Pfizer
/ˈfaɪzər/ is an American global pharmaceutical corporation headquartered in New York City, with its research headquarters in Groton, Connecticut. It is among the worlds largest pharmaceutical companies and it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and its shares have been a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average since 2004. Pfizer develops and produces medicines and vaccines for a range of medical disciplines, including immunology, cardiology, diabetology/endocrinology. Pfizer was founded in 1849 by cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles F. Erhart in New York City as a manufacturer of fine chemicals and its discovery of Terramycin in 1950 put it on a path towards becoming a research-based pharmaceutical company. It has made numerous acquisitions, including Warner–Lambert in 2000, Pharmacia in 2003, in 2016, Pfizer Inc. was expected to merge with Allergan plc, in a deal that would have been worth $160 billion, to create the Ireland-based Pfizer plc. The merger was called off in April 2016 due to recent new rules from the United States Treasury against inversions, Pfizer is named after German-American Charles Pfizer who co-founded the company with his cousin Charles F.
Erhart. There, they produced an antiparasitic called santonin and this was an immediate success, although it was the production of citric acid that really kick-started Pfizers growth in the 1880s. Pfizer continued to buy property to expand its lab and factory on the bounded by Bartlett Street, Harrison Avenue, Gerry Street. Pfizers original administrative headquarters was at 81 Maiden Lane in Manhattan, by 1906, sales totaled $3.4 million. World War I caused a shortage of calcium citrate that Pfizer imported from Italy for the manufacture of citric acid, Pfizer chemists learned of a fungus that ferments sugar to citric acid and were able to commercialize production of citric acid from this source in 1919. As a result, Pfizer developed expertise in fermentation technology, in the 1940s, penicillin became very inexpensive. As a result, Pfizer searched for new antibiotics with greater profit potential, Pfizers discovery and commercialization of Terramycin in 1950 changed the company from a manufacturer of fine chemicals to a research-based pharmaceutical company.
To augment its research in technology, Pfizer developed a drug discovery program focusing on in vitro synthesis. Pfizer established a health division in 1959 with an 700-acre farm and research facility in Terre Haute. By the 1950s, Pfizer had established offices in Belgium, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, in 1960, the company moved its medical research laboratory operations out of New York City to a new facility in Groton, Connecticut. In 1980 Pfizer launched Feldene, a prescription medication that became Pfizers first product to reach one billion United States dollars in total sales. During the 1980s and 1990s, Pfizer Corporation growth was sustained by the discovery and marketing of Zoloft, Norvasc, Aricept, Diflucan, in this decade, Pfizer grew by mergers, including those with Warner–Lambert and Wyeth. In 2003, the company acquired Esperion Therapeutics for $1.3 billion, in 2004, Pfizer announced it would acquire Meridica for $125 million
Volkswagen Group
Volkswagen Group, or Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, shortly VW AG, is a German multinational automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Wolfsburg, Lower Saxony, Germany. It designs and distributes passenger and commercial vehicles, engines, in 2016, it was the largest automaker in the world with sales of 10.3 million units, overtaking Toyota. It has maintained the largest market share in Europe for over two decades and it ranked seventh in the 2016 Fortune Global 500 list of the worlds largest companies. It is divided into two divisions, the Automotive Division and the Financial Services Division, and has approximately 340 subsidiary companies. VW has two major joint-ventures in China, the company has operations in approximately 150 countries and operates 100 production facilities across 27 countries. Volkswagen was founded in 1937 to manufacture the car which would become known as the Beetle, the companys production grew rapidly in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1965 it acquired Auto Union, which subsequently produced the first post-war Audi models.
Volkswagen launched a new generation of front-wheel drive vehicles in the 1970s, including the Passat and Golf, the companys operations in China have grown rapidly in the past decade with the country becoming its largest market. It has been traded in the United States via American depositary receipts since 1988, Volkswagen delisted from the London Stock Exchange in 2013. The state of Lower Saxony holds 12. 7% of the companys shares, Volkswagen held a 19. 9% non-controlling shareholding in Suzuki between 2009 and 2015. An international arbitration court ordered Volkswagen to sell the back to Suzuki. Suzuki paid $3. 8bn to complete the stock buy-back just hours prior to a scandal about emissions violations engulfing Volkswagen. Volkswagen was founded on 28 May 1937 in Berlin as the Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH by the National Socialist Deutsche Arbeitsfront. The purpose of the company was to manufacture the Volkswagen car, originally referred to as the Porsche Type 60, the Volkswagen Type 1 and this vehicle was designed by Ferdinand Porsches consulting firm, and the company was backed by the support of Adolf Hitler.
