second+world+war

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

Between 1911 and 1914 Heinrich Focke and Georg Wulf built a monoplane and some years later, in 1924, they founded the Focke-Wulf company. They designed and built a variety of civil and military aircraft including the F 19Ente, a tail-first design of 1927. This canard layout was thought to be safer than conventional designs but, unfortunately, it crashed, killing Wulf. Around 1930 Focke became interested in rotary-wing aircraft, and in 1931 he set up a company with Gerd Achgelis to conduct research in this field. The Focke-Wulf company took out a licence to build Cierva autogiros. Focke designed an improved autogiro, the Fw 186, which flew in 1938; it was entered for a military competition, but it was beaten by a fixed-wing aircraft, the Fieseler Storch. In May 1935 Focke resigned from Focke-Wulf to concentrate on helicopter development with the Focke-Achgelis company. His first design was the Fa 61 helicopter, which utilized the fuselage and engine of a conventional aeroplane but instead of wings had two out-riggers, each carrying a rotor. The engine drove these rotors in opposite directions to counteract the adverse torque effect (with a single rotor the fuselage tends to rotate in the opposite direction to the rotor). Following its first flight on 26 June 1936, the Fa 61 went on to break several world records. However, it attracted more public attention when it was flown inside the huge Deutschlandhalle in Berlin by the famous female test pilot Hanna Reitsch in February 1938. Focke continued to develop his helicopter projects for the Focke-Achgelis company and produced the Fa 223 Drache in 1940. This used twin contra-rotating rotors, like the Fa 61, but could carry six people. Its production was hampered by allied bombing of the factory. During the Second World War Focke- Achgelis also produced a rotor kite which could be towed behind a U-boat to provide a flying "crow's nest", as well as designs for an advanced convertiplane (part aeroplane, part helicopter). After the war, Focke worked in France, the Netherlands and Brazil, then in 1954 he became Professor of Aeroplane and Helicopter Design at the University of Stuttgart.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building, Civil engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Eugène Freyssinet was an army engineer during the First World War who pioneered pre-stressed reinforced concrete and experimented with building concrete bridges. After 1918 he formed his own company to develop his ideas. He investigated the possibilities of very high-strength concrete, and in so doing studied shrinkage and creep. He combined high-quality concrete with highly stressed, stretched steel to give top quality results. His work in 1926 on Plougastel Bridge, at that time the longest reinforced concrete bridge, is a notable example of his use of this technique. In 1916 Freyssinet had built his famous airship hangars at Orly, which were destroyed in the Second World War; the hangars were roofed in parabolic sections to a height of about 200 ft. In 1934 he succeeded in saving the Ocean Terminal at Le Havre from sinking into the mud and being covered by the sea by using his pre-stressing techniques. By 1938 he had developed a superior method of pre-stressing with steel which led to widespread adoption of his methods.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Horology

[br]

[br]

[br]

John Harwood served an apprenticeship as a watch repairer in Bolton, and after service in the First World War he obtained a post with a firm of jewellers in Douglas, Isle of Man. He became interested in the self-winding wrist watch, not because of the convenience of not having to wind it, but because of its potential to keep the mainspring fully wound and to exclude dust and moisture from the watch movement. His experience at the bench had taught him that these were the most common factors to affect adversely the reliability of watches. Completely unaware of previous work in this area, in 1922 he started experimenting and two years later he had produced a serviceable model for which he was granted a patent in 1924. The watch operated on the pedometer principle, the mainspring being wound by a pivoted weight that oscillated in the watch case as a result of the motion of the arm. The hands of his watch were set by rotating the bezel surrounding the dial, dispensing with the usual winding/hand-setting stem which allowed dust and moisture to enter the watch case. He took the watch to Switzerland, but he was unable to persuade the watchmaking firms to produce it until he had secured independent finance to cover the cost of tooling. The Harwood Self-Winding Watch Company Ltd was set up in 1928 to market the watches, but although several thousand were produced the company became a victim of the slump and closed down in 1932. The first practical self-winding watch also operated on the pedometer principle and is attributed to Abraham-Louis Perrellet (1770). The method was refined by Breguet in France and by Recordon, who patented the device in England, but it proved troublesome and went out of fashion. There was a brief revival of interest in self-winding watches towards the end of the nineteenth century, but they never achieved great popularity until after the Second World War, when they used either self-winding mechanisms similar to that devised by Harwood or weights which rotated in the case.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

