Word: inventors
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Died. Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt, 81, a British government scientist who developed the first practical radar system; after a long illness; in Inverness, Scotland. A member of the same family to which the inventor of the steam engine, James Watt, belonged, Watson-Watt worked on what was then called "radio location," a process of bouncing radio waves off distant objects. Tested by tracking the plane that carried Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to Munich and back in 1938, Watson-Watt's aircraft-spotting radar later helped his country repel German attacks during the Battle of Britain...
...simple adage. Says Truxton Pratt, a senior vice president of Bankers Trust Co. who flies a sailplane in New England: "You reach a point in life and the adventure stops. Soaring puts it back." Hang-gliding and soaring have common roots in the 19th century, when English Inventor George Cayley and later, German Engineer Otto Lilienthal began applying their knowledge of birds to efforts to get man off the ground. After World War I, the Versailles Treaty denied military aircraft to the vanquished and the Germans trained some 50,000 glider pilots. Americans began picking up the gliding habit...
...color are gleaming red and blue zigzags, rows of tiny gold stars, and a gaudy, iridescent rainbow glaze. They have no discernible source of power and no visible moving parts, though at least one of them (The Rippe 1921 Virgin Gas Engine) is said to run on faith. The inventor, in a burst of Yankee practicality, foresaw the need for an alternative source of power. Another of the Rippe engines, the 911 pumper, was designed to enable water to run in whatever direction it wanted, including uphill. Nearly every piece in the show is supposed to pump either water...
...Rippe recounts Jeremiah's whimsical quest in a tape which accompanies the shop. In the best American diehard tradition Jeremiah Rippe flouted convention, defied public opinion, devoted his whole life to the creation of ever more powerful and improbable looking engines, and eventually died, a broken and unrecognized inventor mourned only by his dog. His last creation--the spawn of a mind unhinged by disappointment--was a monstrous machine that was meant to pull his coffin to his grave...
Boorstin's book is full of genuinely entertaining stories of the people and products which went into the making of our democracy of things. A whole chapter of the book is devoted to the inventor of the automatic cash-register...