Seat belt
A seat belt is a vehicle safety device designed to secure the occupant of a vehicle against harmful movement that may result during a collision or a sudden stop. A seat belt functions to reduce the likelihood of death or serious injury in a traffic collision by reducing the force of secondary impacts with interior strike hazards, by keeping occupants positioned for maximum effectiveness of the airbag and by preventing occupants being ejected from the vehicle in a crash or if the vehicle rolls over; when in motion, the driver and passengers are travelling at the same speed as the car. If the driver makes the car stop or crashes it, the driver and passengers continue at the same speed the car was going before it stopped. A seatbelt applies an opposing force to the driver and passengers to prevent them from falling out or making contact with the interior of the car. Seatbelts are considered Primary Restraint Systems, because of their vital role in occupant safety. An analysis conducted in the United States in 1984 compared a variety of seat belt types alone and in combination with air bags.
The range of fatality reduction for front seat passengers was broad, from 20% to 55%, as was the range of major injury, from 25% to 60%. More the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has summarized this data by stating "seat belts reduce serious crash-related injuries and deaths by about half." Most seatbelt malfunctions are a result of there being too much slack in the seatbelt at the time of the accident. In 1946, Dr. C. Hunter Shelden opened a neurological practice at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, California. In the early 1950s, Dr. Shelden made a major contribution to the automotive industry with his idea of retractable seat belts; this came about his from his care of the high number of head injuries coming through the emergency room. He investigated the early seat belts whose primitive designs were implicated in these injuries and deaths. To reduce the high level of injuries he was seeing, he proposed, in late 1955, retractable seat belts, recessed steering wheels, reinforced roofs, roll bars, automatic door locks, passive restraints such as the air bag.
Subsequently, in 1966, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act requiring all automobiles to comply with certain safety standards. American car manufacturers Nash and Ford offered seat belts as options, while Swedish Saab first introduced seat belts as standard in 1958. After the Saab GT 750 was introduced at the New York Motor Show in 1958 with safety belts fitted as standard, the practice became commonplace. Glenn Sheren, of Mason, submitted a patent application on March 31, 1955 for an automotive seat belt and was awarded US Patent 2,855,215 in 1958; this was a continuation of an earlier patent application that Mr. Sheren had filed on September 22, 1952. However, the first modern three point seat belt used in most consumer vehicles today was patented in 1955 U. S. Patent 2,710,649 by the Americans Roger W. Griswold and Hugh DeHaven; the Swedish national electric utility, did a study of all fatal, on-the-job accidents among their employees. The study revealed that the majority of fatalities occurred while the employees were on the road on company business.
In response, two Vattenfall safety engineers, Bengt Odelgard and Per-Olof Weman, started to develop a seat belt. Their work was presented to Swedish manufacturer Volvo in the late 1950s, set the standard for seat belts in Swedish cars; the three-point seatbelt was developed to its modern form by Swedish inventor Nils Bohlin for Volvo—who introduced it in 1959 as standard equipment. In addition to designing an effective three-point belt, Bohlin demonstrated its effectiveness in a study of 28,000 accidents in Sweden. Unbelted occupants sustained fatal injuries throughout the whole speed scale, whereas none of the belted occupants were fatally injured at accident speeds below 60 mph. No belted occupant was fatally injured. Bohlin was granted U. S. Patent 3,043,625 for the device; the world's first seat belt law was put in place in 1970, in the state of Victoria, making the wearing of a seat belt compulsory for drivers and front-seat passengers. This legislation was enacted after trialing Hemco seatbelts, designed by Desmond Hemphill, in the front seats of police vehicles, lowering the incidence of officer injury and death.
