Word: webbs
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...partial understanding of Johnson, one has to go back to the harsh hill country of west-central Texas where he was born in 1908. Historian Walter Prescott Webb describes it as a land of "nauseating loneliness," whose inhabitants were "far from markets, burned by drought, beaten by hail, withered by hot winds, frozen by blizzards, eaten out by grasshoppers, exploited by capitalists and cozened by politicians...
Rose of Texas. And it is a galaxy removed from the granite and limestone land that Webb wrote about...
...good ship architecture has always depended heavily on intuition. But feel-of-the-sea design is increasingly tested and checked by the complex sciences of fluid dynamics and molecular stress. Nowhere in the U.S. are ancient skills and new techniques taught more tautly than at New York's Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, a Long Island college whose 70 students get room, board, books and tuition free, and almost always wind up at the top of their profession...
...centuries master shipwrights taught their jealously guarded trade by word of mouth to a handful of working apprentices. Webb Institute's founder, William Henry Webb, learned the business from his father Isaac, a flourishing New York shipbuilder of the early 1800s. Taking over in 1840, he turned out 138 major vessels during the next three decades. Among them were the clipper ships Challenge, which had a 210-ft. mainmast (the tallest ever built) with almost three acres of sail, and the Comet, which set the record (76 days) for sailing round the Horn from San Francisco to New York...
When steam forced Webb to close his yards, he became an investor. In 1889, with big profits from the Pacific Mail Steamship Co. and the Panama Railroad, he created Webb's Academy and Home for Shipbuilders-the first and still the only college in the U.S. devoted solely to naval architecture and marine engineering (though comparable courses are offered by M.I.T. and the University of Michigan). Webb's bequest of $2,500,000, now grown to $8,000,000, pays 70% of the school's operating expenses. Alumni and industry make up the rest, helping...