Ten World Engineering Marvels-- Part 4: Netherlands and Da Subways

9.  NETHERLANDS NORTH SEA PROTECTION WORKS

With parts of their country below sea level, a system of floodgates, storm surge barriers and dams to prevent flooding and claim land from the sea, Netherlands constructed this.

The project began in 1927 with the construction of a 19-mile long dike, decades of land reclamation followed.

10.  NEW YORK AND BOSTON SUBWAYS

Horse-drawn carriages clogged the streets (and left behind certain droppings) and then there were the elevated trains with their soot, so leaders in Boston and New York took another way to solve the problem.  And that was to go underground.

Boston opened its subway in 1897 and New York City  seven years later.

--CootSubs

Ten World Engineering Marvels-- Part 3: The Chunnel, Railroad and Liberty

6.  CHANNEL TUNNEL

Opened in 1994 after six years of construction connecting Great Britain with the rest of Europe.  Known as the "Chunnel"  Thirty-one miles long.  Since they built it from both ends don't you know they were kind of hoping they'd come together at the same spot.

7.  TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD

Work on it began even as the Civil War was being fought.  Went eastward from Sacramento, California and west from Omaha, Nebraska.  Completed with the Golden Spike in 1869.

Cross-country travel in the United States  was cut from months to under a week.

8.  STATUE OF LIBERTY

A symbol of friendship between France and the United States.  It was dedicated in New York Harbor in 1886.

--CootTun

Ten World Engineering Feats-- Part 2: Interstates, Cable and a Dam

3.  THE INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM

President Eisenhower  spearheaded the  passage of the Federal-Aid Highway  Act of 1956 which authorized the largest public works project in history.  The construction of 41,000 miles of expressways with controlled ramp access and no at grade intersections, just overpasses.

4.  TRANSATLANTIC CABLE

In 1854, American Cyrus West Field secured a charter to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean floor.  After four failed attempts, British and American ships succeeded in laying the nearly 2,000 mile cable linking Ireland and Newfoundland in 1858.

5.  HOOVER DAM

Built by over 21,000 workers, the 60 story dam is the world's largest concrete structure at the time it was dedicated in 1935.  It caused the great growth of cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix.

--CootDam

Ten World Engineering Marvels-- Part 1: Panama Canal and Golden Gate Bridge

From the History.com site by Christopher Klein.

These remarkable feats of design and construction transformed the ways that people travel, communicate and live.

For thousands of years, mankind has engineered some remarkable structures such as the pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China.  More recently, engineers have undertaken massive  transportation and communications projects  that have pushed the boundaries of human ingenuity.

I am just listing them and giving one or two facts about each.  The site has pictures and a lot more.

Here is a list of ten of them:

1.  PANAMA CANAL

52 miles long and opened in 1914

2.  GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE

1,7 miles long (was the longest suspension bridge for  27 years)  Opened in 1937.  It's been wiped out in more than a few disaster movies so don't drive on it when they are shooting a movie about San Francisco.

--Cooter

Newfound Tech Finds Vietnam War Navigator-- Part 4: Amazing Technology

Still, investigators pursued potential leads about the wreckage of the two B-52s for decades.

In February of last year. scientists from Project Recover helped the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) continue the search for the B-52s where previous ones had failed.  The target of their survey vessel's two week expedition was the seafloor area measuring about eight square miles.

In the past, such expeditions would have relied on divers or "fairly rudimentary" sonar.  But this time they were using three 6-foot-long robots with the ability to scan up to 229 feet on either side and produce high-resolution imagery of the seafloor.

The wreckage of one of the B-52s came into view.  Then the team saw human remains on the seabed.  Before recovering them, the crew obtained permission from military officials in Vietnam and the United States by satellite phone.

About 24 hours later, the remains were brought to the surface.  A lab in Hawaii eventually identified them as belonging to Major Paul A. Avolese.

The remains of two other men who were on the same B-52 have yet to be found.  A full excavation to cover them would typically be the next step in such a case, and the DPAA would make that decision.

In September, the Pentagon said a ceremonial pin would be placed next to his name at the Courts of the Missing, in the National Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu to indicate that he had been found.

Six WW II Innovations-- Part 4: Radar

6.  RADAR

MIT's Radiation L:anoratory, or "Rad Lab," played a huge role in advancing radio technology in the 1940s.  However, the lab's original goal was to use  electromagnetic radiation as a weapon, not a form of detection.

