to+be+impressed+with+(

noun ((an) act of conquering: The Norman Conquest; He's impressed with you - you've made a conquest.) erobring

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noun ((an) act of conquering: The Norman Conquest; He's impressed with you - you've made a conquest.) erobring

3ª persona singular (él/ella/usted) presente indicativo

2ª persona singular (tú) imperativo

◊ la causa de todas mis desgracias the cause of o the reason for all my misfortunes;

◊ una causa perdida a lost cause

◊ le causó mucha pena it made him very sad;

◊ le causó mucha pena it made him very sad;

im·press [ɪmʼpres] vt

1) ( evoke admiration)

to \impress sb jdn beeindrucken, jdm imponieren;

to be \impressed [by sb/sth] [von jdm/etw] beeindruckt sein;

to be \impressed with sb/ sth von jdm/etw beeindruckt sein;

it never fails to \impress me how elegant the people look in Paris ich bin immer aufs Neue von der Eleganz der Bewohner von Paris angetan

2) ( make realize)

to \impress sth on [or upon] sb jdn von etw dat überzeugen, jdm etw einprägen;

to \impress sth on [or upon] one's memory [or mind] sich dat etw einprägen

3) ( stamp)

to \impress sth etw [auf]drucken vi Eindruck machen, imponieren;

to fail to \impress keinen [guten] Eindruck machen

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology, Textiles

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Although his father was a farmer, at the age of 10 Samuel Marsden went to work as a blacksmith, and continued in that trade for ten years. He then decided to go into the Church, was educated at Hull Grammar School and Cambridge, and was ordained in 1793. He then emigrated to Australia, where he took up an appointment as Assistant Chaplain to the Colony. He was stationed at Parramatta, where he was granted 100 acres and bought a further 128 acres himself. In 1800 he became Principal Chaplain, and by 1802 he farmed the third largest farm in the colony. Initially he was able to obtain only two Marino rams and was forced to crossbreed with imported Indian stock. However, with this combination he was able to improve wool quality dramatically, and this stock provided the basis of his breeding stock. In 1807 he returned to Britain, taking 160 lb of wool with him. This was woven into 40 yards (36.5 m) of cloth in a mill near Leeds, and from this Marsden had a suit made which he wore when he visited George III. The latter was so impressed with the cloth that he presented Marsden with five Marino ewes in lamb, with which he returned to Australia. By 1811 he was sending more than 5,000 lb of wool back to the UK each year. In 1814 Marsden concentrated more on Church matters and made the first of seven missionary visits to New Zealand. He made the last of these excursions the year before his death.

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SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace, Ports and shipping

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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.

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(1939-1945)

   In the European phase of the war, neutral Portugal contributed more to the Allied victory than historians have acknowledged. Portugal experienced severe pressures to compromise her neutrality from both the Axis and Allied powers and, on several occasions, there were efforts to force Portugal to enter the war as a belligerent. Several factors lent Portugal importance as a neutral. This was especially the case during the period from the fall of France in June 1940 to the Allied invasion and reconquest of France from June to August 1944.

   In four respects, Portugal became briefly a modest strategic asset for the Allies and a war materiel supplier for both sides: the country's location in the southwesternmost corner of the largely German-occupied European continent; being a transport and communication terminus, observation post for spies, and crossroads between Europe, the Atlantic, the Americas, and Africa; Portugal's strategically located Atlantic islands, the Azores, Madeira, and Cape Verde archipelagos; and having important mines of wolfram or tungsten ore, crucial for the war industry for hardening steel.

   To maintain strict neutrality, the Estado Novo regime dominated by Antônio de Oliveira Salazar performed a delicate balancing act. Lisbon attempted to please and cater to the interests of both sets of belligerents, but only to the extent that the concessions granted would not threaten Portugal's security or its status as a neutral. On at least two occasions, Portugal's neutrality status was threatened. First, Germany briefly considered invading Portugal and Spain during 1940-41. A second occasion came in 1943 and 1944 as Great Britain, backed by the United States, pressured Portugal to grant war-related concessions that threatened Portugal's status of strict neutrality and would possibly bring Portugal into the war on the Allied side. Nazi Germany's plan ("Operation Felix") to invade the Iberian Peninsula from late 1940 into 1941 was never executed, but the Allies occupied and used several air and naval bases in Portugal's Azores Islands.