On 16 September 1938, Gezuvor was renamed Volkswagenwerk GmbH, only a small number of Type 60 Volkswagens were made during this time. The Fallersleben plant manufactured the V-1 flying bomb, making the plant a major bombing target for the Allied forces, however, no British car manufacturer was interested, the vehicle does not meet the fundamental technical requirement of a motor-car. It is quite unattractive to the average buyer, to build the car commercially would be a completely uneconomic enterprise. In 1948, the Ford Motor Company of USA was offered Volkswagen, but Ernest Breech, as part of the Industrial plans for Germany, large parts of German industry, including Volkswagen, were to be dismantled. Total German car production was set at a maximum of 10% of the 1936 car production numbers
Manufacturing engineering
The manufacturing engineers primary focus is to turn raw materials into a new or updated product in the most economic and effective way possible. It is a broad area which includes the design and development of products. Manufacturing engineering is considered to be a subdiscipline of industrial engineering and has very strong overlaps with mechanical engineering. Manufacturing engineers success or failure directly impacts the advancement of technology and this field of manufacturing engineering emerged from tool and die discipline in the early 20th century. It expanded greatly from the 1960s when industrialized countries introduced factories with,1, numerical control machine tools and automated systems of production. Advanced statistical methods of quality control, These factories were pioneered by the American electrical engineer William Edwards Deming, the same methods of quality control turned Japanese factories into world leaders in cost-effectiveness and production quality. This cut costs and improved production speed, the history of manufacturing engineering can be traced to factories in the mid 19th century USA and 18th century UK.
Founded in 1104 in the Republic of Venice several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, the Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people. Many historians regard Matthew Boultons Soho Manufactory as the first modern factory, similar claims can be made for John Lombes silk mill in Derby, or Richard Arkwrights Cromford Mill. The Cromford Mill was purpose-built to accommodate the equipment it held, one historian, Murno Gladst, contends that the first factory was in Potosí. The Potosi factory took advantage of the abundant silver that was mined nearby, british colonies in the 19th century built factories simply as buildings where a large number of workers gathered to perform hand labor, usually in textile production. This proved more efficient for the administration and distribution of materials to individual workers than earlier methods of manufacturing and this experience formed the basis for the studies of manufacturing engineering.
Between 1820 and 1850, non-mechanized factories supplanted traditional artisan shops as the predominant form of manufacturing institution, henry Ford further revolutionized the factory concept and thus manufacturing engineering in the early 20th century with the innovation of mass production. Highly specialized workers situated alongside a series of rolling ramps would build up a product such as an automobile and this concept dramatically decreased production costs for virtually all manufactured goods and brought about the age of consumerism. Modern manufacturing engineering studies include all intermediate processes required for the production and integration of a products components, some industries, such as semiconductor and steel manufacturers use the term fabrication for these processes. Automation is used in different processes of manufacturing such as machining and welding, automated manufacturing refers to the application of automation to produce goods in a factory. Robotics is the application of mechatronics and automation to create robots and these robots may be of any shape and size, but all are preprogrammed and interact physically with the world.
To create a robot, an engineer typically employs kinematics and mechanics, robots are used extensively in manufacturing engineering
Industrial design
Industrial design is a process of design applied to products that are to be manufactured through techniques of mass production. This distinguishes industrial design from craft-based design, where the form of the product is determined by the creator at the time of its creation. The role of a designer is to create and execute design solutions for problems of form, usability, physical ergonomics, brand development, sustainability. The division of labour that underlies the practice of design did have precedents in the pre-industrial era. The use of drawing to specify how something was to be constructed was first developed by architects and shipwrights during the Italian Renaissance. The emergence of industrial design is linked to the growth of industrialisation and mechanisation that began with the industrial revolution in Great Britain in the mid 18th century. The first use of the industrial design is often attributed to the industrial designer Joseph Claude Sinel in 1919. Christopher Dresser is considered among the first independent industrial designers, Industrial designs origins lie in the industrialization of consumer products.
The earliest use of the term may have been in The Art Union, the Practical Draughtsmans Book of Industrial Design by Jacques-Eugène Armengaud was printed in 1853. The subtitle of the work explains, that it wants to offer a course of mechanical, engineering. The study of those types of drawing, according to Armengaud. This work paved the way for a big expansion in the drawing education in France, the United Kingdom. Robert Lepper helped to establish one of the countrys first industrial design programs at Carnegie Institute of Technology. Product design and industrial design overlap in the fields of user interface design, information design, except for certain functional areas of overlap between industrial design and engineering design, educational programs in the U. S. Most industrial designers complete a design or related program at a school or university. Diplomas and degrees take two to four years of study, the study results in a Bachelor of Industrial Design, Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Fine Arts.
