A towering cotton tree which has stood for several hundred years in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, has been brought down by a heavy storm.
President Julius Maada Bio said the tree fell after a downpour on Wednesday night. He described it as a "great loss to the nation".
He said the tree was a symbol of liberty for early settlers. It also appears on Sierra Leone banknotes.
But some Christians hailed its demise, saying it was used for witchcraft.
A heavy rainstorm a week ago caused one of the tree's branches to fall, but it had been thought it would survive.
However, in another storm on Wednesday, the entire tree came down, leaving just part of the trunk still standing.
The city's skyline has changed dramatically as a result - some would say, for ever.
The 70m (230 ft)-high cotton tree was said to be the oldest of its kind in the country - a government statement estimated it to be 400 years old.
Just 300m away are the Freedom Steps, climbed by newly arrived freed slaves who offered prayers at the tree before making Freetown their home.
As the city grew over the years, it expanded around the ancient tree at its heart.
President Julius Maada Bio and other officials are expected to visit the site to determine what to do.
"We will have something at the same spot that bears testament to the great Cotton Tree's place in our history," he tweeted.
In 1973, the innovators at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) had a time machine. The Alto computer transported computing 15 years into the future with its groundbreaking features and functions. It influenced Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and a generation of researchers. A half century later, how we live with computing is still shaped by the Alto.
On the 50th anniversary of the Alto, many of its creators and some of today’s leading inventors gathered at CHM to share the Alto’s legacy and discuss what we can expect for the future of computing research—centered today on artificial intelligence (AI).
The Palo Alto Research Center (a Xerox company) has authorized the Computer History Museum to provide public viewing of the software, documents, and other files on this web site, and to provide these same files to private individuals and non-profit institutions with the same rights granted to CHM and subject to the same obligations undertaken by CHM. For more information about these files, see this explanatory information and @CHM post.
In 1970, the well-heeled corporate behemoth Xerox, with a nearly perfect monopoly on the quintessential office technology of photocopying, cut the ribbon on a new and ambitious bet on its future: the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC was a large research and development organization, comprised of distinct laboratories. Several concentrated on extending Xerox’s dominance of photocopying, like the General Science and Optical Science Laboratories. Others, specifically the Computer Science and Systems Science Laboratories, were aimed at a new goal. They would develop computer hardware and software that could plausibly form the basis for the “office of the future” some ten to fifteen years hence, giving Xerox a profound head start in this arena. //
Individual Alto users could store and back up their files in several ways. Altos could store information on removable “disk packs” the size of a medium pizza. Through the Ethernet, they could also store information on a series of IFSs, “Interim File Servers.” These were Altos outfitted with larger hard drives, running software that turned them into data stores. The researchers who developed the IFS software never anticipated that their “interim” systems would be used for some fifteen years.
With the IFSs, PARC researchers could store and share copies of their innovations, but the ancient anxiety demanded the question: “But what if something happened to an IFS?!” Here again, Ethernet held a solution. The PARC researchers created a new tape backup system, this time controlled by an Alto. Now, using Ethernet connections, files from the MAXC, the IFSs, and individuals’ Altos could be backed up to 9-track magnetic tapes. //
The nearly one hundred and fifty thousand unique files —around four gigabytes of information—in the archive cover an astonishing landscape: programming languages; graphics; printing and typography; mathematics; networking; databases; file systems; electronic mail; servers; voice; artificial intelligence; hardware design; integrated circuit design tools and simulators; and additions to the Alto archive. All of this is open for you to explore today at https://info.computerhistory.org/xerox-parc-archive Explore!
According to ShortFinals.org, in 1941, in Trafford Park, Manchester, Ford UK had two assembly plants where they were told to build Rolls-Royce Merlins – lots of them! At the time, this engine was in the vast majority of British fighters and bombers, including the two which had just won the Battle of Britain, the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane.
In his book Not Much Of An Engineer, Rolls Royce supercharger designer Stanley Hooker states that Ford UK looked at the Merlin engine drawings and said “we can’t build an engine to those tolerances.” Hooker said loftily (his words) “I suppose the tolerances are too tight for you?” ” No, they are much too loose – we use much tighter tolerances for car engines so all the parts are truly interchangeable without any hand adjustment needed.”
Ford re-drew the blue-prints for the Merlin, making it more suitable for mass production, and by 1944, over 400 engines a week were flowing out of the plants.
The first Merlin engine developed 880hp but by the time the last mark of Merlin was produced the power output was 2030hp.
The Merlin engine was then enlarged still further and named the Griffon. Aircraft which were powered by the Merlin engine include the Lancaster, Spitfire, Halifax, Hurricane, Battle, Defiant, Whitley, Mosquito, Hornet, York, Lincoln and North American Mustang.