   The second major crisis for Portugal's neutrality came with increasing Allied pressures for concessions from the summer of 1943 to the summer of 1944. Led by Britain, Portugal's oldest ally, Portugal was pressured to grant access to air and naval bases in the Azores Islands. Such bases were necessary to assist the Allies in winning the Battle of the Atlantic, the naval war in which German U-boats continued to destroy Allied shipping. In October 1943, following tedious negotiations, British forces began to operate such bases and, in November 1944, American forces were allowed to enter the islands. Germany protested and made threats, but there was no German attack.

   Tensions rose again in the spring of 1944, when the Allies demanded that Lisbon cease exporting wolfram to Germany. Salazar grew agitated, considered resigning, and argued that Portugal had made a solemn promise to Germany that wolfram exports would be continued and that Portugal could not break its pledge. The Portuguese ambassador in London concluded that the shipping of wolfram to Germany was "the price of neutrality." Fearing that a still-dangerous Germany could still attack Portugal, Salazar ordered the banning of the mining, sale, and exports of wolfram not only to Germany but to the Allies as of 6 June 1944.

   Portugal did not enter the war as a belligerent, and its forces did not engage in combat, but some Portuguese experienced directly or indirectly the impact of fighting. Off Portugal or near her Atlantic islands, Portuguese naval personnel or commercial fishermen rescued at sea hundreds of victims of U-boat sinkings of Allied shipping in the Atlantic. German U-boats sank four or five Portuguese merchant vessels as well and, in 1944, a U-boat stopped, boarded, searched, and forced the evacuation of a Portuguese ocean liner, the Serpa Pinto, in mid-Atlantic. Filled with refugees, the liner was not sunk but several passengers lost their lives and the U-boat kidnapped two of the ship's passengers, Portuguese Americans of military age, and interned them in a prison camp. As for involvement in a theater of war, hundreds of inhabitants were killed and wounded in remote East Timor, a Portuguese colony near Indonesia, which was invaded, annexed, and ruled by Japanese forces between February 1942 and August 1945. In other incidents, scores of Allied military planes, out of fuel or damaged in air combat, crashed or were forced to land in neutral Portugal. Air personnel who did not survive such crashes were buried in Portuguese cemeteries or in the English Cemetery, Lisbon.

   Portugal's peripheral involvement in largely nonbelligerent aspects of the war accelerated social, economic, and political change in Portugal's urban society. It strengthened political opposition to the dictatorship among intellectual and working classes, and it obliged the regime to bolster political repression. The general economic and financial status of Portugal, too, underwent improvements since creditor Britain, in order to purchase wolfram, foods, and other materials needed during the war, became indebted to Portugal. When Britain repaid this debt after the war, Portugal was able to restore and expand its merchant fleet. Unlike most of Europe, ravaged by the worst war in human history, Portugal did not suffer heavy losses of human life, infrastructure, and property. Unlike even her neighbor Spain, badly shaken by its terrible Civil War (1936-39), Portugal's immediate postwar condition was more favorable, especially in urban areas, although deep-seated poverty remained.

   Portugal experienced other effects, especially during 1939-42, as there was an influx of about a million war refugees, an infestation of foreign spies and other secret agents from 60 secret intelligence services, and the residence of scores of international journalists who came to report the war from Lisbon. There was also the growth of war-related mining (especially wolfram and tin). Portugal's media eagerly reported the war and, by and large, despite government censorship, the Portuguese print media favored the Allied cause. Portugal's standard of living underwent some improvement, although price increases were unpopular.

   The silent invasion of several thousand foreign spies, in addition to the hiring of many Portuguese as informants and spies, had fascinating outcomes. "Spyland" Portugal, especially when Portugal was a key point for communicating with occupied Europe (1940-44), witnessed some unusual events, and spying for foreigners at least briefly became a national industry. Until mid-1944, when Allied forces invaded France, Portugal was the only secure entry point from across the Atlantic to Europe or to the British Isles, as well as the escape hatch for refugees, spies, defectors, and others fleeing occupied Europe or Vichy-controlled Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Through Portugal by car, ship, train, or scheduled civil airliner one could travel to and from Spain or to Britain, or one could leave through Portugal, the westernmost continental country of Europe, to seek refuge across the Atlantic in the Americas.

   The wartime Portuguese scene was a colorful melange of illegal activities, including espionage, the black market, war propaganda, gambling, speculation, currency counterfeiting, diamond and wolfram smuggling, prostitution, and the drug and arms trade, and they were conducted by an unusual cast of characters. These included refugees, some of whom were spies, smugglers, diplomats, and business people, many from foreign countries seeking things they could find only in Portugal: information, affordable food, shelter, and security. German agents who contacted Allied sailors in the port of Lisbon sought to corrupt and neutralize these men and, if possible, recruit them as spies, and British intelligence countered this effort. Britain's MI-6 established a new kind of "safe house" to protect such Allied crews from German espionage and venereal disease infection, an approved and controlled house of prostitution in Lisbon's bairro alto district.

