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James Wilcox

Airplane Timeline - Greatest Engineering Achievements of the Twentieth Century - 0 views

    • James Wilcox
       
      I love helicopters!  But I never knew that they had been around for so many years.
  • 1947   Sound barrior broken U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Charles "Chuck" Yeager becomes the fastest man alive when he pilots the Bell X-1 faster than sound for the first time on October 14 over the town of Victorville, California.
  • 1952   Discovery of the area rule of aircraft design Richard Whitcomb, an engineer at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, discovers and experimentally verifies an aircraft design concept known as the area rule. A revolutionary method of designing aircraft to reduce drag and increase speed without additional power, the area rule is incorporated into the development of almost every American supersonic aircraft. He later invents winglets, which increase the lift-to-drag ratio of transport airplanes and other vehicles.
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  • 1925-1926   Introduction of lightweight, air-cooled radial engines The introduction of a new generation of lightweight, air-cooled radial engines revolutionizes aeronautics, making bigger, faster planes possible.
  •   1917   The Junkers J4, an all-metal airplane, introduced Hugo Junkers, a German professor of mechanics introduces the Junkers J4, an all-metal airplane built largely of a relatively lightweight aluminum alloy called duralumin.
  • 1904   Concept of a fixed "boundary layer" described in paper by Ludwig Prandtl German professor Ludwig Prandtl presents one of the most important papers in the history of aerodynamics, an eight-page document describing the concept of a fixed "boundary layer," the molecular layer of air on the surface of an aircraft wing. Over the next 20 years Prandtl and his graduate students pioneer theoretical aerodynamics.
  • 1933   First modern commercial airliner In February, Boeing introduces the 247, a twin-engine 10-passenger monoplane that is the first modern commercial airliner. With variable-pitch propellers, it has an economical cruising speed and excellent takeoff. Retractable landing gear reduces drag during flight.
  • 935   First practical radar British scientist Sir Robert Watson-Watt patents the first practical radar (for radio detection and ranging) system for meteorological applications. During World War II radar is successfully used in Great Britain to detect incoming aircraft and provide information to intercept bombers.
  • 1937   Jet engines designed Jet engines designed independently by Britain’s Frank Whittle and Germany’s Hans von Ohain make their first test runs. (Seven years earlier, Whittle, a young Royal Air Force officer, filed a patent for a gas turbine engine to power an aircraft, but the Royal Air Ministry was not interested in developing the idea at the time. Meanwhile, German doctoral student Von Ohain was developing his own design.) Two years later, on August 27, the first jet aircraft, the Heinkel HE 178, takes off, powered by von Ohain’s HE S-3 engine.
  •   1939   First practical singlerotor helicopters Russian emigre Igor Sikorsky develops the VS-300 helicopter for the U.S. Army, one of the first practical singlerotor helicopters.
Mike Lemon

The ENIAC Story - 1 views

  • As in many other first along the road of technological progress, the stimulus which initiated and sustained the effort that produced the ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer)--the world's first electronic digital computer--was provided by the extraordinary demand of war
  • This Department had the responsibility for the design, development, procurement, storage, and issue of all combat materiel and munitions for the Army. In 1939 it was staffed by a relative handful of officers and career civilian employees.
  • One of the extraordinarily important tasks
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  • was the preparation of firing and bombing tables for the Army which at that time, of course, included the Army Air Corps.
  • The analyzer installed at Aberdeen had ten integrating units and provisions for two input and two output tables as well. But, despite its value as an important mechanical aid to computation, it had several severe limitations.
  • It was, of course, known that the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania had a Bush differential analyzer of somewhat larger capacity than the one installed at Aberdeen. As a matter of fact, the one at the Moore School had fourteen integrating units. Therefore one of the first steps taken was the award to the University of Pennsylvania of a contract by the Ordnance Department for the utilization of this device.
  • he original agreement between the United States of America and the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, dated June 5, 1943, called for six months of "research and development of an electronic numerical integrator and computer and delivery of a report thereon." This initial contract committed $61,700 in U.S. Army Ordnance funds
  • The ENIAC was placed in operation at the Moore School, component by component, beginning with the cycling unit and an accumulator in June 1944. This was followed in rapid succession by the initiating unit and function tables in September 1945 and the divider and square-root unit in October 1945. Final assembly took place during the fall of 1945. By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become standard circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and used a modified Eccles-Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-speed storage-and-control device.
  • The ENIAC was not originally designed as an internally programmed computer. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections. However, means for altering the program and repeating its iterative steps were built into the master programmer
  • The ENIAC led the computer field during the period 1949 through 1952 when it served as the main computation workhorse for the solution of the scientific problems of the Nation. It surpassed all other existing computers put together whenever it came to problems involving a large number of arithmetic operations. It was the major instrument for the computation of all ballistic tables for the U.S. Army and Air Force.
Margaret Weddle

Atomic Age #1 - Atomic Age (comic book issue) - Comic Vine - 0 views

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    ""Atomic Age #1" is a comic whose story involves the arrival of an alien humanoid on a US Air Force base located on a fictional island in the South Pacific." History, Science, & comic books! fun!!
Shaun Frenza

Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1) - 1 views

  • holy alliance to exorcise
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Religious diction
  • All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Man is responsible for technology which is responsible for a fast paced world, which they don't like
  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Japan
    • Shaun Frenza
       
      Seems a little singular - is there a specific reason why you only say "Japan"
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  • The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Capitalism has taken over the world, and those that were slow to buy into the idealology are being left in the dust, and dependant on others, which they don't like.
  • Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Communists retaliate by not producing enough goods.
  • He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Paints these people as the suffers, clearly appealing to them to call for "equality"
  • Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      In Communism all become slaves of the state and the state leaders, how is that better?
    • Shaun Frenza
       
      Or they become the machine - They are not the slave, they are the mechanizm together... at least that is what they tell themselves.
  • All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Conflicts with the MIT lesson, except for those that have to work. (in regard to females working) again an appeal to the working class people, who are the masses to revolt. This works less well in America because of the American dream and the possibility for change fostered by it.
  • At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984, they hope lies in the masses of uncontrolled people
  • Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The working class fights back
  • so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      they aren't alone in their cause
  • The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations;
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The shear fact of having money and therefore time to spend with children brings these differences.
  • The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.
  • Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Doesn't believe capitalism can survive.
    • Rhett Ferrin
       
      Wait, all these sound like good things. Is he saying its bad to have Toyotas? Is it bad to have bannanas in December?
  • rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
    • Rhett Ferrin
       
      Can someone help me out here? Is he being sarcastic? He says capitalizm is bad then says that the bourgeoisie 'rescued' people from the 'idiocy of rural life' Thomas Jefferson thought the rural life was the ideal and to be sought after. I can't tell if Marx is for or against it.
  • By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour
  • By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
  • immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation
    • Shaun Frenza
       
      Notice how we are in the same situation now as were were then - the facilitation of communication with the internet and how it shapes the world to become more homogenous.
Andrew DeWitt

NASA - NASA Helps Kick Off Competition for Bright Minds - 0 views

  • "In the first century of flight, NASA made countless contributions to aviation by improving performance, efficiency and safety. Just as we needed the brightest minds for all those contributions, we need the brightest minds now and in the future to develop, operate and improve our future air transportation system,"
  • Teams of three to seven high school students from at least 29 states and the District of Columbia will compete to design a more fuel-efficient airplane
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