At the Dinorwig Quarry workshops, Gilfach Ddu, Llanberis, north Wales, UK wooden patterns could be made on the site for any metal object which was required in the workshops. This image shows some of the larger wooden patterns which are now hung on the wall of the foundry at the Welsh Slate Museum, near the stairway which leads to the pattern workshop. After they had been completed, the wooden patterns would then be taken to the foundry where they were placed in wooden boxes. The boxes would then be filled with sand and the wooden pattern would be removed, leaving a mould which could then be filled with molten iron.

 

The pattern makers were highly skilled workers who produced many intricate and complex patterns. At Llanberis, the majority of the patterns were made by members of one local family, known as 'teulu Patrwm' (the Pattern family).

 

Description based on the Welsh Slate Museum Guidebook (2002). Dinorwig Quarry closed in 1969

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Parliament building

The original intention was to build two separate buildings for the Imperial Council and the House of Representatives of the by the February Patent 1861 established Reichsrat (Imperial Council). After the Compromise with Hungary, however, this plan was dropped and in the year 1869 the architect Theophil von Hansen by the Ministry of the Interior entrusted with the elaboration of the monumental project for a large parliament building. The first cut of the spade followed in June 1874, the foundation stone bears the date "2nd September 1874". At the same time was worked on the erection of the imperial museums, the Town Hall and the University. Theophil Hansen took - as already mentioned - well thought out and in a very meaningful way the style of the Viennese parliament building from ancient Greece; stem important constitutional terms but also from the Greek antiquity - such as "politics", "democracy" and others. Symbolic meaning had also that from nearly all crown lands of the monarchy materials have been used for the construction of the parliament building. Thus, the structure should symbolize the confluence of all the forces "of the in the in the Reichsrat represented kingdoms and countries" in the Vienna parliament building. With the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ended the era of the multinational Parliament in Vienna.

Since November 1918, the building is the seat of the parliamentary bodies of the Republic of Austria, first the National Assembly and later the National Council in the until its destruction in 1945 remained unchanged session hall of the former Imperial Council holding meetings. During the Second World War, the parliament building was severely affected, about half of the building fabric were destroyed. On 7th February 1945 the portico by bombing suffered serious damage. Two columns were totally destroyed, the edge ceiling construction with the richly gilded coffered ceiling and a magnificent frieze painting, which was 121 meters long and 2 meters high and the most ideal and economic roles of the Parliament representing allegorically, were seriously damaged. During reconstruction, the rebuilding did not occur in the originally from Hansen originating features: instead of Pavonazzo marble for the wall plate cover Salzburg marble was used. The frieze painting initially not could be recovered, only in the 90s it should be possible to restore single surviving parts. In addition to destructions in the Chancellery Wing at the Ring Road as well as in the portico especially the Imperial Council tract was severely affected by the effects of war. The meeting room of the Imperial Council was completely burned out, in particular the figural jewelry as well as the ruined marble statues of Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Sophocles, Socrates, Pericles and Demosthenes appearing hardly recoverable. In this circumstances, it was decided not to reconstruct the old Imperial Council hall, but a new hall with a businesslike but refined and convenient furnishing for the National Council of the Republic of Austria to build. During the reconstruction of the building in the years 1945 to 1956 efforts were also made the yet by Hansen envisaged technical independence further to develop and to perfect. Thus the parliament building now has an emergency generator, which ensures, any time, adequate electricity supply of the house in case of failure of the city network, and a variety of other technical facilities, which guarantee a high supply autonomy. Not only from basic considerations in the sense of seperation of powers but also from the possibility of an extraordinary emergency, is this a compelling need. National Council and the Federal Council as the elected representative bodies of the Austrian people must at all times - especially in case of disaster - the material conditions for their activity have guaranteed. This purpose serve the mentioned facilities and many others, sometimes very complicated ones and the persons entrusted with their maintenance. To the staff of the Parliamentary Administration therefore belong not only academics, stenographers, administrators, secretaries and officials of the room service as in each parliament, but also the with the maintenance of the infrastructure of the parliament building entrusted technicians and skilled workers.

Analogous to other parliaments was for years, even decades tried to acquire or to rent one or the other object near the Parliament building. Finally one was able in 1981 to start with a basic conversion or expansion of the house Reichsratsstrasse 9 under planning by the architect Prof. Dr. Sepp Stein, in this connection was given the order the parliament building through a tunnel with the house in the Reichsratsstrasse to connect. With this tunnel not only a connection for pedestrians should be established, but also a technical integration of the two houses. In the basement of the building in which in early 1985 could be moved in, confluences the road tunnel; furthermore it serves the accommodation of technical rooms as well as of the storage, preparation and staff rooms for a restauration, a main kitchen and a restaurant for about 130 people are housed on the ground floor. On the first floor are located dining rooms for about 110 people; workrooms for MPs are in the second, offices in the third to the sixth floor housed. Ten years after the house Reichsratsstrasse 9 another building could be purchased, the house Reichsratsstrasse 1, and, again under the planning leadership of architect Prof. Dr. Sepp Stein, adapted for the purposes of the Parliament. This house also through an in the basement joining under road tunnel with the Parliament building was connected. The basement houses storage rooms, the ground floor next to an "info-shop" where information materials concerning the Austrian Parlament can be obtained, the Parliament Post Office and the printery. In the six upper floors are offices and other work spaces for different departments of the Parliamentary Administration. The previously by these departments used rooms in the Parliament building were, after it was moved into the house Reichsratsstrasse in 1994, mostly the parliamentary clubs made available. Already in 1992 by the rental of rooms in a building in the Schenkenstraße for the parliamentary staff of the deputies office premises had been created.

Pallas Athene

Parliament Vienna

The 5.5 meter high monumental statue of Pallas Athena in front of the parliament building in Vienna gives not only the outside appearance of this building a striking sculptural accent, but has almost become a symbolic figure of the Austrian parliamentarism. The Danish architect Theophil Hansen, according to which draft in the years 1874-1884 the parliament building has been built, has designed this as a "work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk)"; thus, his planning also including the figural decoration of the building. The in front of the Parliament ramp to be built monumental fountain should according to Hansen's original planning be crowned of an allegoric representation of the Austria, that is, a symbolization of Austria. In the definitive, in 1878 by Hansen submitted figure program took its place Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The monumental statue was realized only after Hansen's death, but according to his design by sculptor Carl Kundmann in 1902.

Meeting room of the former House of Representatives

The meeting room of the former House of Representatives is largely preserved faithfully and now serves the meetings of the Federal Assembly as well as ceremonies and commemorative meetings of the National Council and the Federal Council. Architecturally, the hall is modeled on a Greek theater. Before the end wall is the presidium with the lectern and the Government Bench, in the semicircle the seats of the deputies are arranged. The from Carrara marble carved statues on the front wall - between the ​​of Unterberger marble manufactured columns and pilasters - represent Roman statesmen, the by Friedrich Eisenmenger realised frieze painting depicts the emergence of political life, and the pediment group above it should symbolize the daily routine.

Portico

The large portico, in its proportions recreating the Parthenon of the Acropolis of Athens, forms the central chamber of the parliament building and should according to the original intention serve as a meeting place between members of the House of Representatives and of the Imperial Council. Today it functions as a venue, such as for the annual reception of the President of the National Council and the President of the Federal Council for the Diplomatic Corps. When choosing materials for the parliament building, Theophil Hansen strove to use marbles and stones from the crown lands of the monarchy, thus expressing their attachment to their Parliament. For example, consist the 24 monolithic, that is, produced from one-piece, columns, each more than 16 tons of weight, of the great hypostyle hall of Adnet marble, the floor panels of Istrian karst marble. When in the last months of the Second World War the Parliament building was severely affected by bomb hits, also the portico suffered severe damage, and the two columns in the north-west corner of the hall were destroyed, the edge ceiling construction with the richly gilded coffered ceiling and below the ceiling running frieze painting by Eduard Lebiedzki have been severely damaged. The two destroyed columns in 1950 were replaced by two new ones, broken from the same quarry as the originals, but not exhibiting the same pattern. The parts of the Lebiedzki frieze which have been restorable only in the 90s could be restored.

www.wien-vienna.at/index.php?ID=1102

Peter I commonly known as Peter the Great, was Tsar of all Russia from 1682, and the first Emperor of all Russia from 1721 until his death in 1725. He reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V until 1696. From this year, Peter was an absolute monarch who remained the ultimate authority. His methods were often harsh and autocratic.

 

Most of Peter's reign was consumed by long wars against the Ottoman and Swedish Empires. Despite initial difficulties, the wars were ultimately successful and led to expansion to the Sea of Azov and the Baltic Sea, thus laying the groundwork for the Imperial Russian Navy. His victory in the Great Northern War ended Sweden's era as a great power and its domination of the Baltic region while elevating Russia's standing to the extent it came to be acknowledged as an empire. Peter led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernized, and based on radical Enlightenment.

 

In 1700, he introduced the Gregorian calendar but the Russian Orthodox Church was particularly resistant to this change; they wanted to maintain its distinct identity and avoid appearing influenced by Catholic practices.[citation needed] In 1703, he introduced the first Russian newspaper, Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti, and ordered the civil script, a reform of Russian orthography largely designed by himself. He founded the city of Saint Petersburg on the shore of the Neva as a "window to the West" in May 1703. In 1712 Peter moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, where it remained – with only a brief interruption – until 1918. He promoted higher education and industrialization in the Russian Empire.

 

Peter had a great interest in plants, animals and minerals, in malformed creatures or exceptions to the law of nature for his cabinet of curiosities. He encouraged research of deformities, all along trying to debunk the superstitious fear of monsters. The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Saint Petersburg State University were founded in 1724, a year before his death.

 

Peter is primarily credited with the modernization of the country, transforming it into a major European power. His administrative reforms, creating a Governing Senate in 1711, the Collegium in 1717 and the Table of Ranks in 1722 had a lasting impact on Russia, and many institutions of the Russian government trace their origins to his reign.

 

Early life

Peter was named after the apostle. He grew up at Izmaylovo Estate and was educated from an early age by several tutors commissioned by his father, Tsar Alexis of Russia, most notably Nikita Zotov, Patrick Gordon, and Paul Menesius. On 29 January 1676, Alexis died, leaving the sovereignty to Peter's elder half-brother, the weak and sickly Feodor III of Russia. Throughout this period, the government was largely run by Artamon Matveev, an enlightened friend of Alexis, the political head of the Naryshkin family and one of Peter's greatest childhood benefactors.

 

This position changed when Feodor died in 1682. As Feodor did not leave any children, a dispute arose between the Miloslavsky family (Maria Miloslavskaya was the first wife of Alexis I) and Naryshkin family (Natalya Naryshkina was his second) over who should inherit the throne. He jointly ruled with his elder half-brother, Ivan V, until 1696. Ivan, was next in line but was chronically ill and of infirm mind. Consequently, the Boyar Duma (a council of Russian nobles) chose the 10-year-old Peter to become Tsar, with his mother as regent.

 

This arrangement was brought before the people of Moscow, as ancient tradition demanded, and was ratified. Sophia, one of Alexis' daughters from his first marriage, led a rebellion of the Streltsy (Russia's elite military corps) in April–May 1682. In the subsequent conflict, some of Peter's relatives and friends were murdered, including Artamon Matveyev, and Peter witnessed some of these acts of political violence.

 

The Streltsy made it possible for Sophia, the Miloslavskys (the clan of Ivan) and their allies to insist that Peter and Ivan be proclaimed joint Tsars, with Ivan being acclaimed as the senior. Sophia then acted as regent during the minority of the sovereigns and exercised all power. For seven years, she ruled as an autocrat. A large hole was cut in the back of the dual-seated throne used by Ivan and Peter. Sophia would sit behind the throne and listen as Peter conversed with nobles, while feeding him information and giving him responses to questions and problems. He lived at Preobrazhenskoye. This throne can be seen in the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow.

 

At the age of 16, Peter discovered an English boat on the estate, had it restored and learned to sail. He received a sextant, but did not know how to use the instrument. Therefore, he began a search for a foreign expert in the German Quarter. Peter befriended two Dutch carpenters, Frans Timmerman and Karsten Brandt, and several other foreigners in Russian service. Peter studied arithmetic, geometry, and military sciences. He was not interested in a musical education but seems to have liked fireworks and drumming.

 

Peter was not particularly concerned that others ruled in his name. He engaged in such pastimes as shipbuilding and sailing, as well as mock battles with his toy army. Peter's mother sought to force him to adopt a more conventional approach and arranged his marriage to Eudoxia Lopukhina in 1689. The marriage was a failure, and ten years later Peter forced his wife to become a nun and thus freed himself from the union.

 

By the summer of 1689, Peter, planned to take power from his half-sister Sophia, whose position had been weakened by two unsuccessful Crimean campaigns against the Crimean Khanate in an attempt to stop devastating Crimean Tatar raids into Russia's southern lands. When she learned of his designs, Sophia conspired with some leaders of the Streltsy, who continually aroused disorder and dissent. Peter, warned by others from the Streltsy, escaped in the middle of the night to the impenetrable monastery of Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra; there he slowly gathered adherents who perceived he would win the power struggle. Sophia was eventually overthrown, with Peter I and Ivan V continuing to act as co-tsars. Peter forced Sophia to enter a convent, where she gave up her name and her position as a member of the royal family.

 

Still, Peter could not acquire actual control over Russian affairs. Power was instead exercised by his mother, Natalya Naryshkina. It was only when Natalya died in 1694 that Peter, then aged 22, became an independent sovereign. Formally, Ivan V was a co-ruler with Peter, though being ineffective. Peter became the sole ruler when Ivan died in 1696 without male offspring, two years later.

 

Peter grew to be extremely tall, especially for the time period, reportedly standing 6 ft 8 in (2.03 m). Peter had noticeable facial tics, and he may have suffered from petit mal seizures, a form of epilepsy. Meanwhile, he was a frequent guest in German quarter, where he met Anna and Willem Mons.

 

Ideology of Peter's reign

As a young man, Peter I adopted the Protestant model of existence in a pragmatic world of competition and personal success, which largely shaped the philosophy of his reformism. He perceived the Russian people as rude, unintelligent, stubborn in their sluggishness, a child, a lazy student. He highly appreciated the state's role in the life of society, saw it as an ideal instrument for achieving high goals, saw it as a universal institution for transforming people, with the help of violence and fear, into educated, conscious, law-abiding and useful to the whole society subjects.

 

He introduced into the concept of the autocrat's power the notion of the monarch's duties. He considered it necessary to take care of his subjects, to protect them from enemies, to work for their benefit. Above all, he put the interests of Russia. He saw his mission in turning it into a power similar to Western countries, and subordinated his own life and the lives of his subjects to the realization of this idea. Gradually penetrated the idea that the task should be solved with the help of reforms, which will be carried out at the autocrat's will, who creates good and punishes evil. He considered the morality of a statesman separately from the morality of a private person and believed that the sovereign in the name of state interests can go to murder, violence, forgery and deceit.

 

He went through the naval service, starting from the lowest ranks: bombardier (1695), captain (1696), colonel (1706), schout-bij-nacht (1709), vice-admiral (1714), admiral (1721). By hard daily work (according to the figurative expression of Peter the Great himself, he was simultaneously "forced to hold a sword and a quill in one right hand") and courageous behavior he demonstrated to his subjects his personal positive example, showed how to act, fully devoting himself to the fulfillment of duty and service to the fatherland.

 

Reign

Peter implemented sweeping reforms aimed at modernizing Russia. Heavily influenced by his advisors from Western Europe, Peter reorganized the Russian army along modern lines and dreamed of making Russia a maritime power. He faced much opposition to these policies at home but brutally suppressed rebellions against his authority, including by the Streltsy, Bashkirs, Astrakhan, and the greatest civil uprising of his reign, the Bulavin Rebellion.

 

Peter implemented social modernization in an absolute manner by introducing French and western dress to his court and requiring courtiers, state officials, and the military to shave their beards and adopt modern clothing styles. One means of achieving this end was the introduction of taxes for long beards and robes in September 1698.

 

In his process to westernize Russia, he wanted members of his family to marry other European royalty. In the past, his ancestors had been snubbed at the idea, but now, it was proving fruitful. He negotiated with Frederick William, Duke of Courland to marry his niece, Anna Ivanovna. He used the wedding in order to launch his new capital, St Petersburg, where he had already ordered building projects of westernized palaces and buildings. Peter hired Italian and German architects to design it.

 

As part of his reforms, Peter started an industrialization effort that was slow but eventually successful. Russian manufacturing and main exports were based on the mining and lumber industries. For example, by the end of the century Russia came to export more iron than any other country in the world.

 

To improve his nation's position on the seas, Peter sought more maritime outlets. His only outlet at the time was the White Sea at Arkhangelsk. The Baltic Sea was at the time controlled by Sweden in the north, while the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea were controlled by the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Empire respectively in the south.

 

Peter attempted to acquire control of the Black Sea, which would require expelling the Tatars from the surrounding areas. As part of an agreement with Poland that ceded Kiev to Russia, Peter was forced to wage war against the Crimean Khan and against the Khan's overlord, the Ottoman Sultan. Peter's primary objective became the capture of the Ottoman fortress of Azov, near the Don River. In the summer of 1695 Peter organized the Azov campaigns to take the fortress, but his attempts ended in failure.

 

Peter returned to Moscow in November 1695 and began building a large navy in Voronezh. He launched about thirty ships against the Ottomans in 1696, capturing Azov in July of that year.

 

Grand Embassy

Peter knew that Russia could not face the Ottoman Empire alone. In 1697, he traveled "incognito" to Western Europe on an 18-month journey with a large Russian delegation–the so-called "Grand Embassy". He used a fake name, allowing him to escape social and diplomatic events, but since he was far taller than most others, he could not fool anyone. One goal was to seek the aid of European monarchs, but Peter's hopes were dashed. France was a traditional ally of the Ottoman Sultan, and Austria was eager to maintain peace in the east while conducting its own wars in the west. Peter, furthermore, had chosen an inopportune moment: the Europeans at the time were more concerned about the War of the Spanish Succession over who would succeed the childless King Charles II of Spain than about fighting the Ottoman Sultan.

 

In Königsberg, the Tsar was apprenticed for two months to an artillery engineer. In July he met Sophia of Hanover at Coppenbrügge castle. She described him: "The tsar is a tall, handsome man, with an attractive face. He has a lively mind is very witty. Only, someone so well endowed by nature could be a little better mannered." Peter rented a ship in Emmerich am Rhein and sailed to Zaandam, where he arrived on 18 August 1697. He studied saw-mills, manufacturing and shipbuilding but left after a week. Through the mediation of Nicolaas Witsen, an expert on Russia, the Tsar was given the opportunity to gain practical experience in shipyard, belonging to the Dutch East India Company, for a period of four months, under the supervision of Gerrit Claesz Pool. The diligent and capable Tsar assisted in the construction of an East Indiaman ship Peter and Paul specially laid down for him. During his stay the Tsar engaged many skilled workers such as builders of locks, fortresses, shipwrights, and seamen—including Cornelis Cruys, a vice-admiral who became, under Franz Lefort, the Tsar's advisor in maritime affairs. Peter later put his knowledge of shipbuilding to use in helping build Russia's navy.

 

Peter felt that the ship's carpenters in Holland worked too much by eye and lacked accurate construction drawings. On 11 January 1698 (Old Style) Peter arrived at Victoria Embankment with four chamberlains, three interpreters, two clock makers, a cook, a priest, six trumpeters, 70 soldiers from the Preobrazhensky regiment, four dwarfs and a monkey. Peter stayed at 21 Norfolk Street, Strand and met with King William III and Gilbert Burnet, attended a session of the Royal Society, received a doctorate from Oxford University, trained a telescope on Venus at the Greenwich Observatory, and saw a Fleet Review by Royal Navy at Deptford. He studied the English techniques of city-building he would later use to great effect at Saint Petersburg. At the end of April 1698 he left after learning to make watches, carpenting coffins and posing for Sir Godfrey Kneller.