   Foreign observers and writers were impressed with the exotic, spy-ridden scene in Lisbon, as well as in Estoril on the Sun Coast (Costa do Sol), west of Lisbon harbor. What they observed appeared in noted autobiographical works and novels, some written during and some after the war. Among notable writers and journalists who visited or resided in wartime Portugal were Hungarian writer and former communist Arthur Koestler, on the run from the Nazi's Gestapo; American radio broadcaster-journalist Eric Sevareid; novelist and Hollywood script-writer Frederick Prokosch; American diplomat George Kennan; Rumanian cultural attache and later scholar of mythology Mircea Eliade; and British naval intelligence officer and novelist-to-be Ian Fleming. Other notable visiting British intelligence officers included novelist Graham Greene; secret Soviet agent in MI-6 and future defector to the Soviet Union Harold "Kim" Philby; and writer Malcolm Muggeridge. French letters were represented by French writer and airman, Antoine Saint-Exupery and French playwright, Jean Giroudoux. Finally, Aquilino Ribeiro, one of Portugal's premier contemporary novelists, wrote about wartime Portugal, including one sensational novel, Volframio, which portrayed the profound impact of the exploitation of the mineral wolfram on Portugal's poor, still backward society.

   In Estoril, Portugal, the idea for the world's most celebrated fictitious spy, James Bond, was probably first conceived by Ian Fleming. Fleming visited Portugal several times after 1939 on Naval Intelligence missions, and later he dreamed up the James Bond character and stories. Background for the early novels in the James Bond series was based in part on people and places Fleming observed in Portugal. A key location in Fleming's first James Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953) is the gambling Casino of Estoril. In addition, one aspect of the main plot, the notion that a spy could invent "secret" intelligence for personal profit, was observed as well by the British novelist and former MI-6 officer, while engaged in operations in wartime Portugal. Greene later used this information in his 1958 spy novel, Our Man in Havana, as he observed enemy agents who fabricated "secrets" for money.

   Thus, Portugal's World War II experiences introduced the country and her people to a host of new peoples, ideas, products, and influences that altered attitudes and quickened the pace of change in this quiet, largely tradition-bound, isolated country. The 1943-45 connections established during the Allied use of air and naval bases in Portugal's Azores Islands were a prelude to Portugal's postwar membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

SUBJECT AREA: Paper and printing

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Robert was born into a prosperous family and received a fair education, after which he became a lawyer's clerk. In 1780, however, he enlisted in the Army and joined the artillery, serving with distinction in the West Indies, where he fought against the English. When dissatisfied with his prospects, Robert returned to Paris and obtained a post as proof-reader to the firm of printers and publishers owned by the Didot family. They were so impressed with his abilities that they promoted him, c. 1790, to "clerk inspector of workmen" at their paper mill at Essonnes, south of Paris, under the control of Didot St Leger.

It was there that Robert conceived the idea of a continuous papermaking machine. In 1797 he made a model of it and, after further models, he obtained a patent in 1798. The paper was formed on a continuously revolving wire gauze, from which the sheets were lifted off and hung up to dry. Didot was at first scathing, but he came round to encouraging Robert to make a success of the machine. However, they quarrelled over the financial arrangements and Robert left to try setting up his own mill near Rouen. He failed for lack of capital, and in 1800 he returned to Essonnes and sold his patent to Didot for part cash, part proceeds from the operation of the mill. Didot left for England to enlist capital and technical skills to exploit the invention, while Robert was left in charge at Essonnes. It was the Fourdrinier brothers and Bryan Donkin who developed the papermaking machine into a form in which it could succeed. Meanwhile the mill at Essonnes under Robert's direction had begun to falter and declined to the point where it had to be sold. He had never received the full return from the sale of his patent, but he managed to recover his rights in it. This profited him little, for Didot obtained a patent in France for the Fourdrinier machine and had two examples erected in 1814 and the following year, respectively, neatly side-tracking Robert, who was now without funds or position. To support himself and his family, Robert set up a primary school in Dreux and there passed his remaining years. Although it was the Fourdrinier papermaking machine that was generally adopted, it is Robert who deserves credit for the original initiative.

