Los Angeles Convention Center
The Los Angeles Convention Center is a convention center in the southwest section of downtown Los Angeles. The LACC hosts multiple annual conventions and has been used as a filming location in TV show and movies; the Convention Center, designed by architect Charles Luckman, opened in 1971 and expanded in 1981, 1993 and 1997. It was built as a rectanglular building, between Pico Boulevard and 11th Street on Figueroa Street; the northeast portion of the Center was demolished in 1997 to make way for the Staples Center. The Convention Center Annex of green glass and white steel frames on the south side of Pico, was designed by architect James Ingo Freed; the area in front of the Convention Center is known as the Gilbert Lindsay Plaza, named for the late councilman who represented the Downtown area of Los Angeles for many years. A 10-foot -high monument honoring "The Emperor of the Great 9th District" was unveiled in 1995; the drive between Figueroa Street and the Convention Center building is named after Councilman Lindsay.
On March 1, 1983, a tornado caused damages to upper-level panels. The building was repaired and new Convention Center lettering signs were installed at a total cost of $3 million. On September 15, 2008, the Los Angeles Convention Center became the first U. S. convention center and first Los Angeles City building of its age and size in the U. S. to be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certified for Existing Buildings from the United States Green Building Council. In 2013, the Los Angeles City Council voted to let Anschutz Entertainment Group manage the Convention Center; the LACC hosts annual events such as the Los Angeles Auto Show, the Abilities Expo, the Anime Expo, is best known to video game fans as host to the Electronic Entertainment Expo known as E3. During the week leading up to the annual Grammy Awards, the convention center hosts several Grammy week events. Since 2005, the convention center has hosted the MusiCares Person of the Year tribute, which takes place two days prior to the Grammy Awards.
It hosted the pre-telecast portion of the Grammy Awards until 2013, when the pre-telecast was moved to the Nokia Theatre. Following the annual Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony, the convention center hosts the Governors Ball, one of the major Emmy after-parties. During the 2028 Summer Olympics, the convention center will host six sports, it will host women's Basketball Preliminaries, Fencing, Table Tennis and BMX Freestyle. It will be a part of the Live Site Olympic Zone down Figueroa St; the LACC is one of the largest convention centers in the United States with over 720,000 sq ft of exhibition space, 147,000 sq ft of meeting space, 1,960,000 sq ft of parking, a 299-seat theater. The lobby floors in the north half of the building feature two large 140,000 sq ft multicolor maps of inlaid terrazzo; the project was installed by artist Alexis Smith in 1993. A map of the world centered on the Pacific Rim covers the entire floor of the main lobby, while a map of the constellations around the north celestial pole covers the floor of the upstairs lobby.
South Hall Kentia Hall West Hall Neil Petree Hall Concourse 3 food courts On-site parking for 5,600 vehicles including electrical charge stations In 2010, the Anschutz Entertainment Group and businessman Casey Wasserman proposed construction of Farmers Field, a US$1 billion combination football stadium and convention center, meant to attract the return of a National Football League team to the Los Angeles area. The development proposal was abandoned in March 2015. A new proposal was developed in 2015, approved by city hall and a design team was chosen. A new convention hall, called "LACOEX", would be built, with a connection to the south hall. Construction and approval is set to commence by 2019. William M. Hughes, Los Angeles City Council member, 1927–1929, urged conventions to come to Los Angeles List of convention centers in the United States Los Angeles Convention Center website Los Angeles Convention Center Twitter @ConventionLA Los Angeles Convention Center Facebook @ConventionLA Los Angeles Convention Center Instagram @Conventioncenterla Los Angeles Convention Center TripAdvisor Los Angeles Convention Center Yelp
Cliff Henderson
Clifford "Cliff" Henderson was the managing director of the National Air Races from 1928 through 1939. Described as "the Barnum of aviation," he obtained sponsors for two of the most well-known air races of the period, the Bendix transcontinental and the Thompson closed-course classics; the Thompson Trophy was first awarded in 1929. The 1929 National Air Races included the first official women-only event, the Women's Air Derby, a cross-country race from Los Angeles to Cleveland, Ohio. In 1931, he convinced businessman Vincent Bendix to sponsor the Bendix Trophy Race, a transcontinental speed dash open to men and women. Henderson was awarded the L'Ordre de'Etoile Noire de Benin for his service in World War II as the U. S. Air Force Military Commissioner of Dakar. With his brother Phillip, Henderson built the Pan-Pacific Auditorium in 1935; the landmark Streamline Moderne convention center, designed by Los Angeles architects Wurdeman & Becket, was the region's primary indoor venue with 100,000 square feet of exhibition space and seating for up to 6,000.