Afterwards, the programme can be extended to postgraduate degrees such as Master of Design, Master of Fine Arts. Industrial design studies function and form—and the connection between product and environment, industrial design professionals work in small scale design, rather than overall design of complex systems such as buildings or ships
Machine
A machine is a tool containing one or more parts that uses energy to perform an intended action. Machines are usually powered by chemical, thermal, or electrical means, historically, a power tool required moving parts to classify as a machine. However, the advent of electronics has led to the development of power tools without moving parts that are considered machines, a simple machine is a device that simply transforms the direction or magnitude of a force, but a large number of more complex machines exist. Examples include vehicles, electronic systems, molecular machines, television, the word machine derives from the Latin word machina, which in turn derives from the Greek. The word mechanical comes from the same Greek roots, the Ancient Greeks probably have borrowed the word mekhane from the ancient Hebrews. The ancient Greeks were familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures and language, a wider meaning of fabric, structure is found in classical Latin, but not in Greek usage. This meaning is found in late medieval French, and is adopted from the French into English in the mid-16th century, in the 17th century, the word could mean a scheme or plot, a meaning now expressed by the derived machination.
The modern meaning develops out of specialized application of the term to stage engines used in theater and to siege engines. Simple Machines are commonly reckoned to be Six in Number, viz. the Ballance, Pulley, Wedge, compound Machines, or Engines, are innumerable. The word engine used as a synonym both by Harris and in language derives ultimately from Latin ingenium ingenuity, an invention, perhaps the first example of a human made device designed to manage power is the hand axe, made by chipping flint to form a wedge. A wedge is a machine that transforms lateral force and movement of the tool into a transverse splitting force. The idea of a simple machine originated with the Greek philosopher Archimedes around the 3rd century BC, who studied the Archimedean simple machines, pulley and he discovered the principle of mechanical advantage in the lever. Later Greek philosophers defined the five simple machines and were able to roughly calculate their mechanical advantage. Heron of Alexandria in his work Mechanics lists five mechanisms that can set a load in motion, windlass, pulley and screw, however the Greeks understanding was limited to statics and did not include dynamics or the concept of work.
In 1586 Flemish engineer Simon Stevin derived the mechanical advantage of the inclined plane, the complete dynamic theory of simple machines was worked out by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei in 1600 in Le Meccaniche. He was the first to understand that simple machines do not create energy, the classic rules of sliding friction in machines were discovered by Leonardo da Vinci, but remained unpublished in his notebooks. They were rediscovered by Guillaume Amontons and were developed by Charles-Augustin de Coulomb. The word mechanical refers to the work that has produced by machines or the machinery
Thermal oxidizer
A thermal oxidizer is a process unit for air pollution control in many chemical plants that decomposes hazardous gases at a high temperature and releases them into the atmosphere. Thermal oxidizers are used to destroy hazardous air pollutants and volatile organic compounds from industrial air streams. These pollutants are generally hydrocarbon based and when destroyed via thermal combustion they are oxidized to form CO2. Three main factors in designing the effective thermal oxidizers are temperature, residence time, the temperature needs to be high enough to ignite the waste gas. Most organic compounds ignite at the temperature between 590 °C and 650 °C, to ensure near destruction of hazardous gases, most basic oxidizers are operated at much higher temperature levels. When catalyst is used, the temperature range may be lower. Residence time is to ensure there is enough time for the combustion reaction to occur. The turbulence factor is the mixture of air with the hazardous gases. The simplest technology of thermal oxidation is direct-fired thermal oxidizer, a process stream with hazardous gases is introduced into a firing box through or near the burner and enough residence time is provided to get the desired destruction removal efficiency of the VOCs.
Most direct-fired thermal oxidizers operate at levels between 980 °C and 1,200 °C with air flow rates of 0.24 to 24 standard cubic meters per second. These are best applied where there is a high concentration of VOCs to act as the fuel source for complete combustion at the targeted operating temperature. One of today’s most widely accepted air pollution control technologies across industry is a thermal oxidizer. RTOs use a bed which is heated from a previous oxidation cycle to preheat the input gases to partially oxidize them. The preheated gases enter a chamber that is heated by an external fuel source to reach the target oxidation temperature which is in the range between 760 °C and 820 °C. The final temperature may be as high as 1,100 °C for applications that require maximum destruction, the air flow rates are 2.4 to 240 standard cubic meters per second. RTOs are very versatile and extremely efficient – thermal efficiency can reach 95% and they are regularly used for abating solvent fumes, etc. from a wide range of industries.
