Corporation

In the beginning there was the phone company — the brand-new Bell Telephone, to be precise. And there were nascent hackers. Of course in 1878 they weren't called hackers yet. Just practical jokers, teenage boys hired to run the switchboards who had an unfortunate predilection for disconnecting and misdirecting calls ("You're not my Cousin Mabel?! Operator! Who's that snickering on the line? Hello?"). Now you know why the first transcontinental communications network hired female operators.

From the first syllable of recorded time - this is the story of plastic that shook the world, a guide to the key players and events which shaped the record's development. Read the first part of our history of vinyl, 1850 to 1879, with audio.

Environmental problems with steel tanks:
The fiberglass underground storage tank owes its very existence to the shortcomings of steel tanks – and their resulting environmental problems.
In the early 1960s, the American Petroleum Institute challenged us (we were then known as the Special Products Division of Owens-Corning) to develop a rustproof underground storage tank that would be safe and strong enough to satisfy the petroleum industry’s most stringent long-term storage demands.

Most aeronautical histories treat the Bristol Aeroplane Company and its predecessor, the British & Colonial Aeroplane Company, as though they were vast, faceless industrial conglomerates.
But like the aeronautical companies set up by Handley Page, A.V. Roe, Sopwith, de Havilland, Vickers, Blackburn and Rolls, Bristol was the product of one man's vision. His determination to bring honour to his native city, led him to fight the Board of Trade for the right to name his craft "Bristol", rather than naming them after himself. He was the self made entrepreneur, tramway pioneer, stockbroker, industrialist and philanthropist, Sir George White Bt., LLD.,JP. (1854-1916)

Everything's relative. Speed, mass, space and time are all subjective. Nor are age, motion or the wanderings of the planets measures that humans can agree on anymore; they can be judged only by the whim of the observer. Light has weight. Space has curves. And coiled within a pound of matter, any matter, is the explosive power of 14 million tons of TNT. We know all this, we are set adrift in this way at the end of the 20th century, because of Albert Einstein.

By the mid-1800s New York City was one of the most crowded places on earth. Each year tens of thousands of new immigrants were arriving, spilling out into the streets and competing with established city dwellers for space. The congested streets and pokey transportation system were a source of constant complaint: "Modern martyrdom may be succintly defined as riding in a New York omnibus," groused one passenger. Another noted, "It would not be decent to carry live hogs thus--and hardly dead ones."
Then, in March 1888, a ferocious blizzard ground the city to a halt. Mountains of snow twenty feet high filled the streets, horse-drawn streetcars and omnibuses lay abandoned, the entire city was paralyzed. The snow left no doubt that New York needed an underground rail system and in 1894, after years of political obstacles, a plan was approved. Construction began in 1900.

Engineering timeline is the name we have given to any combination of items or events in the history of engineering which can be located on a map of the UK.
On this site, the results of any search you make are shown as a dot or series of dots on a map. Next to the map, the search results are listed in chronological order. These form the engineering timeline, linking elements of engineering history across time and place.

Then + Now
A brief overview of this Web site that compares what we knew in 1900 to what we know today
That's My Theory
Meet some of the scientists who made twentieth century history on this made-for-the-Web game show
On the Edge
These comic-book style stories take you back through time and present scientists soon after they made their discoveries

During that historic period known as the Renaissance, after the "dark" Middle Ages, there occurred the inventions of printing, gunpowder and the mariner's compass, followed by the discovery of America. Equally remarkable was the invention of the microscope: an instrument that enables the human eye, by means of a lens or combinations of lenses, to observe enlarged images of tiny objects. It made visible the fascinating details of worlds within worlds.