the+first+world+war

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

At the age of seventeen Goddard climbed a tree and, seeing the view from above, he became determined to make some device with which to ascend towards the planets. In an autobiography, published in 1959 in the journal Astronautics, he stated, "I was a different boy when I descended the ladder. Life now had a purpose for me." His first idea was to launch a projectile by centrifugal force, but in 1909 he started to design a rocket that was to be multi-stage and fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Not long before the First World War he produced a report, "A method of reaching extreme altitudes", which was for the Smithsonian Institution and was published in book form in 1919. During the war he worked on solid-fuelled rockets as weapons. His book contained notes on the amount of fuel required to raise 1 lb (454 g) of payload to an infinite altitude. He incurred ridicule as "the moon man" when he proposed the use of flash powder to indicate successful arrival on the moon. In 1923 he severed his connections with military work and returned to the University of Massachusetts. On 16 March 1926 he launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket from his aunt's farm in Auburn, Massachusetts; powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen, it flew to a height of 12 m (40 ft) and travelled 54 m (177 ft) in 2.4 seconds.

In November 1929 he met the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who persuaded both the Guggenheim Foundation and the Carnegie Institute to support Goddard's experiments financially. He moved to the more suitable location of the Mescalere Ranch, near Roswell, New Mexico, where he worked until 1941. His liquid-fuelled rockets reached speeds of 1,100 km/h (700 mph) and heights of 2,500 m (8,000ft). He investigated the use of the gyroscope to steady his rockets and the assembly of power units in clusters to increase the total thrust. In 1941 he moved to the naval establishment at Annapolis, Maryland, working on liquid-fuelled rockets to assist the take-off of aircraft from carriers. He worked for the US Government on this and the development of military rockets until his death from throat cancer in 1945. In all, he was granted 214 patents, roughly three per year of his life.

In 1960 the US Government admitted infringement of Goddard's patents during the rocket programme of the 1950s and awarded his widow a payment of $1,000,000, while the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) honoured him by naming the Goddard Spaceflight Center near Washington, DC, after him. The Goddard Memorial Library at Clark University, in his home town of Worcester, Massachusetts, was also named in his honour.

[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: Architecture and building

[br]

[br]

[br]

During the 1890s Behrens, as an artist, was a member of the German branch of Sezessionismus and then moved towards Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) types of design in different media. His interest in architecture was aroused during the first years of the twentieth century, and a turning-point in his career was his appointment in 1907 as Artistic Supervisor and Consultant to AEG, the great Berlin electrical firm. His Turbine Factory (1909) in the city was a breakthrough in design and is still standing: in steel and glass, with visible girder construction, this is a truly functional modern building far ahead of its time. In 1910 two more of Behrens's factories were completed in Berlin, followed in 1913 by the great AEG plant at Riga, Latvia.

After the First World War Behrens was in great demand for industrial construction. He designed office schemes such as those at the Mannesmann Steel Works in Dusseldorf (1911–12; now destroyed) and, in a departure from his earlier work, was responsible for a more Expressionist form of design, mainly in brick, in his extensive complex for I.G.Farben at Höchst (1920–4).

In the years before the First World War, some of those who were later amongst the most famous names in modern architecture were among his pupils: Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret).

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

[br]

[br]

[br]

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.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

Educated at Westminster College, in 1904 Tizard went to Magdalen College, Oxford, gaining Firsts in mathematics and chemistry. After a period of time in Berlin with Nernst, he joined the Royal Institution in 1909 to study the colour changes of indicators. From 1911 until 1914 he was a tutorial Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, but with the outbreak of the First World War he joined first the Royal Garrison Artillery, then, in 1915, the newly formed Royal Flying Corps, to work on the development of bomb-sights. Successively in charge of testing aircraft, a lieutenant-colonel in the Ministry of Munitions and Assistant Controller of Research and Experiments for the Royal Air Force, he returned to Oxford in 1919 and the following year became Reader in Chemical Thermodynamics; at this stage he developed the use of toluene as an air-craft-fuel additive.

In 1922 he was appointed an assistant secretary at the government Department of Industrial and Scientific Research, becoming Principal Assistant Secretary in 1922 and its Permanent Director in 1927; during this time he was also a member of the Aeronautical Research Committee, being Chairman of the latter in 1933–43. From 1929 to 1942 he was Rector of Imperial College. In 1932 he was also appointed Chairman of a committee set up to investigate possible national air-defence systems, and it was largely due to his efforts that the radar proposals of Watson-Watt were taken up and an effective system made operational before the outbreak of the Second World War. He was also involved in various other government activities aimed at applying technology to the war effort, including the dam-buster and atomic bombs.

President of Magdalen College in 1942–7, he then returned again to Whitehall, serving as Chairman of the Advisory Council on Scientific Policy and of the Defence Research Policy Committee. Finally, in 1952, he became Pro-Chan-cellor of Southampton University.

[br]

1. prep on

argomento about

( circa) (round) about

sul tavolo on the table

sul mare by the sea

sulle tremila lire round about three thousand lire

su misura made to measure

nove volte su dieci nine times out of ten

2. adv up

( al piano di sopra) upstairs

su! come on!

avere su vestito have on

guardare in su look up

* * *

su avv.