A 2-point belt attaches at its two endpoints. A simple strap was first used March 12, 1910 by pilot Benjamin Foulois, a pioneering aviator with the Aeronautical Division, U. S. Signal Corps, so he might remain at the controls during turbulence. A lap belt is a strap; this was the most installed type of belt prior to legislation requiring three-point belts, is found in older cars. Coaches are equipped with lap belts. University of Minnesota Professor James J. Ryan was the inventor of and held the patent on the automatic retractable lap safety belt. Ralph Nader cited Ryan's work in Unsafe at Any Speed and in 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed two bills requiring safety belts in all passenger vehicles starting in 1968; until the 1980s, three-point belts were available only in the front outboard seats of cars. Evidence of the potential of lap belts to cause separation of the lumbar vertebrae and the sometimes associated paralysis, or "seat belt syndrome", led to progressive revision of passenger safety regulations in nearly all developed countries to require three-point belts first in all outboard seating position
Metal
A metal is a material that, when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured, shows a lustrous appearance, conducts electricity and heat well. Metals are malleable or ductile. A metal may be an alloy such as stainless steel. In physics, a metal is regarded as any substance capable of conducting electricity at a temperature of absolute zero. Many elements and compounds that are not classified as metals become metallic under high pressures. For example, the nonmetal iodine becomes a metal at a pressure of between 40 and 170 thousand times atmospheric pressure; some materials regarded as metals can become nonmetals. Sodium, for example, becomes a nonmetal at pressure of just under two million times atmospheric pressure. In chemistry, two elements that would otherwise qualify as brittle metals—arsenic and antimony—are instead recognised as metalloids, on account of their predominately non-metallic chemistry. Around 95 of the 118 elements in the periodic table are metals; the number is inexact as the boundaries between metals and metalloids fluctuate due to a lack of universally accepted definitions of the categories involved.
In astrophysics the term "metal" is cast more to refer to all chemical elements in a star that are heavier than the lightest two and helium, not just traditional metals. A star fuses lighter atoms hydrogen and helium, into heavier atoms over its lifetime. Used in that sense, the metallicity of an astronomical object is the proportion of its matter made up of the heavier chemical elements. Metals are present in many aspects of modern life; the strength and resilience of some metals has led to their frequent use in, for example, high-rise building and bridge construction, as well as most vehicles, many home appliances, tools and railroad tracks. Precious metals were used as coinage, but in the modern era, coinage metals have extended to at least 23 of the chemical elements; the history of metals is thought to begin with the use of copper about 11,000 years ago. Gold, iron and brass were in use before the first known appearance of bronze in the 5th millennium BCE. Subsequent developments include the production of early forms of steel.
Metals are lustrous, at least when freshly prepared, polished, or fractured. Sheets of metal thicker than a few micrometres appear opaque; the solid or liquid state of metals originates in the capacity of the metal atoms involved to lose their outer shell electrons. Broadly, the forces holding an individual atom’s outer shell electrons in place are weaker than the attractive forces on the same electrons arising from interactions between the atoms in the solid or liquid metal; the electrons involved become delocalised and the atomic structure of a metal can be visualised as a collection of atoms embedded in a cloud of mobile electrons. This type of interaction is called a metallic bond; the strength of metallic bonds for different elemental metals reaches a maximum around the center of the transition metal series, as these elements have large numbers of delocalized electrons. Although most elemental metals have higher densities than most nonmetals, there is a wide variation in their densities, lithium being the least dense and osmium the most dense.
Magnesium and titanium are light metals of significant commercial importance. Their respective densities of 1.7, 2.7 and 4.5 g/cm3 can be compared to those of the older structural metals, like iron at 7.9 and copper at 8.9 g/cm3. An iron ball would thus weigh about as much as three aluminium balls. Metals are malleable and ductile, deforming under stress without cleaving; the nondirectional nature of metallic bonding is thought to contribute to the ductility of most metallic solids. In contrast, in an ionic compound like table salt, when the planes of an ionic bond slide past one another, the resultant change in location shifts ions of the same charge into close proximity, resulting in the cleavage of the crystal; such a shift is not observed in a covalently bonded crystal, such as a diamond, where fracture and crystal fragmentation occurs. Reversible elastic deformation in metals can be described by Hooke's Law for restoring forces, where the stress is linearly proportional to the strain. Heat or forces larger than a metal's elastic limit may cause a permanent deformation, known as plastic deformation or plasticity.