From 1917, Wiles served during the First World War in the artillery, air force and army service corps. After a short postwar period in the City, he qualified in medicine at the Middlesex Hospital in 1928. His distinguished student career led to posts at the Middlesex and the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. He served as a brigadier orthopaedic surgeon in the Army during the Second World War and in 1946 returned as Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon to the Middlesex.

He made outstanding contributions to postwar developments in orthopaedics and, as well as practising, wrote extensively on a variety of subjects including joint replacement. Taking early retirement in 1959 he moved to Jamaica, where he was involved in the affairs of the University of the West Indies.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

Yagi studied engineering at Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University), graduating in 1910. For the next four years he taught at Engineering High School in Sendai, Honshu, then in 1914 he was sent to study resonance phenomena under Barkhausen at Dresden University. When the First World War broke out he was touring Europe, so he travelled to London to study under Ambrose Fleming at University College, London. Continuing his travels, he then visited the USA, studying at Harvard under G.W. Pierce, before returning to his teaching post at Sendai Engineering High School, which in 1919 was absorbed into Tohoku University. There, in 1921, he obtained his doctorate, and some years later he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering. Having heard of the invention of the magnetron, he worked with a student, Kinjiro Okabe; in 1927 they produced microwave energy at a wavelength of a few tens of centimetres. However, he is best known for his development with another student, Shintaro Uda, of a directional, multi-element ultrahigh frequency aerial, which he demonstrated during a tour of the USA in 1928. During the Second World War Yagi worked on radar systems. After his retirement he became Professor Emeritus at Tohoku and Osaka universities and formed the Yagi Antenna Company.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Medical technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Trueta studied medicine at Barcelona University and graduated in 1921. He held successive surgical appointments until in 1929 he was appointed to the Caja de Provision y Socorro, an organization handling 40,000 cases of injury per year. In 1935, soon after becoming Chief Surgeon in Catalonia, he was confronted by the special problems presented by the casualties of the Spanish Civil War.

With a Nationalist victory imminent in 1939, he moved to England where his special skills were recognized, and at the outbreak of the Second World War he was appointed to the Wing-field Hospital and the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. After an interregnum at the end of the war, in 1949 he was appointed Nuffield Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Oxford, and held this post until his retirement in 1965, when he was able to return to Spain.

His technique of wound management stressed the importance of wound cleansing, excision of non-viable tissue, drainage and immobilization, and was particularly timely in that the advent of penicillin permitted the practical pursuit of new concepts in the treatment not only of the soft tissues, but also of bone infection. He was engaged in many other research projects, in particular those concerned with "crush syndrome" and its renal implications.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Zworykin studied engineering at the Institute of Technology in St Petersburg under Boris Rosing, assisting the latter with his early experiments with television. After graduating in 1912, he spent a time doing X-ray research at the Collège de France in Paris before returning to join the Russian Marconi Company, initially in St Petersburg and then in Moscow. On the outbreak of war in 1917, he joined the Russian Army Signal Corps, but when the war ended in the chaos of the Revolution he set off on his travels, ending up in the USA, where he joined the Westinghouse Corporation. There, in 1923, he filed the first of many patents for a complete system of electronic television, including one for an all-electronic scanning pick-up tube that he called the iconoscope. In 1924 he became a US citizen and invented the kinescope, a hard-vacuum cathode ray tube (CRT) for the display of television pictures, and the following year he patented a camera tube with a mosaic of photoelectric elements and gave a demonstration of still-picture TV. In 1926 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Pittsburgh and in 1928 he was granted a patent for a colour TV system.