1 ( moto, direzione) up; ( al piano superiore) upstairs: puoi venire su un momento?, can you come up (stairs) a moment?; vado su a prendere le chiavi, I'll go up and get the keys; l'ho mandato su in solaio, I've sent him up to the attic; devo portare su le valigie?, shall I bring the cases up?; guardate su, look up; tira su quel pezzo di carta, pick up that piece of paper; il prezzo della benzina è andato su parecchio, the price of petrol has gone up a great deal // là su → lassù; qua su → quassù // su e giù → giù // su per, up: su per la collina, up the hill; si precipitò su per le scale, he rushed upstairs // metter su casa, to set up house // tirar su un bambino, ( allevarlo) to bring up a child // tirarsi su, ( in salute) to recover (o to pick up); ( finanziariamente) to get on one's feet again // Con uso rafforzativo: si spinse su su fino alla vetta, he climbed all the way up to the summit; risalire su su fino alle origini, to go all the way back to the beginning

2 ( posizione, situazione) up (above) (anche fig.); ( al piano superiore) upstairs: gli ospiti sono su in terrazza, the guests are up on the terrace; l'ufficio è su al primo piano, the office is up on the first floor; ti chiamano da su, they're calling you from upstairs (o from up above); a mezzanotte era ancora su, ( alzato) he was still up at midnight // più su, higher up; ( più avanti) further up (o further along): abita due piani più su, he lives two floors (higher) up; appendi il quadro un po' più su, hang the picture a little higher up; l'albergo è pochi metri più su, the hotel is a few metres further on

3 ( indosso) on: aveva su un paio di scarpe nuove, he had a new pair of shoes on; metti su il soprabito, put your coat on // metter su arie, to put on airs

4 ( con valore esortativo): su, sbrigati!, get a move on!; su, andiamo!, come on, let's go!; su, coraggio!, su con la vita!, cheer up!; su, non piangere!, come on, don't cry!

5 ( con uso pleonastico): di su!, out with it!

6 in su, ( verso l'alto) up (wards); ( in avanti) onwards: guardai in su, I looked up; giaceva sul pavimento a faccia in su, he was lying face upwards on the floor; dalla vita in su, from the waist upwards; camminare col naso in su, to walk with one's nose in the air; i nostri prezzi vanno da dieci euro in su, our prices are from ten euros upwards; il traffico è scorrevole da Bologna in su, the traffic is moving smoothly from Bologna onwards; la norma si applica a tutto il personale, dal fattorino in su, the rule applies to all staff, from the office boy up; la tapparella non va né in su né in giù, the shutter won't go either up or down

◆ s.m.: era un su e giù continuo, it was a continuous coming and going.

◆ FRASEOLOGIA: su le mani!, hands up! // su per giù, more or less (o roughly o about): avrà su per giù la mia età, he must be about my age; c'erano su per giù mille persone, there were roughly a thousand people // essere su di morale, to be in high spirits // essere su di giri, to be revved up; (fig.) to feel on top of the world // avercela su con qlcu., to have it in for s.o. ∙ Per andare su, mettere su, venire su → anche andare, mettere, venire.

su prep.

1 ( per indicare sovrapposizione con contatto) on, (form.) upon; ( con movimento) up; on to (o onto); ( in cima a) on top of: c'è una macchia sul pavimento, there's a stain on the floor; la lettera era sul tavolo, the letter was on the table; posalo sulla sedia, put it on the chair; l'acrobata camminava su una fune, the acrobat was walking on a tightrope; metti il coperchio sulla pentola, put the lid on the pan; si arrampicò su un albero, he climbed up a tree; salire su una scala, to go up a ladder; salire sul treno, to get on the train; caricarono gli sci sul tetto della macchina, they loaded the skis on to the car roof (o on top of the car); i corpi giacevano ammassati uno sull'altro, the bodies were piled one on top of another; il paese sorgeva su una ridente collina, the village stood on (o upon) a sunny hilltop; l'aereo si è schiantato sull'autostrada, the plane crashed on to the motorway // il suo ragionamento si fondava su false premesse, his reasoning was based on false assumptions // far assegnamento su qlcu., to rely on s.o.

2 (per indicare sovrapposizione senza contatto, ovvero protezione, difesa, rivestimento) over: stiamo volando su Londra, we're flying over London; c'è un ponte sul fiume, there's a bridge over the river; una nube tossica incombeva sulla città, a toxic cloud hung over the city; metti un golfino sulle spalle, put a cardigan over your shoulders; passare la lucidatrice sul pavimento, to pass the polisher over the floor; spalmare la crema sul viso, to spread cream over one's face // sul suo capo pendeva la minaccia del licenziamento, the threat of dismissal hung over his head

3 (per indicare superiorità, dominio, controllo) over: non ha alcuna autorità su di noi, he has no authority over us; celebrare la vittoria sul nemico, to celebrate one's victory over the enemy; regnare su un popolo, to reign over a people; esercitare la propria influenza, il proprio potere su qlcu., to exert one's influence, power over s.o.; avere un vantaggio su qlcu., to have an advantage over s.o.