 

The Embassy next went to Leipzig, Dresden, Prague and Vienna. Peter spoke with Augustus II the Strong and Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor.[18] Peter's visit was cut short, when he was forced to rush home by a rebellion of the Streltsy. The rebellion was easily crushed before Peter returned home; of the Tsar's troops, only one was killed. Peter nevertheless acted ruthlessly towards the mutineers. Over one thousand two hundred of the rebels were tortured and executed, and Peter ordered that their bodies be publicly exhibited as a warning to future conspirators. The Streltsy were disbanded, some of the rebels were deported to Siberia, and the individual they sought to put on the Throne — Peter's half-sister Sophia — was forced to become a nun.

 

Peter's visits to the West impressed upon him the notion that European customs were in several respects superior to Russian traditions. He commanded all of his courtiers and officials to wear European clothing and cut off their long beards, causing his Boyars, who were very fond of their beards, great upset. Boyars who sought to retain their beards were required to pay an annual beard tax of one hundred rubles. Peter also sought to end arranged marriages, which were the norm among the Russian nobility, because he thought such a practice was barbaric and led to domestic violence, since the partners usually resented each other.

 

In 1698, Peter I instituted a beard tax to modernize Russian society. In the same year Peter sent a delegation to Malta, under boyar Boris Sheremetev, to observe the training and abilities of the Knights of Malta and their fleet. Sheremetev investigated the possibility of future joint ventures with the Knights, including action against the Turks and the possibility of a future Russian naval base. On 12 September 1698, Peter officially founded the first Russian Navy base, Taganrog on the Sea of Azov.

 

In 1699, Peter changed the date of the celebration of the new year from 1 September to 1 January. Traditionally, the years were reckoned from the purported creation of the World, but after Peter's reforms, they were to be counted from the birth of Christ. Thus, in the year 7207 of the old Russian calendar, Peter proclaimed that the Julian Calendar was in effect and the year was 1700. On the death of Lefort in 1699, Menshikov succeeded him as Peter's prime favourite and confidant. In 1701, the Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation was founded; for fifteen years, not only naval officers, but also surveyors, engineers, and gunners were educated there.

 

Great Northern War

First Winter Palace

Peter made a temporary peace with the Ottoman Empire that allowed him to keep the captured fort of Azov, and turned his attention to Russian maritime supremacy. He sought to acquire control of the Baltic Sea, which had been taken by the Swedish Empire a half-century earlier. Peter declared war on Sweden, which was at the time led by the young King Charles XII. Sweden was also opposed by Denmark–Norway, Saxony, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Preobrazhensky regiment took part in all major battles of the Great Northern War.

 

Russia was ill-prepared to fight the Swedes, and their first attempt at seizing the Baltic coast ended in disaster at the Battle of Narva in 1700. In the conflict, the forces of Charles XII, rather than employ a slow methodical siege, attacked immediately using a blinding snowstorm to their advantage. After the battle, Charles XII decided to concentrate his forces against the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, which gave Peter time to reorganize the Russian army. He invited Nicolaas Bidloo to organize a military hospital. In 1701, Peter the Great signed a decree on the opening of Moscow School of Mathematics and Navigation.

 

While the Poles fought the Swedes, Peter founded the city of Saint Petersburg on 29 June 1703, in Ingermanland (a province of the Swedish Empire that he had captured). It was named after his patron saint Saint Peter. He forbade the building of stone edifices outside Saint Petersburg, which he intended to become Russia's capital, so that all stonemasons could participate in the construction of the new city. Peter moved the capital to St. Petersburg in 1703. While the city was being built along the Neva he lived in a modest three-room log cabin (with a study but without a fire-place) which had to make room for the first version of the Winter palace. The first buildings which appeared were the Peter and Paul Fortress, a shipyard at the Admiralty and Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

 

Following several defeats, Polish King Augustus II the Strong abdicated in 1706. Swedish king Charles XII turned his attention to Russia, invading it in 1708. After crossing into Russia, Charles defeated Peter at Golovchin in July. In the Battle of Lesnaya, Charles suffered his first loss after Peter crushed a group of Swedish reinforcements marching from Riga. Deprived of this aid, Charles was forced to abandon his proposed march on Moscow.

 

Charles XII refused to retreat to Poland or back to Sweden and instead invaded Ukraine. Peter withdrew his army southward, employing scorched earth, destroying along the way anything that could assist the Swedes. Deprived of local supplies, the Swedish army was forced to halt its advance in the winter of 1708–1709. In the summer of 1709, they resumed their efforts to capture Russian-ruled Ukraine, culminating in the Battle of Poltava on 27 June. The battle was a decisive defeat for the Swedish forces, ending Charles' campaign in Ukraine and forcing him south to seek refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Russia had defeated what was considered to be one of the world's best militaries, and the victory overturned the view that Russia was militarily incompetent. In Poland, Augustus II was restored as King.

 

Peter, overestimating the support he would receive from his Balkan allies, attacked the Ottoman Empire, initiating the Russo-Turkish War of 1710. Peter's campaign in the Ottoman Empire was disastrous, and in the ensuing Treaty of the Pruth, Peter was forced to return the Black Sea ports he had seized in 1697. In return, the Sultan expelled Charles XII.

 

The Ottomans called him Mad Peter (Turkish: deli Petro), for his willingness to sacrifice large numbers of his troops in wartime. Peter I loved all sorts of rarities and curiosities. In 1704 Abram Petrovich Gannibal, a child with Ethiopian origin, was presented to him; in 1716 Peter took him to Paris.

 

In 1711, Peter established by decree a new state body known as the Governing Senate. Normally, the Boyar duma would have exercised power during his absence. Peter, however, mistrusted the boyars; he instead abolished the Duma and created a Senate of ten members. The Senate was founded as the highest state institution to supervise all judicial, financial and administrative affairs. Originally established only for the time of the monarch's absence, the Senate became a permanent body after his return. A special high official, the Ober-Procurator, served as the link between the ruler and the senate and acted, in Peter own words, as "the sovereign's eye". Without his signature no Senate decision could go into effect; the Senate became one of the most important institutions of Imperial Russia.

 

1712, Peter I issued a decree establishing an Engineering School in Moscow, which was supposed to recruit up to 150 students, and two-thirds of them were to consist of nobles.[31] Therefore, on 28 February 1714, he issued a decree calling for compulsory education, which dictated that all Russian 10- to 15-year-old children of the nobility, government clerks, and lesser-ranked officials must learn basic mathematics and geometry, and should be tested on the subjects at the end of their studies.

 

Peter's northern armies took the Swedish province of Livonia (the northern half of modern Latvia, and the southern half of modern Estonia), driving the Swedes out of Finland. In 1714 the Russian fleet won the Battle of Gangut. Most of Finland was occupied by the Russians.

 

In 1716, the Tsar visited Riga, and Danzig in January, Stettin, and obtained the assistance of the Electorate of Hanover and the Kingdom of Prussia fighting a war against Sweden at Wismar. He was forced to leave Mecklenburg. In Altona he met with Danish diplomats. He went on to Bad Pyrmont in May/June, because of an illness he stayed at this spa. He arrived in Amsterdam in December, where he bought some interesting collections: those of Frederik Ruysch, Levinus Vincent and Albertus Seba and paintings by Maria Sibylla Merian for his Kunstkamera. He visited a silk manufacture and a paper-mill, and learned to create paper and to spin silk. He visited Herman Boerhaave and Carel de Moor in Leiden and ordered two mercury thermometers from Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and instruments from Musschenbroek. In April 1717 he continued his travel from Flushing to Brussels in the Austrian Netherlands and Dunkirk, Calais, Paris, where he obtained many books and proposed a marriage between his daughter and King Louis XV. Saint-Simon described him as "tall, well-formed and slim…with a look both bewildered and fierce." Via Reims, and Spa Peter travelled on to Maastricht, at that time one of the most important fortresses in Europe, where he was received by Daniël van Dopff, the commander of the fortress. He went back to Amsterdam and visited the Hortus Botanicus and left the city early September.

 

The Tsar's navy was powerful enough that the Russians could penetrate Sweden. Still, Charles XII refused to yield, and not until his death in battle in 1718 did peace become feasible. After the battle near Åland, Sweden made peace with all powers but Russia by 1720. In 1721, the Treaty of Nystad ended the Great Northern War. Russia acquired Ingria, Estonia, Livonia, and a substantial portion of Karelia. In turn, Russia paid two million Riksdaler and surrendered most of Finland. The Tsar retained some Finnish lands close to Saint Petersburg, which he had made his capital in 1712. Between 1713 and 1728, and from 1732 to 1918, Saint Petersburg was the capital of imperial Russia.

 

Title

Following his victory in the Great Northern War, he adopted the title of emperor in 1721.

 

By the grace of God, the most excellent and great sovereign emperor Pyotr Alekseevich the ruler of all the Russias: of Moscow, of Kiev, of Vladimir, of Novgorod, Tsar of Kazan, Tsar of Astrakhan and Tsar of Siberia, sovereign of Pskov, great prince of Smolensk, of Tver, of Yugorsk, of Perm, of Vyatka, of Bulgaria and others, sovereign and great prince of the Novgorod Lower lands, of Chernigov, of Ryazan, of Rostov, of Yaroslavl, of Belozersk, of Udora, of Kondia and the sovereign of all the northern lands, and the sovereign of the Iverian lands, of the Kartlian and Georgian Kings, of the Kabardin lands, of the Circassian and Mountain princes and many other states and lands western and eastern here and there and the successor and sovereign and ruler.

 

Later years

In 1717, Alexander Bekovich-Cherkassky led the first Russian military expedition into Central Asia against the Khanate of Khiva. The expedition ended in complete disaster when the entire expeditionary force was slaughtered.

 

In 1718, Peter investigated why the formerly Swedish province of Livonia was so orderly. He discovered that the Swedes spent as much administering Livonia (300 times smaller than his empire) as he spent on the entire Russian bureaucracy. He was forced to dismantle the province's government.

 

To the end of 1717, the preparatory phase of administrative reform in Russia was completed. After 1718, Peter established colleges in place of the old central agencies of government, including foreign affairs, war, navy, expense, income, justice, and inspection. Later others were added, to regulate mining and industry. Each college consisted of a president, a vice-president, a number of councilors and assessors, and a procurator. Some foreigners were included in various colleges but not as president. Peter did not have enough loyal, talented or educated persons to put in full charge of the various departments. Peter preferred to rely on groups of individuals who would keep check on one another. Decisions depended on the majority vote.

 

Peter's last years were marked by further reform in Russia. On 22 October 1721, soon after peace was made with Sweden, he was officially proclaimed Emperor of All Russia. Some proposed that he take the title Emperor of the East, but he refused. Gavrila Golovkin, the State Chancellor, was the first to add "the Great, Father of His Country, Emperor of All the Russias" to Peter's traditional title Tsar following a speech by the archbishop of Pskov in 1721. Peter's imperial title was recognized by Augustus II of Poland, Frederick William I of Prussia, and Frederick I of Sweden, but not by the other European monarchs. In the minds of many, the word emperor connoted superiority or pre-eminence over kings. Several rulers feared that Peter would claim authority over them, just as the Holy Roman Emperor had claimed suzerainty over all Christian nations.

 

In 1722, Peter created a new order of precedence known as the Table of Ranks. Formerly, precedence had been determined by birth. To deprive the Boyars of their high positions, Peter directed that precedence should be determined by merit and service to the Emperor. The Table of Ranks continued to remain in effect until the Russian monarchy was overthrown in 1917.

 

The once powerful Persian Safavid Empire to the south was in deep decline. Taking advantage of the profitable situation, Peter launched the Russo-Persian War of 1722–1723, otherwise known as "The Persian Expedition of Peter the Great", which drastically increased Russian influence for the first time in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea region, and prevented the Ottoman Empire from making territorial gains in the region. After considerable success and the capture of many provinces and cities in the Caucasus and northern mainland Persia, the Safavids were forced to hand over territory to Russia, comprising Derbent, Shirvan, Gilan, Mazandaran, Baku, and Astrabad. Within twelve years all the territories were ceded back to Persia, now led by the charismatic military genius Nader Shah, as part of the Treaty of Resht, the Treaty of Ganja, and as the result of a Russo-Persian alliance against the Ottoman Empire, which was the common enemy of both.

 

Peter introduced new taxes to fund improvements in Saint Petersburg. He abolished the land tax and household tax and replaced them with a poll tax. The taxes on land and on households were payable only by individuals who owned property or maintained families. The new head taxes were payable by serfs and paupers. In 1725 the construction of Peterhof, a palace near Saint Petersburg, was completed. Peterhof (Dutch for "Peter's Court") was a grand residence, becoming known as the "Russian Versailles".

 

In the winter of 1723, Peter, whose overall health was never robust, began having problems with his urinary tract and bladder. In the summer of 1724, a team of doctors performed surgery releasing upwards of four pounds of blocked urine. Peter remained bedridden until late autumn. In the first week of October, restless and certain he was cured, Peter began a lengthy inspection tour of various projects. According to legend, in November, at Lakhta along the Gulf of Finland to inspect some ironworks, Peter saw a group of soldiers drowning near shore and, wading out into near-waist deep water, came to their rescue.

 

This icy water rescue is said to have exacerbated Peter's bladder problems and caused his death. The story, however, has been viewed with skepticism by some historians, pointing out that the German chronicler Jacob von Staehlin is the only source for the story, and it seems unlikely that no one else would have documented such an act of heroism. This, plus the interval of time between these actions and Peter's death seems to preclude any direct link.

 

In early January 1725, Peter was struck once again with uremia. Legend has it that before lapsing into unconsciousness Peter asked for a paper and pen and scrawled an unfinished note that read: "Leave all to ..." and then, exhausted by the effort, asked for his daughter Anna to be summoned.

 

Peter died between four and five in the morning 8 February 1725. An autopsy revealed his bladder to be infected with gangrene. He was fifty-two years, seven months old when he died, having reigned forty-two years. He is interred in Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, Russia.

 

After the death of Peter I, there were immediately students who came to the Military College with a request to "leave science" under the pretext of "unconsciousness and incomprehensibility."

 

Religion

Peter did not believe in miracles and founded The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters, an organization that mocked the Orthodox and Catholic Church when he was eighteen. In January 1695, Peter refused to partake in a traditional Russian Orthodox ceremony of the Epiphany Ceremony, and would often schedule events for The All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters to directly conflict with the Church. He often used the nickname Pakhom Mikhailov (Russian: Пахом Михайлов) among the ministers of religion who made up his relatively close circle of long-term drinking companions. He drank less than the others, deliberately getting the others drunk in order to listen to their drunken conversations.

 

Peter was brought up in the Russian Orthodox faith, but he had low regard for the Church hierarchy, which he kept under tight governmental control. The traditional leader of the Church was the Patriarch of Moscow. In 1700, when the office fell vacant, Peter refused to name a replacement, allowing the patriarch's coadjutor (or deputy) to discharge the duties of the office. Peter could not tolerate the patriarch exercising power superior to the tsar, as indeed had happened in the case of Philaret (1619–1633) and Nikon (1652–66). In 1716 he invited Theophan Prokopovich to come to the capital. In 1718 he ordered to translate the "Introduction to European History" (a work by Samuel Pufendorf); the Ecclesiastical Regulations of 1721 are based on it. The Church reform of Peter the Great therefore abolished the patriarchate, replacing it with a Holy Synod that was under the control of a Procurator, and the tsar appointed all bishops.

 

In 1721, Peter followed the advice of Prokopovich in designing the Holy Synod as a council of ten clergymen. For leadership in the Church, Peter turned increasingly to Ukrainians, who were more open to reform, but were not well loved by the Russian clergy. Peter implemented a law that stipulated that no Russian man could join a monastery before the age of fifty. He felt that too many able Russian men were being wasted on clerical work when they could be joining his new and improved army.

 

A clerical career was not a route chosen by upper-class society. Most parish priests were sons of priests and were very poorly educated and paid. The monks in the monasteries had a slightly higher status; they were not allowed to marry. Politically, the Church was impotent.

 

Marriages and family

Peter the Great had two wives, with whom he had fifteen children, three of whom survived to adulthood. Peter's mother selected his first wife, Eudoxia Lopukhina, with the advice of other nobles in 1689. This was consistent with previous Romanov tradition by choosing a daughter of a minor noble. This was done to prevent fighting between the stronger noble houses and to bring fresh blood into the family. He also had a mistress from Westphalia, Anna Mons.

 

Upon his return from his European tour in 1698, Peter sought to end his unhappy marriage. He divorced the Tsaritsa and forced her to join a convent. She had borne him three children, although only one, Alexei Petrovich, Tsarevich of Russia, had survived past his childhood.

 

Menshikov introduced him to Marta Helena Skowrońska, a Polish-Lithuanian peasant, and took her as a mistress some time between 1702 and 1704. Marta converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and was given the name Catherine. Though no record exists, Catherine and Peter married secretly between 23 Oct and 1 December 1707 in St. Petersburg. Peter valued Catherine and married officially, at Saint Isaac's Cathedral in Saint Petersburg on 19 February 1712.

 

His eldest child and heir, Alexei, was suspected of being involved in a plot to overthrow the Emperor. Alexei was tried and confessed under torture during questioning conducted by a secular court (count Tolstoy). He was convicted and sentenced to be executed. The sentence could only be carried out with Peter's signed authorization, and Alexei died in prison, as Peter hesitated before making the decision. Alexei's death most likely resulted from injuries suffered during his torture. Alexei's mother Eudoxia was punished. She was dragged from her home, tried on false charges of adultery, publicly flogged, and confined in monasteries while being forbidden to be talked to.

 

In 1724, Peter had his second wife, Catherine, crowned as Empress, although he remained Russia's actual ruler.

 

Issue

By his two wives, he had fifteen children: three by Eudoxia and twelve by Catherine. These included four sons named Pavel and three sons named Peter, all of whom died in infancy. Only three of his children survived to adulthood. He also had three grandchildren: Tsar Peter II and Grand Duchess Natalia by Alexei and Tsar Peter III by Anna.

 

Mistresses and illegitimate children

Princess Maria Dmitrievna Cantemirovna of Moldavia (1700–1754), daughter of Dimitrie Cantemir

Unnamed son (1722 - 1723?) – different sources say that the baby was stillborn or died before he was one year old.

Lady Mary Hamilton, Catherine I's lady in waiting of Scottish descent.

Miscarriage (1715)

Unnamed child (1717 - 1718?)

 

Legacy

Peter's legacy has always been a major concern of Russian intellectuals. Riasanovsky points to a "paradoxical dichotomy" in the black and white images such as God/Antichrist, educator/ignoramus, architect of Russia's greatness/destroyer of national culture, father of his country/scourge of the common man. Voltaire's 1759 biography gave 18th-century Russians a man of the Enlightenment, while Alexander Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman" poem of 1833 gave a powerful romantic image of a creator-god. Slavophiles in mid-19th century deplored Peter's westernization of Russia.

 

Western writers and political analysts recounted "The Testimony" or secret will of Peter the Great. It supposedly revealed his grand evil plot for Russia to control the world via conquest of Constantinople, Afghanistan and India. It was a forgery made in Paris at Napoleon's command when he started his invasion of Russia in 1812. Nevertheless, it is still quoted in foreign policy circles.

 

The Communists executed the last Romanovs, and their historians such as Mikhail Pokrovsky presented strongly negative views of the entire dynasty. Stalin however admired how Peter strengthened the state, and wartime, diplomacy, industry, higher education, and government administration. Stalin wrote in 1928, "when Peter the Great, who had to deal with more developed countries in the West, feverishly built works in factories for supplying the army and strengthening the country's defenses, this was an original attempt to leap out of the framework of backwardness." As a result, Soviet historiography emphasizes both the positive achievement and the negative factor of oppressing the common people.

 

After the fall of Communism in 1991, scholars and the general public in Russia and the West gave fresh attention to Peter and his role in Russian history. His reign is now seen as the decisive formative event in the Russian imperial past. Many new ideas have merged, such as whether he strengthened the autocratic state or whether the tsarist regime was not statist enough given its small bureaucracy. Modernization models have become contested ground.