An applied force may be a compressive force, or a shear, bending or torsion force. A temperature change may affect the movement or displacement of structural defects in the metal such as grain boundaries, point vacancies and screw dislocations, stacking faults and twins in both crystalline and non-crystalline metals. Internal slip and metal fatigue may ensue; the atoms of metallic substances are arranged in one of three common crystal structures, namely body-centered cubic, face-centered cubic, hexagonal close-packed. In bcc, each atom is positioned at the center of a cube of eight others. In fcc and hcp, each atom is surrounded by twelve others; some metals adopt different structures depending on the temperature. The
Milwaukee
Milwaukee is the largest city in the state of Wisconsin and the fifth-largest city in the Midwestern United States. The seat of the eponymous county, it is on Lake Michigan's western shore. Ranked by its estimated 2014 population, Milwaukee was the 31st largest city in the United States; the city's estimated population in 2017 was 595,351. Milwaukee is the main cultural and economic center of the Milwaukee metropolitan area which had a population of 2,043,904 in the 2014 census estimate, it is the second-most densely populated metropolitan area in the Midwest, surpassed only by Chicago. Milwaukee is considered a Gamma global city as categorized by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network with a regional GDP of over $105 billion; the first Europeans to pass through the area were French Catholic Jesuit missionaries, who were ministering to Native Americans, fur traders. In 1818, the French Canadian explorer Solomon Juneau settled in the area, in 1846, Juneau's town combined with two neighboring towns to incorporate as the city of Milwaukee.
Large numbers of German immigrants arrived during the late 1840s, after the German revolutions, with Poles and other eastern European immigrants arriving in the following decades. Milwaukee is known for its brewing traditions, begun with the German immigrants. Beginning in the early 21st century, the city has been undergoing its largest construction boom since the 1960s. Major new additions to the city in the past two decades include the Milwaukee Riverwalk, the Wisconsin Center, Miller Park, the Milwaukee Streetcar, an expansion to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee Repertory Theater, Pier Wisconsin, as well as major renovations to the UW–Milwaukee Panther Arena; the Fiserv Forum opened in late 2018. The name "Milwaukee" comes from an Algonquian word millioke, meaning "good", "beautiful" and "pleasant land" or "gathering place "; the name has a less pleasant connotation in the Menominee language, where it is called Māēnāēwah, "some misfortune happens". Indigenous cultures lived along the waterways for thousands of years.
The first recorded inhabitants of the Milwaukee area are the historic Menominee, Mascouten, Sauk and Ojibwe. Many of these people had lived around Green Bay before migrating to the Milwaukee area around the time of European contact. In the second half of the 18th century, the Native Americans living near Milwaukee played a role in all the major European wars on the American continent. During the French and Indian War, a group of "Ojibwas and Pottawattamies from the far Michigan" joined the French-Canadian Daniel Liénard de Beaujeu at the Battle of the Monongahela. In the American Revolutionary War, the Native Americans around Milwaukee were some of the few groups to ally with the rebel Continentals. After the Revolutionary War, the Native Americans fought the United States in the Northwest Indian War as part of the Council of Three Fires. During the War of 1812, they held a council in Milwaukee in June 1812, which resulted in their decision to attack Chicago in retaliation against American expansion.
This resulted in the Battle of Fort Dearborn on August 15, 1812, the only known armed conflict in the Chicago area. This battle convinced the American government that the Native Americans had to be removed from their land. After being attacked in the Black Hawk War in 1832, the Native Americans in Milwaukee signed the Treaty of Chicago with the United States in 1833. In exchange for their ceding their lands in the area, they were to receive monetary payments and lands west of the Mississippi in Indian Territory. Europeans had arrived in the Milwaukee area prior to the 1833 Treaty of Chicago. French missionaries and traders first passed through the area in the late 18th centuries. Alexis Laframboise, in 1785, coming from Michilimackinac settled a trading post. Early explorers called the Milwaukee River and surrounding lands various names: Melleorki, Mahn-a-waukie and Milwaucki, in efforts to transliterate the native terms. For many years, printed records gave the name as "Milwaukie". One story of Milwaukee's name says, ne day during the thirties of the last century a newspaper calmly changed the name to Milwaukee, Milwaukee it has remained until this day.