4 (a un livello superiore, più in alto di) above (anche fig.): il sole era alto sull'orizzonte, the sun was high above the horizon; il paese è a 500 metri sul livello del mare, the village is 500 m above sea level // per lui il lavoro ha la precedenza su tutto, he puts work before everything

5 ( lungo) on; ( che si affaccia su) on to (o onto): una casa, una città sul fiume, a house, a city on the river; un negozio sul corso principale, a shop on the main street; passeggiammo sul lungomare, we walked on (o along) the seafront; la mia finestra guarda sul cortile, my window looks on to (o onto) the courtyard; questa porta dà sul giardino, this door opens onto the garden

6 ( verso, in direzione di, contro) to (wards); ( contro) on; at: l'esercito marciò su Napoli, the army marched on Naples; tutti i riflettori erano puntati sulla rock star, all the spotlights were focused on the rock star; tutti si scagliarono su di lui, they all flung themselves at (o on) him (o fam. they all went for him); sparare sulla folla, to fire on (o into) the crowd

7 ( dopo, di seguito a) after: commettere errori su errori, to make mistake after mistake // costruire pietra su pietra, to build stone by stone

8 ( approssimativamente) about; ( di tempo) at, about: sul mezzogiorno, about midday; sul far della sera, at nightfall; sulla fine del secolo, at the turn of the century; da qui a Firenze ci si impiega sulle tre ore, it takes about three hours to get (from here) to Florence; peserà sui 50 chili, it must weigh about 50 kilos; l'ha pagato sui 500 euro, he paid about 500 euros for it; un ragazzo sui 10 anni, a boy about 10 years of age; è sulla trentina, he's about thirty years old // un colore sul verde, a greenish colour // era un po' sul depresso, he was a bit depressed

9 ( intorno a, riguardo a) on, about: un saggio sulla letteratura del Novecento, an essay on 20th century literature; su che cosa sarà la conferenza?, what will the talk be about?; sa tutto sulla storia del jazz, he knows everything about the history of jazz; discutere sui fatti del giorno, to discuss the day's events

10 ( per esprimere proporzione) out of: nove su dieci espressero parere favorevole, nine out of ten were in favour; arriva in ritardo due gioni su tre, he arrives late two days out of three; una volta su mille, one time out of a thousand; meritare otto su dieci, to get eight out of ten.

◆ FRASEOLOGIA: sul momento, at first; sull'istante, immediately; sui due piedi, on the spot // su misura, made to measure // dipinto su legno, tela, painted on wood, canvas // (comm.): su campione, by sample; su campione tipo, on type (o on standard); su richiesta, on demand // essere sul punto di fare qlco., to be about (o to be going) to do sthg. // fare sul serio, to be in (o deadly) earnest (o to be serious): fai sul serio?, are you serious? (o fam. no kidding?) // credere sulla parola, to take s.o.'s word for it.

* * *

1. prep su + il=sul, su + lo=sullo, su + l'=sull', su + la=sulla, su + i=sui, su + gli=sugli, su + le= sulle

1) (gen) on, (moto) on(to), (in cima a) on (top of)

2) (addosso) over

3) (da una parte all'altra) over

4) (autorità, dominio) over

5) (più in alto di) above

6) (argomento) about, on

7) (circa) about, around

8) (proporzione) out of, in

9)

2. avv

1) (in alto, verso l'alto) up, (al piano superiore) upstairs

2) (in poi) onwards

3) (addosso) on

4)

* * *

preposizione (artcl. sul, sullo, sulla, sull'; pl. sui, sugli, sulle)

1) (con contatto) on, upon; (con movimento) on, onto; (in cima a) on top of

2) (senza contatto o per indicare rivestimento, protezione) over

3) (per indicare superiorità, dominio) over

4) (al di sopra di) above

5) (verso)

6) (con nomi di fiumi e laghi)

7) (per indicare un supporto) on

8) (riguardo a, intorno a) on, about

9) (per indicare il modo)

10) (per indicare approssimazione) about, around

11) (per indicare iterazione) after, upon

12) (distributivo) out of

1) (in alto) up

2) (al piano superiore) upstairs

3) (come rafforzativo)

4) in su up, upwards

5) su per

6) su e giù (in alto e in basso) up and down; (avanti e indietro) up and down, to and fro

interiezione come on

* * *

su

/su/

I preposizione

 (artcl. sul, sullo, sulla, sull'; pl. sui, sugli, sulle)

 1 (con contatto) on, upon; (con movimento) on, onto; (in cima a) on top of; la tazza è sul tavolo the cup is on the table; battere il pugno sul tavolo to slam one's fist on the table; passare la mano su qcs. to run one's hand over sth.; salire sulla scala, su un albero to climb (up) the ladder, a tree; dimenticare l'ombrello sul treno to leave one's umbrella on the train; salire sul treno, sull'autobus to get on o onto the train, the bus; mettilo su quel mucchio put it on top of that pile

 2 (senza contatto o per indicare rivestimento, protezione) over; nuvole sulle montagne clouds over the mountain tops; un ponte sul fiume a bridge across o over the river; portare un maglione sulla camicia to wear a sweater over one's shirt; mettere una coperta sulla poltrona to lay a blanket over the armchair

 3 (per indicare superiorità, dominio) over; governare su un paese to rule (over) a country

 4 (al di sopra di) above; 500 m sul livello del mare 500 m above sea level

 5 (verso) la stanza dà sul parco the room looks onto o towards the park; puntare un'arma su qcn. to aim a gun at sb.