 

He initiated a wide range of economic, social, political, administrative, educational and military reforms which ended the dominance of traditionalism and religion in Russia and initiated its westernization. His efforts included secularization of education, organization of administration for effective governance, enhanced use of technology, establishing an industrial economy, modernization of the army and establishment of a strong navy.

 

Historian Y. Vodarsky said in 1993 that Peter, "did not lead the country on the path of accelerated economic, political and social development, did not force it to 'achieve a leap' through several stages.... On the contrary, these actions to the greatest degree put a brake on Russia's progress and created conditions for holding it back for one and a half centuries!" The autocratic powers that Stalin admired appeared as a liability to Evgeny Anisimov, who complained that Peter was, "the creator of the administrative command system and the true ancestor of Stalin."

 

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, "He did not completely bridge the gulf between Russia and the Western countries, but he achieved considerable progress in development of the national economy and trade, education, science and culture, and foreign policy. Russia became a great power, without whose concurrence no important European problem could thenceforth be settled. His internal reforms achieved progress to an extent that no earlier innovator could have envisaged."

 

While the cultural turn in historiography has downplayed diplomatic, economic and constitutional issues, new cultural roles have been found for Peter, for example in architecture and dress. James Cracraft argues:

 

The Petrine revolution in Russia—subsuming in this phrase the many military, naval, governmental, educational, architectural, linguistic, and other internal reforms enacted by Peter's regime to promote Russia's rise as a major European power—was essentially a cultural revolution, one that profoundly impacted both the basic constitution of the Russian Empire and, perforce, its subsequent development.

In popular culture

 

Peter has been featured in many histories, novels, plays, films, monuments and paintings. They include the poems The Bronze Horseman, Poltava and the unfinished novel The Moor of Peter the Great, all by Alexander Pushkin. The former dealt with The Bronze Horseman, an equestrian statue raised in Peter's honour. Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote a biographical historical novel about him, named Peter I, in the 1930s.

 

The 1922 German silent film Peter the Great directed by Dimitri Buchowetzki and starring Emil Jannings as Peter

In 1929 A.N. Tolstoy's play was true to the party line, depicting Peter as a tyrant who "suppressed everyone and everything as if he had been possessed by demons, sowed fear, and put both his son and his country on the rack."

The 1937–1938 Soviet film Peter the Great

The 1976 film How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor, starring Aleksey Petrenko as Peter, and Vladimir Vysotsky as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, shows Peter's attempt to build the Baltic Fleet.

Peter was played by Jan Niklas and Maximilian Schell in the 1986 NBC miniseries Peter the Great.

The 2007 film The Sovereign's Servant depicts the unsavoury brutal side of Peter during the campaign.

A character based on Peter plays a major role in The Age of Unreason, a series of four alternate history novels written by American science fiction and fantasy author Gregory Keyes.

Peter is one of many supporting characters in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle – mainly featuring in the third novel, The System of the World.

Peter was portrayed on BBC Radio 4 by Isaac Rouse as a boy, Will Howard as a young adult and Elliot Cowan as an adult in the radio plays Peter the Great: The Gamblers and Peter the Great: The Queen of Spades, written by Mike Walker and which were the last two plays in the first series of Tsar. The plays were broadcast on 25 September and 2 October 2016.

A verse in the "Engineers' Drinking Song" references Peter the Great:

There was a man named Peter the Great who was a Russian Tzar;

When remodeling his the castle put the throne behind the bar;

He lined the walls with vodka, rum, and 40 kinds of beers;

And advanced the Russian culture by 120 years!

 

Peter was played by Jason Isaacs in the 2020 'antihistory' Hulu series The Great.

Peter is featured as the leader of the Russian civilization in the computer game Sid Meier's Civilization VI.

Peter was played by Ivan Kolesnikov in the 2022 Russian historical documentary film Peter I: The Last Tsar and the First Emperor.

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some Background:

The Ki-38 fighter was designed by the Tachikawa Aircraft Company Limited (立川飛行機株式会社, Tachikawa Hikōki Kabushiki Kaisha) near Tokyo, an aircraft manufacturer in the Empire of Japan, specializing primarily in aircraft for the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force. The Ki-38 prototype was produced in response to a December 1937 specification for a successor to the popular fixed-gear Nakajima Ki-27 Nate. The specification called for a top speed of 500 km/h (310 mph), a climb rate of 5,000 m (16,000 ft) in five minutes and a range of 800 km (500 mi). Maneuverability was to be at least as good as that of Ki-27.

 

When first flown in early January 1939, the Ki-38 prototype was a disappointment. Japanese test pilots complained that it was less maneuverable than the Ki-27 Nate and not much faster. Even though the competition was eventually won by the Ki-43, service trials determined the aircraft to hold sufficient promise to warrant further work, leading to the adoption of an expanded and strengthened wing and a more refined Mitsubishi Ha-102 (Army Type 100 1,050hp Air Cooled Radial) 14-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engine. During spring 1939, following the completion of further proving trials, an order for a pre-production batch of 25 aircraft was placed.

 

As a whole, the Ki-38 was an all-modern design consisting of all-metal skin and understructure construction with low-set monoplane wing appendages. The wings were straight in their general design with rounded tips and set well-forward of amidships. The engine was fitted to the extreme forward section of the fuselage in a traditional manner, powering a three-bladed propeller installation. Interestingly, the cockpit was also situated well-forward in the design, shortening the visual obstacle that was the engine compartment to some extent. However, views were still obstructed by the short engine housing to the front and the wings to the lower sides. The fuselage tapered at the rear to which a single vertical tail fin was affixed along with mid-mounted horizontal tailplanes. The undercarriage was retractable and of the "tail-dragger" arrangement consisting of two main single-wheeled landing gear legs and a fixed, diminutive tail wheel leg at the rear.

 

The series-production Ki-38-I was further modified to enhance its performance. These changes involved a major weight saving program, a slimmer and longer fuselage with bigger tail surfaces and a new, more streamlined bubble-style canopy that offered, even while bearing many struts, the pilot a very good all-round field of view.

 

In addition to good maneuverability, the Ki-38-I had a good top speed of more than 500 km/h (310 mph). The initial Ki-38 was armed with four 7.7 mm (0.303 in) Type 89 machine guns in the wings, but this soon turned out to be insufficient against armored Allied fighters and bombers. Quickly, the inner pair of weapons was, after just 50 aircraft, replaced with 12.7 mm (0.50 in) Ho-103 machine guns in the Ki-38-Ib (the initial version subsequently became the Ki-38-Ia), of which 75 were built. On board of the following Ki-38-Ic, the inner weapons were replaced with a pair of even heavier and more effective 20 mm (0.787 in) Ho-5 cannon, which required fairings for the ammunition under the wings and made this version easy to identify. The Ki-38-Ic became the most frequent variant, with 150 examples built.

 

All types also featured external hardpoints for a drop tank under the fuselage or a pair of bombs of up to 250 kg (550 lb) caliber under the wings. Late production aircraft were designated Ki-38-II. The pilot enjoyed a slightly taller canopy and a reflector gunsight in place of the earlier telescopic gunsight. The revised machines were also fitted with a 13 mm (0.51 in) armor plate for the pilot's head and back, and the aircraft's fuel tanks were coated in rubber to form a crude self-sealing tank. This was later replaced by a 3-layer rubber bladder, 8mm core construction, with 2mm oil-proof lamination. Some earlier aircraft were retrofitted with these elements, when available to the field workshops, and they dramatically improved the aircraft’s resilience to enemy fire. However, the bladder proved to be highly resistant only against light 7.7 mm (0.303 in) bullets but was not as effective against larger calibers. The Ki-38-II’s armament was the same as the Ki-38-Ic’s and 120 aircraft were built.

 

Ki-38 production started in November 1939 at the Tachikawa Hikoki KK and at the 1st Army Air Arsenal (Tachikawa Dai-Ichi Rikugun Kokusho) plants, also at Tachikawa. Although Tachikawa Hikoki successfully managed to enter into large-scale production of the Ki-38, the 1st Army Air Arsenal was less successful – hampered by a shortage of skilled workers, it was ordered to stop production after 49 Ki-38 were built, and Tachikawa ceased production of the Ki-38 altogether in favor of the Ki-43 in mid-1944.

 

Once it was identified and successfully distinguished from the IJA’s new Ki-43 “Oscar” and the IJN’s A6M “Zero” (Oscar), which both had very similar outlines, the Ki-38 received the Allied code name “Brad”. Even though it was not produced in the numbers of the Ki-43 or the A6M, the Ki-38 fought in China, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, New Guinea, the Philippines, South Pacific islands and the Japanese home islands. Like the Oscar and the Zero, the Ki-38 initially enjoyed air superiority in the skies of Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, Burma and New Guinea. This was partly due to the better performance of the Brad and partly due to the relatively small numbers of combat-ready Allied fighters, mostly the Curtiss P-36 Hawk, Curtiss P-40, Brewster Buffalo, Hawker Hurricane and Curtiss-Wright CW-21 in Asia and the Pacific during the first months of the war.

 

As the war progressed, however, the fighter suffered from the same weaknesses as its slower, fixed-gear Ki-27 "Nate" predecessor and the more advanced naval A6M Zero: light armor and less-than-effective self-sealing fuel tanks, which caused high casualties in combat. Its armament of four light machine guns also proved inadequate against the more heavily armored Allied aircraft. Both issues were more or less mended with improved versions, but the Ki-38 could never keep up with the enemy fighters’ development and potential. And as newer Allied aircraft were introduced, the Japanese were forced into a defensive war and most aircraft were flown by inexperienced pilots.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1

Length: 8.96 m (29 ft 4 in)

Wingspan: 10.54 m (34 ft 7 in)

Height: 3.03 m (9 ft 11 in)

Wing area: 17.32 m² (186.4 sq ft)

Empty weight: 2,158 kg (4,758 lb)

Gross weight: 2,693 kg (5,937 lb)

Max takeoff weight: 2,800 kg (6,173 lb)

 

Powerplant:

1× Mitsubishi Ha-102 14-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engine with 1,050hp (755 kW),

driving a 3-bladed variable-pitch propeller

 

Performance

Maximum speed: 509 km/h (316 mph, 275 kn)

Cruise speed: 450 km/h (280 mph, 240 kn)

Range: 600 km (370 mi, 320 nmi)

Service ceiling: 10,000 m (33,000 ft)

Time to altitude: 2,000 m (6,600 ft) in 3 minutes 24 seconds

Wing loading: 155.4 kg/m2 (31.8 lb/sq ft)

Power/mass: 0.182 hp/lb (0.299 kW/kg)

 

Armament:

2× 20 mm (0.787 in) Ho-5 cannon with 150 rpg

2× 7.7 mm (0.303 in) Type 89 machine guns with 500 rpg

2× underwing hardpoints for single 30 kg (66 lb) or 2 × 250 kg (550 lb) bombs

1× ventral hardpoint for a 200 l (53 US gal; 44 imp gal) drop tank

  

The kit and its assembly:

I always thought that the French Bloch MB 150 had some early WWII Japanese look to it, and with this idea I recently procured a relatively cheap Heller kit for this conversion project that would yield the purely fictional Tachikawa Ki-38 for the IJA – even though the Ki-38 existed as a Kawasaki project and eventually became the Ki-45, so that the 38 as kitai number was never actively used.

 

The Heller MB 150 is a vintage kit, and it is not a good one. You get raised panel lines, poor details (the engine is a joke) and mediocre fit. If you want a good MB 150 in 1:72, look IMHO elsewhere.

For the Ki-38 I wanted to retain most of the hull, the first basic change was the integration of a cowling from a Japanese Mitsubishi Ha-102 two-row radial (left over from an Airfix Ki-46 “Dinah”), which also received a new three-blade propeller with a different spinner on a metal axis inside. The engine also received some more interior details, even though the spinner blocks most sight.

 

The next, more radical move was to replace the MB 150’s spinal cockpit fairing with a bubble canopy and a lowered back – I found a very old and glue-tinted canopy from a Matchbox A6M in the spares box, and it turned out to be very suitable for the Ki-38. However, cleaning the clear piece was quite challenging, because all raised struts had to be sanded away to get rid of the old glue and paint residues, and re-polishing it back to a more or less translucent state took several turns with ever finer sandpaper, polishing paste and soft polishing mops on a mini drill. The spine was re-created with 2C-putty and the canopy was blended into it and into the fuselage with several PSR turns.

 

Inside, I used a different pilot figure (which would later be hard to see, though), added a fuel tank behind the seat with some supporting struts and inserted a piece of styrene sheet to separate the landing gear well from the cockpit – OOB it’s simply open.

The landing gear was basically taken OOB, I just replaced the original tail skid with a wheel and modified the wheels with hub covers, because the old kit wants you to push them onto long axis’ with knobs at their tips so that they remain turnable. Meh!

The fairings under the guns in the wings (barrels scratched from the MB 150’s OOB parts) are conformal underwing fuel tanks from a late Seafire (Special Hobby kit).

  

Painting and markings:

The initial plan was a simple green/grey IJA livery, but the model looked SO much like an A6M that I rather decided to give it a more elaborate paint scheme. I eventually found an interesting camouflage on a Mitsubishi Ki-51 “Sonia” attack plane, even though without indications concerning its unit, time frame or theater of operations (even though I assume that it was used in the China-Burma-India theater): an overall light grey base, onto which opaque green contrast fields/stripes had been added, and the remaining light grey upper areas were overpainted with thin sinuous lines of the same green. This was adapted onto the Ki-38 with a basis in Humbrol 167 (RAF Barley Grey) and FS 34102 (Humbrol 117) for the green cammo. I also wanted to weather the model considerably, as a measure to hide some hardware flaws, so that a partial “primer coat” with Aluminum (Revell 99) was added to several areas, to shine through later. The yellow ID markings on the wings’ leading edges were painted with Humbrol 69. The propeller blades were painted with Humbrol 180, the spinner in a slightly lighter mix of 180 and 160.

Interior surfaces were painted with a dull yellowish green, a mix of Revell 16 and 42, just the inside of the landing gear covers became grey as the outside, in a fashion very similar to early Ki-43s.

 

The decals came form various sources, including a Hasegawa Ki-61 sheet for the unit markings and some stencils and hinomaru in suitable sizes from a generic roundel sheet.

 

Some dry-brushing with light grey was done to emphasize edges and details, and some soot stains were added with graphite to the exhausts and the guns. Finally, the kit was sealed with matt acrylic varnish, some more dry-brushing with aluminum was done, esp. around the cockpit, and position lights were added with translucent paint.

  

An unexpected result – I was not prepared that the modified MB 150 looks THAT much like a Mitsubishi A6M or the Ki-43! There’s even an Fw 190-ish feel to it, from certain angles. O.K., the canopy actually comes from a Zero and the cowling looks very similar, too. But the overall similarity is baffling, just the tail is the most distinguishing feature! However, due to the poor basis and the almost blind canopy donor, the model is far from stellar or presentable – but some in-flight shots look pretty convincing, and even the camouflage appears to be quite effective over wooded terrain.

When visitors come to the Portland Japanese Garden, one of the first features they notice is a massive stone structure at the west end of the new Cultural Village. Measuring 18.5 feet tall and 185 feet long, it rises up to both greet visitors and transport them to another place and time.

 

Walking past it, the visitor catches his reflection in an oversized stone [??] and pauses. Staring up at the dry stacked rocks looming above, this structure prompts more questions than answers: just what is this giant wall? And what is it doing in the middle of Portland, Oregon?

  

A WALL LIKE NO OTHER

This wall—known as a shiro-zumi Castle Wall—is part of the Portland Japanese Garden’s $33.5 million Cultural Crossing expansion, which also includes three new LEED-certified buildings designed by world-renowned architect Kengo Kuma.

 

The idea for the wall began with Garden Curator Sadafumi “Sada” Uchiyama. Due to the Garden’s position on the top of the hill, it became clear early on that a retaining wall was needed to hold back the western slope. Instead of a more traditional retaining wall, Sada thought it would be an opportunity to feature yet another connection to Japanese heritage craftsmanship. The Castle Wall is a first of its kind to be built outside of Japan.

 

A TRADITIONAL TECHNIQUE

In medieval Japan, fortresses (shiro) were constructed primarily of wood and paper—the same materials used to make houses, shops, and other buildings.

 

While a strategically placed wooden castle could hold off many, one flaming arrow could destroy the entire structure.

 

Over time, battlements made from mud and wood were shored up with stone. During the intense Azuchi-Momoyama Period (1569-1603), rival clans struggled for control over Japan’s feudal regions. The Shogun, using information from Jesuit missionaries who had traveled through Germany, started using masonry to fortify his castles.

 

Within one generation, Japanese artisans developed stone-building techniques that surpassed the European prototypes.

 

Ano-zumi, a traditional technique to build a dry stone wall, was developed around 350 years ago. This technique uses unhewn stones which lock together to form a strong wall, designed to last for centuries.

 

Large foundation stones (sumi) support the weight of natural, raw stones. Instead of mortar, ballast stones (i.e., gravel or stone chips) fill the gaps between the stones and provide additional strength.

 

Traditionally, each wall contains several feature stones to add visual interest, as well as a kagami, or mirror stone.

 

The kagami is the largest stone, with a smooth, outward- facing surface. These massive boulders invite the viewer to pause for a moment of reflection—it is a visual break in the wall’s densely packed stones.

 

The kagami also represents the Shogun’s station within Japanese society. Only a leader with significant wealth and power could move a stone of this size, much less install it in a castle wall.

 

“A castle wall was originally a symbol of power,” said Sada. “Approaching, the viewer would think of how much work and how many people it takes to build a wall of this size. In medieval times, that meant hundreds of skilled workers, and animals, working for months. It was incredibly costly—only a great leader could have a wall like this,” he added.

 

A WALL CONNECTING CULTURES: CALLING UPON THE PAST TO BUILD THE FUTURE

Creating such a sizable structure at the Portland Japanese Garden would not be easy and required a uniquely refined skill set.

 

To find the right person to lead this project, Sada would have to go back in time.

 

He reached out to Suminori Awata. A fifteenth-generation Japanese stone mason, Mr. Awata used the ano-zumi, or “dry stone” building style, which originated in 17th century Japan.

 

At the time he was asked to take on the Castle Wall project, Mr. Awata didn’t know much about the Portland Japanese Garden. But when Sada described what he envisioned, Mr. Awata did not hesitate to say yes.

 

“I have been learning this craft since I was very young. My family has been stone masons for 300 or 350 years; they built around 80% of the stone walls in Japan."

 

"My father and I both learned our family’s trade by watching my grandfather. As an adult, I’ve been repairing walls my family built and I have built walls for large houses and shrines. But I’ve never built anything of this size. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

 

As a result of his ancestors’ superior craftsmanship, Mr. Awata has rarely created new work. Instead, he has spent his career repairing or maintaining existing walls, which were built by his ancestors.

 

Some of the walls date back to the 9th century and have survived earthquakes that flattened more modern, high-tech buildings.

 

The Castle Wall at the Portland Japanese Garden represented Mr. Awata’s first opportunity to practice his trade on a grand scale.

 

Immediately after Mr. Awata signed on, his team of assistants was assembled. Matt Driscoll (O’Driscoll Stone, Petaluma, Ca.) and Kyle Schlagenhauf (Green Man Builders, Arcata, Ca.), were selected, as was Ed Lockett, owner of Stone Sculptures, Inc., and his team. Finally, Sada and the Portland Japanese Garden gardeners took turns contributing to shaping and placing the stones.

 

SOURCING LOCAL STONE

Throughout the project, it was a top priority to maintain the feel and essence of the Japanese garden and architect Kengo Kuma’s overall vision for the Cultural Crossing project. Thus, before work could even begin on the 185-foot-long wall, there was an extensive search to find the perfect stones.

 

Oregon is rich in Basalt, a type of lava-derived rock which can have an irregular grain and is considered too fragile for larger projects like the Castle Wall, as it might crumble under the wall’s weight.