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   Portugal's world's fair, held from May to October 1998, set in Lisbon. Designed to commemorate and celebrate the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama's 1498 discovery of an all-water route to India, this was an ambitious undertaking for a small country with a developing economy. The setting of the exposition was remote eastern Lisbon, along the banks of the Tagus estuary. To facilitate logistics, Portugal opened a new Metro station (Oriente) for the Expo and the new Vasco da Gama Bridge, just northeast of the site. More than 10 million visitors, many of them from abroad but a large proportion from Spain and Portugal, arrived at the site by Metro, bus, taxi, or car and were guided by signs in three languages: Portuguese, Spanish, and English. To the dismay of Francophones, the choice of English and Spanish reflected both the nature of the globalization process and Portugal's growing connections with Europe and the wider world.

   The theme of Expo '98 was "The Oceans, Heritage for the Future," and the official mascot-symbol was "Gil," a cartoon characterization of a drop of ocean water, based on the suggestion of schoolchildren from the small town of Barrancos. Somewhat in the spirit of Disney's Mickey Mouse, "Gil" reflected cheeriness, but his message was serious, alerting the public to the fact that the oceans were endangered and fresh drinking water increasingly in short supply for a burgeoning world population. Among the outstanding structures at Expo '98 was the Pavilion of Portugal, designed by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza Vieira, and the Pavilion of the Oceans or the Oceanarium (which remained open to the public after the exposition closed), which was designed by an American architect.

   Despite the general success of the fair, critics gave mixed reviews to the historic commemoration of the Discoveries facets of the effort. No vessel from Vasco da Gama's 1497-99 famous voyage was reproduced at the fair's dockside exhibit—although there was a 19th-century sailing vessel and a reproduction of one of the vessels from Christopher Columbus's first voyage, constructed by Portuguese in Madeira—nor was there much else on Vasco da Gama in the Pavilion of Portugal. Instead, visitors were impressed with a multimedia show based on knowledge of a Portuguese shipwreck, a 17th-century nau, found by archaeologists in recent years. The sound and light show in this lovely space was magnificent. The most popular exhibits were the Oceanarium and the Utopia Pavilion, where lines could be hours long. Despite the fact that Expo '98 made only a weak effort to attract visitors from outside Europe, the general consensus was that it was a successful enterprise, unique in Portugal's record of historic and contemporary expositions since 1940.

    See also Commemorations, Portuguese historic.

SUBJECT AREA: Telecommunications

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The son of a surgeon who became Professor of Anatomy at Durham University, Cooke received a conventional classical education, with no science, in Durham and at Edinburgh University. He joined the East India Company's aimy in Madras, but resigned because of ill health in 1833. While convalescent, Cooke travelled in Europe and began making wax models of anatomical sections, possibly as teaching aids for his father. In Germany he saw an experimental electric-telegraph demonstration, and was so impressed with the idea of instantaneous long-distance communication that he dropped the modelling and decided to devote all his energies to developing a practical electric telegraph. His own instruments were not successful: they worked across a room, but not over a mile of wire. His search for scientific advice led him to Charles Wheatstone, who was working on a similar project, and together they obtained a patent for the first practical electric telegraph. Cooke's business drive and Wheatstone's scientific abilities should have made a perfect partnership, but the two men quarrelled and separated. Cooke's energy and enthusiasm got the telegraph established, first on the newly developing railways, then independently. Sadly, the fortune he made from the telegraph was lost in other ventures, and he died a poor man.

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SUBJECT AREA: Chemical technology, Land transport

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Goodyear entered his father's country hardware business before setting up his own concern in Philadelphia. While visiting New York, he noticed in the window of the Roxburgh India Rubber Company a rubber life-preserver. Goodyear offered to improve its inflating valve, but the manager, impressed with Goodyear's inventiveness, persuaded him to tackle a more urgent problem, that of seeking a means of preventing rubber from becoming tacky and from melting or decomposing when heated. Goodyear tried treatments with one substance after another, without success. In 1838 he started using Nathaniel M.Hayward's process of spreading sulphur on rubber. He accidentally dropped a mass of rubber and sulphur on to a hot stove and noted that the mixture did not melt: Goodyear had discovered the vulcanization of rubber. More experiments were needed to establish the correct proportions for a uniform mix, and eventually he was granted his celebrated patent no. 3633 of 15 June 1844. Goodyear's researches had been conducted against a background of crippling financial difficulties and he was forced to dispose of licences to vulcanize rubber at less than their real value, in order to pay off his most pressing debts.

