1.
Hotel Nacional de Cuba
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The Hotel Nacional de Cuba is a historic luxury hotel located on the Malecón in the middle of Vedado, Havana, Cuba. It stands on Taganana Hill a few metres from the sea, and offers a view of Havana Harbour, the seawall, the hotel was constructed in just fourteen months on the site of the Santa Clara Battery, which dates back to 1797. Part of the battery has been preserved in the hotels gardens, in 1933, after Fulgencio Batistas 4 September 1933 coup against the transitional government, it was the residence of Sumner Welles, a special envoy sent by U. S. Their eventual assault on the hotel, on October 2,1933, caused damage to the building, including shell and bullet holes. Chicago developer Arnold Kirkeby acquired the hotel in the early 1940s, francis Ford Coppola memorably dramatised the conference in his film The Godfather Part II. In the mid-1950s, Kirkeby Hotels sold the Nacional to New York developer William Zeckendorf, by 1955, Lansky had managed to persuade Batista to give him a piece of the Nacional. That same year Pan Ams Intercontinental Hotels Corporation bought the hotel from Zeckendorf, alphons Landa, prominent Washington attorney represented Pan Am and arranged for other clients and friends to acquire pieces of the hotel ownership at the same time. Dave Beck, President of the Teamsters and Roy Fruehauf of the Fruehauf Trailer Company were silent partners for at least 2 years, Fruehauf would sell his interest in the hotel in May 1957, other investors would lose everything when Castro came to power. Lansky planned to take a wing of the 10-storey hotel and create luxury suites for high-stakes gamblers, Batista endorsed Lanskys idea even though there were objections from American expatriates such as Ernest Hemingway. Under Lanskys impetus, a wing of the entrance hall was refurbished to include a bar, a restaurant, a showroom. It was operated by Lansky and his brother Jake, with Wilbur Clark as the front man, in 1956, singer Nat King Cole was contracted to perform in Cuba and wanted to stay at the Hotel Nacional de Cuba but was not allowed to because he was black. The hotel had earlier turned away Joe Louis, Marian Anderson, Jackie Robinson, Cole honored his contract, and the concert at the Tropicana was a huge success. The following year, he returned to Cuba for another concert, there is now a tribute to him in the form of a bust and a jukebox in the Hotel Nacional. The casino and clubs were an immediate success, according to an unpublished article sent to Cuban Information Archives around 1956-57, The bar was tended by local bartenders, and the casino managed by gentlemen from Las Vegas. By the spring of 1957 the casino, sublet by the hotel for a rent to Lansky, was bringing in as much cash as the biggest casinos in Las Vegas. In late 1958 the casino was sold to Michael McLaney and Carroll Rosenbloom, following the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, Havanas casinos were briefly shut down, but were quickly reopened after protests by casino workers left out of work. Fidel Castro nationalized the hotel on March 20,1960 and finally closed the casino in October 1960, jean-Paul Sartre visited Cuba in 1960 with his wife, the philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir staying in the hotel. They wanted to know about the process of those mythical heroes of Cuba
2.
Issaquah, Washington
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Issaquah is a city in King County, Washington, United States. The population was 30,434 at the 2010 census, according to the Washington State Office of Financial Management, Issaquah ranked 6th of 279 eligible incorporated communities in population growth between 2000 and 2005. Forbes. com ranked Issaquah the 2nd fastest-growing suburb in the state, Issaquah is an anglicized word for a local Native American name, meaning either the sound of birds, snake, or little stream. Squak Valley, a name for the area, also derives from this same Native-American name. In 1885, the unincorporated area was the scene of an attack on Chinese laborers who had come to pick hops from local fields. The city itself was incorporated on April 29,1892. Initially a small mining town, this town has changed noticeably both in its appearance and economic focus, Issaquah was originally developed to service the mining industry on nearby Squak and Cougar mountain, and began as the town of Gilman, Washington. As the mining deposits neared depletion in the late 1890s, other companies started to realize Issaquahs potential to support a lumber business. These companies exported timber from Issaquah and other small, local towns to Seattle and larger and these early boom industries, however, faded into a period of relative quiet by the time of the Great Depression. The town remained fairly placid through the decades, with The Boeing Company providing the majority of employment in the area. Microsoft and other industries moved into Redmond, Washington and other cities in the area. Both Boeing and Microsoft have significantly affected Issaquahs history, cultural development, in June 1996, Costco moved its global headquarters to Issaquah from nearby Kirkland, Washington. Other Issaquah employers include Siemens Medical Solutions Ultrasound Group, GoldSim Technology Group, Overtime Technologies, Boehms Candies, Issaquah is located 15 miles east-southeast of Seattle at the south end of Lake Sammamish. Neighboring cities include Bellevue, and Redmond, both 8 miles away, Issaquah resides within the Mountains to Sound Greenway. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of 11.40 square miles. Issaquah is surrounded on three sides by the Issaquah Alps, Cougar Mountain on the west, Squak Mountain to the south, to the north of Issaquah is Lake Sammamish. They believe that these three mountains are the remains of an older mountain range long since eroded by earthquakes, volcanic action. According to a 2012 estimate, the income for a household in the city was $87,074
3.