 6 (con nomi di fiumi e laghi) un ponte sul Tamigi a bridge over the Thames; le città sul Po the towns along the Po; crociera sul Nilo cruise on the Nile; vacanze sul Lago Maggiore holidays by Lake Maggiore

 7 (per indicare un supporto) on; su CD on CD; disegnare sulla sabbia to draw in the sand; copiare su carta to copy onto paper; sul giornale in the newspaper; sul quarto canale telev. on channel four

 8 (riguardo a, intorno a) on, about

 9 (per indicare il modo) su commissione on commission; su consiglio di qcn. on sb.'s advice, at o on sb.'s suggestion; su ordine di qcn. on sb.'s order

 10 (per indicare approssimazione) about, around; essere sui vent'anni to be about twenty; sul finire del secolo towards the end of the century

 11 (per indicare iterazione) after, upon; commettere sbagli su sbagli to make one mistake after another, to make mistake after mistake

 12 (distributivo) out of; due persone su tre two out of every three people; una settimana su tre one week in three

II avverbio

 1 (in alto) up; su in cima up on the top; guardare su to look up; su le mani! hands up!

 2 (al piano superiore) upstairs; su fa più freddo it's colder upstairs; portare qcs. su in soffitta to take sth. up to the attic

 3 (come rafforzativo) salire su su nel cielo to raise up and up o further up into the sky

 4 in su up, upwards; più in su further up; guardare in su to look up(wards); dalla vita in su from the waist up(wards); dai 3 anni in su from (the age of) 3 up; a faccia in su face up(wards)

 5 su per su per la montagna, le scale up the mountain, the stairs

 6 su e giù (in alto e in basso) up and down; (avanti e indietro) up and down, to and fro; andare su e giù per le scale to go up and down the stairs

III interiezione

 come on.

1  world war

♦voorbeelden:

1   de Eerste Wereldoorlog • the first World War, World War I

     de Tweede Wereldoorlog • the second World War, World War II

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

Marconi was educated in physics at Leghorn and at Bologna University. An avid experimenter, he worked in his parents' attic and, almost certainly aware of the recent work of Hertz and others, soon improved the performance of coherers and spark-gap transmitters. He also discovered for himself the use of earthing and of elevated metal plates as aerials. In 1895 he succeeded in transmitting telegraphy over a distance of 2 km (1¼ miles), but the Italian Telegraph authority rejected his invention, so in 1896 he moved to England, where he filed the first of many patents. There he gained the support of the Chief Engineer of the Post Office, and by the following year he had achieved communication across the Bristol Channel.

The British Post Office was also slow to take up his work, so in 1897 he formed the Wireless Telegraph \& Signal Company to work independently. In 1898 he sold some equipment to the British Army for use in the Boer War and established the first permanent radio link from the Isle of Wight to the mainland. In 1899 he achieved communication across the English Channel (a distance of more than 31 miles or 50 km), the construction of a wireless station at Spezia, Italy, and the equipping of two US ships to report progress in the America's Cup yacht race, a venture that led to the formation of the American Marconi Company. In 1900 he won a contract from the British Admiralty to sell equipment and to train operators. Realizing that his business would be much more successful if he could offer his customers a complete radio-communication service (known today as a "turnkey" deal), he floated a new company, the Marconi International Marine Communications Company, while the old company became the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company.

His greatest achievement occurred on 12 December 1901, when Morse telegraph signals from a transmitter at Poldhu in Cornwall were received at St John's, Newfoundland, a distance of some 2,100 miles (3,400 km), with the use of an aerial flown by a kite. As a result of this, Marconi's business prospered and he became internationally famous, receiving many honours for his endeavours, including the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909. In 1904, radio was first used to provide a daily bulletin at sea, and in 1907 a transatlantic wireless telegraphy service was inaugurated. The rescue of 1,650 passengers from the shipwreck of SS Republic in 1909 was the first of many occasions when wireless was instrumental in saving lives at sea, most notable being those from the Titanic on its maiden voyage in April 1912; more lives would have been saved had there been sufficient lifeboats. Marconi was one of those who subsequently pressed for greater safety at sea. In 1910 he demonstrated the reception of long (8 km or 5 miles) waves from Ireland in Buenos Aires, but after the First World War he began to develop the use of short waves, which were more effectively reflected by the ionosphere. By 1918 the first link between England and Australia had been established, and in 1924 he was awarded a Post Office contract for short-wave communication between England and the various parts of the British Empire.

