Non-Profit

One of the foremost engineers and architects in the United States had connections with both North Carolina and Rowan County in the period between 1818 and 1840. His name was Ithiel Town, a Connecticut Yankee who was born in 1784, the son of a farmer.

As a youth he worked as a carpenter and taught school. Adventuring to Boston he acquired a knowledge of architecture under Asher Benjamin, an architect and prolific writer on the subject. While there he was chosen to make improvements on the State House at Boston.

His reputation was made in 1814 when he designed Center Church on the New Haven, Connecticut green. He later designed the state capitols in Indianapolis, Indiana and in Raleigh.

On January 28, 1820 he was granted a patent for a truss bridge and from that time forward he was the best known bridge builder in the country. His return from this work was greater than from his work as an architect. He published in 1821 a book on iron and wood bridges which became the bible for bridge-building in America.

Until quite recently, I though that the first published HR diagram was constructed by Ejnar Hertzsprung for the stars of the Pleiades. Already in 1908, when Hertzsprung (then still an amateur astronomer with training in photochemistry) visited Karl Schwarzschild at Göttingen, he brought with him a working version with photographic magnitudes plotted against effective wavelengths. To determine the latter quantity, nowadays replaced by spectral type or color index, Hertzsprung attached a coarse diffraction grating before the objective so that an ordinary stellar image on the photographic plate was accompanied by a very short first-order spectrum on either side. The separation of the most intense parts of these spectra then directly translated into the effective wavelength of the star's light. However, this first Hertzsprung attempt to visualize the relation between luminosities and colors of stars suffered from a systematic error due to influence of the secondary spectrum of the objective. It was not until 1911, when the satisfactory version of the diagram was presented (Publ. Astrophys. Observ. Potsdam 22, 1, 1911) together with a color-magnitude diagram for another winter cluster, the Hyades.

What Is Libdex?
Libdex is a worldwide directory of library homepages, web-based OPACs,
Friends of the Library pages, and library e-commerce affiliate links.
The directory does not include links to terminal-based OPACs.

MedHist offers free access to a searchable catalogue of Internet sites and resources covering the history of medicine.

Find out how electrocuting chickens (1775), getting laboratory assistants to put their hands in buckets of saline (1887), taking the ECG of a horse and following it to the slaughterhouse (1909), induction of indiscriminate angina attacks (1931), and hypothermic dogs (1953) have helped to improve our understanding of the ECG as a clinical tool. And why is the ECG labelled PQRST (1895)?

JARED DIAMOND is Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Until recently he was Professor of Physiology at the UCLA School of Medicine. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the widely acclaimed Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, which also is the winner of Britain's 1998 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

The Jane Goodall Institute advances the power of individuals to takeinformed and compassionate action to improve the environment for all living things. With Dr. Jane Goodall's words and example as guiding principles, the Institute inspires hope for a brighter future.

Described as one of the 8 true geniuses, Von Kármán's inspiration for aeronautics came about during doctoral study at one of the world's foremost universities in the 1900s, Göttingen. After an all-night party in Paris, a friend suggested that, instead of going to sleep, they watch the French aviation pioneer Henri Farman fly his machine. Farman successfully completed a 2-kilometre (1.25-mile) course as Von Kármán embarked upon a long career in the aeronautical and astronautical sciences.

Agencies
Russian Space Agency
Home page for the Russian Space Agency (RKA) which was formed after the breakup of the former Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Soviet space program. The RKA uses the technology and launch sites that belonged to the former Soviet space program NASA mirror site
The Yuri Gagarin Cosmonauts Traing Center
Home page for the Yuri Gagarian Cosomonaut Training Centre at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. English and Russian versions.
Conquers of Space, a gallery of Soviet and Russian cosomonauts.
NASA Watch
Site often critical of NASA.
Animal Astronauts-Laika
Web page for Laika, the dog launched into orbit by the Soviet Union.

Fifty years ago, in 1947, it was common knowledge that there was a "Wall of Air" at the speed of sound. As an airplane neared this critical point, shock waves would buffet its wings and tail. The pilot would lose control, a condition then called "compressibility." Often, the airplane would shatter into pieces