Cassell (publisher)
Cassell & Co is a British book publishing house, founded in 1848 by John Cassell, which became in the 1890s an international publishing group company. In 1995 Cassell & Co acquired Pinter Publishers. In December 1998 Cassell & Co was bought by the Orion Publishing Group. In January 2002 Cassell imprints, including the Cassell Reference and Cassell Military were joined with the Weidenfeld imprints to form a new division under the name of Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd. Cassell Illustrated survives as an imprint of the Octopus Publishing Group. John Cassell, in turn a carpenter, temperance preacher and coffee merchant turned to publishing, his first publication was on 1 July 1848, a weekly newspaper called The Standard of Freedom advocating religious and commercial freedom. The Working Man's Friend became another popular publication. In 1849 Cassell was dividing his time between his grocery business. In 1851 his expanding interests led to his renting part of La Belle Sauvage, a London inn, a playhouse in Elizabethan times.
The former inn was demolished in 1873 to make way for a railway viaduct, with the company building new premises behind. La Belle Sauvage was destroyed in 1941 by WWII bombing as well as many archives. Thomas Dixon Galpin who came from Dorchester in Dorset and George William Petter, born in Barnstaple in Devon were partners in a printing firm and on John Cassell's bankruptcy in June 1855 acquired the publishing company and Cassell's debts. Between 1855 and 1858 the printing firm operated as Petter and Galpin and their work was published by W. Kent & Co. John Cassell was relegated to being a junior partner after becoming insolvent in 1858, the firm being known as Cassell, Petter & Galpin. With the arrival of a new partner, Robert Turner, in 1878, it became Cassell, Galpin & Company. Galpin was the astute business manager. George Lock, the founder of Ward Lock, another publishing house, was Galpin's first cousin. Petter resigned in 1883 as a result of disagreement over publishing fiction, in 1888 the company name was changed to Cassell & Co, following Galpin's retirement and Petter's death.
Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid was general manager until 1905 when Arthur Spurgeon took over and revitalized the firm. Magazine publishers, Spurgeon concentrated on reviving the book business. In 1923 the company was floated on the Stock Exchange and a few years the magazines owned by the company were sold to Amalgamated Press following many industrial disputes. In 1969, Cassell was acquired by the American company Crowell Collier & Macmillan (later renamed Macmillan Publishers. Macmillan sold Cassell to CBS in 1982. CBS sold Cassell in a buyout in 1986. In October 1992, Cassell & Co bought Victor Gollancz Ltd from Houghton Mifflin. In December 1998 the company was taken over by Orion Publishing Group. In 1999, Cassell's academic and religious lists were merged with the American company Continuum to form the Continuum International Publishing Group. Cassell's Magazine Cassell’s Saturday Journal Cassell's Weekly T. P.'s & Cassell's Weekly Chums The Echo The Lady's World The Woman's World, edited by Oscar Wilde Little Folks, edited by Sam Hield Hamer The Illustrated Magazine of Art The Magazine of Art The New Magazine The New Penny Magazine The Penny Magazine, Cassell's Popular Magazine The Quiver Magazine The Story-Teller The Work Gustave Doré's illustrations for La Grande Bible de Tours Media related to Cassell & Co. at Wikimedia Commons
George Sarton
George Alfred Leon Sarton, was a Belgian-born American chemist and historian. He is considered the founder of the discipline of the history of science, he has a significant importance in the history of science and his most influential work was the Introduction to the History of Science, which consists of three volumes and 4,296 pages. Sarton aimed to achieve an integrated philosophy of science that provided a connection between the sciences and the humanities, which he referred to as "the new humanism", he gives his name to the George Sarton Medal. George Alfred Leon Sarton was born in Ghent, Belgium on August 31, 1884, his parents were Alfred Sarton and Léonie Van Halmé. His mother died, he graduated from the University of Ghent in 1906 and two years won a gold medal for one of his papers on chemistry. He received his PhD in mathematics at the University of Ghent in 1911, he emigrated to the United States from Belgium due to the First World War, worked there the rest of his life and writing about the history of science.