The spelling "Milwaukie" lives on in Milwaukie, named after the Wisconsin city in 1847, before the current spelling was universally accepted. Milwaukee has three "founding fathers": Solomon Juneau, Byron Kilbourn, George H. Walker. Solomon Juneau was the first of the three to come to the area, in 1818, he founded. In competition with Juneau, Byron Kilbourn established Kilbourntown west of the Milwaukee River, he ensured. This accounts for the large number of angled bridges. Further, Kilbourn distributed maps of the area which only showed Kilbourntown, implying Juneautown did not exist or the river's east side was uninhabited and thus undesirable; the third prominent developer was George H. Walker, he claimed land to the south of the Milwaukee River, along with Juneautown, where he built a log house in 1834. This area became known as Walker's Point; the first large wave of settlement to the areas that would become Milwaukee County and the City of Milwaukee began in 1835, following removal of the tribes in the Co
Bow collector
A bow collector is one of the three main devices used on tramcars to transfer electric current from the wires above to the tram below. While once common in continental Europe, it was replaced by the pantograph or the trolley pole, itself later replaced by the pantograph; when the bow collector was first conceived by German inventor Ernst Werner von Siemens in the late 1880s, American inventor Frank J. Sprague of Virginia had just patented his trolley pole system of current collection from an overhead wire. To avoid contravening this patent, the Siemens company was forced to design its own, unique form of current collection, namely the bow collector; the bow collector was first used by the Siemens electric company in its early electric tramcars in either the late 1880s or early 1890s. The Hobart electric tramway system - the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, opened in 1893 - used Siemens cars with early bow collectors. Many other continental European and some British tramway systems, including Leeds and Glasgow used this method.
The bow collector is one of the simplest and most reliable methods of current collection used on tramways. The earliest versions were very heavy-gauge wire or steel bars bent into a rectangular shape and mounted long-side-down on the tramcar roof; the height of the collector was such. The top section is made of a 1-inch broad steel rod, machined to have a bow-shaped cross section, hence the name; this bow shaped rod is referred to as the'collector plate', in models may be up to several inches wide. Unlike many trolley poles, the bow collector does not have a revolving base, but is rather fixed centrally to the tramcar roof. In the late 1900s the simple framing methods mentioned above were replaced by more complex and sophisticated methods, but the general mode of operation remained the same; the changes of design are most noticeable on systems where both double- and single-deck cars were used on the same system. Single deck trams have tall and constructed collectors with complicated frames to support the heavy cast-steel collector plate, while double deck cars have heavier collectors with less complicated frames.
To maintain good electrical contact, the bow collector must exert quite strong pressure on the wire above, so complicated systems of springs or weights were put into use to ensure good electrical contact, hence efficient operation was maintained. The steel rails on the tracks act as the electrical return. Properly the bow collector should be mounted in such a way so that the top edge of the collector plate would rise several inches above the wire when the collector frame is standing straight up, thus the collector leans opposite to the direction of travel. To allow this to happen, the overhead wire must be raised by several inches at places where the bows are swung over, such as terminals and turn-outs; this operation is achieved by ropes and pulleys. The collector is folded down to a horizontal position; some early cars had no means to swing the bows over. It was thought that this would happen automatically when the tramcar started travelling the other way, but collectors such as these were a failure.
Most Soviet trams had no means to swing the bows over. These trams were not designed to travel two ways. Another example is KTV-55-2 tramcar which had two bow collectors for the two directions of travelling; the bow collector has fewer moving parts than the trolley pole, but is heavier and sometimes more complicated to construct. The construction of overhead wires for bow collectors is simpler than trolley pole wiring; as bow collectors do not have revolving mountings, the collector cannot jump off the wire or follow the wrong one at intersections, as trolley poles sometimes do. Thus overhead'frogs' and guides for trolley poles are not necessary with bow collectors. Bow collectors are, much noisier than trolley poles; the overhead wires for bow collectors are stretched tighter than for trolley poles, straight sections are'staggered', that is, the wire does not run straight down the centreline of the track, but rather zig-zags across a small distance. This distributes wear across the bow collector's collector plate, extends the collector's life.
In addition to some vintage tramways, bow collectors are still used in some tram systems in the former Soviet Union, e. g. in Kazan and Dzerzhinsk. On the Isle of Man, the Snaefell Mountain Railway's implementation is unusual in that the overhead wire is slack and free to hang in a catenary. Hopkinson bow collectors are used, to avoid problems with trolley poles in high winds on the mountainous route – the Snaefell line uses a Fell rail for braking; each car has two rigidly vertical bow collectors, with a slack wire above them making contact under its own weight. The collectors are not quite tall enough to make contact with the wire at its suspension points, they are far enough apart, relative to the pole spacing, so that while one is out of contact with the wire the other is mid span and making good contact. The collectors can only be lowered by unbolting them at roof level; this inability to isolate them hampered fire fighting when car 5 caught fire in 1970. Similar collectors were used at first on the nearby and earlier Manx Electric Railway.