It closed after the 1972 opening of the much larger Los Angeles Convention Center. Henderson and his brother Randall founded Palm Desert, California in the 1940s, envisioning a modern utopia growing from the scrub, he built the Shadow Mountain Club in 1948. With its glamorous figure-eight swimming pool and high-dive competitions, the club drew celebrities and future residents. Born in Iowa, Henderson graduated from the University of Southern California with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1917, he served in the 35th Ambulance Unit, in France during World War I transferred to the 101st Aero Squadron. After the war, Henderson settled in Los Angeles and promoted aviation, serving as chairman of ground arrangements for the Army's Around the World Flight in 1924 from Clover Field. Becoming Director of Aviation of Los Angeles in 1928, he served as the first manager of the Los Angeles airport system. In that same year Henderson became manager of the National Air Races, promoting aviation with competition trophies, including the Thompson and Grieve Trophies.
He retired from the National Air Races in 1939. In World War II, Henderson served in the Army Air Corps, he was involved in planning the Burma Hump air route, served as military governor of Dakar in North Africa. Henderson was a member of a male-only aviators' social club. Henderson was married to actress Marian Marsh, he died on March 1984 in Rancho Mirage near Palm Desert. The National Aeronautic Association presents an annual Cliff Henderson Award for Achievement; the award is given to a living individual or group whose vision, leadership, or skill has made a significant and lasting contribution to the promotion and advancement of aviation or space activity. Notable recipients of the Cliff Henderson Trophy include Wesley L. McDonald, Walter J. Boyne, Thomas H. Miller, Eugene Peyton Deatrick. In 1978, a bust of Henderson was dedicated in Palm Desert; the bust, by Henry McCann, serves as a tribute to Henderson's role as an early developer of the city. "Cliff Henderson Special Collection". San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives, Flickr.
Retrieved 14 October 2016. "Finding aid for the Cliff Henderson Photo Collection". San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives. Retrieved 1 December 2016. "Finding aid for the Clifford W. Henderson Photographs". Western Reserve Historical Society. Retrieved 14 October 2016. Schultz, Barbara H.. Cliff Henderson - Visionary Leader. Lancaster, CA: Little Buttes Publishing Co. ISBN 978-0-9652181-4-6. Archived from the original on 2018-09-28. Retrieved 2018-09-28
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous 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 and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was an American army general and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, he was a five-star general in the United States Army and served as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe, he was responsible for planning and supervising the invasion of North Africa in Operation Torch in 1942–43 and the successful invasion of France and Germany in 1944–45 from the Western Front. Born David Dwight Eisenhower in Denison, Texas, he was raised in Kansas in a large family of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, his family had a strong religious background. His mother was born a Lutheran, married as a River Brethren, became a Jehovah's Witness. So, Eisenhower did not belong to any organized church until 1952, he cited constant relocation during his military career as one reason. He graduated from West Point in 1915 and married Mamie Doud, with whom he had two sons. During World War I, he was denied a request to serve in Europe and instead commanded a unit that trained tank crews.