 

For the Castle Wall cornerstones, huge blocks of granite were needed—six feet long and at least three feet thick.

 

Finding a source for stones of this size and strength was no easy task. Sada wanted to source the stones locally and knew of a quarry outside of Baker City, Oregon which produces fine-grained, blue tinted granite called Baker Blue—but the quarry had been closed for several decades.

 

The property is managed by Dan Dunn, owner of Alpine Boulder Company, who only opens the quarry for very special projects. It is the only known source of granite in Oregon.

 

Several trips to the quarry yielded 1,000 tons of the Baker Blue granite. Together, Sada and Mr. Awata hand selected the enormous blocks of granite.

 

“I listen to the boulders. From the time I found them in the quarry to when I select them for final placement, they are always telling me where they want to go. That is what I watched my grandfather do and that is how I know these rocks will stay in place,” said Mr. Awata.

 

BOLTS AND FEATHERS, CUBED AND SQUARED

The boulders were then transported to Smith Rock Inc. in Southeast Portland, using specialized heavy- equipment.

 

There, workers began cutting stones into smaller pieces that could be shaped and split by hand, using tools such as saws, hammers, and drills.

 

Under the direction of Mr. Awata, Schlagenhauf, and Driscoll, gardeners from the Portland Japanese Garden helped split the boulders to prepare them for their placement as part of the wall’s foundation.

 

The sound of metal on rock—drill bits, mallets, and saws—filled the air, along with dust and flying rock chips. Mr. Awata walked from stone to stone, carefully observing everyone’s progress.

 

Instead of mortar, smaller ballast stones would fit to join larger foundation stones. The goal was to cut more than 800 tons of Baker Blue granite into long, large foundation pieces.

 

Fifty-five cornerstones would support the authentic medieval Castle Wall.

 

BAKER BLUE GRANITE

Baker Blue granite is strong enough to support hundreds of tons of rock without breaking or crumbling ensuring the Castle Wall will stand for generations of visitors to enjoy—an enduring example of the finest Japanese craftsmanship, made from Oregon materials.

 

“With such a beautiful, high-quality stone, we didn’t need to do much to prepare it for construction. We might use a 1/8-inch grinder on the face, to accentuate the coloring of the granite. Really, the biggest challenge was getting such a huge piece of rock into place on site,” said Driscoll.

 

Which is not to suggest the process was easy. To split a boulder of this size cleanly, the mason drills a line of identical holes along the face of the rock.

 

Metal bolts and “feathers,” or winged bolt-holders, are inserted and hammered in with a metal mallet. In order to spread the stress evenly, each bolt gets a few taps at a time. The mason goes down to the end of the line, and then doubles back.

 

Very slowly, the boulder begins to split. Experienced masons may even walk away mid-way through this process to let the stone “rest,” knowing that gentle pressure is even more effective than heavy, intense mallet strikes.

 

Senior Gardener Adam Hart and Gardener Justin Blackwell joined the stone-cutting crew at Smith Rock and had the opportunity to split 200 tons of Baker Blue granite under Mr. Awata’s direction.

 

“He marked the cuts with a piece of chalk, and then we got to it,” said Blackwell. “In some ways, it wasn’t that different than what we do in the Garden. When we’re pruning, for example, there’s already awareness that you need to hold your body a certain way when you’re using the pruning saw, and that there’s a certain rhythm and method of cutting. It was good to have that background when we were working with the stone.”

 

While hand tools were a big part of the stone shaping, Hart was relieved to be using modern methods and machines this time around. In less than two weeks, all 55 cornerstones needed for construction were completed.

“We had drills and saws, it made a big difference. It was an honor to work with Awata- san; a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” said Hart.

 

THE LANGUAGE OF STONE

Astuko Kimura had never worn a hard hat and vest before. In fact, she’d never worked outside for a job.

 

“You had to really bundle up. It was early in the morning in February. I learned right away to dress like I was going skiing because it was cold,” said Kimura laughing.

Kimura, a mother of two grown children, was grocery shopping when she saw a newspaper article that mentioned the Garden’s Cultural Crossing Project—specifically the Castle Wall.

 

She called the Garden the very next day to inquire about an interpreter position.

That Saturday, Kimura had a sit-down interview with Garden Curator Sadafumi Uchiyama and got the job.

 

Kimura bundled up and went to work interpreting every week day in February. “I was so impressed with Sada-san. I had been to the Japanese Garden before but had honestly forgotten how wonderful it was.”

 

Kimura grew up just outside Tokyo, and goes back to Japan twice a year to visit family. She works part-time as an interpreter for Japanese visitors coming to the airport, so this was a perfect fit for her. “Plus, what a neat experience to tell my kids I was a part of,” she said.

Nana Goto, who lives in Gresham, had seen the same call for interpreters and thought it would be fun.

“I thought—now this is going to be an experience of a lifetime,” she said.

 

Keiko Gilbert interpreted two days a week in March. “I was impressed with the process and loved watching the Castle Wall grow. Mr. Awata mentioned that usually people cannot see the process in Japan since it’s hidden from the public, so I felt very lucky to be a part of it,” said Gilbert.

Despite the severe and challenging conditions at the construction site, the three women stayed positive while supporting the team of stone masons.

 

“Watching them work, I would think about how cultural Japan meets American culture. It was amazing to be just a small part of what will have a long history,” said Kimura.

 

Desirae Wood, Project Manager and Assistant Administrative Assistant to Uchiyama noted the incredibly positive effect these women had on the overall project. “One of the most important—and unexpected—things they did was keep morale up. We were working in the cold rain all day. I know it really helped Awata-san’s state of mind which helped keep everyone going.”

 

THE FIRST STONE

On the morning of February 1, 2016 gray skies drizzled as two dozen people waited in anticipation for the beginning of this historic project. Three cups were carefully placed atop a giant Baker Blue boulder, there to act as a temporary altar. With one cup filled with rice, one with salt, and the last with sake, the stage was set. Mr. Awata stood alongside Ed Lockett and Sada, who addressed the group:

 

“This is a modest ceremony we perform to ask nature to look kindly on our project for the safety of what we build, and the people who build it. Ordinarily we would also drink the sake but with power equipment surrounding us, that’s not such a good idea.”

 

Then Sada passed the sake bottle to Mr. Awata who held it and said a few quiet words. With that, the ceremony was complete.

 

The group disbanded and the work, for which everyone had been prepping, began in earnest. Finally, under Mr. Awata’s watchful eye, the first piece of the Garden’s Castle Wall was carefully lowered into place.

 

Gradually, like prehistoric puzzle pieces, more stones were added. In the cool morning air, the Garden’s Castle Wall—the first of its kind built in this country or this century—began to take shape.

 

THE BALLET OF BOULDERS

Weeks later, the Castle Wall construction continued. Mr. Awata’s role was always the careful planning, guiding each boulder to its new home.

 

After a stone had been selected to be added to the wall, a rigger carefully wrapped it with a cable, paying special attention to the cable’s placement to prevent the massive rock from leaning or rolling when hoisted.

 

It was then lifted above the wall by excavator. The team used ropes, poles, and hands to guide the stone, gently lowering it into place.

 

Next came the subtle adjustments: leveling the stone, checking its alignment. Once Mr. Awata approved, the deliberate process began again with the next boulder.

Craftsmanship and intention were the priorities.

 

From day one Sada said the site had one rule for the stones: “Each stone should move only once.”

 

All of this as Driscoll and Schlagenhauf chiseled away, the musical pings

of their hammers hitting the stone, rising above the construction site

noises like a well-composed score to the stone dancers. 1

 

THE HUMANITY OF STONE

By the numbers alone, this project is remarkable. But numbers don’t quantify the heart and commitment that has driven this project from the start. It was the can-do spirit articulated in the actions of everyone involved, which brought this special project to life.

 

In the end, the monumental Castle Wall project was completed quickly and quietly. Originally scheduled to be completed at the end of April 2016, the wall ultimately wrapped up nearly a month early.

 

When asked how the team was able to accomplish this, Lockett replied, “In a big project like this, I’ve seen a lot go wrong. But this project—we had an incredible team and it all just came together. Everyone was dedicated to making this. And what folks may not realize is that Sadafumi Uchiyama’s attention, commitment, and work—that is what really drove this project.”

 

Though mindful of the task at hand, Mr. Awata and his team of assistants were looking ahead the whole time. Throughout the building process, the team dedicated themselves to saving time and materials. This led to a small surplus of labor and stone, making it possible to create another stone wall face at the north end of the new Entrance Plaza at the bottom of the hill.

 

When asked what his grandfather would say about this project, Awata-san reflected for a moment and responded, “At first I think he would be very surprised that I was doing a project in America. But once he got over that, I think he would point out ways it could be better. He would say ‘There is always more to do.’ ”

 

In Japanese masonry, form and function are inseparable concepts. Every structural element has a symbolic meaning.

 

For Mr. Awata, the relationship between the stones at the base of the wall and its top was crucial in construction. Each stone played a role—whether supporting the pieces above it, binding the front and back of the wall together, or crowning the wall.

 

Seeing the wall for the first time, visitors should feel a sense of awe.

 

Reflecting on the construction, Mr. Awata stated, “The slope is impressive, yet sensitive,” continuing that the wall will make people think of how these stones were worked on and assembled in such a beautiful, intentional way.

 

Although stone is sometimes considered a cold, awkward, rough material, Mr. Awata hopes that visitors will experience its humanity through the careful stacking of the wall. “The human element of its construction,” he said, “is as inescapable as the earth the stones came from.”

 

BY THE NUMBERS

One thousand tons of granite Traveled 250 miles.

 

To be measured, marked, split, feathered, faced, cut, chiseled, and stacked.

 

Totaling 3,400 man-hours.

 

Communicating in three languages.

 

Led by 15 generations of craftsmanship.

 

To be 185 feet long.

 

And 18.5 feet tall.

 

Resulting in not one but two castle walls.

 

A first for North America.

japanesegarden.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PJF_CastleW...

 

The new House of Waterford Crystal

The new, high-tech House of Waterford Crystal has opened its doors in Waterford City, Ireland, allowing visitors to explore the history and craftsmanship of the world’s premier crystal manufacturer. The center, which comprises an actual crystal factory tour, visitor center and opulent retail store, houses the largest collection of Waterford Crystal in the world.

Visitors can interact with the skilled workers as they watch the crystal mix being transformed into glass in a 1200ºC (2192ºF) furnace before being blown and decorated with deep engravings. They can watch the glass being formed into the products they see on sale in luxury stores around the globe and learn about the production techniques through audiovisual displays and chatting to the craftsmen. Many of the most prestigious pieces of Waterford Crystal, which have been presented to celebrities and politicians, are also on display.

  

For full length of video, please visit youtu.be/Da3FNouQR7U

Franciscan Church "Holy Mother Maria of Mercy" in Maribor.

 

LARGE

 

About

 

Franciscan Church "Holy Mother Maria of Mercy" in Maribor. For a long time I wanted to take night shot from this old brick church, build with plans from Wienna's architect Richard Jordan, between 19. and 20. century. It was build on place of Capuchin order cloister and church "Mother of Murcey", where was from the year 1786 the headquarter of Slovenian beforecity parochial. It is build in form of old Roman basilica. Bricks for building were carried by hand from women, appr. from 2 km away.

Most of the inner paintings were painted by Hungarian painter Ferenz Pruszinskay, kross road was curved from wood by carver Miloš Hohnjec from Celje, pipe organ were made from Maribor skilled worker Jožef Brandl. On main oltar is Maria's plastics from 18th century, in a presbytery are frescos an vitrages from painter Stane Kregar.

 

The shot

 

Standard 3 exposures [-2,0,+2EV] in IS0400/RAW at f/8.0 (1/60 seconds exposure time for 0 EV) using the EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens @10mm, from hand.

 

Photomatix

 

Tonemapped using the detail enhancer, twice.

 

Photoshop

 

° removed noise on upper part (sky),

° Curves to give a brick wall more details,

° Highlights and Shadows used to open up shadows a little,

° High pass filter for more details, blended with Multiply appr. 10%,

° Scaled, framed and signed.

 

You

 

All comments, criticism and tips for improvements are ( as always ) welcome.

 

Music

 

Avril Lavigne - Knocking on Heaven's Door

 

Series: CRYSTAL CRAFTING #1

 

Crystals Masters Crafters making a Crystal Jar

 

Location: House of Waterford Crystal - Parnell Street - Waterford - County Waterford - Munster - Ireland - IE - Europe - EU

 

Photographer: Mark

 

Photoshop Camera Raw Filter (RED)

M.J. Oliver Residence in Wichita, KS (now razed - the house, not Wichita, KS). An early description of this house noted that interior walls and ceilings were finished with hand-pained frescoes. Exterior brickwork was extremely ornate (especially the south chimney - which is somewhat hidden behind the tree in this photo - which corbells up through the limestone foundation and has decorative brickwork patterns the entire height of the house). Photo shows mainly the front (east side) of the house and the south side of the house (whcih actually has the larger porch). If one were looking due northwest at Lawrence & 10th Street in Wichita, KS, this was the scene. This residence is confirmed to have been designed & built by W.H. Sternberg circa 1886. The residence was torn down to make way for commercial development and today the Saigon Restaurant sits on this site. Judging by some of the other more modest homes in the photo, this was without a doubt a first class Victorian home with two (probably coal-burning) fireplaces. The fence of wrought and cast iron also set this home apart. Because of the tremendous economic boom at the time this house was built, skilled workers from all over the country were relocating to Wichita in hopes of finding work. There were a couple of newly-relocated mural painters in Wichita (one allegedly from Illinois the other from "back east") and this house is reported to have had large hand-painted frescoes on the walls & ceilings (done by the artist from Illinois). Consistent with Sternberg-designed homes this one displays the diamond pattern in the front awning, highly corbelled & decorative brick work on the chimney column and flue, a front window on the 2nd level appears to extend into the 3rd level (tied together by a decorative element at the roof line) giving the impression of a two-story room on the front as well as a steeply pitched roof. The broad side of this house faces south towards downtown. The roof line of this home appears to mimic the C.R. Miller home in many ways. Of course the C.R. Miller home was on south Lawrence and the broad side faced north. Here the M.J.. Oliver is on north Lawrence and the broad side faces south. There are additional design aspects of this home that resemble or appear to "copy" other confirmed Sternberg-designed properties such as the low sloping roof line on the north (similar to the Levy Mansion) and the and the wrap-around porch on the south side of the residence (reminiscent of Sternberg Mansion). Although not visible in this photo, the one south porch covers two entryways to the residence with stairs on both the east (showing) and west side (a similar wrap-around porch - south side of the residence - covering two entry doors with stairs on east and west side of porch also seen at Sternberg Mansion). Not exclusively, but commonly Sternberg-designed-built homes have the front entryway on the right side of the house (as this house does). This house was built about 1886. The Wichita City Directory does not list a residential address for M.J. Oliver in 1885, however in 1887, this address (1105 N. Lawrence) is listed as his residential address. So sometime between 1885 and 1887 this house was built. This period was also the very height of the economic boom. This photo is believed to have been taken the Winter of 1886 or 1887. The Olivers planted new trees (along the fence next to 10th street) when they moved in and a confirmed 1888 photo shows those same trees, but looking a little larger than they appear in this photo.

 

The Georgian-style porch on the south of the residence (closest to 10th street) with opposing stairs on each side indicates that even though this is the largest porch on the residence, it was not the front or main porch. The main porch on Sternberg homes always has the widest staircase and always leads directly into the home - it's a straight shot into the home. However all other staircases in Sternberg homes always encompass turns or twists between the time a person enters the staircase and essentially "leaving" the staircase (whether exterior or interior). In the case of the south porch one must turn to enter the house. With regard to interior staircases in Sternberg homes, they are never straight. When you enter the staircase you're never exactly sure where you might end up as they always turn at least once if not more than once and rarely (or not easily) can you see the final destination of the staircase from the starting point. For this reason I have always thought of Sternberg staircases as "passageways of mystery" and what a Victorian delight they would have been at a time when most staircases were purely functional, Sternberg built all secondary staircases in his homes (other than the main one to the front door) as elements of intrigue and mystery. This design aspect also had practical purposes, too, as it shielded the private areas of the second floor from lookers on the first floor without having to use portieres or doors for privacy. Perhaps this was one reason W.H. Sternberg was so popular for residential design. In the late 1800s, he was specifically building homes for the enjoyment and livability of its occupants, which was an idea that wasn't common for persons of moderate to upscale means. Only the extremely wealthy could afford to have their homes architected and built to suit their own comfort and Sternberg did maintain and use the services of prominent architects when the situation called for it. Indeed, Sternberg is credited with having been the first person in Wichita to use the services of an architect (outside of the area) purely for residential design. That residence was the home of C.R. Miller on South Lawrence (home commonly known as "Lyndhurst") and the architect was none other than Standord White who had a national reputation for designing homes for the super wealthy including the Vanderbilts, the Astors, Joseph Pulitzer and many other notable and wealthy persons of the day. Another "novel" feature that W.H. Sternberg is credited with having built (in the Wichita area ) was the first-ever laundry chute (in the Pratt-Campbell Mansion). Again the notion of designing and building one's home specifically for the comfort of its occupants was not at all common in the 1800s. Work was the standard and the notion of "short-cutting" the stairs by building a laundry chute was unheard of. But Sternberg brought many of these types of new designs together and introduced them to prospective home builders and it resulted in wide-spread appeal and acclaim to his benefit. The Biographical Album of Sedgwick County notes in 1888, that W.H. Sternberg designed and built "probably twice as many" homes and buildings as the next largest contractor. What he did was new and different and many people had the means to do something new and different. Sternberg was the area's leading designer and contractor at a time in the 1800s when Wichita had a larger population than Dallas, TX and was by some measures the fastest growing city in the entire country (#2 would have been New York City, #3 would have been Kansas City). His building styles to this day are well-loved by all who see them.

 

Years before this house was built, Sternberg was promoting himself as both an “architect and builder” of homes, specifically offering “designing and drafting” services. An advertisement for Sternberg, Hall & Co in the 1869 - 1870 Chenango County, New York Directory noted, “Being Architects and Builders themselves, they know just what is wanted for a house and how to prepare it. Give them your patronage if you would have everything in first-class style.” It is interesing to note that they listed "Architects" first and "Builders" second in the list of services. Some have tended to think of W.H. Sternberg as mainly a contractor, but indeed the architecting and design services that he did himself were a substantial portion of his business if not the larger portion.

 

Your thoughts, ideas, comments and / or additional information are welcomed and appreciated!!

  

Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume (1,180 cu mi (4,900 km3)) and the third-largest by surface area (22,404 sq mi (58,030 km2)), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the east, its basin is conjoined with that of Lake Huron through the 3+1⁄2 miles (5.6 kilometers) wide, 295 feet (90 meters; 49 fathoms) deep, Straits of Mackinac, giving it the same surface elevation as its easterly counterpart; the two are technically a single lake.

 

Lake Michigan is the world's largest lake by area in one country. Located in the United States, it is shared, from west to east, by the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Ports along its shores include Milwaukee and the City of Green Bay in Wisconsin; Chicago in Illinois; Gary in Indiana; and Muskegon in Michigan. Green Bay is a large bay in its northwest, and Grand Traverse Bay is in the northeast. The word "Michigan" is believed to come from the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯᑲᒥ (michi-gami or mishigami) meaning "great water".

 

Some of the most studied early human inhabitants of the Lake Michigan region were the Hopewell Native Americans. Their culture declined after 800 AD and for the next few hundred years, the region was the home of peoples known as the Late Woodland Native Americans. In the early 17th century, when western European explorers made their first forays into the region, they encountered descendants of the Late Woodland Native Americans: the historic Chippewa; Menominee; Sauk; Fox; Winnebago; Miami; Ottawa; and Potawatomi peoples. The French explorer Jean Nicolet is believed to have been the first European to reach Lake Michigan, possibly in 1634 or 1638. In the earliest European maps of the region, the name of Lake Illinois has been found in addition to that of "Michigan", named for the Illinois Confederation of tribes. During the 1640s and 1650s, the Beaver Wars over the fur trade with the European colonies, initiated by the Iroquois, forced a massive demographic shift as their western neighbors fled the violence. They sought refuge west and north of Lake Michigan.