With his achievements by then recognized by the Italian Government, in 1915 he was appointed Radio-Communications Adviser to the Italian armed forces, and in 1919 he was an Italian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. From 1921 he lived on his yacht, the Elettra, and although he joined the Fascist Party in 1923, he later had reservations about Mussolini.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

Oswald Short trained as an engineer; he was largely self-taught but was assisted by his brothers Eustace and Horace. In 1898 Eustace and the young Oswald set up a balloon business, building their first balloon in 1901. Two years later they sold observation balloons to the Government of India, and further orders followed. Meanwhile, in 1906 Horace designed a high-altitude balloon with a spherical pressurized gondola, an idea later used by Auguste Piccard, in 1931. Horace, a strange genius with a dominating character, joined his younger brothers in 1908 to found Short Brothers. Their first design, based on the Wright Flyer, was a limited success, but No. 2 won a Daily Mail prize of £1,000. In the same year, 1909, the Wright brothers chose Shorts to build six of their new Model A biplanes. Still using the basic Wright layout, Horace designed the world's first twin-engined aeroplane to fly successfully: it had one engine forward of the pilot, and one aft. During the years before the First World War the Shorts turned to tractor biplanes and specialized in floatplanes for the Admiralty.

Oswald established a seaplane factory at Rochester, Kent, during 1913–14, and an airship works at Cardington, Bedfordshire, in 1916. Short Brothers went on to build the rigid airship R 32, which was completed in 1919. Unfortunately, Horace died in 1917, which threw a greater responsibility onto Oswald, who became the main innovator. He introduced the use of aluminium alloys combined with a smooth "stressed-skin" construction (unlike Junkers, who used corrugated skins). His sleek biplane the Silver Streak flew in 1920, well ahead of its time, but official support was not forthcoming. Oswald Short struggled on, trying to introduce his all-metal construction, especially for flying boats. He eventually succeeded with the biplane Singapore, of 1926, which had an all-metal hull. The prototype was used by Sir Alan Cobham for his flight round Africa. Several successful all-metal flying boats followed, including the Empire flying boats (1936) and the ubiquitous Sunderland (1937). The Stirling bomber (1939) was derived from the Sunderland. The company was nationalized in 1942 and Oswald Short retired the following year.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Broadcasting, Electronics and information technology, Telecommunications

[br]

[br]

[br]

Interested from childhood in anything mechanical, as a teenager Armstrong constructed a variety of wireless equipment in the attic of his parents' home, including spark-gap transmitters and receivers with iron-filing "coherer" detectors capable of producing weak Morse-code signals. In 1912, while still a student of engineering at Columbia University, he applied positive, i.e. regenerative, feedback to a Lee De Forest triode amplifier to just below the point of oscillation and obtained a gain of some 1,000 times, giving a receiver sensitivity very much greater than hitherto possible. Furthermore, by allowing the circuit to go into full oscillation he found he could generate stable continuous-waves, making possible the first reliable CW radio transmitter. Sadly, his claim to priority with this invention, for which he filed US patents in 1913, the year he graduated from Columbia, led to many years of litigation with De Forest, to whom the US Supreme Court finally, but unjustly, awarded the patent in 1934. The engineering world clearly did not agree with this decision, for the Institution of Radio Engineers did not revoke its previous award of a gold medal and he subsequently received the highest US scientific award, the Franklin Medal, for this discovery.

During the First World War, after some time as an instructor at Columbia University, he joined the US Signal Corps laboratories in Paris, where in 1918 he invented the superheterodyne, a major contribution to radio-receiver design and for which he filed a patent in 1920. The principle of this circuit, which underlies virtually all modern radio, TV and radar reception, is that by using a local oscillator to convert, or "heterodyne", a wanted signal to a lower, fixed, "intermediate" frequency it is possible to obtain high amplification and selectivity without the need to "track" the tuning of numerous variable circuits.

Returning to Columbia after the war and eventually becoming Professor of Electrical Engineering, he made a fortune from the sale of his patent rights and used part of his wealth to fund his own research into further problems in radio communication, particularly that of receiver noise. In 1933 he filed four patents covering the use of wide-band frequency modulation (FM) to achieve low-noise, high-fidelity sound broadcasting, but unable to interest RCA he eventually built a complete broadcast transmitter at his own expense in 1939 to prove the advantages of his system. Unfortunately, there followed another long battle to protect and exploit his patents, and exhausted and virtually ruined he took his own life in 1954, just as the use of FM became an established technique.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

Amos Ayre grew up on the Tyne with the stimulus of shipbuilding and seafaring around him. After an apprenticeship as a ship draughtsman and distinction in his studies, he held responsible posts in the shipyards of Belfast and later Dublin. His first dramatic move came in 1909 when he accepted the post of Manager of the new Employment Exchange at Govan, then just outside Glasgow. During the First World War he was in charge of fleet coaling operations on the River Forth, and later was promoted Admiralty District Director for shipyard labour in Scotland.

Before the conclusion of hostilities, with his brother Wilfrid (later Sir Wilfrid Ayre) he founded the Burntisland Shipbuilding Company in Fife. Setting up on a green field site allowed the brothers to show innovation in design, production and marketing. Such was their success that the new yard was busy throughout the Depression, building standard ships which incorporated low operating costs with simplicity of construction.