Following the war, he served under various generals and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general in 1941. After the U. S. entered World War II, Eisenhower oversaw the invasions of North Africa and Sicily before supervising the invasions of France and Germany. After the war, Eisenhower served as Army Chief of Staff and took on the role as president of Columbia University. In 1951–52, he served as the first Supreme Commander of NATO. In 1952, Eisenhower entered the presidential race as a Republican to block the isolationist foreign policies of Senator Robert A. Taft, who opposed NATO and wanted no foreign entanglements, he won that election and the 1956 election in landslides, both times defeating Adlai Stevenson II. He became the first Republican to win since Herbert Hoover in 1928. Eisenhower's main goals in office were to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and reduce federal deficits. In 1953, he threatened the use of nuclear weapons until China agreed to peace terms in the Korean War.
China did agree and an armistice resulted that remains in effect. His New Look policy of nuclear deterrence prioritized inexpensive nuclear weapons while reducing funding for expensive Army divisions, he continued Harry S. Truman's policy of recognizing the Republic of China as the legitimate government of China, he won congressional approval of the Formosa Resolution, his administration provided major aid to help the French fight off Vietnamese Communists in the First Indochina War. After the French left he gave strong financial support to the new state of South Vietnam, he supported local military coups against democratically-elected governments in Guatemala. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Eisenhower condemned the Israeli and French invasion of Egypt, he forced them to withdraw, he condemned the Soviet invasion during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 but took no action. During the Syrian Crisis of 1957 he approved a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion by Syria's pro-Western neighbours.
After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, Eisenhower authorized the establishment of NASA, which led to the Space Race. He deployed 15,000 soldiers during the 1958 Lebanon crisis. Near the end of his term, his efforts to set up a summit meeting with the Soviets collapsed when a U. S. spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union. He approved the Bay of Pigs invasion, left to his successor, John F. Kennedy, to carry out. On the domestic front, Eisenhower was a moderate conservative who continued New Deal agencies and expanded Social Security, he covertly opposed Joseph McCarthy and contributed to the end of McCarthyism by invoking executive privilege. Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent Army troops to enforce federal court orders that integrated schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, his largest program was the Interstate Highway System. He promoted the establishment of strong science education via the National Defense Education Act. Eisenhower's two terms saw widespread economic prosperity except for a minor recession in 1958.
In his farewell address to the nation, Eisenhower expressed his concerns about the dangers of massive military spending deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers. Historical evaluations of his presidency place him among the upper tier of U. S. presidents. The Eisenhauer family migrated from Karlsbrunn in Nassau-Saarbrücken, to North America, first settling in York, Pennsylvania, in 1741, in the 1880s moving to Kansas. Accounts vary as to when the German name Eisenhauer was anglicized to Eisenhower. Eisenhower's Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors, who were farmers, included Hans Nikolaus Eisenhauer of Karlsbrunn, who migrated to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1741. Hans's great-great-grandson, David Jacob Eisenhower, was Eisenhower's father and was a college-educated engineer, despite his own father Jacob's urging to stay on the family farm. Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Eisenhower, born in Virginia, of German Protestant ancestry, moved to Kansas from Virginia, she married David on September 23, 1885, in Lecompton, Kansas, on the campus of their alma mater, Lane University.
David owned a general store in Hope, but the business failed due to economic conditions and the family became impoverished. The Eisenhowers lived in Texas from 1889 until 1892, returned to Kansas, with $24 to their name at the time. David worked as a railroad mechanic and at a creamery. By 1898, the parents provided a suitable home for their large family; the future pr
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was an American singer and actor. Regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, he is referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or "the King". Presley was born in Tupelo and relocated to Memphis, with his family when he was 13 years old, his music career began there in 1954, recording at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips, who wanted to bring the sound of African-American music to a wider audience. Accompanied by guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, Presley was a pioneer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues. In 1955, drummer D. J. Fontana joined to complete the lineup of Presley's classic quartet and RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage him for more than two decades. Presley's first RCA single, "Heartbreak Hotel", was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States. With a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, he became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll.