 

Lake Michigan is joined via the narrow, open-water Straits of Mackinac with Lake Huron, and the combined body of water is sometimes called Michigan–Huron (also Huron–Michigan). The Straits of Mackinac were an important Native American and fur trade route. Located on the southern side of the straits is the town of Mackinaw City, Michigan, the site of Fort Michilimackinac, a reconstructed French fort founded in 1715, and on the northern side is St. Ignace, Michigan, site of a French Catholic mission to the Indians, founded in 1671. In 1673, Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet and their crew of five Métis voyageurs followed Lake Michigan to Green Bay and up the Fox River, nearly to its headwaters, in their search for the Mississippi River. By the late 18th century, the eastern end of the straits was controlled by Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island, a British colonial and early American military base and fur trade center, founded in 1781.

 

With the advent of European exploration into the area in the late 17th century, Lake Michigan became used as part of a line of waterways leading from the Saint Lawrence River to the Mississippi River and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. French coureurs des bois and voyageurs established small ports and trading communities, such as Green Bay, on the lake during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In the 19th century, Lake Michigan was integral to the development of Chicago and the Midwestern United States west of the lake. For example, 90% of the grain shipped from Chicago traveled by ships east over Lake Michigan during the antebellum years. The volume rarely fell below 50% after the Civil War even with the major expansion of railroad shipping.

 

The first person to reach the deep bottom of Lake Michigan was J. Val Klump, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1985. Klump reached the bottom via submersible as part of a research expedition. In 2007, a row of stones paralleling an ancient shoreline was discovered by Mark Holley, professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan College. This formation lies 40 feet (12 m) below the surface of the lake. One of the stones is said to have a carving resembling a mastodon. The formation needed more study before it could be authenticated. The warming of Lake Michigan was the subject of a 2018 report by Purdue University. In each decade since 1980, steady increases in obscure surface temperature have occurred. This is likely to lead to decreasing native habitat and to adversely affect native species survival, including game fish.

 

Chicago is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388 in the 2020 census, it is the third-most populous city in the United States after New York City and Los Angeles. As the seat of Cook County, the second-most populous county in the U.S., Chicago is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area, which is often colloquially called "Chicagoland".

 

Located on the shore of Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. It grew rapidly in the mid-19th century. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, but Chicago's population continued to grow. Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and architecture, such as the Chicago School, the development of the City Beautiful Movement, and the steel-framed skyscraper.

 

Chicago is an international hub for finance, culture, commerce, industry, education, technology, telecommunications, and transportation. It has the largest and most diverse derivatives market in the world, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures alone. O'Hare International Airport is routinely ranked among the world's top six busiest airports by passenger traffic, and the region is also the nation's railroad hub. The Chicago area has one of the highest gross domestic products (GDP) of any urban region in the world, generating $689 billion in 2018. Chicago's economy is diverse, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.

 

Chicago is a major tourist destination. Chicago's culture has contributed much to the visual arts, literature, film, theater, comedy (especially improvisational comedy), food, dance, and music (particularly jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, gospel, and electronic dance music, including house music). Chicago is home to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, while the Art Institute of Chicago provides an influential visual arts museum and art school. The Chicago area also hosts the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Chicago, among other institutions of learning. Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues, including two Major League Baseball teams.

 

In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by the Potawatomi, an indigenous tribe who had succeeded the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples in this region.

 

The first known permanent settler in Chicago was trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African descent, perhaps born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and established the settlement in the 1780s. He is commonly known as the "Founder of Chicago."

 

In 1795, following the victory of the new United States in the Northwest Indian War, an area that was to be part of Chicago was turned over to the U.S. for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the U.S. Army constructed Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed during the War of 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn by the Potawatomi before being later rebuilt.

 

After the War of 1812, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago and sent west of the Mississippi River as part of the federal policy of Indian removal.

 

On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 6,000 people. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as Receiver of Public Monies. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837, and for several decades was the world's fastest-growing city.

 

As the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicago's first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848. The canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River.

 

A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad. Manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade (established 1848) listed the first-ever standardized "exchange-traded" forward contracts, which were called futures contracts.

 

In the 1850s, Chicago gained national political prominence as the home of Senator Stephen Douglas, the champion of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the "popular sovereignty" approach to the issue of the spread of slavery. These issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage. Lincoln was nominated in Chicago for U.S. president at the 1860 Republican National Convention, which was held in a purpose-built auditorium called the Wigwam. He defeated Douglas in the general election, and this set the stage for the American Civil War.

 

To accommodate rapid population growth and demand for better sanitation, the city improved its infrastructure. In February 1856, Chicago's Common Council approved Chesbrough's plan to build the United States' first comprehensive sewerage system. The project raised much of central Chicago to a new grade with the use of jackscrews for raising buildings. While elevating Chicago, and at first improving the city's health, the untreated sewage and industrial waste now flowed into the Chicago River, and subsequently into Lake Michigan, polluting the city's primary freshwater source.

 

The city responded by tunneling two miles (3.2 km) out into Lake Michigan to newly built water cribs. In 1900, the problem of sewage contamination was largely resolved when the city completed a major engineering feat. It reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that the water flowed away from Lake Michigan rather than into it. This project began with the construction and improvement of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and was completed with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that connects to the Illinois River, which flows into the Mississippi River.

 

In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed an area about 4 miles (6.4 km) long and 1-mile (1.6 km) wide, a large section of the city at the time. Much of the city, including railroads and stockyards, survived intact, and from the ruins of the previous wooden structures arose more modern constructions of steel and stone. These set a precedent for worldwide construction. During its rebuilding period, Chicago constructed the world's first skyscraper in 1885, using steel-skeleton construction.

 

The city grew significantly in size and population by incorporating many neighboring townships between 1851 and 1920, with the largest annexation happening in 1889, with five townships joining the city, including the Hyde Park Township, which now comprises most of the South Side of Chicago and the far southeast of Chicago, and the Jefferson Township, which now makes up most of Chicago's Northwest Side. The desire to join the city was driven by municipal services that the city could provide its residents.

 

Chicago's flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Europe and migrants from the Eastern United States. Of the total population in 1900, more than 77% were either foreign-born or born in the United States of foreign parentage. Germans, Irish, Poles, Swedes, and Czechs made up nearly two-thirds of the foreign-born population (by 1900, whites were 98.1% of the city's population).

 

Labor conflicts followed the industrial boom and the rapid expansion of the labor pool, including the Haymarket affair on May 4, 1886, and in 1894 the Pullman Strike. Anarchist and socialist groups played prominent roles in creating very large and highly organized labor actions. Concern for social problems among Chicago's immigrant poor led Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull House in 1889. Programs that were developed there became a model for the new field of social work.

 

During the 1870s and 1880s, Chicago attained national stature as the leader in the movement to improve public health. City laws and later, state laws that upgraded standards for the medical profession and fought urban epidemics of cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever were both passed and enforced. These laws became templates for public health reform in other cities and states.

 

The city established many large, well-landscaped municipal parks, which also included public sanitation facilities. The chief advocate for improving public health in Chicago was John H. Rauch, M.D. Rauch established a plan for Chicago's park system in 1866. He created Lincoln Park by closing a cemetery filled with shallow graves, and in 1867, in response to an outbreak of cholera he helped establish a new Chicago Board of Health. Ten years later, he became the secretary and then the president of the first Illinois State Board of Health, which carried out most of its activities in Chicago.

 

In the 1800s, Chicago became the nation's railroad hub, and by 1910 over 20 railroads operated passenger service out of six different downtown terminals. In 1883, Chicago's railway managers needed a general time convention, so they developed the standardized system of North American time zones. This system for telling time spread throughout the continent.

 

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition on former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park. The Exposition drew 27.5 million visitors, and is considered the most influential world's fair in history. The University of Chicago, formerly at another location, moved to the same South Side location in 1892. The term "midway" for a fair or carnival referred originally to the Midway Plaisance, a strip of park land that still runs through the University of Chicago campus and connects the Washington and Jackson Parks.

 

During World War I and the 1920s there was a major expansion in industry. The availability of jobs attracted African Americans from the Southern United States. Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population of Chicago increased dramatically, from 44,103 to 233,903. This Great Migration had an immense cultural impact, called the Chicago Black Renaissance, part of the New Negro Movement, in art, literature, and music. Continuing racial tensions and violence, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919, also occurred.

 

The ratification of the 18th amendment to the Constitution in 1919 made the production and sale (including exportation) of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. This ushered in the beginning of what is known as the gangster era, a time that roughly spans from 1919 until 1933 when Prohibition was repealed. The 1920s saw gangsters, including Al Capone, Dion O'Banion, Bugs Moran and Tony Accardo battle law enforcement and each other on the streets of Chicago during the Prohibition era. Chicago was the location of the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, when Al Capone sent men to gun down members of a rival gang, North Side, led by Bugs Moran.

 

Chicago was the first American city to have a homosexual-rights organization. The organization, formed in 1924, was called the Society for Human Rights. It produced the first American publication for homosexuals, Friendship and Freedom. Police and political pressure caused the organization to disband.

 

The Great Depression brought unprecedented suffering to Chicago, in no small part due to the city's heavy reliance on heavy industry. Notably, industrial areas on the south side and neighborhoods lining both branches of the Chicago River were devastated; by 1933 over 50% of industrial jobs in the city had been lost, and unemployment rates amongst blacks and Mexicans in the city were over 40%. The Republican political machine in Chicago was utterly destroyed by the economic crisis, and every mayor since 1931 has been a Democrat.

 

From 1928 to 1933, the city witnessed a tax revolt, and the city was unable to meet payroll or provide relief efforts. The fiscal crisis was resolved by 1933, and at the same time, federal relief funding began to flow into Chicago. Chicago was also a hotbed of labor activism, with Unemployed Councils contributing heavily in the early depression to create solidarity for the poor and demand relief; these organizations were created by socialist and communist groups. By 1935 the Workers Alliance of America begun organizing the poor, workers, the unemployed. In the spring of 1937 Republic Steel Works witnessed the Memorial Day massacre of 1937 in the neighborhood of East Side.

 

In 1933, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was fatally wounded in Miami, Florida, during a failed assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1933 and 1934, the city celebrated its centennial by hosting the Century of Progress International Exposition World's Fair. The theme of the fair was technological innovation over the century since Chicago's founding.

 

During World War II, the city of Chicago alone produced more steel than the United Kingdom every year from 1939 – 1945, and more than Nazi Germany from 1943 – 1945.

 

The Great Migration, which had been on pause due to the Depression, resumed at an even faster pace in the second wave, as hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South arrived in the city to work in the steel mills, railroads, and shipping yards.

 

On December 2, 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi conducted the world's first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. This led to the creation of the atomic bomb by the United States, which it used in World War II in 1945.

 

Mayor Richard J. Daley, a Democrat, was elected in 1955, in the era of machine politics. In 1956, the city conducted its last major expansion when it annexed the land under O'Hare airport, including a small portion of DuPage County.

 

By the 1960s, white residents in several neighborhoods left the city for the suburban areas – in many American cities, a process known as white flight – as Blacks continued to move beyond the Black Belt. While home loan discriminatory redlining against blacks continued, the real estate industry practiced what became known as blockbusting, completely changing the racial composition of whole neighborhoods. Structural changes in industry, such as globalization and job outsourcing, caused heavy job losses for lower-skilled workers. At its peak during the 1960s, some 250,000 workers were employed in the steel industry in Chicago, but the steel crisis of the 1970s and 1980s reduced this number to just 28,000 in 2015. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Raby led the Chicago Freedom Movement, which culminated in agreements between Mayor Richard J. Daley and the movement leaders.

 

Two years later, the city hosted the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention, which featured physical confrontations both inside and outside the convention hall, with anti-war protesters, journalists and bystanders being beaten by police. Major construction projects, including the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower, which in 1974 became the world's tallest building), University of Illinois at Chicago, McCormick Place, and O'Hare International Airport, were undertaken during Richard J. Daley's tenure. In 1979, Jane Byrne, the city's first female mayor, was elected. She was notable for temporarily moving into the crime-ridden Cabrini-Green housing project and for leading Chicago's school system out of a financial crisis.

 

In 1983, Harold Washington became the first black mayor of Chicago. Washington's first term in office directed attention to poor and previously neglected minority neighborhoods. He was re‑elected in 1987 but died of a heart attack soon after. Washington was succeeded by 6th ward alderperson Eugene Sawyer, who was elected by the Chicago City Council and served until a special election.

 

Richard M. Daley, son of Richard J. Daley, was elected in 1989. His accomplishments included improvements to parks and creating incentives for sustainable development, as well as closing Meigs Field in the middle of the night and destroying the runways. After successfully running for re-election five times, and becoming Chicago's longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley declined to run for a seventh term.

 

In 1992, a construction accident near the Kinzie Street Bridge produced a breach connecting the Chicago River to a tunnel below, which was part of an abandoned freight tunnel system extending throughout the downtown Loop district. The tunnels filled with 250 million US gallons (1,000,000 m3) of water, affecting buildings throughout the district and forcing a shutdown of electrical power. The area was shut down for three days and some buildings did not reopen for weeks; losses were estimated at $1.95 billion.

 

On February 23, 2011, Rahm Emanuel, a former White House Chief of Staff and member of the House of Representatives, won the mayoral election. Emanuel was sworn in as mayor on May 16, 2011, and won re-election in 2015. Lori Lightfoot, the city's first African American woman mayor and its first openly LGBTQ mayor, was elected to succeed Emanuel as mayor in 2019. All three city-wide elective offices were held by women (and women of color) for the first time in Chicago history: in addition to Lightfoot, the city clerk was Anna Valencia and the city treasurer was Melissa Conyears-Ervin.

 

On May 15, 2023, Brandon Johnson assumed office as the 57th mayor of Chicago.

 

Illinois is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Great Lakes to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash and Ohio rivers to its south. Its largest metropolitan areas are Chicago and the Metro East region of Greater St. Louis. Other metropolitan areas include Peoria and Rockford, as well as Springfield, its capital, and Champaign-Urbana, home to the main campus of the state's flagship university. Of the fifty U.S. states, Illinois has the fifth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth-largest population, and the 25th-largest land area.

 

Illinois has a highly diverse economy, with the global city of Chicago in the northeast, major industrial and agricultural hubs in the north and center, and natural resources such as coal, timber, and petroleum in the south. Owing to its central location and favorable geography, the state is a major transportation hub: the Port of Chicago has access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway and to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River via the Illinois Waterway. Chicago has been the nation's railroad hub since the 1860s, and its O'Hare International Airport has been among the world's busiest airports for decades. Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States and a bellwether in American culture, exemplified by the phrase Will it play in Peoria?.

 

Present-day Illinois was inhabited by various indigenous cultures for thousands of years, including the advanced civilization centered in the Cahokia region. The French were the first Europeans to arrive, settling near the Mississippi and Illinois River in the 17th century in the region they called Illinois Country, as part of the sprawling colony of New France. Following U.S. independence in 1783, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky via the Ohio River, and the population grew from south to north. Illinois was part of the United States' oldest territory, the Northwest Territory, and in 1818 it achieved statehood. The Erie Canal brought increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes, and the small settlement of Chicago became one of the fastest growing cities in the world, benefiting from its location as one of the few natural harbors in southwestern Lake Michigan. The invention of the self-scouring steel plow by Illinoisan John Deere turned the state's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden. In the mid-19th century, the Illinois and Michigan Canal and a sprawling railroad network greatly facilitated trade, commerce, and settlement, making the state a transportation hub for the nation.

 

By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois became one of America's most industrialized states and remains a major manufacturing center. The Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans, particularly in Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago became a leading cultural, economic, and population center and is today one of the world's major commercial centers; its metropolitan area, informally referred to as Chicagoland, holds about 65% of the state's 12.8 million residents.

 

Two World Heritage Sites are in Illinois, the ancient Cahokia Mounds, and part of the Wright architecture site. Major centers of learning include the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. A wide variety of protected areas seek to conserve Illinois' natural and cultural resources. Historically, three U.S. presidents have been elected while residents of Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Barack Obama; additionally, Ronald Reagan was born and raised in the state. Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

The Dinorwic Quarry at Llanberis, now the home of the National Slate Museum and the Electric Mountain Visitor Centre, was once one of the largest slate quarries in the world. Today the scars of the terraces on the side of Elidir Fach and Elidir Fawr, along with the tips of slate waste, are silent testimony to the industrialisation of this beautiful north Wales valley. The quarry was once the major source of income for many communities, not only in the shadow of the mountain itself, but as far away as the east coast of the Isle of Anglesey from where many workmen travelled by boat and train every weekend to live in the spartan conditions of the quarry barracks.

Slate quarrymen were a special breed of highly skilled workers who laboured in what would now been seen as appalling conditions in the face of the prevailing elements, forever running the risk of death, ill-health and serious injury.

After hours of preparation by a crew of skilled workers, the crane operator starts his hoist of a large column form section at this Interstate 69 construction site in Rosenberg, Texas near Houston.

In beautiful 60 year old vintage condition! Built like a tank! These boxes were very carefully constructed by skilled workers at the Yashima/Yashica factory(?) or were supplied by an outside company. Normally these boxes would show much more shelf wear and tear but this one was protected by an outer "shipping" box. This is one of the few boxes Yashima/Yashica produced with katakana characters on it. I believe this camera (the Model C TLR) was mostly made for the Japanese domestic market and are not normally seen outside of Japan.

+++ DISCLAIMER +++

Nothing you see here is real, even though the conversion or the presented background story might be based on historical facts. BEWARE!

  

Some Background:

The Ki-38 fighter was designed by the Tachikawa Aircraft Company Limited (立川飛行機株式会社, Tachikawa Hikōki Kabushiki Kaisha) near Tokyo, an aircraft manufacturer in the Empire of Japan, specializing primarily in aircraft for the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force. The Ki-38 prototype was produced in response to a December 1937 specification for a successor to the popular fixed-gear Nakajima Ki-27 Nate. The specification called for a top speed of 500 km/h (310 mph), a climb rate of 5,000 m (16,000 ft) in five minutes and a range of 800 km (500 mi). Maneuverability was to be at least as good as that of Ki-27.

 

When first flown in early January 1939, the Ki-38 prototype was a disappointment. Japanese test pilots complained that it was less maneuverable than the Ki-27 Nate and not much faster. Even though the competition was eventually won by the Ki-43, service trials determined the aircraft to hold sufficient promise to warrant further work, leading to the adoption of an expanded and strengthened wing and a more refined Mitsubishi Ha-102 (Army Type 100 1,050hp Air Cooled Radial) 14-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engine. During spring 1939, following the completion of further proving trials, an order for a pre-production batch of 25 aircraft was placed.

 

As a whole, the Ki-38 was an all-modern design consisting of all-metal skin and understructure construction with low-set monoplane wing appendages. The wings were straight in their general design with rounded tips and set well-forward of amidships. The engine was fitted to the extreme forward section of the fuselage in a traditional manner, powering a three-bladed propeller installation. Interestingly, the cockpit was also situated well-forward in the design, shortening the visual obstacle that was the engine compartment to some extent. However, views were still obstructed by the short engine housing to the front and the wings to the lower sides. The fuselage tapered at the rear to which a single vertical tail fin was affixed along with mid-mounted horizontal tailplanes. The undercarriage was retractable and of the "tail-dragger" arrangement consisting of two main single-wheeled landing gear legs and a fixed, diminutive tail wheel leg at the rear.

 

The series-production Ki-38-I was further modified to enhance its performance. These changes involved a major weight saving program, a slimmer and longer fuselage with bigger tail surfaces and a new, more streamlined bubble-style canopy that offered, even while bearing many struts, the pilot a very good all-round field of view.