They gave trouble with poor contact and so the slack wire system was developed. A tensioned wire gave a good contact but broke contact when
Havana
Havana is the capital city, largest city, major port, leading commercial center of Cuba. The city has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, it spans a total of 781.58 km2 – making it the largest city by area, the most populous city, the fourth largest metropolitan area in the Caribbean region. The city of Havana was founded by the Spanish in the 16th century and due to its strategic location it served as a springboard for the Spanish conquest of the Americas, becoming a stopping point for treasure-laden Spanish galleons returning to Spain; the King Philip II of Spain granted Havana the title of City in 1592. Walls as well as forts were built to protect the old city; the sinking of the U. S. battleship Maine in Havana's harbor in 1898 was the immediate cause of the Spanish–American War. The city is the center of the Cuban government, home to various ministries, headquarters of businesses and over 90 diplomatic offices; the current mayor is Marta Hernández of the Communist Party of Cuba. In 2009, the city/province had the third highest income in the country.
Contemporary Havana can be described as three cities in one: Old Havana and the newer suburban districts. The city extends westward and southward from the bay, entered through a narrow inlet and which divides into three main harbors: Mari melena and Antares; the sluggish Almendares River traverses the city from south to north, entering the Straits of Florida a few miles west of the bay. The city attracts over a million tourists annually. Old Havana was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982; the city is noted for its history, culture and monuments. As typical of Cuba, Havana experiences a tropical climate. Most native settlements became the site of Spanish colonial cities retaining their original Taíno names. Conquistador Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar founded Havana on August 25, 1515, on the southern coast of the island, near the present town of Surgidero de Batabanó, or more on the banks of the Mayabeque River close to Playa Mayabeque. All attempts to found. However, an early map of Cuba drawn in 1514 places the town at the mouth of this river.
Between 1514 and 1519 the Spanish established at least two different settlements on the north coast, one of them in La Chorrera, today in the neighborhoods of Vedado and Miramar, next to the Almendares River. The town that became Havana originated adjacent to what was called Puerto de Carenas, in 1519; the quality of this natural bay, which now hosts Havana's harbor, warranted this change of location. Pánfilo de Narváez gave Havana – the sixth town founded by the Spanish on Cuba – its name: San Cristóbal de la Habana; the name combines patron saint of Havana. Shortly after the founding of Cuba's first cities, the island served as little more than a base for the Conquista of other lands. Havana began as a trading port, suffered regular attacks by buccaneers and French corsairs; the first attack and resultant burning of the city was by the French corsair Jacques de Sores in 1555. Such attacks convinced the Spanish Crown to fund the construction of the first fortresses in the main cities – not only to counteract the pirates and corsairs, but to exert more control over commerce with the West Indies, to limit the extensive contrabando that had arisen due to the trade restrictions imposed by the Casa de Contratación of Seville.
Ships from all over the New World carried products first to Havana, in order to be taken by the fleet to Spain. The thousands of ships gathered in the city's bay fueled Havana's agriculture and manufacture, since they had to be supplied with food and other products needed to traverse the ocean. On December 20, 1592, King Philip II of Spain granted Havana the title of City. On, the city would be designated as "Key to the New World and Rampart of the West Indies" by the Spanish Crown. In the meantime, efforts to build or improve the defensive infrastructures of the city continued. Havana expanded in the 17th century. New buildings were constructed from the most abundant materials of the island wood, combining various Iberian architectural styles, as well as borrowing profusely from Canarian characteristics. In 1649, an epidemic of the fatal Yellow fever brought from Cartagena in Colombia affected a third of the European population of Havana. By the middle of the 18th century Havana had more than seventy thousand inhabitants, was the third-largest city in the Americas, ranking behind Lima and Mexico City but ahead of Boston and New York.
