Sublime

Ostrach avait donné de l'argent pour les enfants des combattants des brigades internationales et qu'il avait essayé à diverses reprises d'user de son influence sur ses collègues pour limiter la puissance de la bombe à cobalt, de façon à conserver sur la terre quelque forme élémentaire de la vie – notamment le plancton, la flore marine, et le milieu

Best-practice steam engine technology could have saved the equivalent of a quarter of labor costs at most plants. Inefficient furnaces were oxidizing away huge amounts of metal. The Germans were pulling ahead in the use of overhead belt conveyors. It was absurdly wasteful to support 119 rail-shape standards. Better management of furnace linings, mo

The particular solutions of engineers are on the whole local, limited by time and place and singularity.

“Without me here, it would’ve happened even earlier. There are over a thousand researchers at the base. I just pointed them in the right direction. I’ve felt for a long time that the tokamak approach17 is a dead end. Given the right approach, a breakthrough was a certainty. Me, I’m a theoretician. I don’t get experimentation. My blind pointing prob

Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify

George Melville would serve as the Jeannette’s engineer. Said to be distantly related to the great author, Melville was an improvisational genius with machines—a greasy-fingered savant who seemed most at home among thumping boilers and sharp blasts of steam. The engineer, thirty-eight years old, had a booming voice, a stout physique, and an enormou

The United States Army Corps of Engineers has its Chicago District headquarters in a Classical Revival building on LaSalle Street. A plaque outside the building explains that it was the site of the General Time Convention of 1883, held to sync the country’s clocks. The process involved pruning dozens of regional time zones down to four, which, in m

Dear Dr. Fletcher: We are greatly disturbed by testimony of May 2 to the Rogers Commission that strongly suggests that Morton Thiokol, Inc., and at least one NASA official, have attempted to control the flow of information to the Commission through acts of intimidation and punishment. In evaluating that testimony, it appears that a Morton Thiokol e

The measure that gave Marshall the authority to circumvent it was concealed as a rider to the Army’s annual appropriation bill.32