In 1929 he embarked on a tour of Europe to study TV developments; on his return he joined the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) as Director of the Electronics Research Group, first at Camden and then Princeton, New Jersey. Securing a budget to develop an improved CRT picture tube, he soon produced a kinescope with a hard vacuum, an indirectly heated cathode, a signal-modulation grid and electrostatic focusing. In 1933 an improved iconoscope camera tube was produced, and under his direction RCA went on to produce other improved types of camera tube, including the image iconoscope, the orthicon and image orthicon and the vidicon. The secondary-emission effect used in many of these tubes was also used in a scintillation radiation counter. In 1941 he was responsible for the development of the first industrial electron microscope, but for most of the Second World War he directed work concerned with radar, aircraft fire-control and TV-guided missiles.

After the war he worked for a time on high-speed memories and medical electronics, becoming Vice-President and Technical Consultant in 1947. He "retired" from RCA and was made an honorary vice-president in 1954, but he retained an office and continued to work there almost up until his death; he also served as Director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research from 1954 until 1962.

[br]

See also: Baird, John Logie; Farnsworth, Philo Taylor; Jenkins, Charles Francis

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

In 1912 Donald Douglas went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study aeronautical engineering. After graduating in this relatively new subject he joined the Glenn L.Martin Company as Chief Engineer. In 1920 he founded the Davis-Douglas Company in California to build an aircraft capable of flying across America non-stop: unfortunately, the Cloudster failed to achieve its target. Douglas reorganized the company in 1921 as the Douglas Company (later it became the Douglas Aircraft Company). In 1924 a team of US Army personnel made the first round-the-world flight in specially designed Douglas World Cruisers, a feat which boosted Douglas's reputation considerably. This reputation was further enhanced by his airliner, designed in 1935, that revolutionized air travel: the Douglas Commercial 3, or DC-3, of which some 13,000 were built. A series of piston-engined airliners followed, culminating in the DC-7. Meanwhile, in the military field, Douglas aircraft played a major part in the Second World War. In the jet age Douglas continued to produce a wide range of successful civil and military aircraft, and the company also moved into the rocket and guided missile business. In 1966 Donald W. Douglas was still Chairman of the company, with Donald W.Douglas Jr as President. In 1967 the company merged with the McDonnell Aircraft Company to become the giant McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Civil engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Bailey was educated at the Leys School, Cambridge, before going to Sheffield University where he studied for a degree in engineering. He joined the Civil Service in 1928 and was posted to the staff of the Experimental Bridging Establishment of the Ministry of Supply at Christchurch, Hampshire. There he continued his boyhood hobby of making model bridges of wood and string. He evolved a design for a prefabricated metal bridge assembled from welded panels linked by pinned joints; this became known as the Bailey bridge. Its design was accepted by the War Office in 1941 and from then on it was used throughout the subsequent conflict of the Second World War. It was a great improvement on its predecessor, the Inglis bridge, designed by a Cambridge University professor of engineering, Charles Inglis, with tubular members that were 10 or 12 ft (3.66 m) long; this bridge was notoriously difficult to construct, particularly in adverse weather conditions, whereas the Bailey bridge's panels and joints were far more manageable and easy to assemble. The simple and standardized component parts of the Bailey bridge made it highly adaptable: it could be strengthened by increasing the number of truss girders, and wide rivers could be crossed by a series of Bailey bridges connected by pontoons. Field Marshal Montgomery is recorded as saying that without the Bailey bridge we should not have won the war'.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

Throughout the history of aviation there have been many attempts to produce a cheap and simple aeroplane for "the man in the street". The tiny Demoiselle built by Alberto Santos- Dumont in 1909 or the de Havilland Moth of 1925 are good examples, but the one which very nearly achieved this aim was Henri Mignet's Flying Flea of 1933. Mignet was a self-taught designer of light aircraft, which often incorporated his unorthodox ideas. His Pou-du-Ciel ("Sky Louse" or "Flying Flea") was unorthodox. The materials used in construction were conventional wood and fabric, but the control system departed from the usual wing plus tailplane (with elevators). The Flea had two wings in tandem. The rear wing was fixed, while the forward wing was hinged to allow the angle of incidence, and hence its lift, to be increased or decreased. Reducing the forward wing's lift would cause the Flea to dive. After Mignet's first flight, on 6 September 1933, and the publication of his book Le Sport de l'air, which explains how to build a Poudu-Ciel, a Pou-building craze started in France. Mignet's book was translated into English and 6,000 copies were sold in a month. During 1935 the craze spread to Britain, where a Flying Flea could be built for £50–£90, including the engine. After several fatal crashes, the aircraft was banned in 1936. A design fault in the control system was to blame, and although this was remedied the wave of popular enthusiasm vanished. Mignet continued to design light aircraft and during the Second World War he was working on a Pou- Maquis for use by the French Resistance but the war ended before the aircraft was ready. During the post-war years a series of Flying Flea derivatives appeared, but their numbers were small. However, the home-build movement in general has grown in recent years, a fact which would have pleased Henri Mignet, the "Patron Saint of Homebuilders".