During the 18th century Havana was the most important of the Spanish ports because it had facilities where ships could be refitted and, by 1740, it had become Spain's largest and most active shipyard and only drydock in the New World. The city was captured by the British during the Seven Years' War; the episode began on June 6, 1762, when at dawn, a British fleet, comprising more than 50 ships and a combined force of over 11,000 men of the Royal Navy and Army, sailed into Cuban waters and made an amphibious landing east of Havana. The British opened up trade with their North American and Caribbean colonies, causing a rapid transformation of Cuban society. Less than a year after Havana was seized, the Peace of Paris was signed by the three warring powers thus ending the Seven Years' War; the treaty gave
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the most populous city in Canada, with a population of 2,731,571 in 2016. Current to 2016, the Toronto census metropolitan area, of which the majority is within the Greater Toronto Area, held a population of 5,928,040, making it Canada's most populous CMA. Toronto is the anchor of an urban agglomeration, known as the Golden Horseshoe in Southern Ontario, located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A global city, Toronto is a centre of business, finance and culture, is recognized as one of the most multicultural and cosmopolitan cities in the world. People have travelled through and inhabited the Toronto area, situated on a broad sloping plateau interspersed with rivers, deep ravines, urban forest, for more than 10,000 years. After the broadly disputed Toronto Purchase, when the Mississauga surrendered the area to the British Crown, the British established the town of York in 1793 and designated it as the capital of Upper Canada. During the War of 1812, the town was the site of the Battle of York and suffered heavy damage by United States troops.
York was incorporated in 1834 as the city of Toronto. It was designated as the capital of the province of Ontario in 1867 during Canadian Confederation; the city proper has since expanded past its original borders through both annexation and amalgamation to its current area of 630.2 km2. The diverse population of Toronto reflects its current and historical role as an important destination for immigrants to Canada. More than 50 percent of residents belong to a visible minority population group, over 200 distinct ethnic origins are represented among its inhabitants. While the majority of Torontonians speak English as their primary language, over 160 languages are spoken in the city. Toronto is a prominent centre for music, motion picture production, television production, is home to the headquarters of Canada's major national broadcast networks and media outlets, its varied cultural institutions, which include numerous museums and galleries and public events, entertainment districts, national historic sites, sports activities, attract over 25 million tourists each year.
Toronto is known for its many skyscrapers and high-rise buildings, in particular the tallest free-standing structure in the Western Hemisphere, the CN Tower. The city is home to the Toronto Stock Exchange, the headquarters of Canada's five largest banks, the headquarters of many large Canadian and multinational corporations, its economy is diversified with strengths in technology, financial services, life sciences, arts, business services, environmental innovation, food services, tourism. When Europeans first arrived at the site of present-day Toronto, the vicinity was inhabited by the Iroquois, who had displaced the Wyandot people, occupants of the region for centuries before c. 1500. The name Toronto is derived from the Iroquoian word tkaronto, meaning "place where trees stand in the water"; this refers to the northern end of what is now Lake Simcoe, where the Huron had planted tree saplings to corral fish. However, the word "Toronto", meaning "plenty" appears in a 1632 French lexicon of the Huron language, an Iroquoian language.
It appears on French maps referring to various locations, including Georgian Bay, Lake Simcoe, several rivers. A portage route from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron running through this point, known as the Toronto Carrying-Place Trail, led to widespread use of the name. In the 1660s, the Iroquois established two villages within what is today Toronto, Ganatsekwyagon on the banks of the Rouge River and Teiaiagon on the banks of the Humber River. By 1701, the Mississauga had displaced the Iroquois, who abandoned the Toronto area at the end of the Beaver Wars, with most returning to their base in present-day New York. French traders abandoned it in 1759 during the Seven Years' War; the British defeated the French and their indigenous allies in the war, the area became part of the British colony of Quebec in 1763. During the American Revolutionary War, an influx of British settlers came here as United Empire Loyalists fled for the British-controlled lands north of Lake Ontario; the Crown granted them land to compensate for their losses in the Thirteen Colonies.
The new province of Upper Canada was being needed a capital. In 1787, the British Lord Dorchester arranged for the Toronto Purchase with the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nation, thereby securing more than a quarter of a million acres of land in the Toronto area. Dorchester intended the location to be named Toronto. In 1793, Governor John Graves Simcoe established the town of York on the Toronto Purchase lands, naming it after Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. Simcoe decided to move the Upper Canada capital from Newark to York, believing that the new site would be less vulnerable to attack by the United States; the York garrison was constructed at the entrance of the town's natural harbour, sheltered by a long sand-bar peninsula. The town's settlement formed at the eastern end of the harbour behind the peninsula, near the present-day intersection of Parliament Street and Front Street. In 1813, as part of the War of 1812, the Battle of York ended in the town's capture and plunder by United States forces.