Regenerative Thermal Oxidizers are ideal in a range of low to high VOC concentrations up to 10 g/m3 solvent, there are currently many types Regenerative Thermal Oxidizer on the market with the capabitlity of 99. 5+% Volatile Organic Compound oxidisation or destruction efficiency. The ceramic heat exchanger in the towers can be designed for thermal efficiencies as high as 97+%, ventilation air methane thermal oxidizers are used to destroy methane in the exhaust air of underground coal mine shafts
General Dynamics
General Dynamics Corporation is an American aerospace and defense multinational corporation. Formed by mergers and divestitures, it is the worlds fifth-largest defense contractor based on 2012 revenues, General Dynamics is headquartered in West Falls Church, Fairfax County, Virginia. The company has changed markedly in the post–Cold War era of defense consolidation and it has four main business segments, Marine Systems, Combat Systems, Information Systems Technology, and Aerospace. General Dynamics former Fort Worth Division manufactured one of the Western worlds most-produced jet fighters, the F-16 Fighting Falcon—until 1993, in 1999, the company re-entered the airframe business with its purchase of Gulfstream Aerospace. General Dynamics traces its ancestry to John Philip Hollands Holland Torpedo Boat Company and this company was responsible for developing the U. S. Navys first submarines built at Lewis Nixons Crescent Shipyard, located in Elizabethport, New Jersey. The revolutionary submarine boat Holland VI was built there, its keel being laid down in 1896, crescents superintendent and naval architect, Arthur Leopold Busch, supervised the construction of this submarine.
After being launched on 17 May 1897, it was purchased by the Navy. The Holland was officially commissioned on 12 October 1900 and became the United States Navys first submarine, the Navy placed an order for more submarines, which were developed in rapid succession and were assembled at two different locations on both coasts. These submarines were known as the A-Class or Adder Class, Holland effectively lost control of the company and found himself earning a salary of $90 a week as chief engineer, while the company that he founded was selling submarines for $300,000 each. Holland resigned from the company effective April 1904, rice became Electric Boats first President, remaining there from that time until 1915 when he stepped down just prior to his death on 2 November 1915. Electric Boat gained a reputation for unscrupulous arms dealing in 1904-05, when it sold submarines to Japans Imperial Japanese Navy and Russias Imperial Russian Navy, who were at war. Holland submarines were sold to the British Royal Navy through the English armaments company Vickers.
The new pioneering craft originally developed by the company was now legitimized as genuine naval weapons by the worlds most powerful navies. In the post-World War II wind-down, Electric Boat was cash-flush but lacking in work, hoping to diversify and chief executive officer John Jay Hopkins started looking for companies that would fit into Electric Boats market. Hopkins quickly found that Canadair, owned by the Canadian government, was suffering from similar post-war malaise and was up for sale, Hopkins bought the company for $10 million in 1946. Even by the Canadian governments calculations, the factory alone was more than $22 million. When Electric Boat purchased Canadair, its line and inventory systems were in disorder. Hopkins hired Canadian-born mass-production specialist H. Oliver West to take over the presidents role, as defense spending increased with the onset of the Cold War, Canadair went on to win many Canadian military contracts for the Royal Canadian Air Force, and became a major aerospace company
Tool
A tool is any physical item that can be used to achieve a goal, especially if the item is not consumed in the process. Tool use by humans dates back millions of years, and other animals are known to employ simple tools. Tools that are used in fields or activities may have different designations such as instrument, implement, device. The set of tools needed to achieve a goal is equipment, the knowledge of constructing and using tools is technology. Anthropologists believe that the use of tools was an important step in the evolution of mankind, because tools are used extensively by both humans and wild chimpanzees, it is widely assumed that the first routine use of tools took place prior to the divergence between the two species. These early tools, were made of perishable materials such as sticks. Stone artifacts only date back to about 2.5 million years ago, however, a 2010 study suggests the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis ate meat by carving animal carcasses with stone implements.