"Their first idea that they had was if they could send a beam of electromagnetic energy at a plane, maybe  we could kill the pilot by cooking them or something," Wallace says.  "The cooking thing wasn't working, but they were getting bounce-back that they could receive and they had  the idea that they could use electromagnetic radiation just like they used sound radiation in sonar.  So, they started working on radar."

Radar helped Allies detect enemy ships and planes.  

Later, it proved helpful in many non-military uses, including civilian craft and detecting major weather events like hurricanes.

--DaCoot

Six WW II Innovations: Electronic Computers

5.  ELECTRONIC  COMPUTERS

In 1940, the word "computers" referred to people (mostly women)  who performed complex calculations by hand.  During World War II, the United States began developing new machines to do  calculations for ballistics trajectories, and those who had been doing this by hand took jobs programming these new machines.

The programmers who worked on the University of Pennsylvania's ENIAC machine included Jean Jennings  Bartik, who went on to lead the development of computer storage and memory.  Also, Frances Elizabeth "Betty" Holberton, who went on to create the first software application.

Lieutenant  Grace Hopper (later a Navy  rear admiral) also programmed the Mark 1 machine at Harvard  University during the war and went on to develop the first computer programming language.

In Britain, Alan Turing invented an electro-mechanical machine called the Bombe that helped break the German Enigma cipher.  While not technically what today we would call a computer, the Bombe was the forerunner to the Colossus  machines,  a series of British electronic computers.

During the war,  programmers like Dorothy Du Boisson and Elsie Booker used the Colossus machines to break messages encrypted with the German Lorenz cipher.

--Cooter

Six WW II Innovations That Changed Everyday Life-- Part 2: Jet Engines and Blood Plasma Tranfusion

3.  JET ENGINES

Frank Whittle, an English engineer with the Royal Air Force filed the first patent for a het engine in 1930, but the first country to fly a jet engine plane was Germany, which performed a test flight of its model on August 27, 1939.

The first Allied plane to use jet technology  took flight on May 15, 1941.  Though they didn't have much of an impact on the war, but jet engines later would transform both military and civilian transportation.

**************************

4.  BLOOD PLASMA TRANSFUSION

During the war, an American  surgeon named Charles Drew standardized the production of blood plasma for medical use.

Unlike blood,  plasma can be given to anyone regardless of a person's blood type, making it easier to administer on the battlefield.

--Cooter

Six WW II Innovations That Changed Everyday Life-- Part 1

From April 26, 2021, History site by Becky Little.

Of course, everyone knows about atomic energy and the atom bomb which came out of the war, but there were other developments as well.  Some of these innovations date from before the war, but were able to take off because of it.

1.  FLU VACCINES

The influenza pandemic of WW I motivated the U.S. military to develop the first flu vaccine.  Scientists began to isolate the flu viruses in the 1930s and in the 1940s, the U.S. Army  helped sponsor a vaccine against them.

The U.S. approved the first vaccine for military use in 1945 and for civilian use in 1946.  One of the researchers on this project was Dr. Jonas Salk, the scientist who would later develop the vaccine used to defeat polio.

2.  PENICILLIN

Before the widespread development of antibiotics like penicillin in the U.S., even small cuts or scrapes could lead to deadly infections.  The Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but it wasn't  until WW II that the U.S. began to produce mass amounts as a medical treatment.

Military surgeons were  amazed at how much the drug reduced pain, increased chances of survival.  The drug was considered so vital to the war effort, that the Allies produced 2.3 million doses of penicillin for the troops to prepare for the D-Day landings.

--GreGen

These Five Weapons Made WW I an Absolute Bloodbath-- Part 2: Triplanes, U-boats and Monster Guns

FOKKER TRIPLANE

Baron von Richtofen flew it and Snoopy battled it, but the Fokker Dr 1 Triplane had the maneuverability and rapid climb rate, it terrorized the skies over the Western Front in 1917 and 1918.

TYPE 93 U-BOAT

They weren't fast, especially under water and had limited endurance and couldn't stay underwater for too long.  But armed with 88 or 101 millimeter deck guns and six torpedo tubes with 16 reloads.

The 24 Type 93s sank 411,000 tons of Allied shipping.

BIG BERTHA AND THE PARIS GUN

BIG BERTHA was a giant German howitzer  with 16.5inch caliber and could hurl a nearly one ton shell eight miles.  In 1914, it leveled Belgian forts and almost allowed German armies to capture Paris.

The PARIS GUN made history by hurling shells into the stratosphere.  It could hurl a 200-pound shell 81 miles which allowed Germans to bombard Paris.  But, it was expensive and fragile (the barrel had to be replaced after firing 20 shots).