The surrender of the town was negotiated by John Strachan. American soldiers destroyed much of the garrison and set fire to the parliament buildings during their five-day occupation; because of the sacking of York, British troops retaliated in the war with the Burning of Wa
Frank J. Sprague
Frank Julian Sprague was an American naval officer and inventor who contributed to the development of the electric motor, electric railways, electric elevators. His contributions were important in promoting urban development by increasing the size cities could reasonably attain and by allowing greater concentration of business in commercial sections, he became known as the "Father of Electric Traction". Sprague was born in Milford, Connecticut in 1857 to David Cummings Sprague and Frances Julia King Sprague, he attended Drury High School in North Adams and excelled in mathematics. In 1874, he won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy in Maryland. There, he graduated seventh in the class of 1878, he was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy. During his ensuing naval service, he first served on the USS Richmond the USS Minnesota. While his ship was in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1881, Sprague invented the inverted type of dynamo. After he was transferred to the USS Lancaster, flagship of the European Squadron, he installed the first electric call-bell system on a United States Navy ship.
Sprague took leave to attend the International Exposition of Electricity of 1881 in Paris and the Crystal Palace Exhibition in Sydenham, England in 1882, where he was on the jury of awards for gas engines and lamps. In 1883, Edward H. Johnson, a business associate of Thomas Edison, persuaded Sprague to resign his naval commission to work for Edison. One of Sprague's significant contributions to the Edison Laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, was the introduction of mathematical methods. Prior to his arrival, Edison conducted many costly trial-and-error experiments. Sprague's approach was to calculate using mathematics the optimum parameters and thus save much needless tinkering, he did important work for Edison, including correcting Edison's system of mains and feeders for central station distribution. In 1884, he decided his interests in the exploitation of electricity lay elsewhere, he left Edison to found the Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company. By 1886, Sprague's company had introduced two important inventions: a constant-speed, non-sparking motor with fixed brushes, regenerative braking, a method of braking that uses the drive motor to return power to the main supply system.
His motor was the first to maintain constant speed under varying load. It was popular, was endorsed by Edison as the only practical electric motor available, his regenerative braking system was important in the development of the electric train and the electric elevator. Sprague's inventions included several improvements to designs for systems of electric streetcars collecting electricity from overhead lines, he improved designs for a spring-loaded trolley pole, developed in 1885 by Charles Van Depoele, devised a improved mounting for streetcar motors and better gear designs, proved that regenerative braking was practical. After testing his trolley system in late 1887 and early 1888, Sprague installed the first successful large electric street railway system – the Richmond Union Passenger Railway in Richmond, which began passenger operation on February 2, 1888. Long a transportation obstacle, the hills of Richmond included grades of over 10%, were an excellent proving ground for acceptance of his new technology in other cities, in contrast to the cable cars which climbed the steepest grades of Nob Hill in San Francisco at the time.
By the summer of 1888, Henry M. Whitney of the West End Street Railway in Boston had witnessed the simultaneous startup of multiple streetcars on a single power source, had signed up for conversion. By January 1889, Boston had its first electric streetcars — which would be the first in the Americas to go underground some eight years — and which had become so popular and noteworthy that poet Oliver Wendell Holmes composed a verse about the new trolley pole technology, the sparking contact shoe at its apex: Since on many a car you'll see A broomstick as plain as plain can be. Within a year, electric power had started to replace more costly horsecars in many cities. By 1889 110 electric railways incorporating Sprague's equipment had been begun or planned on several continents. In 1890, who manufactured most of Sprague's equipment, bought him out, Sprague turned his attention to electric elevators. However, he continued to be interested in the use of electricity for urban transportation and proposed a major expansion of London's Underground in 1901.
Sprague's system of electric supply was a great advantage in relation to the first bipolar U-tube overhead lines, in everyday use since 1883 on the Mödling and Hinterbrühl Tram. While electrifying the streetcars of Richmond, the increased passenger capacity and speed gave Sprague the notion that similar results could be achieved in vertical transportation — electric elevators, he saw that increasing the capacity of elevator shafts would not only save passengers' time, but would increase the earnings of tall buildings, with height limited by the total floor space taken up in the shaftways by slow hydraulic-powered elevators. In 1892, Sprague founded the Sprague Electric Elevator Company. Working with Charles R. Pratt he developed the Sprague-Pratt Electric Elevator; the company developed floor control, automatic elevators, acceleration control of car safeties and a number of freight elevators. The Spague-Pratt elevator ran faster and with larger loads than hydraulic or steam elevators, 584 elevators had been installed worldwide.
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