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Following education at Stockport Grammar School, Williams entered Manchester University in 1929, gaining his BSc in 1932 and MSc in 1933. After a short time as a college apprentice with Metropolitan Vickers, he went to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study for a DPhil, which he was awarded in 1936. He returned to Manchester University that year as an assistant lecturer, gaining his DSc in 1939. Following the outbreak of the Second World War he worked for the Scientific Civil Service, initially at the Bawdsey Research Station and then at the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern, Worcestershire. There he was involved in research on non-incandescent amplifiers and diode rectifiers and the development of the first practical radar system capable of identifying friendly aircraft. Later in the war, he devised an automatic radar system suitable for use by fighter aircraft.

After the war he resumed his academic career at Manchester, becoming Professor of Electrical Engineering and Director of the University Electrotechnical Laboratory in 1946. In the same year he succeeded in developing a data-memory device based on the cathode ray tube, in which the information was stored and read by electron-beam scanning of a charge-retaining target. The Williams storage tube, as it became known, not only found obvious later use as a means of storing single-frame, still television images but proved to be a vital component of the pioneering Manchester University MkI digital computer. Because it enabled both data and program instructions to be stored in the computer, it was soon used worldwide in the development of the early stored-program computers.

[br]

1) "сердитые молодые люди" (об английских молодых писателях 50-х годов XX столетия, выступавших с критикой буржуазного общества) [термин возник в связи с постановкой в 1956 г. пьесы Дж. Осборна "Оглянись во гневе" (‘Look Back in Anger’)]

2) "сердитые молодые люди" ( критически настроенная молодёжь Великобритании после 2-й мировой войны)

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

Von Braun's mother was an amateur astronomer who introduced him to the futuristic books of Jules Verne and H.G.Wells and gave him an astronomical telescope. He was a rather slack and undisciplined schoolboy until he came across Herman Oberth's book By Rocket to Interplanetary Space. He discovered that he required a good deal of mathematics to follow this exhilarating subject and immediately became an enthusiastic student.

The Head of the Ballistics and Armaments branch of the German Army, Professor Karl Becker, had asked the engineer Walter Dornberger to develop a solid-fuel rocket system for short-range attack, and one using liquid-fuel rockets to carry bigger loads of explosives beyond the range of any known gun. Von Braun joined the Verein für Raumschiffsfahrt (the German Space Society) as a young man and soon became a leading member. He was asked by Rudolf Nebel, VfR's chief, to persuade the army of the value of rockets as weapons. Von Braun wisely avoided all mention of the possibility of space flight and some financial backing was assured. Dornberger in 1932 built a small test stand for liquid-fuel rockets and von Braun built a small rocket to test it; the success of this trial won over Dornberger to space rocketry.

Initially research was carried out at Kummersdorf, a suburb of Berlin, but it was decided that this was not a suitable site. Von Braun recalled holidays as a boy at a resort on the Baltic, Peenemünde, which was ideally suited to rocket testing. Work started there but was not completed until August 1939, when the group of eighty engineers and scientists moved in. A great fillip to rocket research was received when Hitler was shown a film and was persuaded of the efficacy of rockets as weapons of war. A factory was set up in excavated tunnels at Mittelwerk in the Harz mountains. Around 6,000 "vengeance" weapons were built, some 3,000 of which were fired on targets in Britain and 2,000 of which were still in storage at the end of the Second World War.