But, being able to bombard targets that far away gave it notoriety.

--Cooter

Naval Technology in 1916-- Part 1: Superdreadnaught USS Arizona Commissioned

From a 1916 Scientific American "Technology of Naval Warfare, 1916."  This is in the form of a slide show.

1.  Naval aviation.  A picture of a battleship carrying seaplanes.

2.  Catapult for aircraft on a battleship.

3.  Destruction of landmarks taken by Germany along the Belgium coast.  They destroyed anything that could be used by the Allies to navigate.  The picture showed a lighthouse being blown up.

4.  The USS Arizona, superdreadnaught, shown leaving Brooklyn Navy Yard after commissioning in 1916.  It was the U.S. navy's largest and most modern battleship.

5.  Submarine warfare.

Latest in 1916.  --Cooter

Ten Little-Known Technological Firsts-- Part 2: First Commercial Flight

5.  First Commercial Flight--  January 1, 1914, between St. Petersburg and Tampa, Florida.

4.  Xerox Alto--  First Graphical User Interface in 1972.

3.  First Video Rental Store--  Magneto Video in 1977.  Had 50 videos, also first to sell video.  George Atkinson bought one VHS and one Beta copy of each movie and offered to rent them.  It cost $50 for a year's membership.  The first video chain of stores was Video Station which eventually had 600 stores.

2.  Marsh Supermarket was the first supermarket with a Bar Code Scanner in Troy, Ohio in June 1974.  At 8:01, a ten-pack of Wrigley gum became the first item scanned..  That receipt is now in the Smithsonian.

1.  CERN's "World Wide Web Project" the first website on August 6, 1991.

Interesting Stuff.  --Cooter

Ten Little-Known Technological Firsts-- Part 1: First Person to Die in an Auto Accident

From the March 6, 2013, Listverse by Mike Floorwalker.

Of course, photos and more information at the site.


10.  First public radio broadcast: January 13, 1910/

9.  Mary Ward, First to die in a car accident.

8.  WTBS, first basic cable network, 1976.  HBO was the first pay cable network in 1973.

7.  Billy Joel's 52nd Street was the first album released on CD  His 1978 classic was re-released on Oct. 1, 1982, the same day that the CDP-101, the first commercially available CD player was released.

6.  Telstar I--  first communications satellite launched July 10, 1962, owned by AT&T.

--DaCoot

Chicago Needs a Lift-- Part 3: Reversing a River and Chlorination

There are stories of people getting stuck in traffic jams because someone was moving a building from one place to another.  They lifted an entire hotel while people were still init.  Today, all parts of downtown are about ten feet above the natural level of the city because of Ellis Chesbrough.

It was interesting that he borrowed technology from another field, the jack screw from railroads.

Before building it, Chesbrough had gone on a grand tour of Europe, but not to see sights like the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre.  He visited sewer systems.  A man dedicated to his work.
But, even with the new sewers, people were still getting sick after drinking the water.  This led to the more famous story of Chicago reversing the flow of the Chicago River so not to dump the contaminants into Lake Michigan, but instead to send it elsewhere.

And then there is the story of chlorinating the water, which is actually poisoning it.  So, you poison the water to make people healthier.

--Cooter

Chicago Neede a Lift-- Part 2: Ellis Chesbrough

Steven Johnson, host of the series said, "What we wanted with this episode (Clean) was to tell the stories basically of how we came to have things like clean drinking water that doesn't kill us with cholera or typhoid."

Chicago grew from tiny settlement to huge metropolis almost immediately with no infrastructure.  It was "just this kind of muddy, mucky, overcrowded, incredibly smelly and disease-ridden place."  All this occurred from the 1850s to 1970s.

There was no natural drainage because of its flatness.  Even when the need to build sewers became much apparent, there was no where to build it.  Most city have a natural flow down to a river, lake or sea which it is located by.  Even with it being next to Lake Michigan, the flatness prevented that.

"And so this guy, Ellis Chesbrough, has this crazy but ultimately brilliant idea that you could actually just lift the entire city up and create an artificial flow by raising downtown Chicago by about ten feet.  So, using thousands of guys with jack screws, he lifts up these buildings.  They fill the roads with landfill, build sewers down the middle of the road, attach buildings to that."

--DaCoot

Chicago Needed a Lift-- Part 1: Too Low? Raise It!