His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across color lines during a transformative era in race relations, made him enormously popular—and controversial. In November 1956, Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender. Drafted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his recording career two years with some of his most commercially successful work, he held few concerts however, guided by Parker, proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided. In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed television comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of profitable tours. In 1973, Presley gave the first concert by a solo artist to be broadcast around the world, Aloha from Hawaii. Years of prescription drug abuse compromised his health, he died in 1977 at his Graceland estate at the age of 42.
Presley is the best-selling solo artist in the history of recorded music. He was commercially successful in many genres, including pop, country and gospel, he won three competitive Grammys, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame. Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Gladys Love Presley in the two-room shotgun house built by his father, Vernon Elvis Presley, in preparation for the birth. Jesse Garon Presley, his identical twin brother, was delivered 35 minutes before stillborn. Presley became close to both parents and formed an close bond with his mother; the family attended an Assembly of God church. On his mother's side Presley's ancestry was Scots-Irish, with some French Norman. Gladys and the rest of the family believed that her great-great-grandmother, Morning Dove White, was Cherokee. Vernon's forebears were of Scottish origin. Gladys was regarded by friends as the dominant member of the small family.
Vernon moved from one odd job to the evincing little ambition. The family relied on help from neighbors and government food assistance. In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of altering a check written by his landowner and sometime employer, he was jailed for eight months, while Elvis moved in with relatives. In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his teachers regarded him as "average", he was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley's country song "Old Shep" during morning prayers. The contest, held at the Mississippi–Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, was his first public performance; the ten-year-old Presley was dressed as a cowboy. He recalled placing fifth. A few months Presley received his first guitar for his birthday. Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family's church. Presley recalled, "I took the guitar, I watched people, I learned to play a little bit.
But I would never sing in public. I was shy about it."In September 1946, Presley entered a new school, for sixth grade. The following year, he began bringing his guitar to school on a daily basis, he played and sang during lunchtime, was teased as a "trashy" kid who played hillbilly music. By the family was living in a Black neighborhood. Presley was a devotee of Mississippi Slim's show on the Tupelo radio station WELO, he was described as "crazy about music" by Slim's younger brother, one of Presley's classmates and took him into the station. Slim supplemented Presley's guitar tuition by demonstrating chord techniques; when his protégé was twelve years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances. Presley was succeeded in performing the following week. In November 1948, the family moved to Tennessee. After residing for nearly a year in rooming houses, they were granted a two-bedroom apartment in the public housing complex known as the Lauderdale Courts. Enrolled at L. C. Humes Hig
Dodger Stadium
Dodger Stadium called by the metonym Chavez Ravine, is a baseball park located in the Elysian Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, the home field to the Los Angeles Dodgers, the city's National League franchise of Major League Baseball. Opened 57 years ago on April 10, 1962, it was constructed in less than three years at a cost of US$23 million, financed by private sources. Dodger Stadium is the oldest ballpark in MLB west of the Mississippi River, third-oldest overall, after Fenway Park in Boston and Wrigley Field in Chicago and is the world's largest baseball stadium by seat capacity. Referred to as a "pitcher's ballpark", the stadium has seen twelve no-hitters, two of which were perfect games; the stadium hosted the Major League Baseball All-Star Game in 1980 - and will host in 2020 - as well as games of 10 World Series. It hosted the semifinals and finals of the 2009 and 2017 World Baseball Classics, it hosted exhibition baseball during the 1984 Summer Olympics. It will host baseball and softball during the 2028 Summer Olympics.