 

In addition to good maneuverability, the Ki-38-I had a good top speed of more than 500 km/h (310 mph). The initial Ki-38 was armed with four 7.7 mm (0.303 in) Type 89 machine guns in the wings, but this soon turned out to be insufficient against armored Allied fighters and bombers. Quickly, the inner pair of weapons was, after just 50 aircraft, replaced with 12.7 mm (0.50 in) Ho-103 machine guns in the Ki-38-Ib (the initial version subsequently became the Ki-38-Ia), of which 75 were built. On board of the following Ki-38-Ic, the inner weapons were replaced with a pair of even heavier and more effective 20 mm (0.787 in) Ho-5 cannon, which required fairings for the ammunition under the wings and made this version easy to identify. The Ki-38-Ic became the most frequent variant, with 150 examples built.

 

All types also featured external hardpoints for a drop tank under the fuselage or a pair of bombs of up to 250 kg (550 lb) caliber under the wings. Late production aircraft were designated Ki-38-II. The pilot enjoyed a slightly taller canopy and a reflector gunsight in place of the earlier telescopic gunsight. The revised machines were also fitted with a 13 mm (0.51 in) armor plate for the pilot's head and back, and the aircraft's fuel tanks were coated in rubber to form a crude self-sealing tank. This was later replaced by a 3-layer rubber bladder, 8mm core construction, with 2mm oil-proof lamination. Some earlier aircraft were retrofitted with these elements, when available to the field workshops, and they dramatically improved the aircraft’s resilience to enemy fire. However, the bladder proved to be highly resistant only against light 7.7 mm (0.303 in) bullets but was not as effective against larger calibers. The Ki-38-II’s armament was the same as the Ki-38-Ic’s and 120 aircraft were built.

 

Ki-38 production started in November 1939 at the Tachikawa Hikoki KK and at the 1st Army Air Arsenal (Tachikawa Dai-Ichi Rikugun Kokusho) plants, also at Tachikawa. Although Tachikawa Hikoki successfully managed to enter into large-scale production of the Ki-38, the 1st Army Air Arsenal was less successful – hampered by a shortage of skilled workers, it was ordered to stop production after 49 Ki-38 were built, and Tachikawa ceased production of the Ki-38 altogether in favor of the Ki-43 in mid-1944.

 

Once it was identified and successfully distinguished from the IJA’s new Ki-43 “Oscar” and the IJN’s A6M “Zero” (Oscar), which both had very similar outlines, the Ki-38 received the Allied code name “Brad”. Even though it was not produced in the numbers of the Ki-43 or the A6M, the Ki-38 fought in China, Burma, the Malay Peninsula, New Guinea, the Philippines, South Pacific islands and the Japanese home islands. Like the Oscar and the Zero, the Ki-38 initially enjoyed air superiority in the skies of Malaya, Netherlands East Indies, Burma and New Guinea. This was partly due to the better performance of the Brad and partly due to the relatively small numbers of combat-ready Allied fighters, mostly the Curtiss P-36 Hawk, Curtiss P-40, Brewster Buffalo, Hawker Hurricane and Curtiss-Wright CW-21 in Asia and the Pacific during the first months of the war.

 

As the war progressed, however, the fighter suffered from the same weaknesses as its slower, fixed-gear Ki-27 "Nate" predecessor and the more advanced naval A6M Zero: light armor and less-than-effective self-sealing fuel tanks, which caused high casualties in combat. Its armament of four light machine guns also proved inadequate against the more heavily armored Allied aircraft. Both issues were more or less mended with improved versions, but the Ki-38 could never keep up with the enemy fighters’ development and potential. And as newer Allied aircraft were introduced, the Japanese were forced into a defensive war and most aircraft were flown by inexperienced pilots.

  

General characteristics:

Crew: 1

Length: 8.96 m (29 ft 4 in)

Wingspan: 10.54 m (34 ft 7 in)

Height: 3.03 m (9 ft 11 in)

Wing area: 17.32 m² (186.4 sq ft)

Empty weight: 2,158 kg (4,758 lb)

Gross weight: 2,693 kg (5,937 lb)

Max takeoff weight: 2,800 kg (6,173 lb)

 

Powerplant:

1× Mitsubishi Ha-102 14-cylinder air-cooled radial piston engine with 1,050hp (755 kW),

driving a 3-bladed variable-pitch propeller

 

Performance

Maximum speed: 509 km/h (316 mph, 275 kn)

Cruise speed: 450 km/h (280 mph, 240 kn)

Range: 600 km (370 mi, 320 nmi)

Service ceiling: 10,000 m (33,000 ft)

Time to altitude: 2,000 m (6,600 ft) in 3 minutes 24 seconds

Wing loading: 155.4 kg/m2 (31.8 lb/sq ft)

Power/mass: 0.182 hp/lb (0.299 kW/kg)

 

Armament:

2× 20 mm (0.787 in) Ho-5 cannon with 150 rpg

2× 7.7 mm (0.303 in) Type 89 machine guns with 500 rpg

2× underwing hardpoints for single 30 kg (66 lb) or 2 × 250 kg (550 lb) bombs

1× ventral hardpoint for a 200 l (53 US gal; 44 imp gal) drop tank

  

The kit and its assembly:

I always thought that the French Bloch MB 150 had some early WWII Japanese look to it, and with this idea I recently procured a relatively cheap Heller kit for this conversion project that would yield the purely fictional Tachikawa Ki-38 for the IJA – even though the Ki-38 existed as a Kawasaki project and eventually became the Ki-45, so that the 38 as kitai number was never actively used.

 

The Heller MB 150 is a vintage kit, and it is not a good one. You get raised panel lines, poor details (the engine is a joke) and mediocre fit. If you want a good MB 150 in 1:72, look IMHO elsewhere.

For the Ki-38 I wanted to retain most of the hull, the first basic change was the integration of a cowling from a Japanese Mitsubishi Ha-102 two-row radial (left over from an Airfix Ki-46 “Dinah”), which also received a new three-blade propeller with a different spinner on a metal axis inside. The engine also received some more interior details, even though the spinner blocks most sight.

 

The next, more radical move was to replace the MB 150’s spinal cockpit fairing with a bubble canopy and a lowered back – I found a very old and glue-tinted canopy from a Matchbox A6M in the spares box, and it turned out to be very suitable for the Ki-38. However, cleaning the clear piece was quite challenging, because all raised struts had to be sanded away to get rid of the old glue and paint residues, and re-polishing it back to a more or less translucent state took several turns with ever finer sandpaper, polishing paste and soft polishing mops on a mini drill. The spine was re-created with 2C-putty and the canopy was blended into it and into the fuselage with several PSR turns.

 

Inside, I used a different pilot figure (which would later be hard to see, though), added a fuel tank behind the seat with some supporting struts and inserted a piece of styrene sheet to separate the landing gear well from the cockpit – OOB it’s simply open.

The landing gear was basically taken OOB, I just replaced the original tail skid with a wheel and modified the wheels with hub covers, because the old kit wants you to push them onto long axis’ with knobs at their tips so that they remain turnable. Meh!

The fairings under the guns in the wings (barrels scratched from the MB 150’s OOB parts) are conformal underwing fuel tanks from a late Seafire (Special Hobby kit).

  

Painting and markings:

The initial plan was a simple green/grey IJA livery, but the model looked SO much like an A6M that I rather decided to give it a more elaborate paint scheme. I eventually found an interesting camouflage on a Mitsubishi Ki-51 “Sonia” attack plane, even though without indications concerning its unit, time frame or theater of operations (even though I assume that it was used in the China-Burma-India theater): an overall light grey base, onto which opaque green contrast fields/stripes had been added, and the remaining light grey upper areas were overpainted with thin sinuous lines of the same green. This was adapted onto the Ki-38 with a basis in Humbrol 167 (RAF Barley Grey) and FS 34102 (Humbrol 117) for the green cammo. I also wanted to weather the model considerably, as a measure to hide some hardware flaws, so that a partial “primer coat” with Aluminum (Revell 99) was added to several areas, to shine through later. The yellow ID markings on the wings’ leading edges were painted with Humbrol 69. The propeller blades were painted with Humbrol 180, the spinner in a slightly lighter mix of 180 and 160.

Interior surfaces were painted with a dull yellowish green, a mix of Revell 16 and 42, just the inside of the landing gear covers became grey as the outside, in a fashion very similar to early Ki-43s.

 

The decals came form various sources, including a Hasegawa Ki-61 sheet for the unit markings and some stencils and hinomaru in suitable sizes from a generic roundel sheet.

 

Some dry-brushing with light grey was done to emphasize edges and details, and some soot stains were added with graphite to the exhausts and the guns. Finally, the kit was sealed with matt acrylic varnish, some more dry-brushing with aluminum was done, esp. around the cockpit, and position lights were added with translucent paint.

  

An unexpected result – I was not prepared that the modified MB 150 looks THAT much like a Mitsubishi A6M or the Ki-43! There’s even an Fw 190-ish feel to it, from certain angles. O.K., the canopy actually comes from a Zero and the cowling looks very similar, too. But the overall similarity is baffling, just the tail is the most distinguishing feature! However, due to the poor basis and the almost blind canopy donor, the model is far from stellar or presentable – but some in-flight shots look pretty convincing, and even the camouflage appears to be quite effective over wooded terrain.

Secretary of the Army Dr. Mark T. Esper participated in the Regan National Defense Forum bipartisan annual event as a speaker in the A Defense Industrial & Innovation Base Workforce for the 21ST Century: Winning The Competition For Highly Skilled Workers Inside & Outside the Pentagon panel alongside California Congressman Ken Calvert, Ms. Marillyn Hewson, Chairman, President & CEO, Lockheed, and Florida Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy in Semi Valley, CA, Dec. 1, 2018. Mr. Mike Hammer from Fox News moderated the discussion. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Nicole Mejia)

Roadtrip Doel and Antwerp, Belgium

  

Antwerp

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

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For other uses, see Antwerp (disambiguation).

  

Antwerp

Antwerpen

 

Municipality of Belgium

Antwerp.jpg

 

Flag of Antwerp

Flag Coat of arms of Antwerp

Coat of arms

   

Antwerp is located in Belgium

 

Antwerp

 

Antwerp

 

Location in Belgium

  

Map of Antwerp[show]

  

AntwerpenLocatie.png

 

Coordinates: 51°13′N 04°24′ECoordinates: 51°13′N 04°24′E

 

Country

Belgium

 

Community

Flemish Community

 

Region

Flemish Region

 

Province

Antwerp

 

Arrondissement

Antwerp

 

Government

  

• Mayor (list)

Bart De Wever (N-VA)

 

• Governing party/ies

1. N-VA

2. CD&V

3. Open Vld

 

Area

  

• Total

204.51 km2 (78.96 sq mi)

 

Population (1 January 2013)[1]

  

• Total

502,604

 

• Density

2,500/km2 (6,400/sq mi)

 

Postal codes

2000–2660

 

Area codes

03

 

Website

www.antwerpen.be

     

The Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal (Cathedral of our Lady) and the Scheldt river.

    

Grote Markt

Antwerp (Listeni/ˈæntwɜrp/, Dutch: Antwerpen [ˈɑn̪t̪.β̞ɛr.pə(n̪)] ( listen), French: Anvers [ɑ̃ˈvɛʁ(s)], Spanish: Amberes) is a city and municipality in Belgium and the capital of the Antwerp province of Belgium. With a population of 510,610,[2] it is the second most populous city in Belgium, after the capital Brussels, and its metropolitan area, with over 1,190,769 inhabitants, is also the second metropolitan area in Belgium.[3] Antwerp is located on the river Scheldt, which is linked to the North Sea by the Westerschelde estuary. The Port of Antwerp is one of the biggest ports in the world, ranking third in Europe and within the top 20 globally.

 

Antwerp has long been an important city in the Low Countries, both economically and culturally, especially before the Spanish Fury (1576) in the period of the Dutch Revolt. The inhabitants of Antwerp are locally nicknamed Sinjoren, after the Spanish honorific señor or French seigneur, "lord". It refers to the leading Spanish noblemen who ruled the city during the 17th century.[4]

  

History[edit]

 

See also: Timeline of Antwerp

 

Origin of the name[edit]

 

According to folklore, notably celebrated by a statue in front of the town hall, the city got its name from a legend involving a mythical giant called Antigoon who lived near the Scheldt river. He exacted a toll from those crossing the river, and for those who refused, he severed one of their hands and threw it into the river. Eventually, the giant was slain by a young hero named Brabo, who cut off the giant's own hand and flung it into the river. Hence the name Antwerpen, from Dutch hand werpen, akin to Old English hand and wearpan (to throw), which has evolved to today's warp.[5]

 

However, John Lothrop Motley argues that Antwerp's name derives from an 't werf (on the wharf).[6] Aan 't werp (at the warp) is also possible. This "warp" (thrown ground) is a man-made hill, just high enough to remain dry at high tide, whereupon a farm would be built. Another word for werp is pol (hence polders).

 

The prevalent theory is that the name originated in the Gallo-Roman period and comes from the Latin antverpia. Antverpia would come from Ante (before) Verpia (deposition, sedimentation), indicating land that forms by deposition in the inside curve of a river (which is in fact the same origin as Germanic waerpen). Note that the river Scheldt, before a transition period between 600 to 750, followed a different track. This must have coincided roughly with the current ringway south of the city, situating the city within a former curve of the river.[7]

 

Pre-1500[edit]

 

Historical Antwerp had its origins in a Gallo-Roman vicus civilization. Excavations carried out in the oldest section near the Scheldt, 1952–1961 (ref. Princeton), produced pottery shards and fragments of glass from mid-2nd century to the end of the 3rd century.

 

In the 4th century, Antwerp was first named, having been settled by the Germanic Franks.[8] The name was reputed to have been derived from "anda" (at) and "werpum" (wharf).[6]

 

The Merovingian Antwerp, now fortified, was evangelized by Saint Amand in the 7th century. At the end of the 10th century, the Scheldt became the boundary of the Holy Roman Empire. Antwerp became a margraviate, a border province facing the County of Flanders.

 

In the 11th century Godfrey of Bouillon was for some years known as the marquis of Antwerp. In the 12th century, Norbert of Xanten established a community of his Premonstratensian canons at St. Michael's Abbey at Caloes. Antwerp was also the headquarters of Edward III during his early negotiations with Jacob van Artevelde, and his son Lionel, the Duke of Clarence, was born there in 1338.

 

16th century[edit]

 

After the silting up of the Zwin and the consequent decline of Bruges, the city of Antwerp, then part of the Duchy of Brabant, gained in importance. At the end of the 15th century the foreign trading houses were transferred from Bruges to Antwerp, and the building assigned to the English nation is specifically mentioned in 1510. Antwerp became the sugar capital of Europe, importing product from Portuguese and Spanish plantations. The city attracted Italian and German sugar refiners by 1550, and shipped their refined product to Germany, especially Cologne.[9] Moneylenders and financiers did a large business loaning money to the English government in the 1544–1574 period. London bankers were too small to operate on that scale, and Antwerp had a highly efficient bourse that itself attracted rich bankers from around Europe. After the 1570s the city's banking business declined; England ended its borrowing in Antwerp in 1574.[10]

 

Fernand Braudel states that Antwerp became "the centre of the entire international economy, something Bruges had never been even at its height."[11] Antwerp was the richest city in Europe at this time.[12] Antwerp's golden age is tightly linked to the "Age of Exploration". Over the first half of the 16th century Antwerp grew to become the second-largest European city north of the Alps by 1560s with some 200,000 people.[13][14] Many foreign merchants were resident in the city. Francesco Guicciardini, the Venetian envoy, stated that hundreds of ships would pass in a day, and 2,000 carts entered the city each week. Portuguese ships laden with pepper and cinnamon would unload their cargo. According to Luc-Normand Tellier "It is estimated that the port of Antwerp was earning the Spanish crown seven times more revenues than the Americas."[15]

 

Without a long-distance merchant fleet, and governed by an oligarchy of banker-aristocrats forbidden to engage in trade, the economy of Antwerp was foreigner-controlled, which made the city very cosmopolitan, with merchants and traders from Venice, Ragusa, Spain and Portugal. Antwerp had a policy of toleration, which attracted a large orthodox Jewish community. Antwerp was not a "free" city though, since it had been reabsorbed into the Duchy of Brabant in 1406 and was controlled from Brussels.

 

Antwerp experienced three booms during its golden age: The first based on the pepper market, a second launched by American silver coming from Seville (ending with the bankruptcy of Spain in 1557), and a third boom, after the stabilising Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, in 1559, based on the textiles industry. At the beginning of the 16th century Antwerp accounted for 40% of world trade.[15] The boom-and-bust cycles and inflationary cost-of-living squeezed less-skilled workers. In the century after 1541, however, the city's economy and population declined dramatically, while rival Amsterdam experienced massive growth.

 

The religious revolution of the Reformation erupted in violent riots in August 1566, as in other parts of the Low Countries. The regent Margaret, Duchess of Parma, was swept aside when Philip II sent the Duke of Alba at the head of an army the following summer. When the Eighty Years' War broke out in 1568, commercial trading between Antwerp and the Spanish port of Bilbao collapsed and became impossible. On 4 November 1576, Spanish soldiers plundered the city during the so-called Spanish Fury; 7,000 citizens were massacred, 800 houses were burnt down, and over 2 million sterling of damage was done.

 

Subsequently,the city joined the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and became the capital of the Dutch revolt. In 1585, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, captured it after a long siege and as part of the terms of surrender its Protestant citizens were given two years to settle their affairs before quitting the city.[16] Most went to the United Provinces in the north, starting the Dutch Golden Age. Antwerp's banking was controlled for a generation by Genoa, and Amsterdam became the new trading centre.

 

17th–19th centuries[edit]

     

Map of Antwerp (1624)

    

Antwerp and the river Scheldt, photochrom ca. 1890–1900

The recognition of the independence of the United Provinces by the Treaty of Münster in 1648 stipulated that the Scheldt should be closed to navigation, which destroyed Antwerp's trading activities. This impediment remained in force until 1863, although the provisions were relaxed during French rule from 1795 to 1814, and also during the time Belgium formed part of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands (1815 to 1830). Antwerp had reached the lowest point of its fortunes in 1800, and its population had sunk under 40,000, when Napoleon, realizing its strategic importance, assigned two million[clarification needed] to enlarge the harbour by constructing two docks and a mole and deepening the Scheldt to allow for larger ships to approach Antwerp.[12] Napoleon hoped that by making Antwerp's harbour the finest in Europe he would be able to counter London's harbour and stint British growth, but he was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo before he could see the plan through.[17]

     

Antwerp, Belgium, from the left bank of the Scheldt (ca. 1890-1900)

In 1830, the city was captured by the Belgian insurgents, but the citadel continued to be held by a Dutch garrison under General David Hendrik Chassé. For a time Chassé subjected the town to periodic bombardment which inflicted much damage, and at the end of 1832 the citadel itself was besieged by a French army. During this attack the town was further damaged. In December 1832, after a gallant defence, Chassé made an honourable surrender.

 

Later that century, a ring of fortresses was constructed some 10 km (6 mi) from the city centre, as Antwerp was considered vital for the survival of the young Belgian state. And in the last decade Antwerp presented itself to the world via a World's Fair attended by 3 million.[18]

 

20th century[edit]

 

Antwerp was the first city to host the World Gymnastics Championships, in 1903. During World War I, the city became the fallback point of the Belgian Army after the defeat at Liège. The Siege of Antwerp lasted for 11 days, but the city was taken after heavy fighting by the German Army, and the Belgians were forced to retreat westwards. Antwerp remained under German occupation until the Armistice.

 

Antwerp hosted the 1920 Summer Olympics. During World War II, the city was an important strategic target because of its port. It was occupied by Germany in May 1940 and liberated by the British 11th Armoured Division on 4 September 1944. After this, the Germans attempted to destroy the Port of Antwerp, which was used by the Allies to bring new material ashore. Thousands of Rheinbote, V-1 and V-2 missiles battered the city. The city was hit by more V-2s than all other targets during the entire war combined, but the attack did not succeed in destroying the port since many of the missiles fell upon other parts of the city. As a result, the city itself was severely damaged and rebuilt after the war in a modern style. After the war, Antwerp, which had already had a sizeable Jewish population before the war, once again became a major European centre of Haredi (and particularly Hasidic) Orthodox Judaism.