Music box
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A music box or musical box is an automatic musical instrument that produces sounds by the use of a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc so as to pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb. They were developed from musical snuff boxes of the 18th century, some of the more complex boxes also have a tiny drum and/or bells, in addition to the metal comb. The original snuff boxes were tiny containers which could fit into a waistcoat pocket. The music boxes could have any size from that of a hat box to a piece of furniture. They were usually powered by clockwork and originally produced by artisan watchmakers, for most of the 19th century, the bulk of music box production was concentrated in Switzerland, building upon a strong watchmaking tradition. The first music box factory was opened there in 1815 by Jérémie Recordon, there were also a few manufacturers in Bohemia and Germany. By the end of the 19th century, some of the European makers had opened factories in the United States, the cylinders were normally made of metal and powered by a spring. In some of the models, the cylinders could be removed to change melodies, thanks to an invention by Paillard in 1862. In some exceptional models, there were four springs, to provide continuous play for up to three hours, the very first boxes at the end of the 18th century made use of metal disks. The switchover to cylinders seems to have been complete after the Napoleonic wars, in the last decades of the 19th century, however, mass-produced models such as the Polyphon and others all made use of interchangeable metal disks instead of cylinders. The cylinder-based machines rapidly became a minority, instead, the cylinder worked by actuating bellows and levers which fed and opened pneumatic valves which activated a modified wind instrument or plucked the chords on a modified string instrument. Some devices could do both at the time and were often combinations of player pianos and music boxes, such as the Orchestrion. There were many variations of large machines, usually built for the affluent of the pre-phonograph 19th century. Some were called the Symphonium, others were called the Concert Regina Music Box machine, both variations were as tall as a grandfather clock and both used interchangeable large disks to play different sets of tunes. Both were spring-wound and driven and both had a bell-like sound, the machines were often made in England, Italy, and the US, with additional disks made in Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia. Early juke-box pay versions of them existed in places also. Marshs free Museum and curio shop in Long Beach, Washington has several still-working versions of them on public display, the Musical Museum, Brentford, London has a number of machines. The Morris Museum in Morristown, NJ, USA has a notable collection, in addition to video and audio footage of each piece, the actual instruments are demonstrated for the public daily on a rotational basis
4.