The stadium hosted a soccer tournament on August 3, 2013 featuring four clubs, the hometown team Los Angeles Galaxy, Europe's Real Madrid and Juventus. For the first time at Dodger Stadium, the Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks played a regular season game on January 25, 2014 as part of the NHL Stadium Series. In the mid-1950s, Brooklyn Dodgers team president Walter O'Malley had tried to build a domed stadium in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, but was unable to reach an agreement with city officials for the land acquisition, reached a deal with the city of Los Angeles; the land for Dodger Stadium was seized from local owners and inhabitants in the early 1950s by the city of Los Angeles using eminent domain with funds from the Federal Housing Act of 1949. The city had planned to develop the Elysian Park Heights public housing project, which included two dozen 13-story buildings and more than 160 two-story townhouses, in addition to newly rebuilt playgrounds and schools, a college. Before construction could begin on the housing project, the local political climate changed when Norris Poulson was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1953.
Proposed public housing projects such as Elysian Park Heights lost most of their support as they became associated with socialist ideals. Following protracted negotiations, the city purchased the Chavez Ravine property back from the Federal Housing Authority at a drastically reduced price, with the stipulation that the land be used for a public purpose, it was not until June 3, 1958, when Los Angeles voters approved a "Taxpayers Committee for Yes on Baseball" referendum, that the Dodgers were able to acquire 352 acres of Chavez Ravine from the city. While Dodger Stadium was under construction, the Dodgers played in the league's largest capacity venue from 1958 through 1961 at their temporary home, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which could seat in excess of 90,000 people. Los Angeles-based Mike Davis, in his seminal work on the city, City of Quartz, describes the process of convincing Chavez Ravine homeowners to sell. With nearly all of the original Spanish-speaking homeowners unwilling to sell, developers resorted to offering immediate cash payments, distributed through their Spanish-speaking agents.
Once the first sales had been completed, remaining homeowners were offered lesser amounts of money, to create a community panic of not receiving fair compensation, or of being left as one of the few holdouts. Many residents continued to hold out despite the pressure being placed upon them by developers, resulting in the Battle of Chavez Ravine, a ten-year struggle by the residents to maintain control of their property, which they lost. Dodger Stadium was the first Major League Baseball stadium since the initial construction of the original Yankee Stadium to be built using 100% private financing, the last until Oracle Park in San Francisco opened in 2000. Ground was broken for Dodger Stadium on September 17, 1959; the top of local ridges were removed and the soil was used to fill in Sulfur and Cemetery Ravines to provide a level surface for a parking lot and the stadium. A local elementary school was buried and sits beneath the parking lot northwest of third base. A total of 8 million cubic yards of earth were moved in the process of building the stadium.
21,000 precast concrete units, some weighing as much as 32 tons, were fabricated onsite and lowered into place with a specially built crane to form the stadium's structural framework. The stadium was designed to be expandable to 85,000 seats by expanding the upper decks over the outfield pavilions. Dodger Stadium was the home of the Los Angeles Angels from 1962 through 1965. To avoid referring to their landlords, the Angels called the park Chavez Ravine Stadium, after the geographic feature in which the stadium sits. At the conclusion of the 2005 season, the Los Angeles Dodgers made major renovations during the subsequent off-season; the largest of these improvements was the replacement of nearly all the seats in the stadium. The seats that were removed had been in use since 1975 and helped give the stadium its unique "space age" feel with a color palette of bright yellow, orange and red; the new seats are in the original 1962 color scheme consisting of yellow, light orange and sky blue. 2,000 pairs of seats were made available for purchase with the proceeds going to charity.
The baseline seating sections have been converted into retro-style "box" seating, adding leg ro
Jet pack
A jet pack, rocket belt, or rocket pack is a device worn on the back which uses jets of gas or liquid to propel the wearer through the air. The concept has been present in science fiction for a century and became widespread in the 1960s. Real jet packs have been developed using a variety of mechanisms, but their uses are much more limited than their fictional counterparts because of the challenges of Earth's atmosphere, low energy density of available fuels, the human body not being suited to fly, they are principally used for stunts. A practical use for the jet pack has been in extra-vehicular activities for astronauts. In the most general terms, a jet pack is a wearable device which allows the user to fly by providing thrust. With the exception of use in a microgravity environment, this thrust must be upwards so as to overcome the force of gravity, must be enough to overcome the weight of the user, the jet pack itself and its fuel; this requires the jet pack to continually push mass in a downwards direction.