In 1911, he married an English artist. Their daughter Eleanore Marie was born the following year in 1912. Although he and his family emigrated to England after World War I broke out, they immigrated to the United States in 1915, where they would live for the rest of their lives, he worked for the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and lectured at Harvard University, 1916–18. At Harvard, he became a lecturer in 1920, a professor of the history of science from 1940 until his retirement in 1951, he was a research associate of the Carnegie Institution of Washington from 1919 until 1948. Sarton intended to complete an exhaustive nine-volume history of science. By the time of his death, he had completed only the first three volumes: I. From Homer to Omar Khayyam. From Rabbi Ben Ezra to Roger Bacon, pt. 1–2. Science and learning in the fourteenth-century, pt. 1–2. Sarton had been inspired for his project by his study of Leonardo da Vinci, but he had not reached this period in history before dying.
After his death, a representative selection of his papers was edited by Dorothy Stimson. It was published by Harvard University Press in 1962. In honor of Sarton's achievements, the History of Science Society created the award known as the George Sarton Medal, it is the most prestigious award of the History of Science Society. It has been awarded annually since 1955 to an outstanding historian of science selected from the international scholarly community; the medal honors a scholar for lifetime scholarly achievement. Sarton was the founder of this society and of its journals: Isis and Osiris, which publish articles on science and culture. Sarton, George. "The New Humanism". Isis. 6: 9–42. Doi:10.1086/358203. JSTOR 223969. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication no. 376. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, Co. George Sarton, "The Incubation of Western Culture in the Middle East: a George C. Keiser Foundation Lecture", March 29, 1950, Washington, D. C.
Introduction to the History of Science. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins. A History of Science. Ancient science through the Golden Age of Greece, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1952. A History of Science. Hellenistic science and culture in the last three centuries B. C. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959; the Study of the History of Science. Quotations related to George Sarton at Wikiquote Full-text works of George Sarton on Internet Archive Biography of George Sarton from BookRags
Archimedes
Archimedes of Syracuse was a Greek mathematician, engineer and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time, Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying concepts of infinitesimals and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems, including the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area under a parabola. Other mathematical achievements include deriving an accurate approximation of pi, defining and investigating the spiral bearing his name, creating a system using exponentiation for expressing large numbers, he was one of the first to apply mathematics to physical phenomena, founding hydrostatics and statics, including an explanation of the principle of the lever. He is credited with designing innovative machines, such as his screw pump, compound pulleys, defensive war machines to protect his native Syracuse from invasion.
Archimedes died during the Siege of Syracuse when he was killed by a Roman soldier despite orders that he should not be harmed. Cicero describes visiting the tomb of Archimedes, surmounted by a sphere and a cylinder, which Archimedes had requested be placed on his tomb to represent his mathematical discoveries. Unlike his inventions, the mathematical writings of Archimedes were little known in antiquity. Mathematicians from Alexandria read and quoted him, but the first comprehensive compilation was not made until c. 530 AD by Isidore of Miletus in Byzantine Constantinople, while commentaries on the works of Archimedes written by Eutocius in the sixth century AD opened them to wider readership for the first time. The few copies of Archimedes' written work that survived through the Middle Ages were an influential source of ideas for scientists during the Renaissance, while the discovery in 1906 of unknown works by Archimedes in the Archimedes Palimpsest has provided new insights into how he obtained mathematical results.
Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily, at that time a self-governing colony in Magna Graecia, located along the coast of Southern Italy. The date of birth is based on a statement by the Byzantine Greek historian John Tzetzes that Archimedes lived for 75 years. In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes gives his father's name as Phidias, an astronomer about whom nothing else is known. Plutarch wrote in his Parallel Lives that Archimedes was related to King Hiero II, the ruler of Syracuse. A biography of Archimedes was written by his friend Heracleides but this work has been lost, leaving the details of his life obscure, it is unknown, for instance, whether he married or had children. During his youth, Archimedes may have studied in Alexandria, where Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene were contemporaries, he referred to Conon of Samos as his friend, while two of his works have introductions addressed to Eratosthenes. Archimedes died c. 212 BC during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of Syracuse after a two-year-long siege.
According to the popular account given by Plutarch, Archimedes was contemplating a mathematical diagram when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him to come and meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had to finish working on the problem; the soldier was enraged by this, killed Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch gives a lesser-known account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he may have been killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier. According to this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical instruments, was killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable items. General Marcellus was angered by the death of Archimedes, as he considered him a valuable scientific asset and had ordered that he must not be harmed. Marcellus called Archimedes "a geometrical Briareus"; the last words attributed to Archimedes are "Do not disturb my circles", a reference to the circles in the mathematical drawing that he was studying when disturbed by the Roman soldier.
This quote is given in Latin as "Noli turbare circulos meos," but there is no reliable evidence that Archimedes uttered these words and they do not appear in the account given by Plutarch. Valerius Maximus, writing in Memorable Doings and Sayings in the 1st century AD, gives the phrase as "...sed protecto manibus puluere'noli' inquit,'obsecro, istum disturbare'" – "... but protecting the dust with his hands, said'I beg of you, do not disturb this.'" The phrase is given in Katharevousa Greek as "μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε!". The tomb of Archimedes carried a sculpture illustrating his favorite mathematical proof, consisting of a sphere and a cylinder of the same height and diameter. Archimedes had proven that the volume and surface area of the sphere are two thirds that of the cylinder including its bases. In 75 BC, 137 years after his death, the Roman orator Cicero was serving as quaestor in Sicily, he had heard stories about the tomb of Archimedes, but none of the locals were able to give him the location.
He found the tomb near the Agrigentine gate in Syracuse, in a neglected condition and overgrown with bushes. Cicero had the tomb cleaned up, was able to see the carving and read some of the verses, added as an inscription. A tomb discovered in the courtyard of the Hotel Panorama in Syracuse in the early 1960s was claimed to be that of Archimedes, but there was no compelling evidence
Anchor windlass
A windlass is a machine used on ships, used to let-out and heave-up equipment such as a ship's anchor or a fishing trawl. On some ships, it may be located in a specific room called the windlass room. An anchor windlass is a machine that restrains and manipulates the anchor chain on a boat, allowing the anchor to be raised and lowered by means of chain cable. A notched wheel engages the links of the rope. A trawl windlass is a similar machine that restrains or manipulates the trawl on a commercial fishing vessel; the trawl is a sort of big fishing net, wound on the windlass. The fishermen either heaves-up the trawl during fishing operations. A brake is provided for control and a windlass is powered by an electric or hydraulic motor operating via a gear train. Technically the term "windlass" refers only to horizontal winches. Vertical designs are called capstans. Horizontal windlasses make use of an integral gearbox and motor assembly, all located above-deck, with a horizontal shaft through the unit and wheels for chain and/or rope on either side.
Vertical capstans use a vertical shaft, with the gearbox situated below the winch unit. Horizontal windlasses offer several advantages; the unit tends to be more self-contained, protecting the machinery from the corrosive environment found on boats. The dual wheels allow two anchors on double rollers to be serviced. Vertical capstans, for their part, allow the machinery to be placed below decks, thus lowering the center of gravity, allow a flexible angle of pull, it tends to be the case that smaller boats use capstans, larger boats have windlasses, although this is by no means a hard and fast rule. The anchor is shackled to the anchor cable, the cable passes up through the hawsepipe, through the pawl, over the windlass gypsy down through the "spurling pipe" to the chain/cable locker under the forecastle - the anchor bitts are on a bulkhead in the cable locker and the bitter end of the cable is connected to the bitts using the bitter pin, which should be able to be released from outside the locker to "slip" the anchor.