Vending machine
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The first modern vending machines were developed in England in the early 19th century and dispensed postcards. The earliest known reference to a machine is in the work of Hero of Alexandria. His machine accepted a coin and then dispensed holy water, when the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened a valve which let some water flow out, the pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counterweight snapped the lever up and turned off the valve. Coin-operated machines that dispensed tobacco were being operated as early as 1615 in the taverns of England, the machines were portable and made of brass. An English bookseller, Richard Carlile, devised a newspaper dispensing machine for the dissemination of banned works in 1822, simeon Denham was awarded British Patent no.706 for his stamp dispensing machine in 1867, the first fully automatic vending machine. The first modern coin-operated vending machines were introduced in London, England in the early 1880s, the machine was invented by Percival Everitt in 1883 and soon became a widespread feature at railway stations and post offices, dispensing envelopes, postcards, and notepaper. The Sweetmeat Automatic Delivery Company was founded in 1887 in England as the first company to deal primarily with the installation, the first vending machine in the U. S. was built in 1888 by the Thomas Adams Gum Company, selling gum on New York City train platforms. This idea spawned a new type of mechanical device known as the trade stimulators. Some products need to be prepared to become available, for example, tickets are printed or magnetized on the spot, and coffee is freshly concocted. One of the most common form of vending machine, the snack machine, the main example of a vending machine giving access to all merchandise after paying for one item is a newspaper vending machine found mainly in the U. S. and Canada. It contains a pile of identical newspapers, after a sale the door automatically returns to a locked position. The success of such machines is predicated on the assumption that the customer will be honest, and need only one copy. The profit margins in the candy business can be quite high – gumballs, for instance, can be purchased in bulk for 2 cents a piece. Gumballs and candy have a long shelf life, enabling vending machine operators to manage many machines without too much time or cost involved. In addition, the machines are inexpensive compared to soft drink or snack machines. Many operators donate a percentage of the profits to charity so that locations will allow them to place the machines for free, in the past, cigarettes were commonly sold in the United States through these machines, but this is increasingly rare due to concerns about underage buyers. Sometimes a pass has to be inserted in the machine to prove ones age before a purchase can be made, in the United Kingdom, legislation banning them outright came into effect on October 1,2011
5.
Player piano
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The rise of the player piano grew with the rise of the mass-produced piano for the home in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sales peaked in 1924, then declined as the improvement in phonograph recordings due to electrical recording methods developed in the mid-1920s. The idea of musical devices can be traced back many centuries. These devices were later extended to operate musical boxes, which contain a set of tuned metal teeth plucked by the player mechanism, an early musical instrument to be automated was the organ, which is comparatively easy to operate automatically. The power for the notes is provided by air from a system. The playing task is performed by a pinned barrel. The piano is an instrument, requiring each note to be struck with a different force to control the dynamics of the performance. The entire force required to sound the note must be given by the hitting the keys. It proved to be difficult for a device to combine a variable percussive force. Barrels do not provide a force, but a relatively gentle switching motion. Early barrel pianos moved the back and forwards continuously as the operator turned the handle. The hammers hit repeatedly until the pin was removed and this played the note, but at a fixed dynamic and with a tremolo action quite unlike a pianist. The development of the piano was the gradual overcoming of the various difficulties of controlled percussive striking. The earliest practical piano playing device was probably the Forneaux Pianista and this bellows struck the piano key and so played the note. The acceleration of developments leading to the player device started in the 1840s. The start of the period can probably be seen as the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia. At this exhibition were a number of automatic devices, including the Pianista. The earliest description of a piano playing device using perforated paper rolls was Claude Seytres French patent of 1842, the concept was sound, but the device described was impractical in the way it read the roll and operated the piano
6.
Music roll
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A music roll is a storage medium used to operate a mechanical musical instrument. They are used for the piano, mechanical organ, electronic carillon. The vast majority of music rolls are made of paper, other materials that have been utilized include thin card, thin sheet brass, composite multi-layered electro-conductive aluminium and paper roll and, in the modern era, thin plastic or PET film. The music data is stored by means of perforations, the mechanism of the instrument reads these as the roll unwinds, using a pneumatic, mechanical or electrical sensing device called a tracker bar, and the mechanism subsequently plays the instrument. After a roll is played, it is necessary for it to be rewound before it can be played again and this necessitates a break in a musical performance. To overcome this problem, some instruments were built with two player mechanisms allowing one roll to play while the other rewinds, a piano roll is a specific type of music roll, and is designed to operate an automatic piano like the player piano or the reproducing piano. Book music Piano roll Punched card Punched tape Jacquard loom Barbara Bryner, The piano roll, dept. of Music, University of Utah,2002. OCLC50482085 Karl Koenig Jazz in Print Pendragon Press,2002 pg.180
7.