 

Ryckewaert argued for the importance of the Ten-Year Plan for the port of Antwerp (1956–1965). It expanded and modernized the port's infrastructure over a 10-year period, with national funding, intended to build a set of canal docks. The broader importance was to facilitate the growth of the north-eastern Antwerp metropolitan region, which attracted new industry. Extending the linear layout along the Scheldt River, planners designed further urbanization along the same linear city model. Satellite communities would be connected to the main strip. Ryckewaert, argues that in contrast to the more confused Europoort plan for the port of Rotterdam, the Antwerp approach succeeded because of flexible and strategic implementation of the project as a co-production between various authorities and private parties.[19]

 

Starting in the 1990s, Antwerp rebranded itself as a world-class fashion centre. Emphasizing the avant-garde, it tried to compete with London, Milan, New York and Paris. It emerged from organized tourism and mega-cultural events.[20]

  

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp

Fiat has a lot riding on the tiny urban car, which was inspired from the 1950s original. Fiat sold almost 4 million 500s from 1957 to 1975, making the model a national icon as recognizable as Italian movie stars like Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida. Fiat has sold more than 1 million of the larger, modern version since introducing the redesign in Europe in 2007.

 

Marchionne is effectively turning the 500 into a brand of its own: FIAT 500, FIAT500C, Abarth 500, Abarth 500C, Abarth 500 esseesse, Abarth 695 “Tributo Ferrari”, Abarth 695C “Tributo Maserati”, FIAT 500e Electric Car, FIAT 500L, FIAT 500L Living, FIAT 500X and more will follow. For instance the new FIAT500+ (a Fiat 500 with Five Doors to replace Punto Hatchback). The 500 has an emotional and aspirational value. The 500X crossover will be exported to North America from a plant in southern Italy by 2015.

 

Fiat Said to Spend $12 Billion for Made-in-Italy Luxury. In addition to bolstering the upscale Maserati and Alfa Romeo marques with new “Made in Italy” models, the carmaker will focus the Fiat line on variants of the trendy 500 subcompact and the budget-oriented Panda small car. Going upscale with cool, high-margin 500 and Alfa models is the only possible strategy to continue building cars in Italy.

 

As part of the luxury focus for Italy, Fiat will introduce 500 and Jeep sport-utility vehicles next year as well as a convertible version of the Alfa Romeo 4C sports car. Those cars will all be made in its home country.

 

The Fiat Punto, will be replaced by a five-door version of the 500. That mass-market model will be built in Poland to save costs and boost profit margins,

 

Fiat has furloughed many of its production employees in Italy this year and most of those have been off work for more than five months this year. The goal is to bring them all back by focusing on luxury Alfa Romeo and Maserati vehicles. Under the plan, Mirafiori workers will start making the Maserati Levante, the elite brand’s first SUV, by 2015.

 

Fiat’s strategy with the 500 brand makes a lot of sense. It’s an attractive looking vehicle and people who want it are willing to pay a little bit extra to get it. It’s a little luxury. Going upscale is the right strategy for a country with no cheap labor but highly skilled workers.

 

Marchionne’s turnaround plan calls for exporting upscale cars, including Maserati and Alfa Romeo models. The 500 is made in Poland and Mexico, and the 500L is produced in Serbia. The 500X will be built alongside a small Jeep at Fiat’s Melfi plant in southern Italy.

Governor Charlie Baker, Lt. Governor Karyn Polito and Secretary of Education James Peyser join state and local officials to announce investments totaling more than $120 million to four public colleges and universities to renovate and expand campus facilities that further students’ skills in STEM fields during an event at Salem State University in Salem on April 13, 2022. Salem State University, Massasoit Community College, Springfield Technical Community College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell will each receive $30 million for major capital projects that will modernize campus facilities to support STEM instruction and expand the number of skilled workers in key STEM occupations in the Commonwealth. The improvements will increase enrollment capacity in these programs by about 2,000 students. [Joshua Qualls/Governor’s Press Office]

Juanita Gray is shown receiving her certificate from the National Youth Administration War Production and Training Center in Washington, D.C. after graduating circa 1942.

 

Gray, a former domestic worker, is handed her certificate by U. P. Bond Jr., project manager, while E. R. Rodriguez, youth personnel officer, looks on.

 

Gray was immediately referred to the Washington Navy Yard where she was initially hired as a helper, but moved up into skilled work within a year.

 

Washington, D.C. had “Rosies” at the Washington Navy Yard with influxes of women beginning in World War I, though they were nearly all in clerical or cleaning-type jobs. However in World War II, more than 3,000 women were hired at the gun factory into semi-skilled and skilled work with yet another wave during the Korean War of the early 1950s.

 

These included black women who were initially hired in the lowest grade jobs. However, during World War II, black women trained through the National Youth Administration were brought on into semi-skilled positions with a few moving up into skilled work such as machinist.

 

Most women left these jobs after each war, but some stayed on and made careers at the Naval Gun Factory (NGF)

 

The following are excerpts from History of the Washington Navy Yard Civilian Workforce: 1799-1962, by John G. Sharp that traces the history of women at the NGF:

 

Women Enter the Workforce

 

During World War I (1917-1918), NGF expanded in size and ran twenty- four hours each day, seven days a week. Because of the acute wartime shortage of civilian workers, the Navy looked to women and created the Yeoman “F” (Female) rating.

 

This new rating allowed for the first time thousands of women to volunteer for the wartime service.

 

Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who created the Yeoman (F) rating, did so because it allowed the Navy to call up women specifically to relieve officers and men for sea duty, rather than as a substitute for male civilian employees who were serving in the armed forces.

 

This wartime experiment proved so successful that many women were kept on after the armistice as civilian employees.

 

Some like Nellie M. Stein and Ann Tapscott served as Yeoman (F) in the Naval Gun Factory for the duration of the war then immediately went to work as a civilian employee under the civil service as clerks in the same division. Tapscott later became a supervisor in the Accounting Department.

 

African –American women too began to enter the yard labor force during the war. Most of these new workers, such Mrs. Mabel Brown who began her 36 year career as a “Charwomen” (a title later changed to laborer), worked cleaning offices, laboratories and industrial spaces.

 

Their work was often hard and physically demanding, but the work was also steady and better compensated than most positions available to them in the private sector.

 

According to a memo in the Naval Records and Archives Administrations, Nellie Stein began her long federal career in 1912 as a Printers Assistant with the Government Printing Office. When war broke out, Stein volunteered for active duty as a Yeoman F and was stationed at the Naval Gun Factory.

 

After the Armistice, she was hired as “typewriter” at NGF. In 1932 Stein moved into the new Industrial Relations Division where she “constantly studied laws, directives, comptroller general decisions and books on personnel administration for 14 years.”

 

Stein and others like her often had to overcome a great deal of skepticism from her male supervisors and coworkers.

 

Here is one example of the challenges that Stein and other women faced in establishing a place for themselves in the Yard’s work force.

 

The memo stated, “Ordinarily the Personnel Officer would not recommend a Civil Service female employee to an administrative position. He would not so recommend women to be in complete charge of a division for he does not believe that women are emotionally equipped to meet the demands of such a position.”

 

Despite his considerable reservations, NGF’s Personnel Officer CDR. Davis did recommend Stein for the job and by the time of her retirement in 1948 Nellie Stein was NGF’s Assistant Personnel Officer (CAF-11), one of the highest graded positions at the factory.

 

By the 1920s, some factory organizations, such as the Accounting and Supply Departments, not only had large numbers of women but they in fact outnumbered men.

 

Women Ask for the Equal Pay

 

In 1919, the National Women’s Trade Union League asked Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, for the same pay as men working in the Yards.

 

The committee protested to the Secretary against rating women as seamstresses and flag makers in the Navy Yards at the pay of common laborers.

 

Sewing, the committee contented, was a skilled trade and none of the ratings for male skilled trades were as low. They also complained that seamstress and flag maker inspectors did not receive the same pay as men.

 

Despite this and other appeals, comparable pay did not become a reality for another four decades.

 

Women go to War at the Navy Yard and Gun Factory

 

WW II greatly expanded employment opportunities for women. While hundreds of thousands of men were being drafted into military service,

If vital war production was to continue, women were needed in the factories and offices.

 

In January 1943, Yard Commandant, Rear Admiral, Ferdinand L. Reichmuth invited the Washington press corps to tour the Yard. Here reporters from the two major papers could view first-hand the work that women were accomplishing at the Gun Factory and other locations.

 

This tour was the first time that the Yard had been opened to the press in over a year due to wartime security. Reporters were told there were now 1,400 female workers employed in ordnance manufacture. These new entrants ranged in age from 18 to 50.

 

They came from all walks of life having worked as housewives, dry-cleaners and laundry workers, beauticians, office workers, maids and one, Mrs. Arbutus Howlett, who was previously employed as a farmer.

 

As demand for labor grew NGF and other munitions producers advertised widely for Woman Ordnance Worker (WOW). The women working in ordnance production were classified into three grades: ordnance worker, ordnance operative and precision operative.

 

Entry-level pay was 57 cents per hour rising to a high of 108 cents per hour.

 

The world of the female employee was not free of stereotyping and bias. Most of these women worked long hours and also frequently worked Saturday and Sunday.

 

Captain J. R. Palmer, Production Officer, reflected some of the views of

the time, when he described the ideal female employee: “She is between 25 and 35 years of age, single and without local family connections.”

 

“She is a person who has to earn a living and is endowed with a natural mechanical bent and a high degree of adaptability. In her work-a-day world relationships with men in the shops she does not expect the small gallantries a man shows a woman in a social relationship.”

 

Captain Palmer went on to relate to the reporters: “Women are doing the work usually done by apprentices and some had sufficient skill to work as machinist.”

 

One top ranking officer summed up the contribution that female employees were making to the workforce as:

 

“These women are doing a grand job to win the war and win it as quickly as possible. They step into men’s places at the machines and keep them turning without a stop as the men go off to the fighting fronts. Today’s women workers at the Washington Navy Yard produce an ever growing flow of ordnance material.”

 

The Star reported the biggest problem for the new female workers was finding childcare.

 

One female reporter who actually worked in Gun Factory ordnance production took a more jaundiced view:

 

“Equal pay and promotions for women are one of the government standards of employment supported in writing by the Navy Department ....The Navy Yards themselves seem to be unaware of the fact; .... Navy Yard women start at $4.65 a day which with time and a half for the sixth day is $ 29.64 a week. Deduct the 20-percent withholding tax, and you find we luxuriate on $23 a week.”

 

“The highest pay women on production in our shop receive $6.95 a day, a peak she attained after two years of service at the yard. Men get as high as $22 a day.”

 

Many of the women working at the factory may have agreed with Mrs. Robert T. Withers, a milling machine operator in the Breech Mechanism Shop with over two years on the production line’s 4-12 shift: “I feel I am helping my husband and my country and keeping busy so that when this war is over I can be a housewife again.”

 

Women Ordnance Workers Once Again

 

The Korean War meant a heighten demand for NGF to increase munitions production. This combined with the loss of skilled workers to the reserve call-up motivated NGF to begin a serious effort to hire female ordnance workers. Starting in late 1950 NGF hired hundreds of women.

 

All of the new workers were given a two-week indoctrination course. Each new employee was provided practical shop training and instruction in how to operate the various machines and tools, how to read blue prints, and the use of measuring instruments.

 

Some like Mary L. Johnson had previous experience at NGF during WWII and were keen to return. “I worked here once before during the last war and I know something about the work. I honestly feel the work I am doing is important.”

 

Irene Hunter also had worked three years for NGF in World War II. She welcomed a chance to return, saying, “when I was notified that the NGF was hiring women to work on machines again, I quit my job with the picture company and came here. The work that I do is very exciting and takes steady nerves. I believe had I the opportunity, I would like to work here permanently.”

 

Kathleen Siggman, who previously had been a model, an assistant buyer of women’s apparel and worked in a private sector machine shop, was enthusiastic: “this is the best job I ever had!”

 

Daphene Dyer, a war bride from England, related; “I was born in England and spent the last war driving ambulances. That is why I could not go back to office work. I feel that the work I am doing here is essential for my new country and naturally I am anxious to do a job.”

 

In 1961, the last production runs were completed, shops were dismantled and cleaned, and forges and boilers banked. Over $200 million dollars of equipment such as machine tools, industrial cranes and barges were disposed of primarily to other government agencies.

 

By the beginning of 1962, NGF workers, who epitomized the rich heritage of the nation’s trade and craft traditions and who had served their country well in the all the major wars of the 20th century, said quiet goodbyes to their friends and shop mates.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHsmLe4fB5

 

Photo by Roger Smith. The image is an Office of War Information photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. It was published in January 1943.

 

To the Glory of God

and in Memory of the men of East Harling

who fell in the Great War 1914-1918.

R.I.P.

 

14566 Private Herbert Earnest Alderton, 1st. Battalion, The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment).

Born in 1892.

Husband of Florence C, nee Diggins of 100 Rosebery Avenue, Manor Park, London.

Herbert's civilian occupation was as a tram driver.

Herbert was admitted from the base hospital at Boulogne, France to the King George's Hospital, Lambeth, London, where he died in the presence of his wife, aged 26, from gun shot wounds to the spine on Friday 10th. May 1918. He is buried in Square 101. Grave 65202 at City of London Cemetery & Crematorium, Manor Park, Newham, East London.

 

12919 Private Fearnley Askey, 8th. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

Born on 31st. March 1886 In Leeds, Yorkshire, the son of Mr. W.L. and Lily Askey, later Williams, of King Street, East Harling, Norfolk.

Native of Leeds.

Fearnley was killed in action, aged 30, on Saturday 17th. February 1917. He was buried in a battlefield and later, possibly in April 1919, his remains were exhumed and reburied by a Canadian burial party in Grave: IX. B. 12. at Regina Trench Cemetery, Grandcourt, Somme, France with the personal inscription,

'DEARLY LOVED'

 

200399 Private George Zachariah Barnard, 1st/4th. Batallion, Norfolk Regiment.

Born in 1892, the son of George and Eliza Barnard of King Street., East Harling.

Brother of Harry and Horace.

George was killed in action at the Second Battle of Gaza, aged 25, on Thursday 19th. April 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panels 11 to 15 of the Jerusalem Memorial.

 

7594 Private Horace William Barnard, 1st. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

The son of George and Eliza Barnard of King Street., East Harling

Brother of George and Harry.

Horace died in action, aged 24, on Monday 24th. August 1914. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Stone No. 8 of the La Ferte-Sous-Jouarre Memorial, Seine-et-Marne, France.

 

75265 Private Harry Victor Barnard, 17th. Battalion, Royal Fusiliers.

The son of George and Eliza Barnard of King Street., East Harling.

Brother of George and Horace

Harry died of wounds, aged 19, on Sunday 9th. June 1918. He is buried in Grave: I. D 10. at Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension No. 2 with the personal inscription,

'HE IS GONE

BUT NOT FORGOTTEN'

 

28083 Private Edgar Davy Bateman, 13th. Battalion, Essex Regiment.

Born in 1896 at Kentish Town, London

The son of Edgar, publican of the White Hart Inn, East Harling, and Harriet Matilda Bateman, nee Davy, later of 200, Nelson Street, Norwich, Norfolk.

Brother of Edith Maud, b. 1894, St. Pancras, London, William Arthur, b. 1898, Walthamstow, London, Florence May, b. 1901, Walthamstow, London, and Dorothy Gertrude, b. 1904, East Harling.

Edgar was killed in action, aged 20, on Saturday 28th. April 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Bay 7 of the Arras Memorial, Pas de Calais, France.

 

47205 Rifleman Frederick Fergus Beales, 12th. Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps.

Born on 6th. June 1899 at East Harling, the son of James and Alice Caroline Beales, nee Alderton of White Hart Street, East Harling.

Frederick died of pneumonia, aged 19, on Thursday 7th. November 1918. He is buried in Grave: OO. 3. at Sheerness Cemetery, Isle of Sheppey, Kent with the personal inscription,

'LOVED AND REMEMBERED'

 

14014 Private John T. Bean, 1st. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

Born in 1897 at Great Hautbois, Norfolk.

John was killed whilst his battalion were resting at a farm at Verbrandenmolen, opposite Hill 60 south of Ypres, on 31st. May 1915. He was buried at map reference I.34.b.3.8. His grave was identified by his damaged battlefield cross, and he was reburied in Grave: VI. D. 7. at Perth Cemetery (China Wall), Zillebeke, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, possible in August 1919.

 

7007A Seaman George Bond Bean, Royal Naval Reserve, S.S. Cufic.

Born on 19th. January 1893 at Bradfield, near North Walsham, Norfolk, the son of Elizabeth Bean of Cheese Hill, East Harling.

The 1911 census records George employed as a farm labourer.

George died, aged 21, from war related sickness, acute double pneumonia, at East Harling on Friday 15th. November 1918. He is buried in Grave: 229 at East Harling Cemetery.

 

41426 Rifleman Arthur Henry Bloomfield, 9th. Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles.

Born in 1889, the son of William and Mary Bloomfield of East Harling.

Husband of Rosie Lottie, later Parker of 11 Newmarket Street, Brunswick Road, Norwich.

Arthur was killed in action, aged 28, on Thursday 7th. June 1917. He is buried in Grave: I. B. 10 at Lone Tree Cemetery, Spanbroekmolen, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium with the personal inscription,

'ONE OF THE BEST'

 

11339 Private William Robert Brown, 2nd. Battalion, Grenadier Guards.

The son of Mr. and Mrs. H. H. Brown of The Swan Hotel, East Harling.

William died, aged 29, between Monday 14th. September and Wednesday 16th. September 1914. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Stone No. 3 of the Le Ferte-Sous-Jouarre Memorial, Seine-et-Marne, France.

 

69567 Rifleman Harry Edward Buck, 4th. Battalion, New Zealand Rifle Brigade.

Born at Redgrave, Suffolk.

Half-brother of Mrs. A. Holmes, 114 Hall Road, Norwich, Norfolk.

Resident of East Harling in 1911.

In civilian life Harry was a farm hand.

On 2nd. March 1918 Harry embarked aboard HMNZT Tofua and arrived at Southampton on 8th. April.

Harry was killed in action at Havrincourt, France on Thursday 12th. September 1918. He was buried in a marked battlefield grave before being re buried in Grave: IV. D. 2. at Metz-en-Couture Communal Cemetery Extension, Pas de Calais, France.

 

41083 Private Oliver Bullman, 2nd. Battalion, Essex Regiment, formally 25665 Private, Norfolk Regiment.

Born on 15th. January 1889 in Soham, Cambridgeshire, the son William and Mary Ann Bullman, nee Richardson

Husband of Agnes Bullman, nee Whittingdale, of School Yard, East Harling, married In October 1912 in Suffolk.

Father of Beatrice Olive May, b. 28th. May 1910 in Nottinghamshire, and Joseph Oliver, b. 21st. May 1918.

Oliver was a bell ringer at East Harling church.

Oliver died, aged 28, on Wednesday 10th. October 1917 at Langmark, Belgium. He was buried in an unmarked grave at map reference U.19.b.5.b. He was identified by some letters and was reburied in Grave: IX. E. 19. at Cement House Cemetery, Langmark-Poelkapelle, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium with the personal inscription,

'AT REST'

From the Bury Free Press, Saturday 1st. December 1917,

'SOLDIER MISSING.

Oliver Bullman, the third son Mr. and Mrs. W. Bullman, of Ixworth, who until recent years had worked as gardener at the Abbey, and who, at the time of his enlistment in June 1916, was working as a gardener at East Harling, has now been reported missing since 9th October. He was in the trenches just before Christmas, 1916, and was soon afterwards invalided to hospital with trench feet. In the spring of the present year he was again at the front, but had to retire to have his thumb amputated. He had only been back in France two months when he was reported missing. Mr. Bullman had obtained the marksman’s badge, and was with the 2nd Essex Machine Gun Corps. He is married and sympathy is expressed for his parents, wife and children. He has two brothers serving and one in Australia.'