The first digital logic gate built from vacuum tubes appears to have been invented by Bruno Rossi in 1930. Rossi, an Italian physicist studying cosmic rays and radioactivity, was not working on computing equipment but rather sought to detect near-simultaneous events from multiple Geiger-Müller tubes, His Rossi coincidence circuit was an n-input AND gate which identified coincident pulses from multiple detectors with a time resolution of one millisecond.
With an inverting output, this circuit would be a NAND gate 1, from which any Boolean function can be computed and flip-flops constructed as a data storage element.
Max Gergel was a Columbia, South Carolina native, 1942 graduate of the University of South Carolina, and a chemist. In 1977 he authored the memoir, Excuse Me, Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? He later wrote a sequel, The Ageless Gergel. In 1998, he was featured in the Fall issue of the USC Chemist, a newsletter published by the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Max Gergel, who graduated with a degree in chemical engineering from the University of South Carolina in 1942, founded and ran the successful Columbia Organic Chemical Company. A Nobel Prize-winning biochemist once said in a speech that he was encouraged by Gergel, describing him as “an unusually nice man.”
The chemist also had a boat and enjoyed sailing, especially to a house he had in Jamaica.
He also wrote two books, including the 1977 memoir Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? In them, he wrote about how he had helped in the development of the first atomic bomb, as well as in developing weapons for Israel.
But in that varied and interesting life, one thing was missing: a bar mitzvah.
And so, at 96, with the assistance of Rabbi Hesh Epstein, co-director of Chabad of South Carolina in Columbia, Gergel participated in the coming-of-age Jewish ceremony.
A day later, he passed away.
“He did everything he needed to do, and his journey was over, I guess,” said Epstein. “I guess that was his last mitzvah that he needed to do.”
USS Vincennes in Disappointment Bay, Antarctica, during the Wilkes Expedition, circa 1845-1878, attributed to Capt. Charles Wilkes. (Public Domain) //
On Aug. 18, 1838, the United States Exploring Expedition (also known as the Ex. Ex. or the Wilkes Expedition) departed Hampton Roads, Virginia to embark on a four-year surveying and exploring mission that would also be the last circumnavigation of the globe powered fully by sail. //
The Wilkes Expedition produced 241 charts, mapping out 280 Pacific islands, including for the first time the full group of Fiji Islands. The expedition also mapped out 800 miles of the Oregon coast, 100 miles of the Columbia River, a land route from Oregon to San Francisco, and arguably the most consequential, 1,500 miles of the Antarctic coastline, which confirmed it as the world’s seventh continent.
From their adventures, the group collected more than 4,000 ethnographic pieces, which was a third more than those collected from Cook’s three voyages. The naturalist, Titian Peale, collected 2,150 birds, 134 mammals, and 588 species of fish. The geologist, James Dana, collected 300 fossil species, 400 coral species, and 1,000 crustacea species. There were more than 200 entomological and zoological species collected in jars, and more than 5,000 larger specimens placed in large envelopes. Among the horticultural and botanical collections, William Rich, William Brackenridge, and Charles Pickering assembled an astounding 50,000 specimens of 10,000 different species, with an additional 1,000 living plants and approximately 650 seeds belonging to other species of plants.
As the tens of thousands of items were ushered into the country, the United States government struggled to place them. Poinsett and Paulding decided to place the collections in the 265-foot-long Great Hall of the Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. The following decade, more than 100,000 people annually visited the “Collection of the Exploring Expedition” in the Patent Office.
In 1858, the Collection found a new and permanent home inside the Smithsonian Institution, now the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex. “Today,” according to the Smithsonian Institution, “the specimens constitute the core of nearly every collection in every scientific department in the National Museum of Natural History.”
Letting the calendar cycle for 45 years gives each planet a chance to complete a synodic cycle. //
"By increasing the calendar length to 20 periods of 819-days a pattern emerges in which the synodic periods of all the visible planets commensurate with station points in the larger 819-day calendar," the researchers wrote.
The math appears to bear that out. NASA reckons Mercury's synodic period is 115.88 days, but if we allow the ancient Mayans some leniency due to their lack of advanced scientific instruments and say it's 117 days, you can get exactly seven periods on the calendar.
The other planets visible from Earth and known to the Mayans – Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – all have similar mathematical matches when the calendar is allowed to make multiple cycles. Mars, which has the longest synodic period at 780 days, takes 21 periods to fit exactly into 20 cycles, both of which have 16,380 days, just shy of 45 years.
No one truly knows exactly when Daniel Morgan (died July 6, 1802) was born. He may have been born in 1736, or possibly 1735. What is indisputable is that Morgan was born just in time for one of the great revolutions of the world.