Peenemünde was taken by the Russians on 5 May 1945, but by then von Braun was lodging with many of his colleagues at an inn, Haus Ingeburg, near Oberjoch. They gave themselves up to the Americans, and von Braun presented a "prospectus" to the Americans, pointing out how useful the German rocket team could be. In "Operation Paperclip" some 100 of the team were moved to the United States, together with tons of drawings and a number of rocket missiles. Von Braun worked from 1946 at the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, and in 1950 moved to Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama. In 1953 he produced the Redstone missile, in effect a V2 adapted to carry a nuclear warhead a distance of 320 km (199 miles). The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was formed in 1958 and recruited von Braun and his team. He was responsible for the design of the Redstone launch vehicles which launched the first US satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, and the Mercury capsules of the US manned spaceflight programme which carried Alan Shepard briefly into space in 1961 and John Glenn into earth orbit in 1962. He was also responsible for the Saturn series of large, staged launch vehicles, which culminated in the Saturn V rocket which launched the Apollo missions taking US astronauts for the first human landing on the moon in 1969. Von Braun announced his resignation from NASA in 1972 and died five years later.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

He was educated at Gresham's School in Holt and at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, where he graduated in engineering in 1931; he was made an Honorary Fellow in 1974. Cockerell entered the engineering firm of W.H.Allen \& Sons of Bedford as a pupil in 1931, and two years later he returned to Cambridge to engage in radio research for a further two years. In 1935 he joined Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, working on very high frequency (VHF) transmitters and direction finders. During the Second World War he worked on airborne navigation and communication equipment, and later he worked on radar. During this period he filed thirty six patents in the fields of radio and navigational systems.

In 1950 Cockerell left Marconi to set up his own boat-hire business on the Norfolk Broads. He began to consider how to increase the speed of boats by means of air lubrication. Since the 1870s engineers had at times sought to reduce the drag on a boat by means of a thin layer of air between hull and water. After his first experiments, Cockerell concluded that a significant reduction in drag could only be achieved with a thick cushion of air. After experimenting with several ways of applying the air-cushion principle, the first true hovercraft "took off" in 1955. It was a model in balsa wood, 2 ft 6 in. (762 mm) long and weighing 4½ oz. (27.6 g); it was powered by a model-aircraft petrol engine and could travel over land or water at 13 mph (20.8 km/h). Cockerell filed his first hovercraft patent on 12 December 1955. The following year he founded Hovercraft Ltd and began the search for a manufacturer. The government was impressed with the invention's military possibilities and placed it on the secret list. The secret leaked out, however, and the project was declassified. In 1958 the National Research and Development Corporation decided to give its backing, and the following year Saunders Roe Ltd with experience of making flying boats, produced the epoch-making SR N1, a hovercraft with an air cushion produced by air jets directed downwards and inwards arranged round the periphery of the craft. It made a successful crossing of the English Channel, with the inventor on board.

Meanwhile Cockerell had modified the hovercraft so that the air cushion was enclosed within flexible skirts. In this form it was taken up by manufacturers throughout the world and found wide application as a passenger-carrying vehicle, for military transport and in scientific exploration and survey work. The hover principle found other uses, such as for air-beds to relieve severely burned patients and for hover mowers.

The development of the hovercraft has occupied Cockerell since then and he has been actively involved in the several companies set up to exploit the invention, including Hovercraft Development Ltd and British Hovercraft Corporation. In the 1970s and 1980s he took up the idea of the generation of electricity by wavepower; he was Founder of Wavepower Ltd, of which he was Chairman from 1974 to 1982.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

[br]

[br]

[br]

After education at a private school, Dickinson was apprenticed to a London stationer. In 1806 he started in business as a stationer, in partnership with George Longman; they transferred to 65 Old Bailey, where the firm remained until their premises were destroyed during the Second World War. In order to secure the supply of paper and be less dependent on the papermakers, Dickinson turned to making paper on his own account. In 1809 he acquired Apsley Mill, near Hemel Hempstead on the river Gade in Hertfordshire. There, he produced a new kind of paper for cannon cartridges which, unlike the paper then in use, did not smoulder, thus reducing the risk of undesired explosions. The new paper proved very useful during the Napoleonic War.

