acres. He was still developing various machines, but was no longer actively involved in the development of the combine harvester. He continued to work his own machine, with which he would cut just a few acres each year.

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SUBJECT AREA: Land transport, Ports and shipping, Railways and locomotives

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Stevens, a wealthy landowner with an estate at Hoboken on the Hudson River, had his attention drawn to the steamboat of John Fitch in 1786, and thenceforth devoted much of his time and fortune to developing steamboats and mechanical transport. He also had political influence and it was at his instance that Congress in 1790 passed an Act establishing the first patent laws in the USA. The following year Stevens was one of the first recipients of a US patent. This referred to multi-tubular boilers, of both watertube and firetube types, and antedated by many years the work of both Henry Booth and Marc Seguin on the latter.

A steamboat built in 1798 by John Stevens, Nicholas J.Roosevelt and Stevens's brother-in-law, Robert R.Livingston, in association was unsuccessful, nor was Stevens satisfied with a boat built in 1802 in which a simple rotary steam-en-gine was mounted on the same shaft as a screw propeller. However, although others had experimented earlier with screw propellers, when John Stevens had the Little Juliana built in 1804 he produced the first practical screw steamboat. Steam at 50 psi (3.5 kg/cm²) pressure was supplied by a watertube boiler to a single-cylinder engine which drove two contra-rotating shafts, upon each of which was mounted a screw propeller. This little boat, less than 25 ft (7.6 m) long, was taken backwards and forwards across the Hudson River by two of Stevens's sons, one of whom, R.L. Stevens, was to help his father with many subsequent experiments. The boat, however, was ahead of its time, and steamships were to be driven by paddle wheels until the late 1830s.

In 1807 John Stevens declined an invitation to join with Robert Fulton and Robert R.Living-ston in their development work, which culminated in successful operation of the PS Clermont that summer; in 1808, however, he launched his own paddle steamer, the Phoenix. But Fulton and Livingston had obtained an effective monopoly of steamer operation on the Hudson and, unable to reach agreement with them, Stevens sent Phoenix to Philadelphia to operate on the Delaware River. The intervening voyage over 150 miles (240 km) of open sea made Phoenix the first ocean-going steamer.

From about 1810 John Stevens turned his attention to the possibilities of railways. He was at first considered a visionary, but in 1815, at his instance, the New Jersey Assembly created a company to build a railway between the Delaware and Raritan Rivers. It was the first railway charter granted in the USA, although the line it authorized remained unbuilt. To demonstrate the feasibility of the steam locomotive, Stevens built an experimental locomotive in 1825, at the age of 76. With flangeless wheels, guide rollers and rack-and-pinion drive, it ran on a circular track at his Hoboken home; it was the first steam locomotive to be built in America.

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See also: Allen, Horatio; Cooper, Peter