This finding pushes back the earliest known use of tools among hominins to about 3.4 million years ago. Finds of actual tools date back at least 2.6 million years in Ethiopia, one of the earliest distinguishable stone tool forms is the hand axe. Up until recently, weapons found in digs were the tools of “early man” that were studied. Now, more tools are recognized as culturally and historically relevant, as well as hunting, other activities required tools such as preparing food, “…nutting, grain harvesting and woodworking…” Included in this group are “flake stone tools. “Man the hunter” as the catalyst for Hominin change has been questioned, based on marks on the bones at archaeological sites, it is now more evident that pre-humans were scavenging off of other predators carcasses rather than killing their own food. Mechanical devices experienced an expansion in their use in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome with the systematic employment of new energy sources. Their use expanded through the Dark Ages with the addition of windmills, machine tools occasioned a surge in producing new tools in the industrial revolution.
Advocates of nanotechnology expect a similar surge as tools become microscopic in size, one can classify tools according to their basic functions and edge tools, such as the knife, scythe or sickle, are wedge-shaped implements that produce a shearing force along a narrow face. Ideally, the edge of the needs to be harder than the material being cut or else the blade will become dulled with repeated use. But even resilient tools will require periodic sharpening, which is the process of removing deformation wear from the edge, other examples of cutting tools include gouges and drill bits. Moving tools move large and tiny items, many are levers which give the user a mechanical advantage
Raw material
As feedstock, the term connotes these materials are bottleneck assets and are highly important with regards to producing other products. This phenomenon, known as Dutch disease or the resource curse, an example of this is the geological scandal of the Democratic Republic of Congo as it is rich in raw materials, the Second Congo War focused on controlling these raw materials. Raw materials are used by non-humans, such as birds using found objects. Karl Marx, Vol.1, Part III, Chap
Sports equipment
Sports equipment, called sporting goods where sold, is any object used for sport or exercise. Also protective equipment such as weight lifting belts and bench shirts for weight training and powerlifting, vehicles are used as equipment for some sports, including motor sport, aeronautics and hot air ballooning. Small vehicles with flatbeds are often used to carry injured athletes off the field, historically many sports have developed their sporting equipment over time. For instance, the use of a soccer ball dates back to ancient China, as the sporting equipment industry improves, so does the athletes performance. This is due to the fact that the equipment is more efficient and stronger it forming a bio-mechanical system, since the massive adoption of wearable, new sport equipment tend to be electronics and connected to deliver data performances
Furniture
Furniture refers to movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping. Furniture is used to hold objects at a convenient height for work, Furniture can be a product of design and is considered a form of decorative art. In addition to furnitures functional role, it can serve a symbolic or religious purpose and it can be made from many materials, including metal and wood. Furniture can be using a variety of woodworking joints which often reflect the local culture. People have been using natural objects, such as stumps and moss. Archaeological research shows that from around 30,000 years ago, people began constructing and carving their own furniture, using wood, early furniture from this period is known from artwork such as a Venus figurine found in Russia, depicting the goddess on a throne. The first surviving extant furniture is in the homes of Skara Brae in Scotland, complex construction techniques such as joinery began in the early dynastic period of ancient Egypt.
This era saw constructed wooden pieces, including stools and tables, sometimes decorated with valuable metals or ivory. The evolution of furniture design continued in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, with thrones being commonplace as well as the klinai, multipurpose couches used for relaxing, the furniture of the Middle Ages was usually heavy and ornamented. Furniture design expanded during the Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, the seventeenth century, in both Southern and Northern Europe, was characterized by opulent, often gilded Baroque designs. The nineteenth century is defined by revival styles. The first three-quarters of the century are often seen as the march towards Modernism. One unique outgrowth of post-modern furniture design is a return to natural shapes and textures, the English word furniture is derived from the French word fourniture, the noun form of fournir, which means to supply or provide. Thus fourniture in French means supplies or provisions, the practice of using natural objects as rudimentary pieces of furniture likely dates to the beginning of human civilisation.
Early humans are likely to have used tree stumps as seats, rocks as rudimentary tables, during the late palaeolithic or early neolithic period, from around 30,000 years ago, people began constructing and carving their own furniture, using wood and animal bones. The earliest evidence for the existence of constructed furniture is a Venus figurine found at the Gagarino site in Russia, a similar statue of a Mother Goddess was found in Catal Huyuk in Turkey, dating to between 6000 and 5500 BC. The inclusion of such a seat in the figurines implies that these were already common artefacts of that age, a range of unique stone furniture has been excavated in Skara Brae, a Neolithic village in Orkney, Scotland. Each house shows a degree of sophistication and was equipped with an extensive assortment of stone furniture, ranging from cupboards and beds to shelves, stone seats
China
European Union
United States
Eurozone
Japan
Germany
South Korea
India
Italy
France
United Kingdom
Indonesia
Brazil
Mexico
Spain
Russia
Canada
Turkey
Switzerland
Thailand
Ireland
Netherlands
. New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