Sound recording and reproduction
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Sound recording and reproduction is an electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording, prior to the development of analog recording, there were mechanical systems for reproducing instrumental music, such as wind-up music boxes and later, in the late 19th century, player pianos. Analog sound reproduction is the process, with a bigger loudspeaker diaphragm causing changes to atmospheric pressure to form acoustic sound waves. Digital recording and reproduction converts the sound signal picked up by the microphone to a digital form by the process of digitization. This lets the audio data be stored and transmitted by a variety of media. Whereas successive copies of an analog recording tend to degrade in quality, as noise is added. A digital audio signal must be reconverted to analog form during playback before it is amplified and connected to a loudspeaker to produce sound, long before sound was first recorded on cylinders or records, music was recorded—first by written music notation, then also by mechanical devices. Fowler, this. cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century. The Banu Musa brothers also invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine, according to Fowler, the automata were a robot band that performed. more than fifty facial and body actions during each musical selection. In the 14th century, Flanders introduced a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder, similar designs appeared in barrel organs, musical clocks, barrel pianos, and musical boxes. A music box is a musical instrument that produces sounds by the use of a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc so as to pluck the tuned teeth of a steel comb. They were developed from musical snuff boxes of the 18th century, some of the more complex boxes also have a tiny drum and/or bells, in addition to the metal comb. The fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books, the player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store an long piece of music. The most sophisticated of the rolls were hand-played, meaning that the roll represented the actual performance of an individual. This technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904, piano rolls were in continuous mass production from 1896 to 2008. A1908 U. S. Supreme Court copyright case noted that, in 1902 alone, the use of piano rolls began to decline in the 1920s although one type is still being made today. The first device that could record actual sounds as they passed through the air was the phonautograph, the earliest known recordings of the human voice are phonautograph recordings, called phonautograms, made in 1857. They consist of sheets of paper with sound-wave-modulated white lines created by a stylus that cut through a coating of soot as the paper was passed under it
8.
Amplifier
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An amplifier, electronic amplifier or amp is an electronic device that can increase the power of a signal. An amplifier functions by taking power from a supply and controlling the output to match the input signal shape. In this sense, an amplifier modulates the output of the power supply based upon the properties of the input signal, an amplifier is effectively the opposite of an attenuator, while an amplifier provides gain, an attenuator provides loss. An amplifier can either be a piece of equipment or an electrical circuit contained within another device. Amplification is fundamental to modern electronics, and amplifiers are used in almost all electronic equipment. Amplifiers can be categorized in different ways, another is which quantity, voltage or current is being amplified, amplifiers can be divided into voltage amplifiers, current amplifiers, transconductance amplifiers, and transresistance amplifiers. A further distinction is whether the output is a linear or nonlinear representation of the input, amplifiers can also be categorized by their physical placement in the signal chain. The first practical device that could amplify was the triode vacuum tube, invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest. Vacuum tubes were used in almost all amplifiers until the 1960s–1970s when the transistor, invented in 1947, today most amplifiers use transistors, but vacuum tubes continue to be used in some applications. Before the invention of electronic amplifiers, mechanically coupled carbon microphones were used as amplifiers in telephone repeaters. After the turn of the century it was found that negative resistance mercury lamps could amplify, the first practical electronic device that could amplify was the Audion vacuum tube, invented in 1906 by Lee De Forest, which led to the first amplifiers around 1912. The terms amplifier and amplification were first used for this new capability around 1915 when triodes became widespread, the amplifying vacuum tube revolutionized electrical technology, creating the new field of electronics, the technology of active electrical devices. It made possible long distance lines, public address systems, radio broadcasting, talking motion pictures, practical audio recording, radar, television. For 50 years virtually all electronic devices used vacuum tubes. Early tube amplifiers often had positive feedback, which could increase gain but also make the amplifier unstable, much of the mathematical theory of amplifiers was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories during the 1920s to 1940s. Other advances in the theory of amplification were made by Harry Nyquist, the vacuum tube was the only amplifying device for 40 years, and dominated electronics until 1947, when the first transistor, the BJT, was invented. Today most amplifiers use transistors, but vacuum tubes are used in some high power applications such as radio transmitters. All amplifiers have gain, a factor that relates the magnitude of some property of the output signal to a property of the input signal
9.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
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