While some designs have power and/or mass supplied from an external, ground-based source, untethered flight requires all of a flight's fuel to be carried within the pack. This results in problems relating to the overall mass ratio, which limits the maximum flight time to tens of seconds, rather than the sustained flight envisaged in science fiction; the first jet pack design was developed in 1919 by the Russian inventor Aleksandr Fyodorovich Andreyev. The project was well regarded by Nikolai Rynin and technology historians Yu. V. Biryukov and S. V. Golotyuk, it was issued a patent but was not built or tested. It was oxygen-and-methane-powered with wings each 1 m long. A hydrogen peroxide-powered engine is based on the decomposition reaction of hydrogen peroxide. Nearly pure hydrogen peroxide is used. Pure hydrogen peroxide is stable, but in contact with a catalyst it decomposes into a mixture of superheated steam and oxygen in less than 1/10 millisecond, increasing in volume 5,000 times: 2 H2O2 → 2 H2O + O2.
The reaction is exothermic, i.e. accompanied by the liberation of much heat, forming in this case a steam-gas mixture at 740 °C. This hot gas is used as the reaction mass and is fed directly to one or more jet nozzles; the great disadvantage is the limited operating time. The jet of steam and oxygen can provide significant thrust from lightweight rockets, but the jet has a low exhaust velocity and hence a poor specific impulse; such rocket belts can only fly for about 30 seconds. A more conventional bipropellant could more than double the specific impulse. However, although the exhaust gases from the peroxide-based engine are hot, they are still cooler than those generated by alternative propellants. Using a peroxide-based propellant reduces the risk of a fire/explosion which would cause severe injury to the operator. In contrast to, for example, turbojet engines, which expel atmospheric air to produce thrust, rocket packs are far simpler to build than devices using turbojets; the classical rocket pack construction of Wendell Moore can be made under workshop conditions, given good engineering training and a high level of tool-making craftsmanship.
The main disadvantages of this type of rocket pack are: Short duration of flight. The high expense of the peroxide propellant; the inherent dangers of flying below minimum parachute altitude, hence without any safety equipment to protect the operator if there is an accident or malfunction. Safely learning how to fly it, given; the sheer difficulty of manually flying such a device. These circumstances limit the sphere of the application of rocket packs to spectacular public demonstration flights, i.e. stunts. Justin Capră claimed that he invented a "flying rucksack" in 1956 in Romania, without arousing any apparent interest, informed the American Embassy of his idea. In 1962 a backpack was created following Justin Capră's prototype; the backpack is now displayed in a museum. In 1958, Garry Burdett and Alexander Bohr, Thiokol Corporation engineers, created a Jump Belt which they named Project Grasshopper. Thrust was created by high-pressure compressed nitrogen. Two small nozzles were directed vertically downward.
The wearer of the belt could open a valve, letting out nitrogen from the gas cylinder through the nozzles, which tossed him upward to a height of 7 m. After leaning forward, it was possible with the aid of the jump belt's thrust to run at 45 to 50 km/h. Burdett and Bohr tested a hydrogen peroxide-powered version; the jump belt was demonstrated by a serviceman in action, but as no financing was forthcoming, there was no further testing. In 1959 Aerojet General Corporation won a U. S. Army contract to devise a jet rocket pack. At the start of 1960 Richard Peoples made his first tethered flight with his Aeropack; the military did not lose interest in this type of flight vehicle. Transport studies of the U. S. Army Transportation Research Command determined that personal jet devices could have diverse uses: for reconnaissance, crossing rivers, amphibious landing, accessing steep mountain slopes, overcoming minefields, tactical maneuvering, etc; the concept was named "Small Rocket Lift Device", SRLD.
Within the framework of this conce