Through public service culminating in the 1929 Safety of Life at Sea Conference, Amos Ayre became recognized not only as an eminent naval architect, but also as a skilled negotiator. In 1936 he was invited to become Chairman of the Shipbuilding Conference and thereby virtual leader of the industry. As war approached he planned with meticulous care the rearrangement of national shipbuilding capacity, enabling Britain to produce standard hulls ranging from the legendary TID tugs to the standard freighters built in Sunderland or Port Glasgow. In 1939 he became Director of Merchant Shipbuilding, a position he held until 1944, when with typical foresight he asked to be released to plan for shipbuilding's return to normality.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

After serving in the British Army during the Boer War. Dunne returned home convinced that aeroplanes would be more suitable than balloons for reconnaissance work. He built models to test his ideas for a tailless design based on the winged seed of a Javanese climbing plant. In 1906 Dunne joined the staff of the Balloon Factory at Farnborough, where the Superintendent, Colonel J.E.Capper, was also interested in manned kites and aeroplanes. Since 1904 the colourful American "Colonel" S.F. Cody had been experimenting at Farnborough with manned kites, and in 1908 his "British Army Dirigible No. 1" made the first powered flight in Britain. Dunne's first swept-wing tailless glider was ready to fly in the spring of 1907, but it was deemed to be a military secret and flying it at Farnborough would be too public. Dunne, Colonel Capper and a team of army engineers took the glider to a remote site at Blair Atholl in Scotland for its test flights. It was not a great success, although it attracted snoopers, with the result that it was camouflaged. Powered versions made short hops in 1908, but then the War Office withdrew its support. Dunne and his associates set up a syndicate to continue the development of a new tailless aeroplane, the D 5; this was built by Short Brothers (see Short, Hugh Oswald) and flew successfully in 1910. It had combined elevators and ailerons on the wing tips (or elevons as they are now called when fitted to modern delta-winged aircraft). In 1913 an improved version of the D 5 was demonstrated in France, where the pilot left his cockpit and walked along the wing in flight. Dunne had proved his point and designed a stable aircraft, but his health was suffering and he retired. During the First World War, however, it was soon learned that military aircraft needed to be manoeuvrable rather than stable.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic engineering

[br]

[br]

[br]

Sir Alfred Ewing was one of the leading engineering academics of his generation. He was the son of a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, and was educated at Dundee High School and Edinburgh University, where he studied engineering under Professor Fleeming Jenkin. On Jenkin's nomination, Ewing was recruited as Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Tokyo, where he spent five years from 1878 to 1883. While in Tokyo, he devised an instrument for measuring and recording earthquakes. Ewing returned to his home town of Dundee in 1883, as the first Professor of Engineering at the University College recently established there. After seven years building up the department in Dundee, he moved to Cambridge where he succeeded James Stuart as Professor of Mechanism and Applied Mechanics. In thirteen creative years at Cambridge, he established the Engineering Tripos (1892) and founded the first engineering laboratories at the University (1894). From 1903 to 1917 Ewing served the Admiralty as Director of Naval Education, in which role he took a leading part in the revolution in British naval traditions which equipped the Royal Navy to fight the First World War. In that war, Ewing made an important contribution to the intelligence operation of deciphering enemy wireless messages. In 1916 he returned to Edinburgh as Principal and Vice-Chancellor, and following the war he presided over a period of rapid expansion at the University. He retired in 1929.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

McNeill was born in Clydebank just outside Glasgow, and was to serve that town for most of his life. After education at Clydebank High School and then at Allan Glen's in Glasgow, in 1908 he entered the shipyard of John Brown \& Co. Ltd as an apprentice. He was encouraged to matriculate at the University of Glasgow, where he studied naval architecture under the (then) unique Glasgow system of "sandwich" training, alternately spending six months in the shipyard, followed by winter at the Faculty of Engineering. On graduating in 1915, he joined the Army and by 1918 had risen to the rank of Major in the Royal Field Artillery.

After the First World War, McNeill returned to the shipyard and in 1928 was appointed Chief Naval Architect. In 1934 he was made a local director of the company. During the difficult period of the 1930s he was in charge of the technical work which led to the design, launching and successful completion of the great liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. Some of the most remarkable ships of the mid-twentieth century were to come from this shipyard, including the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard, and the Royal Yacht Britannia, completed in 1954. From 1948 until 1959, Sir James was Managing Director of the Clydebank part of the company and was Deputy Chairman by the time he retired in 1962. His public service was remarkable and included chairmanship of the Shipbuilding Conference and of the British Ship Research Association, and membership of the Committee of Lloyd's Register of Shipping.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

When Louis Blériot made his historic flight across the English Channel in 1909, the credit for the success of the flight naturally went to the pilot. Few people thought about the designer of the successful aeroplane, and those who did assumed it was Blériot himself. Blériot did design several of the aeroplanes bearing his name, but the cross- Channel No. XI was mainly designed by his friend Raymond Saulnier, a fact not; broadcast at the time.