Goodyear travelled to Europe in 1851 to extend his patents. To promote his process, he designed a spectacular exhibit for London, consisting of furniture, floor covering, jewellery and other items made of rubber. A similar exhibit in Paris in 1855 won him the Grande Médaille d'honneur and the Croix de la Légion d'honneur from Napoleon III. Patents were granted to him in all countries except England. The improved properties of vulcanized rubber and its stability over a much wider range of temperatures greatly increased its applications; output rose from a meagre 31.5 tonnes a year in 1827 to over 28,000 tonnes by 1900. Even so, Goodyear profited little from his invention, and he bequeathed to his family debts amounting to over $200,000.

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SUBJECT AREA: Canals, Civil engineering, Ports and shipping, Railways and locomotives

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William Jessop inherited from his father a natural ability in engineering, and because of his father's association with John Smeaton in the construction of Eddystone Lighthouse he was accepted by Smeaton as a pupil in 1759 at the age of 14. Smeaton was so impressed with his ability that Jessop was retained as an assistant after completion of his pupilage in 1767. As such he carried out field-work, making surveys on his own, but in 1772 he was recommended to the Aire and Calder Committee as an independent engineer and his first personally prepared report was made on the Haddlesey Cut, Selby Canal. It was in this report that he gave his first evidence before a Parliamentary Committee. He later became Resident Engineer on the Selby Canal, and soon after he was elected to the Smeatonian Society of Engineers, of which he later became Secretary for twenty years. Meanwhile he accompanied Smeaton to Ireland to advise on the Grand Canal, ultimately becoming Consulting Engineer until 1802, and was responsible for Ringsend Docks, which connected the canal to the Liffey and were opened in 1796. From 1783 to 1787 he advised on improvements to the River Trent, and his ability was so recognized that it made his reputation. From then on he was consulted on the Cromford Canal (1789–93), the Leicester Navigation (1791–4) and the Grantham Canal (1793–7); at the same time he was Chief Engineer of the Grand Junction Canal from 1793 to 1797 and then Consulting Engineer until 1805. He also engineered the Barnsley and Rochdale Canals. In fact, there were few canals during this period on which he was not consulted. It has now been established that Jessop carried the responsibility for the Pont-Cysyllte Aqueduct in Wales and also prepared the estimates for the Caledonian Canal in 1804. In 1792 he became a partner in the Butterley ironworks and thus became interested in railways. He proposed the Surrey Iron Railway in 1799 and prepared for the estimates; the line was built and opened in 1805. He was also the Engineer for the 10 mile (16 km) long Kilmarnock \& Troon Railway, the Act for which was obtained in 1808 and was the first Act for a public railway in Scotland. Jessop's advice was sought on drainage works between 1785 and 1802 in the lowlands of the Isle of Axholme, Holderness, the Norfolk Marshlands, and the Axe and Brue area of the Somerset Levels. He was also consulted on harbour and dock improvements. These included Hull (1793), Portsmouth (1796), Folkestone (1806) and Sunderland (1807), but his greatest dock works were the West India Docks in London and the Floating Harbour at Bristol. He was Consulting Engineer to the City of London Corporation from 1796to 1799, drawing up plans for docks on the Isle of Dogs in 1796; in February 1800 he was appointed Engineer, and three years later, in September 1803, he was appointed Engineer to the Bristol Floating Harbour. Jessop was regarded as the leading civil engineer in the country from 1785 until 1806. He died following a stroke in 1814.

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SUBJECT AREA: Domestic appliances and interiors, Electricity, Electronics and information technology

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Lovelock was brought up in Brixton in modest circumstances. At the age of 4 he was given a toy electrical set, which first turned his attention towards the study of science. From the Strand School, Brixton, he went on to the universities of Manchester and London, and after graduating in science, in 1941 he joined the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, as a staff scientist, remaining there for twenty years. During the early 1950s, he and his colleagues were engaged in research into freezing live animals and bringing them back to life by heating: Lovelock was struck by the intense pain this process caused the animals, and he sought a more humane method. He tried diathermy or internal heating through the effect of a continuous wave magnetron borrowed from the Navy. He found that the animals were brought back to life painlessly, and impressed with his success he tried baking a potato for his lunch in the apparatus and found that it cooked amazingly quickly compared with the one hour normally needed in an ordinary oven. Lovelock had invented the microwave oven, but its commercial possibilities were not at first realized.

In the late 1950s he invented the electron capture detector, which proved to be more sensitive than any other analytical equipment in detecting and measuring toxic substances. The apparatus therefore had obvious uses in testing the quality of the environment and so offered a tremendous boost to the "green" movement. In 1961 he was invited to joint the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to employ the apparatus in an attempt to detect life in space.