Dickinson developed a continuous papermaking machine about the same time as the Fourdrinier brothers, but his worked on a different principle. Instead of a continuous flat wire screen, Dickinson used a wire-covered cylinder which dipped into the dilute pulp as it revolved. A felt-covered roller removed the layer of wet pulp, which was then subjected to drying, as in the Fourdrinier machine. The latter was first in use at Frogmore, just upstream from Apsley Mill on the river Gade. Dickinson patented his machine in 1809 and claimed that it was superior for some kinds of paper. In feet, both types of machine have survived, in much enlarged and modified form: the Fourdrinier for general papermaking, the Dickinson cylinder for the making of board. In 1810 Dickinson acquired the nearby Nash Mill, and over the years he extended the scope of his papermaking business, introducing many technical improvements. Among his inventions was a machine to paste together continuous webs of paper to form cardboard. Another, patented in 1829, was a process for incorporating threads of cotton, flax or silk into the body of the paper to make forgery more difficult. He became increasingly prosperous, overcoming labour disputes with unemployed hand-papermakers. and lawsuits against a canal company which threatened the water supply to his mills. Dickinson was the first to use percolation gauges to predict river flow, and his work on water supply brought him election to a Fellowship of the Royal Society in 1845.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Metallurgy, Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

Fermi was one of the most versatile of twentieth-century physicists, one of the few to excel in both theory and experiment. His greatest theoretical achievements lay in the field of statistics and his theory of beta decay. His statistics, parallel to but independent of Dirac, were the key to the modern theory of metals and the statistical modds of the atomic nucleus. On the experimental side, his most notable discoveries were artificial radioactivity produced by neutron bombardment and the realization of a controlled nuclear chain reaction, in the world's first nuclear reactor.

Fermi received a conventional education with a chemical bias, but reached proficiency in mathematics and physics largely through his own reading. He studied at Pisa University, where he taught himself modern physics and then travelled to extend his knowledge, spending time with Max Born at Göttingen. On his return to Italy, he secured posts in Florence and, in 1927, in Rome, where he obtained the first Italian Chair in Theoretical Physics, a subject in which Italy had so far lagged behind. He helped to bring about a rebirth of physics in Italy and devoted himself to the application of statistics to his model of the atom. For this work, Fermi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, but in December of that year, finding the Fascist regime uncongenial, he transferred to the USA and Columbia University. The news that nuclear fission had been achieved broke shortly before the Second World War erupted and it stimulated Fermi to consider this a way of generating secondary nuclear emission and the initiation of chain reactions. His experiments in this direction led first to the discovery of slow neutrons.

Fermi's work assumed a more practical aspect when he was invited to join the Manhattan Project for the construction of the first atomic bomb. His small-scale work at Columbia became large-scale at Chicago University. This culminated on 2 December 1942 when the first controlled nuclear reaction took place at Stagg Field, Chicago, an historic event indeed. Later, Fermi spent most of the period from September 1944 to early 1945 at Los Alamos, New Mexico, taking part in the preparations for the first test explosion of the atomic bomb on 16 July 1945. President Truman invited Fermi to serve on his Committee to advise him on the use of the bomb. Then Chicago University established an Institute for Nuclear Studies and offered Fermi a professorship, which he took up early in 1946, spending the rest of his relatively short life there.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Synthetic materials

[br]

[br]

[br]