In 1911 the Morane-Saulnier company was founded in Paris by Léon (1885–1918) and Robert (1886–1968) Morane and Raymond Saulnier, who became Chief Designer. Flying a Morane-Saulnier, Roland Garros made a recordbreaking flight to a height of 5,611 m (18,405 ft) in 1912, and the following year he made the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean. Morane-Saulnier built a series of "parasol" monoplanes which were very widely used during the early years of the First World War. With the wing placed above the fuselage, the pilot had an excellent downward view for observation purposes, but the propeller ruled out a forward-firing machine gun. During 1913–4, Raymond Saulnier was working on an idea for a synchronized machine gun to fire between the blades of the propeller. He could not overcome certain technical problems, so he devised a simple alternative: metal deflector plates were fitted to the propeller, so if a bullet hit the blade it did no harm. Roland Garros, flying a Type L Parasol, tested the device in action during April 1915 and was immediately successful. This opened the era of the true fighter aircraft. Unfortunately, Garros was shot down and the Germans discovered his secret weapon: they improved on the idea with a fully synchronized machine gun fitted to the Fokker E 1 monoplane. The Morane-Saulnier company continued in business until 1963, when it was taken over by the Potez Group.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of an engineer, Szilard, after service in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War, studied electrical engineering at the University of Berlin. Obtaining his doctorate there in 1922, he joined the faculty and concentrated his studies on thermodynamics. He later began to develop an interest in nuclear physics, and in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, Szilard emigrated to Britain because of his Jewish heritage.

In 1934 he conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction through the breakdown of beryllium into helium and took out a British patent on it, but later realized that this process would not work. In 1937 he moved to the USA and continued his research at the University of Columbia, and the following year Hahn and Meitner discovered nuclear fission with uranium; this gave Szilard the breakthrough he needed. In 1939 he realized that a nuclear chain reaction could be produced through nuclear fission and that a weapon with many times the destructive power of the conventional high-explosive bomb could be produced. Only too aware of the progress being made by German nuclear scientists, he believed that it was essential that the USA should create an atomic bomb before Hitler. Consequently he drafted a letter to President Roosevelt that summer and, with two fellow Hungarian émigrés, persuaded Albert Einstein to sign it. The result was the setting up of the Uranium Committee.

It was not, however, until December 1941 that active steps began to be taken to produce such a weapon and it was a further nine months before the project was properly co-ordinated under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project. In the meantime, Szilard moved to join Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago and it was here, at the end of 1942, in a squash court under the football stadium, that they successfully developed the world's first self-sustaining nuclear reactor. Szilard, who became an American citizen in 1943, continued to work on the Manhattan Project. In 1945, however, when the Western Allies began to believe that only the atomic bomb could bring the war against Japan to an end, Szilard and a number of other Manhattan Project scientists objected that it would be immoral to use it against populated targets.

Although he would continue to campaign against nuclear warfare for the rest of his life, Szilard now abandoned nuclear research. In 1946 he became Professor of Biophysics at the University of Chicago and devoted himself to experimental work on bacterial mutations and biochemical mechanisms, as well as theoretical research on ageing and memory.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Ports and shipping

[br]

[br]

[br]

At the conclusion of his schooling in the South of England, Yarrow became an indentured apprentice to the Thames engine-builder Ravenhill. During this five-year period various incidents and meetings sharpened his interest in scientific matters and he showed the skills that in later years were to be so beneficial to shipbuilding. For two years he acted as London representative for Ravenhill before joining up with a Mr Hedley to form a shipyard on the Isle of Dogs. The company lasted from 1868 until 1875 and in that period produced 350 small launches and other craft. This massive output enabled Yarrow to gain confidence in many aspects of ship design. Within two years of setting out on his own he built his first ship for the Royal Navy: a torpedo boat, then at the cutting edge of technology.

In the early 1890s the company was building watertube boilers and producing destroyers with speeds in excess of 27 knots (50 km/h); it built the Russian destroyer Sokol, did pioneering work with aluminium and with high-tensile steels and worked on shipboard equipment to nullify vibrational effects. With the closure of most of the Thames shipyards and the run-down in skilled labour, Yarrow decided that the shipyard must move to some other part of the United Kingdom. After careful deliberation a green field site to the west of Glasgow was chosen, and in 1908 their first Clyde-built destroyer was launched. The company expanded, more building berths were arranged, boiler construction was developed and over the years they became recognized as specialists in smaller highspeed craft and in "knock down" ships for other parts of the world.

Yarrow retired in 1913, but at the commencement of the First World War he returned to help the yard produce, in four years, twenty-nine destroyers with speeds of up to 40 knots (74 km/h). At the end of hostilities he gave of his time and money to many charities, including those for ex-servicemen. He left a remarkable industrial organization which remains to this day the most prolific builder of surface craft for the Royal Navy.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