In the early 1970s Lovelock relinquished his biological work in order to devote his attention to philosophical matters, specifically to develop his theory of the Universe, now widely celebrated as the "Gaia theory". In this controversial theory, Lovelock regards our planet and all its living beings, including humans, as a single living organism.

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SUBJECT AREA: Architecture and building

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Otis was educated in public schools and worked in a variety of jobs in the trucking and construction industries as well as in a machine shop, a carriage makers, a grist mill, and a saw mill and in a bedstead factory. It was when supervisor of construction of a new bedstead factory at Yonkers in 1852 that he developed the innovative safety features of an elevator that was to be the foundation of his later success. If the ropes or cables of a hoist should break, springs would force pawls on the lift cage to engage the ratcheted guide rails fitted into the sides of the shaft and so stop the lift. In 1853 he was planning to leave his job to join the California Gold Rush but representatives of two New York City firms who had seen his Safety Elevator and were impressed with the safety devices requested that he make them replicas. He purchased space in the Yonkers plant and began manufacture of the lifts. Demand was small at first until in 1854 he exhibited at the American Institute Fair in New York City with an impressive performance. Standing on top of the lift cage, he ordered the rope supporting it to be cut. The safety pawls engaged and the cage stopped its downward movement. From then on orders gradually increased and in 1857 he installed the first safety lift for passengers in the Haughtwout Store in New York City. The invention immediately became popular and started a revolution in architecture and the construction industry, leading to the design and building of skyscrapers, as previously buildings were limited to six or seven storeys, because of the stairs people had to climb. Otis patented several other devices, the most important of which was for a steam elevator which established the future of the Otis Elevator Company. He died at Yonkers in 1861, leaving his business to his sons.

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IMcN / DY

noun ((an) act of conquering: The Norman Conquest; He's impressed with you - you've made a conquest.) conquista

conquest n conquista

tr['kɒŋkwest]

noun

1 conquista

conquest ['kɑn.kwɛst, 'kɑŋ-] n

: conquista f

• conquista s.f.

count & mass noun conquista f

['kɒŋkwest]

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count & mass noun conquista f

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noun ((an) act of conquering: The Norman Conquest; He's impressed with you - you've made a conquest.) die Eroberung

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[ˈkɒŋkwest, AM ˈkɑ:n-]

1. no pl MIL of a thing Eroberung f; of a person Sieg m (of über + akk)

2. ( hum: sexual) Eroberung f fam

to make a \conquest of sb jdn erobern

3. no pl (climbing) Bezwingung f

4. no pl (overcoming) Überwindung f

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conquest [ˈkɒŋkwest; US ˈkɑnˌkwest; ˈkɑŋ-] s

1. Eroberung f:

a) Einnahme f:

the Conquest HIST die normannische Eroberung

b) erobertes Gebiet

c) fig Erringung f:

2. a) Besiegung f

b) auch fig Überwindung f, Bezwingung f

3. fig umg Eroberung f (Person):

make a conquest of sb jemanden erobern oder für sich gewinnen

4. JUR schott (Güter)Erwerb m

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Eroberung f.

noun ((an) act of conquering: The Norman Conquest; He's impressed with you - you've made a conquest.) erobring

subst. \/ˈkɒŋkwest\/

1) erobring

• he is another of her conquests

2) seier

by right of conquest med erobrerens\/seierherrens rett

make a conquest ( overført) erobre, vinne

the Norman Conquest normannernes erobring av England 1066

kilometeravgift

subst. \/ˈmaɪlɪdʒ\/ eller milage

1) ( også kilometer) antall miles, avstand i miles, veistrekning i miles, tilbakelagte miles

2) utgifter per mile

3) ( også mileage allowance) bilgodtgjørelse

4) forklaring: antall kjørte miles per enhet med drivstoff, bensinforbruk per mile

• my new car gets better mileage

• we were impressed with the high mileage of the car

5) ( overført) nytte, fordel, gevinst, profitt

get a lot of mileage out of ( overført) oppnå stor gevinst på, leve høyt på, dra stor nytte av

a) (para actividad manual, física) skill;

◊ tiene habilidad para la carpintería he is good at carpentry

b) (astucia, inteligencia) skill, cleverness;

◊ con habilidad cleverly, skillfully

noun ((an) act of conquering: The Norman Conquest; He's impressed with you - you've made a conquest.) hertaka; ávinningur