This would occur if the windlass brake has slipped and the cable has reached "the bitter end". This is the origin of the term "to the bitter end", it applied in sailing vessels where the cable was a rope, the windlass or capstan was powered by many sailors below decks. NOTE: Anchor cable is not the same as anchor chain. Cable is a heavy rope made by laying up three ordinary ropes which have themselves been made by laying up three strands. Whereas in ordinary rope, known as hawser laid rope, the three strands are laid up from left to right, in cable-laid rope the three hawser ropes must be laid up from right to left; the wheels on either a vertical or horizontal windlass provide for either chain or line to be engaged. The wheel for line is termed a warping head, while the chain handling wheel is variously referred to as the gypsy or wildcat. For clarity in communication the generic term chainwheel is used. On small craft a warping drum is sometimes used to handle both chain & rope, although particular care must be taken with sizing and compatibility of line and windlass, for this feature to work effectively.
It is important. A small difference in link size or consistency can cause undue wear on the chainwheel and/or cause the chain to jump off the windlass when the winch is operating during payout, a runaway condition sometimes referred to as "water spouting" should it occur at high speed. Nowadays on large tankers and cruise ships, the windlass may be split into independent port and starboard units. In these cases they are coupled with warping drums. In some of these the warping drums are of constant tension type. While most windlasses require power, many are manually driven in the same manner as most sailing boats' winches for sheets. In fact only modern boats have practical sources for power, ships in the old days have always required manual power. Powered solutions include steam and electrics. Electrics are convenient and cheap, but hydraulics prove more efficient and powerful on all but small boats. In general and their power system should be capable of lifting the anchor and all its rode if deployed so that it hangs suspended in deep water.
This task should be within the windlass' rated working pull, not its maximum pull. The devil's claw is a device, used as a chain stopper to grab and hold an anchor chain, it consists of a turnbuckle attached at the base of the anchor windlass, a metal hook with two curved fingers that grab one link of a chain. A devil's claw is used on merchant ships because it is lighter and easier to manage than other types of chain stoppers, such as a pelican hook. After hoisting the anchor and setting the windlass brake, the claw is placed on a chain link and the turnbuckle is tightened to take up the tension on the chain. If more than one stopper is used, the turnbuckles can be adjusted to evenly distribute the load. A devil's claw can not be released. To release it, the tension must first be taken up by the windlass brake; the turnbuckle can be loosened and removed. Media related to Anchor windlass at Wikimedia Commons
Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European history lasting from 1250 to 1500 AD. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period. Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict, the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was temporarily shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively, those events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Despite the crises, the 14th century was a time of great progress in the arts and sciences. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root in the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance began.
The absorption of Latin texts had started before the Renaissance of the 12th century through contact with Arabs during the Crusades, but the availability of important Greek texts accelerated with the Capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, when many Byzantine scholars had to seek refuge in the West Italy. Combined with this influx of classical ideas was the invention of printing, which facilitated dissemination of the printed word and democratized learning; those two things would lead to the Protestant Reformation. Toward the end of the period, the Age of Discovery began; the expansion of the Ottoman Empire cut off trading possibilities with the East. Europeans were forced to seek new trading routes, leading to the Spanish expedition under Christopher Columbus to the Americas in 1492 and Vasco da Gama’s voyage to Africa and India in 1498, their discoveries strengthened the power of European nations. The changes brought about by these developments have led many scholars to view this period as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern history and of early modern Europe.