Last Friday, a Marine celebrated his 100th birthday. On December 7, 1941, he was sitting in the “great room” of his fraternity when news of Pearl Harbor arrived in the form of a shout. A fraternity brother was listening to the radio and loudly announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl. America was at war, and so were each of the “brothers” in the house. Some joined right away. Others waited.
This Marine finished his freshman year and then enlisted. Why the Marines? “Because the Marines are first in the fight,” he said. //
He knows that he was one of the lucky Marines to come home. The heroes, he said, never came home.
You are probably thinking, “So what? My computer has all that too.” But the computer in front of me is not today’s MacBook, ThinkPad, or Surface computer.
Rather, it’s half-century-old hardware running software of the same vintage, meticulously restored and in operation at the Computer History Museum’s archive center. Despite its age, using it feels so familiar and natural that it’s sometimes difficult to appreciate just how extraordinary, how different it was when it first appeared.
I’m talking about the Xerox Alto, which debuted in the early spring of 1973 at the photocopying giant’s newly established R&D laboratory, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The reason it is so uncannily familiar today is simple: We are now living in a world of computing that the Alto created.
The Alto was a wild departure from the computers that preceded it. It was built to tuck under a desk, with its monitor, keyboard, and mouse on top. It was totally interactive, responding directly to its single user. //
By 1975, dozens of Xerox PARC’s researchers had personal Altos in their offices and used them daily. The large cabinet contained a CPU, memory, and a removable disk pack. On the desk are additional disk packs and the Alto’s vertical display, mouse, and keyboard. //
Broadly speaking, the PARC researchers set out to explore possible technologies for use in what Xerox had tagged “the office of the future.” They aimed to develop the kind of computing hardware and software that they thought could be both technologically and economically possible, desirable, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, profitable in about 10 to 15 years.
The type of computing they envisioned was thoroughly interactive and personal, comprehensively networked, and completely graphical—with high-resolution screens and high-quality print output.
The Soviets did not have the technology to make blades that could tolerate as high temperatures as the J58 turbine. As a result, the MiG-25 Foxbat flew slower than the SR-71 Blackbird. //
‘As it turns out, the Soviets did not have the technology to make blades that could tolerate as high temperatures as the J58 turbine. As a result, the MiG-25 flew slower than the SR-71 (Mach 2.83 rather than Mach 3.4), and its engine did not last the 400 hours between overhauls that the J58 managed.’
In fact, the SR-71 and MiG-25 are both thermally rather than power limited. Both have reserve power to climb (rapidly) at full speed. Their speed is limited by the temperature of their turbines, and not by power.
RMS Lusitania was an ocean liner operated by the Cunard Company that served the Liverpool, England – New York City, United States route on the North Atlantic. The ship was designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland. The ship was named after the ancient Roman province of Lusitania, which is now part of present-day Portugal and western Spain.
- Operator: Cunard Line, Ltd.
- Builder: John Brown and Co., Clydebank, Scotland
- Keel laid: 16 June 1904
- Launched: 7 June 1906
- Maiden voyage: Liverpool, England – New York, USA, 7 – 13 September 1907
- Round trip voyages: 101 (202 crossings)
- Length of career: 7 yrs, 9 months
Lusitania was launched on 7 June 1906 and entered service for Cunard on 26 August 1907. When she entered service, Lusitania set the records for the largest and fastest ship afloat, taking these records from the ships of the United Kingdom’s naval rival, Germany. Lusitania maintained these records until the entry of her twin sister Mauretania into the North Atlantic run. Lusitania, Mauretania, and slower but larger Aquitania provided a weekly passenger service for the Cunard Line just prior to the First World War.
During World War I, Germany waged submarine warfare against the United Kingdom. Lusitania, which had been built with the capability of being converted into a warship, was identified as a target. The German submarine U-20 torpedoed and sank her on 7 May 1915; this was early in the war before tactics for evading submarines were fully developed. The ship suffered two explosions, the second one which could never fully be explained, and sank in 18 minutes. The Lusitania disaster killed 1,192 of the 1,960 known people on board, leaving 768 survivors. Four of these survivors died soon afterwards of trauma sustained from the sinking, bringing the final death toll to 1,196.
The sinking turned public opinion against Germany, particularly those in Ireland and the then-neutral United States.
Although Boeing is no longer making the 747, and most passenger versions are retired in favor of more fuel-efficient twin-engine planes, the 747-8s will grace the skies for several more decades.
All-cargo airline Atlas Air will operate the final production 747 freighter for global logistics giant Kuehne + Nagel under a dedicated contract. The plane actually bears the livery of Apex Logistics, a Hong Kong-based airfreight forwarder K+N acquired in 2021. Atlas received the final four 747-8s produced by Boeing. Two are assigned to Kuehne + Nagel and one is flying under the control of Cainiao, the logistics arm of e-commerce platform Alibaba.