Anton Flettner was an engineer with a great interest in hydraulics and aerodynamics. At the beginning of the First World War Flettner was recruited by Zeppelin to investigate the possibility of radio-controlled airships as guided missiles. In 1915 he constructed a small radio-controlled tank equipped to cut barbed-wire defences; the military experts rejected it, but he was engaged to investigate radio-controlled pilotless aircraft and he invented a servo-control device to assist their control systems. These servo-controls, or trim tabs, were used on large German bombers towards the end of the war. In 1924 he invented a sailing ship powered by rotating cylinders, but although one of these crossed the Atlantic they were never a commercial success. He also invented a windmill and a marine rudder. In the late 1920s Flettner turned his attention to rotating-wing aircraft, and in 1931 he built a helicopter with small engines mounted on the rotor blades. Progress was slow and it was abandoned after being damaged during testing in 1934. An autogiro followed in 1936, but it caught fire on a test flight and was destroyed. Undeterred, Flettner continued his development work on helicopters and in 1937 produced the Fl 185, which had a single rotor to provide lift and two propellers on outriggers to combat the torque and provide forward thrust. This arrangement was not a great success, so he turned to twin contra-rotating rotors, as used by his rival Focke, but broke new ground by using intermeshing rotors to make a more compact machine. The Fl 265 with its "egg-beater" rotors was ordered by the German navy in 1938 and flew the following year. After exhaustive testing, Flettner improved his design and produced the two-seater Fl 282 Kolibri, which flew in 1940 and became the only helicopter to be used operationally during the Second World War.

After the war, Flettner moved to the United States where his intermeshing-rotor idea was developed by the Kaman Aircraft Corporation.

[br]

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

[br]

[br]

[br]

The son of a physician, Oberth originally studied medicine in Munich, but his education was interrupted by the First World War and service in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Wounded, he passed the time by studying astronautics. He apparently simulated weightlessness and worked out the design for a long-range liquid-propelled rocket, but his ideas were rejected by the War Office; after the war he submitted them as a dissertation for a PhD at Heidelberg University, but this was also rejected. Consequently, in 1923, whilst still an unknown mathematics teacher, he published his ideas at his own expense in the book The Rocket into Interplanetary Space. These included a description of how rockets could achieve a sufficient velocity to escape the gravitational field of the earth. As a result he gained international prestige almost overnight and learned of the work of Robert Goddard and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. After correspondence with the Goddard and Tsiolkovsky, Oberth published a further work in 1929, The Road to Space Travel, in which he acknowledged the priority of Goddard's and Tsiolkovski's calculations relating to space travel; he went on to anticipate by more than thirty years the development of electric and ionic propulsion and to propose the use of giant mirrors to control the weather. For this he was awarded the annual Hirsch Prize of 10,000 francs. From 1925 to 1938 he taught at a college in Mediasch, Transylvania, where he carried out experiments with petroleum and liquid-air rockets. He then obtained a lecturing post at Vienna Technical University, moving two years later to Dresden University and becoming a German citizen. In 1941 he became assistant to the German rocket engineer Werner von Braun at the rocket development centre at Peenemünde, and in 1943 he began work on solid propellants. After the Second World War he spent a year in Switzerland as a consultant, then in 1950 he moved to Italy to develop solid-propellant anti-aircraft rockets for the Italian Navy. Five years later he moved to the USA to carry out advanced rocket research for the US Army at Huntsville, Alabama, and in 1958 he retired to Feucht, near Nuremberg, Germany, where he wrote his autobiography.

[br]

KF / IMcN

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Electronics and information technology, Weapons and armour

[br]

[br]

[br]

Following education at Brechin High School, Watson-Watt entered University College, Dundee (then a part of the University of St Andrews), obtaining a BSc in engineering in 1912. From 1912 until 1921 he was Assistant to the Professor of Natural Philosophy at St Andrews, but during the First World War he also held various posts in the Meteorological Office. During. this time, in 1916 he proposed the use of cathode ray oscillographs for radio-direction-finding displays. He joined the newly formed Radio Research Station at Slough when it was opened in 1924, and 3 years later, when it amalgamated with the Radio Section of the National Physical Laboratory, he became Superintendent at Slough. At this time he proposed the name "ionosphere" for the ionized layer in the upper atmosphere. With E.V. Appleton and J.F.Herd he developed the "squegger" hard-valve transformer-coupled timebase and with the latter devised a direction-finding radio-goniometer.

In 1933 he was asked to investigate possible aircraft counter-measures. He soon showed that it was impossible to make the wished-for radio "death-ray", but had the idea of using the detection of reflected radio-waves as a means of monitoring the approach of enemy aircraft. With six assistants he developed this idea and constructed an experimental system of radar (RAdio Detection And Ranging) in which arrays of aerials were used to detect the reflected signals and deduce the bearing and height. To realize a practical system, in September 1936 he was appointed Director of the Bawdsey Research Station near Felixstowe and carried out operational studies of radar. The result was that within two years the East Coast of the British Isles was equipped with a network of radar transmitters and receivers working in the 7–14 metre band—the so-called "chain-home" system—which did so much to assist the efficient deployment of RAF Fighter Command against German bombing raids on Britain in the early years of the Second World War.

In 1938 he moved to the Air Ministry as Director of Communications Development, becoming Scientific Adviser to the Air Ministry and Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1940, then Deputy Chairman of the War Cabinet Radio Board in 1943. After the war he set up Sir Robert Watson-Watt \& Partners, an industrial consultant firm. He then spent some years in relative retirement in Canada, but returned to Scotland before his death.

[br]