Corporation

An engineer by training, Eiffel founded and developed a company specializing in metal structural work, whose crowning achievement was the Eiffel Tower. He devoted the last thirty years of his life to his experimental research.

Born in Dijon in 1832, he graduated from the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855, the same year that Paris hosted the first world's Fair. He spent several years in the South West of France, where he supervized work on the great railway bridge in Bordeaux, and afterwards he set up in his own right in 1864 as a "constructor", that is, as a business specializing in metal structural work. His outstanding career as a constructor was marked by work on the Porto viaduct over the river Douro in 1876, the Garabit viaduct in 1884, Pest railway station in Hungary, the dome of the Nice observatory, and the ingenious structure of the Statue of Liberty. It culminated in 1889 with the Eiffel Tower.

Some further reference should now be made to two men whose names are identified with the rise and progress of the railway system. George Stephenson was born in a small cottage, in the village of Wylam, on the banks of the Tyne, near Newcastle. He was the son of a collier, and had early to labour for his share of the household bread. Heavy were the demands upon him. When " too young to stride across the furrow " he went to plough. Then we find him picking bats and dross from the coal-heaps, at twopence a day, and he was still so small that he often hid himself when the overseer passed, lest he shculd be thought too little to earn his wages. Shortly after he entered his teens he worked as brakesman on a tramway, and subsequently became stoker to an engine on an estate of Lord Ravensworth, often having to rise at one and two o'clock in the morning, and to work till a late hour at night. Thankful in the receipt of a wage of a shilling a day, he declared, when this amount was doubled, that he was "a man for life."

As a father and son, John and Washington Roebling were the foremost American engineers of suspension bridge construction in the nineteenth century. John Roebling was born in Muhlhausen, Thuringia in 1806. While in school he developed an interest in both metaphysics and in bridge building. He graduated with a degree in civil engineering from the Royal Polytechnic Institute of Berlin in 1826.

In 1831 Roebling and his brother immigrated to Pennsylvania to farm. When this venture failed, Roebling accepted the position of Pennsylvania state engineer. In this position, he surveyed and supervised the construction of canals, locks, and dams.

In 1841 Roebling invented the twisted wire-rope cable, an invention which foreshadowed the use of wire cable supports for the decks of suspension bridges. Six years later he established a factory in New Jersey for the manufacture of this cable. Because the cable could support long spans and extremely heavy loads, Roebling quickly gained a reputation as a quality bridge engineer.

John Roebling was enthusiastic.

"No other part of the East River offers a locality so favorable to bridging," the great engineer wrote to the New York businessmen who proposed building a span to link Manhattan and Long Island.

But the East River bridge that so interested Roebling was not the Brooklyn Bridge that would be the cornerstone of his enduring fame. This span -- proposed in 1856, more than a decade before the Brooklyn Bridge project took form in 1867 -- was what would become the Queensboro Bridge.

Here you can find a PostScript (460 Kbytes), gzipped PostScript (146 Kbytes) and pdf (358 Kbytes) version of Shannon's paper. PDF files can be viewed by Adobe's acrobat reader. Tarred and gzipped contents of the directory (63 Kbytes) that contain the LaTeX code for the paper is also available.

Through the years, Kodak has led the way with an abundance of new products and processes that have made photography simpler, more useful and more enjoyable. Today, our work increasingly involves digital technology, combining the power and convenience of electronics with the quality of traditional photography to produce systems that bring levels of utility and fun to the taking, "making" and utilization of images.

Imagine that you're a poor person living during hard economic times. Your government offers you free medical care. Sounds good. But what if the real reason you're approached is because you have a disease. But instead of giving you medical care, the doctors are really just watching what happens when this disease goes untreated. Suppose a miracle then happens and a treatment is found for your disease. Instead of giving you the new medicine, the doctors continue the experiment of watching the disease go untreated. Years pass, some of your friends who were also in the study die, some pass the disease to their wives and children.

A brief overview of this Web site that compares what we knew in 1900 to what we know today

Time is considered one of our most valuable assets. The keeping of time goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization. Both historians and archeologists believe that stationary and portable sun-dials were probably developed in Egypt or Mesopotamia. The oldest extant sun-dial can be found in Egypt and dates back to 1500 BCE. We know that the early Egyptians used the pyramids as well as the obelisks as a forerunner to the sundial.