Atlas Air, Purchase, New York, is the largest operator of 747 aircraft in the world. As of Tuesday it will have 43 747Fs, including nine -8s. In total it has 50 jumbo jets, including seven 747s it flies as passenger charters for the military, sports teams and other airlines, according to the FlightRadar24 database.
Other airlines with large 747 cargo fleets include Cargolux, Cathay Pacific, Kalitta Air, Korean Air and Singapore Airlines. //
Innovations
First commercial widebody freighter and first long-haul, international freighter … First twin-aisle passenger plane, which lowered per-seat cost and made travel more affordable for the masses … First nose-loading freighter to enable loading of extra-large, nonstandard shipments … Hemispherical Hump — the 747 was originally designed as a freighter with ideal loading through the tilt-open nose. Engineers determined the best place for the flight deck was on its second level so the nose door could open without interference, which explains the iconic hump … First full-motion simulator to provide pilots immersive flight training … High-Bypass Turbofan Engines — These more efficient, quieter engines helped improve takeoff acceleration.
She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space. Even after NASA began using electronic computers, John Glenn requested that she personally recheck the calculations made by the new electronic computers before his flight aboard Friendship 7 – the mission on which he became the first American to orbit the Earth. She continued to work at NASA until 1986, combining her math talent with electronic computer skills. Her calculations proved critical to the success of the Apollo Moon landing program and the start of the Space Shuttle program. //
https://youtu.be/E4j_LpKzcZQ //
A wonderful interview with Johnson where she gets to tell you her story. The interview is 22 minutes and well worth the time.
Kelly Johnson was at his office and got a call from the CIA. He was told to meet a man at a certain restaurant in downtown Georgetown. They said he would be in the back and he would have a pink carnation one his lapel. They gave him a date and time. So, Johnson showed up and sure enough there is a shady looking character sitting in booth in the back.
The guy has on a fedora and a trench coat with a pink carnation in the lapel.
So, Johnson says he goes over and sits down and the guy just stares at him for about a minute. Then he says “we will take six for 30 million.” They just stare at each other then Johnson feels something against his leg and looks down. There is a large brown paper bag under the table and when he looks up the guy is gone. So, he looks in the bag and is bundles of 100,000 dollar bills. Johnson said his first thought was “Kelly you’re a*s is dead.” Downtown Georgetown (Washington DC) brown bag with 30 million in cash.
The CIA Director was the only federal government employee who can spend unvouchered Government money.
Peters recalls; ‘I obviously can’t prove the story but Kelly told it to me when I was just starting the program. He and Bill Parks were there for a ceremony dedicating Kelly Johnson Street at Beale. My backseater Ed Bethart and I were assigned to escort them. The only time he was under control was the actual ceremony. So, Ed and I had the unbelievable pleasure of escorting them anywhere Kelly wanted to go for about nine hours. The majority of that time the four of us alone.’
Unveiled in 1956, the B-58 Hustler was in service for the U.S. Air Force between 1960 and 1970. Convair built 116 jets in total, with 86 going into operation, and 30 built as pre-production and test aircraft. The Hustler was capable of reaching speeds of 1,325 miles per hour, and could achieve a total range of 4,400 miles without refueling. Hustlers could also achieve an altitude ceiling of just under 65,000 feet. While it's possible for commercial jets to reach great heights, the majority of travel that ticketholders cruise along for is done at an altitude of roughly half this feat (35,000 feet, typically).
December 4, 2021
IT WAS thirty years ago, on December 4th, 1991, that Pan American World Airways ceased operations.
This is possibly, maybe, the most significant (and unfortunate) anniversary in airline history, marking the death of history’s most significant airline.
Pan Am’s firsts, bests, longests, mosts, and whatever other superlatives you might come up with, are untouched, and untouchable. Its achievements include conquest of the Pacific Ocean and launch of both the 707 and 747, the two most influential jetliners of all time. Founded and led by a visionary entrepreneur from New Jersey named Juan Trippe, the airline’s network would reach into every nook and corner of the planet, its blue globe logo among the world’s most widely recognized trademarks. It was the only airline to have its own Manhattan skyscraper — the Walter Gropius-designed Pan Am Building, soaring over Grand Central Terminal.
The carrier’s slow and ignominious decline, punctuated by the sales of its most valuable assets and — for a final coffin nail, the Lockerbie bombing — is a tale of hubris, poor management, the volatility of a deregulated airline industry, and plain old bad luck. Most agree that the final chapter began around the time of the disastrous merger with National Airlines in 1980.