late-developing

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