However, the division is somewhat artificial, since ancient learning was never absent from European society. As a result, there was developmental continuity between the modern age; some historians in Italy, prefer not to speak of the Late Middle Ages at all but rather see the high period of the Middle Ages transitioning to the Renaissance and the modern era. The term "Late Middle Ages" refers to one of the three periods of the Middle Ages, along with the Early Middle Ages and the High Middle Ages. Leonardo Bruni was the first historian to use tripartite periodization in his History of the Florentine People. Flavio Biondo used a similar framework in Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire. Tripartite periodization became standard after the German historian Christoph Cellarius published Universal History Divided into an Ancient and New Period. For 18th-century historians studying the 14th and 15th centuries, the central theme was the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of ancient learning and the emergence of an individual spirit.
The heart of this rediscovery lies in Italy, where, in the words of Jacob Burckhardt: "Man became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such". This proposition was challenged, it was argued that the 12th century was a period of greater cultural achievement; as economic and demographic methods were applied to the study of history, the trend was to see the late Middle Ages as a period of recession and crisis. Belgian historian Henri Pirenne continued the subdivision of Early and Late Middle Ages in the years around World War I, yet it was his Dutch colleague, Johan Huizinga, responsible for popularising the pessimistic view of the Late Middle Ages, with his book The Autumn of the Middle Ages. To Huizinga, whose research focused on France and the Low Countries rather than Italy and decline were the main themes, not rebirth. Modern historiography on the period has reached a consensus between the two extremes of innovation and crisis, it is now acknowledged that conditions were vastly different north and south of the Alps, the term "Late Middle Ages" is avoided within Italian historiography.
The term "Renaissance" is still considered useful for describing certain intellectual, cultural, or artistic developments, but not as the defining feature of an entire European historical epoch. The period from the early 14th century up until – and sometimes including – the 16th century, is rather seen as characterized by other trends: demographic and economic decline followed by recovery, the end of western religious unity and the subsequent emergence of the nation state, the expansion of European influence onto the rest of the world; the limits of Christian Europe were still being defined in the 15th centuries. While the Grand Duchy of Moscow was beginning to repel the Mongols, the Iberian kingdoms completed the Reconquista of the peninsula and turned their attention outwards, the Balkans fell under the dominance of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, the remaining nations of the continent were locked in constant international or internal conflict; the situation led to the consolidation of central authority and the emergence of the nation state.
The financial demands of war necessitated higher levels of taxation, resulting in the emergence of representative bodies – most notably the English Parliament. The growth of secular authority was further aided by t
Turnbridge
Turnbridge is the area to the east of Huddersfield town centre ring road in West Yorkshire, England. It forms a corridor along which passes St Andrews Road, the Huddersfield Broad Canal to Aspley, where the Broad Canal meets Huddersfield Narrow Canal in the Aspley Basin. There are places for a limited number of narrowboat moorings; some have electric and fresh water services. The area is reputed to have gained its name from a turning bridge across the canal. In 1865 this was replaced by Turnbridge Lift Bridge
Whim (mining)
A whim called a whim gin or a horse capstan, is a device similar to a windlass, used in mining for hauling materials to the surface. It comprises a wide drum with a vertical axle. A rope is wound around the drum, with both ends traversing several pulleys and hanging down the mine shaft; as the drum is turned around, one end of the rope is lowered, carrying an empty bucket, while the other one is raised, carrying a full load. The major benefit of a whim is that its operation can be performed at a distance from the shaft, thus resolving some of the congestion. Early whims were horse-powered, but they were powered by waterwheels or steam engines, including the most advanced Cornish engines. Whims were used in coal mines until the end of the nineteenth century. Horse whims were used to power team boats; the gin wheel at Nottingham Industrial Museum dating from 1844, is a wooden drum, set on a vertical pole within a wooden frame, with a horizontal shaft from the drum for attaching to a horse. Before joining the other exhibits at Nottingham Industrial Museum, the whim was used at Langton and Pinxton Collieries.
Jones, Michael H.. The Brendon Hills Iron Mines and the West Somerset Mineral Railway. Lydney: Lightmoor Press. ISBN 978-1-899889-53-2. OCLC 795179029