Dr Gibson's work towards the discovery of polythene had its origin in a visit in 1925 to Dr A. Michels of Amsterdam University; the latter had made major advances in techniques for studying chemical reactions at very high pressures. After working with Michels for a time, in 1926 Gibson joined Brunner Mond, one of the companies that went on to form the chemical giant Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). The company supported research into fundamental chemical research that had no immediate commercial application, including the field being cultivated by Michels and Gibson. In 1933 Gibson was joined by another ICI chemist, E.O.Fawcett, who had worked with W.H. Carothers in the USA on polymer chemistry. They were asked to study the effects of high pressure on various reaction systems, including a mixture of benzaldehyde and ethylene. Gibson's notebook for 27 March that year records that after a loss of pressure during which the benzaldehyde was blown out of the reaction tube, a waxy solid was observed in the tube. This is generally recognized as the first recorded observation of polythene. By the following June they had shown that the white, waxy solid was a fairly high molecular weight polymer of ethylene formed at a temperature of 443°K and a pressure of 2,000 bar. However, only small amounts of the material were produced and its significance was not immediately recognized. It was not until two years later that W.P.Perrin and others, also ICI chemists, restarted work on the polymer. They showed that it could be moulded, drawn into threads and cast into tough films. It was a good electrical insulator and almost inert chemically. A British patent for producing polythene was taken out in 1936, and after further development work a production plant began operating in September 1939, just as the Second World War was breaking out. Polythene had arrived in time to make a major contribution to the war effort, for it had the insulating properties required for newly developing work on radar. When peacetime uses became possible, polythene production surged ahead and became the major industry it is today, with a myriad uses in industry and in everyday life.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology

[br]

[br]

[br]

Goldstine studied mathematics at the University of Chicago, Illinois, gaining his PhD in 1936. After teaching mathematics there, he moved to a similar position at the University of Michigan in 1939, becoming an assistant professor. After the USA entered the Second World War, in 1942 he joined the army as a lieutenant in the Ballistic Missile Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. He was then assigned to the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was involved with Arthur Burks in building the valve-based Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) to compute ballistic tables. The machine was completed in 1946, but prior to this Goldstine had met John von Neumann of the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at Princeton, New Jersey, and active collaboration between them had already begun. After the war he joined von Neumann as Assistant Director of the Computer Project at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton, becoming its Director in 1954. There he developed the idea of computer-flow diagrams and, with von Neumann, built the first computer to use a magnetic drum for data storage. In 1958 he joined IBM as Director of the Mathematical Sciences Department, becoming Director of Development at the IBM Data Processing Headquarters in 1965. Two years later he became a Research Consultant, and in 1969 he became an IBM Research Fellow.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

[br]

[br]

[br]

A year after he began practice as an architect, Gropius was responsible for the pace-setting Fagus shoe-last factory at Alfeld-an-der-Leine in Germany, one of the few of his buildings to survive the Second World War. Today the building does not appear unusual, but in 1911 it was a revolutionary prototype, heralding the glass curtain walled method of non-load-bearing cladding that later became ubiquitous. Made from glass, steel and reinforced concrete, this factory initiated a new concept, that of the International school of modern architecture.

In 1919 Gropius was appointed to head the new School of Art and Design at Weimar, the Staatliches Bauhaus. The school had been formed by an amalgamation of the Grand Ducal schools of fine and applied arts founded in 1906. Here Gropius put into practice his strongly held views and he was so successful that this small college, which trained only a few hundred students in the limited years of its existence, became world famous, attracting artists, architects and students of quality from all over Europe.

Gropius's idea was to set up an institution where students of all the arts and crafts could work together and learn from one another. He abhorred the artificial barriers that had come to exist between artists and craftsmen and saw them all as interdependent. He felt that manual dexterity was as essential as creative design. Every Bauhaus student, whatever the individual's field of work or talent, took the same original workshop training. When qualified they were able to understand and supervise all the aesthetic and constructional processes that made up the scope of their work.

In 1924, because of political changes, the Weimar Bauhaus was closed, but Gropius was invited to go to Dessau to re-establish it in a new purpose-built school which he designed. This group of buildings became a prototype that designers of the new architectural form emulated. Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928, only a few years before it was finally closed due to the growth of National Socialism. He moved to England in 1934, but because of a lack of architectural opportunities and encouragement he continued on his way to the USA, where he headed the Department of Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design from 1937 to 1952. After his retirement from there Gropius formed the Architect's Collaborative and, working with other architects such as Marcel Breuer and Pietro Belluschi, designed a number of buildings (for example, the US Embassy in Athens (1960) and the Pan Am Building in New York (1963)).

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

[br]

[br]

[br]

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.

[br]