From the October 15, 2014, Chicago Tribune "In order to get clean Chicago Needed a lift" by Steve Johnson.

"Chicago was the first American city to have a modern sewer system, and because it is so flat, it also had one of the hardest obstacles to achieving that.

"The story of, essentially, the jacking up of downtown Chicago to allow the waste system to be constructed underneath us the start of 'How We Hot to Now,' an engaging new six-part PBS series about ideas and achievements that shaped the modern world."

This episode is called "Clean,"  It goes from the man named Ellis Chesbrough, the city engineer who determined to use railroad jacks to raise the city and goes to Chicago's newest thing, the ongoing Deep Tunnel stormwater management project.

--Cooter

The Bar Code Turns 40: Ten Things You Might Not Have Known-- Part 3

6.  Will the BAR CODE as we know it disappear?  "It will happen," says inventor George Laurer, perhaps by its 50th anniversary.

7.  LAURER thinks the total transition will take a little longer because it requires stores to replace scanners and manufacturers to change labels.

8.  ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES (the makers of the scanners) takes its name from its product-- black and white stripes--right?  RIGHT.  The company has shipped 11 million bar code printers since its inception in 1969.

9.  "It's APPLICATION SPECIFIC," said Dean Dalesandro of  Zebar Technologies Corp.  "But some things require the simple scan of a bar code.  Imagine (the) last time you took something to return it--that's bar code technology."  (I'm not real sure what this last one means.)

But Anyway, Anything to Make My Life Easier.  --Cooter

Some More of Chicago's Top Innovations-- Part 1

From the January 19, 2014, Chicago Tribune "Chicago's top innovations: Single list can't hold them all" by Phil Rosenthal. Back in January, the Tribune ran a list of twenty innovations accredited to Chicago and surrounding area. I printed them, but mostly in short form back then. //// Here are the Top Twenty: 1. Nuclear reaction // 2. Skyscraper // 3. Cell phone // 4. Open-heart surgery // 5. Balloon-frame construction //// 6. Mass production of McCormick Reaper // 7. First gay rights group // 8. Reversing the flow of the Chicago River // 9. First televised presidential debate // 10. Fermi-Linux Code. //// The second 10: 11. Farm Silo (Right here in good ol' tax-paying Spring Grove, Illinois) // 12. Ferris Wheel // 13. Deep dish pizza // 14. Consumer preferance research // 15. Mechanical dishwasher //// 16. Pullman sleeper car // 17. Game of softball // 18. Zipper // 19. Mail-order retail // 20. Vacuum cleaner. //// Well, Phil Rosenthal Thinks There Should Be more. Next. --DaCoot

Chicago Innovations That Changed the World-- Part 8: Nuclear Reactor

7. First Gay Rights Group in U.S. (1924). Henry Gerber established the Society for Human Rights. //// 6. Mass-producing the McCormick Reaper (1848) //// 5. Ballon Frame Construction (1833) Augustine Taylor using boards and nails for construction. //// 4. Open-Heart Surgery (1893). Patient was James Cornish. Doctor was Daniel Hale Williams. //// 3. The Cell Phone (1973) Martin Cooper from IIT, innovator at Motorola. //// 2. Skyscraper (1884) The Home Insurance Building. //// 1. The Nuclear Reactor (1942). //// Some Big Stuff. Some Stretches. --Cooter

Chicago Innovations That Changed the World-- Part 8: Fred Hatch's Farm Silo

11. THE FARM SILO (1873). I'll go into detail on this one as I live in Spring Grove and the name. Until 1973, grain was stored for the winter in pits instead of a tower as you see all over the place today. //// Fred Hatch, of Spring Grove, Illinois, had just graduated from the Illinois Industrial University which eventually became the University of Illinois. With his knowledge, he and his father, Lewis Hatch, built the very first tower silo (but not one you'd recognize today). //// Back at the school, Fred Hatch found agricultural textbooks to be scarce and some had to be translated from French and German by Professor Willard H. Bliss. According to the European books, silage storage meant burying the entire corn plant in pits. He took the idea and expanded on it by extending the hole upward above the ground. //// The Hatches lined a 6-foot-deep pit in their barn with rocks and mortar and over the years kept building higher. Eventually their new silo reached the height of 16 feet inside their barn. They built a floor in their pit of double ply floorboard lined with tar paper. //// This new design (and inside a barn) reduced rain spoilage and made it faster to fill, pack and empty than the pits. //// Eventually, they moved it outside and put a roof on it and you had today's silos. //// Thanks, Fred. --Cooter