 

25770 Private Frederick George Elvin, 8th. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

Frederick was killed in action on Tuesday 22nd. May 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Bay 3 of the Arras Memorial, Pas de Calais, France.

 

1369 Lance Corporal Walter Edward Endley, 1st/4th. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

The youngest son of William George and Florence Ada Endley of Market Place, East Harling.

Walter died, aged 22, on Friday 8th. October 1915 aboard H.M. Hospital Ship Assaye from wounds in the spine he received in action in the Dardanelles He was buried at sea and is commemorated on Panel 43 to 45 of the Helles Memorial.

 

6526 Private Derek St. Clair Everett, 'C' Company, 1st/5th. Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers.

Born in 1896 at East Harling, the son of Mr. E. E. and Mrs. P. E. Everett of East Harling.

Derek died of wounds, aged 20, on Tuesday 31st. October 1916. He is buried in Grave: IV. B. 37. at Dernancourt Communal; Cemetery Extension, Somme, France with the personal inscription,

'ALWAYS REMEMBERED & LOVED

MOTHER & DAD'

 

20855 Private Robert James Frost, 1st. Battalion, Essex Regiment.

Robert was killed in action, aged 20,during the Second Battle of Arras on Saturday 14th. April 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Bay 7 of the Arras Memorial, Pas de Calais, France.

 

43435 Private Earnest William Germany, 2nd. Battalion, Northamptonshire Regiment, formerly 1705, Norfolk Cyclists.

Born in 1891 at Roudham, Norfolk, the son of Ellis, a farm yardman, and Louisa Germany.

The 1901 census records the family living at one of the Flint Hall Cottages at East Harling.

The 1911 census records the family living at Cheese Hill, East Harling. Father Ellis is now a coal merchants cartman, and Earnest is employed as bakers assistant.

In early 1917 Ernest married Sarah Spalding.

Earnest died on Thursday 16th.August 1917. He was buried in an unmarked grave at map reference Sheet 28 N.E.J.8.a.0.2. His remains were exhumed in November 1920 and he was identified from his ID disc. He was reburied in Grave: LI. F. 8. at Tyne Cot Cemetery, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.

 

25/762 Rifleman Charles Harry Glover, 'A' Company, 3rd. Battalion, New Zealand Rifle Brigade (The Earl of Liverpool's Own).

Born in 1891, the son of Mrs. L. Glover, later Moseley, of East Harling.

In civilian life Charles was employed as a driver.

Charles and the 3rd. Battalion, embarked from Wellington, on 15th. February 1916, aboard three ships, HMNZT 42 'Ulimaroa', HMNZT 43 'Mokoia', and HMNZT 44 'Navua'. It is not possible to determine which ship he was on. Their destination was Suez, Egypt.

On 28th. March 1917 the Chronicles of the N.Z.E.F, stated on page 66 that 'C. Glover is believed to be a prisoner of war in Germany, supposedly captured on 2nd.October 1916, although no word had yet been heard from him.'

Charles was killed in action in the front line north of Flers, aged 25, on Monday 2nd. October 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Stone No. of the Caterpillar Valley (New Zealand) Memorial.

Also remembered on the Te Aroha First World War Memorial, Kenrick Street, Te Aroha. NZ.

 

139788 Private Clemence Harbour, Machine Gun Corps (Infantry), formerly 20565, Yorkshire Regiment.

Born at East Harling, the son of James and Ellen Harbour.

Husband of Susanna, later Carter.

Father of Sidney.

Enlisted at Beverley, Yorkshire.

Clemence died at home, aged 25, on Wednesday 18th. December 1918. He is buried in Grave: 20 at East Harling Cemetery.

 

1455 Private Horace Baker Howlett, 8th. Battalion, Canadian Infantry (Manitoba Regiment).

Born on 7th. April 1875 at East Harling, the son of Charles H. and Elizabeth Howlett of Albert Place, Thorpe, Norwich, Norfolk.

Resident of Muskoka, Ontario.

Horace was killed in action, aged 40, on Saturday 24th. April 1915. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 24 of the Yrpes (Menin Gate) Memorial, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Remembered on Page 20 of the First World War Book of Remembrance, Canadian Virtual War Memorial.

 

29467 Private Joseph John Hunt, 10th. Battalion, East Yorkshire Regiment, formally of the Army Service Corps.

Joseph died on Sunday 25th. August 1918. He is buried in Grave: V. D. 91. at Longuenesse (St. Omer) Souvenir Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France.

 

2136 Lance Corporal Stephen Aubrey Miller, 'C' Company, 1st/4th. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

Born in 1895 at Syleham, Suffolk, the son of Arthur and Edith Miller of East Harling.

Stephen was killed in action in Turkey, aged 20, on Monday 16th. August 1915. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 43 to 45 of the Helles Memorial.

 

47699 Rifleman James Robert Osborne, 18th. Battalion, London Regiment (London Irish Rifles), attached to Royal Irish Rifles, formerly 6598, Norfolk Regiment.

Husband of Mrs. Osborne of The Green, Old Buckingham, Norfolk.

Enlisted at Norwich, Norfolk.

James died on Sunday 7th. April 1918. He is buried in Grave: II. J. 14. at Bouzincourt Communal Cemetery Extension, Somme, France.

 

116360 Private John Osborne, 11th Canadian Mounted Rifles, 7th. Battalion, Canadian Infantry (British Columbia Regiment).

Born 9th. May 1887 at East Harling, the son of Mrs. M.A. Osborne of East Harling.

Brother of Alban E. Osborne of Cheese Hill, East Harling.

In civilian life John was employed as a teamster

Enlisted at Vancouver, British Columbia.

John was killed in action, aged 28, on Saturday 10th. November 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 28 of the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium.

Commemorated on Page 304 of the First World War Book of Remembrance, Canadian Virtual War Memorial.

 

200010 Company Serjeant Major Henry Robinson Pattinson, 1st/4th. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, formally 287

Norfolk Regiment.

Henry was killed in action, aged 35, on Thursday 19th. April 1917 in the Second Battle of Gaza on Thursday 19th. April 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panels 11 to 15 of the Jerusalem Memorial.

 

19260 Private William Isaac Pinner, 9th. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

Born in 1885 at Larling, Norfolk, the son of James and Lucy Pinner of Little Snoring Fakenham, Norfolk.

Husband of Laura Pinner of Kenninghall Road, East Harling.

William was killed in action, aged 31, in the attack of The Quadrilateral (Ginchy) on Friday 15th September 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Pier and Face 1 C and 1 D of the Thiepval Memorial, Somme, France.

 

Lt. Phillip Charles Richards, MC, MiD, 'D' Company, 9th. South African Infantry.

Born 20th. October 1883 at East Harling, the son of Phillip C, a chemist, and Christiana Richards of East Harling.

Elder brother of Reginald, below.

Husband of C. W. Richards of Kimberley.

Educated at Thetford Grammar School, Norfolk.

Residence of Barkly West in South Africa and employed with the Cape Mounted Police.

Phillip was awarded the Military Cross for his part in the fighting around Kondoa Irangi, German East Africa

Supplement to the London Gazette, 20th. October 1916,

'Lt. Philip Charles Richards, S. African Inf. For conspicuous gallantry in action. He moved constantly about among his men placing them so as best to repel the enemy's attack. By his fine example under heavy shell, rifle and machine-gun fire, he inspired confidence in his company, and the enemy's attack was repulsed.'

Phillip was Mentioned in Dispatches, page 1355, London Supplement, 8th. February 1917.

Phillip died of malaria, aged 33, on Monday 12th. February 1917. He is buried at Barkly West Cemetery, Northern Cape, South Africa.

 

20887 Private Reginald James Richards, 1st. Battalion, Essex Regiment.

The son of Phillip C, a chemist, and Christiana Richards of East Harling.

Younger brother of Phillip, above.

Reginald was killed in action, aged 30, in the attack of Hilt Trench and Grease Trench on Thursday 12th. October 1916. He is buried in Grave: II. D. 57. at Dartmoor Cemetery, Becordel-Brcourt, Somme, France.

 

29053 Private Herbert Secker, 'A' Company, 2nd. Battalion, Bedfordshire Regiment.

The son of Henry Secker of Gallants Lane, East Harling.

Herbert was killed in action, aged 22, in the unsuccessful attack on Gird Trench near Eaucourt l'Abbaye in the Battle of the Somme on Thursday 12th. October 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Pier and Face 2 C of the Thiepval Memorial, Somme, France.

 

18760 Private John Shaw, 2nd. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

John was killed in action, aged 37, on Saturday 22nd. April 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 10 of the Basra Memorial, Basra, Iraq.

 

7130 Serjeant Herbert James Smith MM, MiD, 1st. Battalion, Norfolk Regiment.

The son of Mrs. S. Graham of Fen Lane, East Harling

Herbert was killed in action, aged 27, in the Longueval area during the Battle of the Somme on Thursday 27th. July 1916. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Pier and Face 1 C and 1 D of the Thiepval Memorial, Somme, France.

 

39062 Private Thomas Smith, 2nd. Battalion, The Loyal North Lancashire Regiment.

The son of Samuel and Emma Jane Smith of Flint Cottage, East Harling.

Thomas was killed in action, aged 40, on Thursday 1st. August 1918. He was buried in a marked grave at Soissons and in late 1919 his remains were exhumed and reburied in Grave: IX. C. 10. at Raperie British Cemetery, Villemontoire, Aisne, France with the personal inscription,

'THY WILL BE DONE'

 

19752 Private Sidney Barnard Sparkes, 4th. Battalion, Grenadier Guards.

Born in 1891, the son of Edward and Rosa Annie Sparkes, later Coldham, of Yew Tree Cottage, East Harling.

Sidney died of wounds, aged 25, received in the Battle of the Somme on Monday 9th. October 1916. He is buried in Grave: XVI. E. 6A. at Etaples Military Cemetery, Pas de Calais, France with the personal inscription,

'GREATER LOVE

HATH NO MAN THAN THIS'

 

36188 Private George Thomas Tyler, 10th. Battalion, South Wales Borderers.

Born at St. Pancras, London.

Resident of East Harling.

George died, aged 22, on Wednesday 18th. September 1918. He was buried at map reference 57c.W.3.b.2.1. and was later reburied in Grave: I. E. 14. at Gouzeaucourt New British Cemetery, Nord, France.

 

G/25131 Private John Huggins Tyler, 8th. Battalion, The Queen's (Royal West Surrey Regiment).

Born in North Lopham, Norfolk.

Resident of East Harling.

John was killed in action, aged 19, on Thursday 21st. March 1918. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 14 and 15 of the Pozieres Memorial, Somme, France.

 

*Not remember on the memorial*

 

R/362 Able Seaman Charles Ashford, Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, Hawke Battalion, R.N. Division.

Born on 31st. July 1887 at Cretingham, Earl Soham, Suffolk, the son of Charles and Harriet Ashford.

In 1881 his family were living at Mauldens Corner, Earl Soham. In 1891 his family lived at 14 Brandeston Road, Earl Soham, and by 1901 at Manor Farm, Gisleham, Suffolk. Later his parents lived at Blo Norton, Norfolk, before his father became the publican at the Trowel and Hammer in East Harling.

By 1908 Charles was living at Carlton Colville, Suffolk. On 26th. December 1908 he married Annie Elizabeth Peek at All Saints’ Church, Narborough, Norfolk. Charles was a labourer, living at Carlton Colville, and Annie lived at Narborough. The 1911 Census shows Charles living at Low Farm, Carlton Colville, and working as a milk cart driver. The census shows him as being married, but Annie has not been traced in the 1911 census, nor in any subsequent record.

Charles was working as a labourer, and living at Whitton Green, Lowestoft, Suffolk when he enlisted for the Army on 2nd. March 1916. He was placed on the Army Reserve and was called up for service on 17th. October 1916. Instead of joining the Army he was enrolled in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. On 18th. October 1916 he joined the 4th. Reserve Battalion, Royal Naval Division, at Blandford. On 2nd. January 1917 he was rated Able Seaman and drafted to Nelson Battalion in France. On 4th. October 1917 Charles disobeyed orders about putting packs on limbers without permission and was punished by being deprived of three days pay. He was granted leave to Britain from 22nd. January to 5th. February 1918.

Charles was posted to the 7th. Entrenching Battalion on 22nd. February 1918. By mid-February 1918 the Royal Naval Division moved to positions on Flesquieres Ridge. Charles returned to the Royal Naval Division on 14th. March 1918 and was posted from Nelson to Hawke Battalion, joining his new battalion on 15th. March. Charles was one of 209 men who joined Hawke Battalion from service with the 7th. Entrenching Battalion. The strength of the battalion, at this time, was 17 officers and 612 men.

From 4.45 a.m. to 5.45 a.m. on 21st. March 1918 the enemy put down a heavy barrage on the front and support lines, with gas-shells falling in the area of the Battalion headquarters. The Germans succeeded in entering the front line and took posts held by 'C' Company in Nigger Trench and Premy Support Trench. The front line was reorganised along Beet Trench and Kaiser Trench, with blocks formed in Nigger, Premy Switch and Premy Avenue trenches. A 3 p.m. a company was sent from Drake Battalion to reinforce the Hawke Battalion and took up positions in Kaiser Support trench. By 8.30 p.m. Hawke Battalion had been relieved by Drake Battalion.

Charles was killed in action, aged 38, on 21st. March 1918. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Bay 1 of the Arras Memorial, Pas de Calais, France.

 

25741 Lance Corporal Frank Shaw, 7th. Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry.

Born at Roudham, Norfolk.

Husband of E. A. Shaw of The Shrubbery, East Harling.

Frank died, aged 32, on Friday 30th. March 1917. He was buried in a marked grave at map reference P10.C.8.1. and was later reburied in Grave: F. 21 at Beaumetz Cross Roads Cemetery, Beaumetz-les-Cambrai, Pas de Calais, France.

 

1939 - 1945

 

1570377 Private Russel C. Barnard, 5th. Battalion, Sherwood Foresters (Notts and Derby Regiment).

Born in December 1913 at East Harling, the son of William Sapey and Alice Mary Barnard, nee Brundle.

Husband of Gladys May Barnard, nee Biggins of Romanby, Northallerton, North Yorkshire. Married in 1941.

Russel died, aged 30, on Monday 4th. September 1944. He is buried in Grave: IV. E. 2. at Montecchio War Cemetery, Marche, Italy with the personal inscription,

'REST IN PEACE,

FOR IN THE NEAR FUTURE

WE SHALL MEET AGAIN

NEVERMORE TO PART'

 

1808691 Gunner Derek Jim Bloomfield, 74 Heave Anti-aircraft Regiment, Royal Artillery.

The son of Samuel George and Ella Bloomfield of Thetford, Norfolk.

Derek died as the result of an accident, aged 23, on Sunday 5th. November 1944 and was buried at position 22/GRU/LH/2176/3. Identified by a label, he was reburied on 27th. June 1945 in Grave: IV. H. 6. at Florence War Cemetery, Italy with the personal inscription,

'LOVED, MISSED

REMEMBERED ALWAYS

TILL WE MEET AGAIN DEAR SON'

 

5776171 Private John Cross, 6th. Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment.

The son of Henry John and Gertrude Emma Cross of East Harling.

John died, aged 25, as a prisoner of war of the Japanese on Thursday 21st. September 1944. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Column 50 of the Singapore Memorial, Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore.

 

1239880 Aircraftman 2nd. Class Kenneth Earnest Frost, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, 2795 Squadron, RAF Regiment.

Born on 6th. April 1922 at East Harling, the eldest son of Ernest and Lily May Frost, nee Randell.

At the time of his call up, Kenneth lived with his parents, sister Enid and younger brother Alan ‘Pop’ in the White Hart pub, East Harling.

After call up Kenneth was posted to RAF Bobbington, then later to Kirby.

On 30th. November 1941 he boarded the ship Andes for Singapore, arriving on 4th. February. He left Singapore on 8th. February for Java where he was attached to the Dutch Army to help defend the island. When the Dutch surrendered Kenneth was captured at Garute on 8th. March. After being in four camps on Java, on 24th. April he was shipped to Ambon on Amboina Island, a journey that lasted 6 days.

On 2nd. May, Ken was marched across the island to Liang POW camp. Once there the task was to build an airfield on Liang Beach. Eventually the airfield was abandoned and Ken was moved with other POW's to Ambon Bay area. On 9th. September Ken left Ambon on the Kaishun Maru, a small wooden boat with 150 POW's on board. On 15th. September the boat developed engine trouble and the men went to a camp on Muna Island. On 20th. September, Ken boarded the ship Kaishun Maru which was strafed, set on fire and sunk not far from shore. The POW's returned to Muna before embarking on Maros Maru, which would be marooned, with 634 POW's aboard, off Makassa for 40 days due to engine trouble. Many men died, and 159 were buried at sea in Makassa harbour.

Kenneth died, aged 22, on 22nd. October 1944. He was buried at sea with a sand bag tied to his legs to sink the body in position 05 degrees/04 mins S, 119 degrees 19 mins E. He is commemorated on Column 442 of the Singapore Memorial, Kranji War Cemetery, Singapore.

 

Acting Sub-Lieutenant Barry Pawlet Grigson, 825 Squadron Fleet Air Arm, HMS Kestrel, Royal Navy.

Born on 19th. May 1940, in Maymyo, Mandalay, Burma, the only son of Capt. Pawlet St. John Baseley Grigson and Kathleen Monica Grigson, nee Bagnall, of East Harling Hall, Norfolk.

On the night of 1st./2nd July 1940, 12 Fairey Swordfish of 825 Squadron FAA, 6 Fairey Swordfish of 812 Squadron FAA, and 5 Fairey Albacore of 826 Squadron FAA, were tasked with attacking a concentration of barges on the River Meuse, east of Rotterdam in Holland, which the Germans had seized to use as landing vessels for their invasion of Britain.

Operating out of RAF Detling in Kent, Barry was piloting Swordfish Mk.1, serial number L7646, coded 5B, with 23 year old Acting Sub-Lt Frederick Leonard Lees as air gunner/observer. L7646 was hit by anti-aircraft fire and quickly lost altitude. According to a Dutch account the Swordfish flew in the direction of Kerkdijk and the crew bailed out, however there was insufficient height for the parachutes to open and both died in the polder Langeplaat.

The unmanned Swordfish hit the Kerkdijk flood wall and the Bristol Pegasus engine brook free. The fuselage destroyed telephone and electricity wires before carrying on for a further 100 m and burning out completely on the land of Adam Barendregt in the polder Zuid-Blankenburg

Barry and Frederick were buried in one grave at the crash site. They were exhumed on 9th. and 10th. July 1940 and were buried with military honours in the General Cemetery Cemetery at Rozenburg with a simple wooden cross with the wording 'Hier ruhen 2 Engl. pilots, 2-7-40' (Here rest 2 Engl. pilots, 2-7-40).

Barry was killed in action, aged 20, on Tuesday 2nd. July 1940. He is buried with Kenneth and two other airmen, one FAA, the other RAF, in Collective Grave: 10 at Rozenburg General Cemetery, Holland. His Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone bears the personal inscription,

'ONLY SON

OF PAWLET & KATHLEEN GRIGSON

OF EAST HARLING HALL, NORFOLK'

 

1358194 Leading Aircraftman Charles William Hall, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.

The son of Elizabeth Hall of Kentish Town, London.

Charles died on Saturday 3rd. January 1942. He is buried at Screen Wall, Section. R, Grave 4702 at City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery.

*Note, this person is unconfirmed as the man on the memorial.

 

912844 Sergeant Cyril Walter Kerridge, Pilot, Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, 13 OTU, RAF.

The son of Walter William John and Lily Julia Kerridge of East Harling.

On Wednesday 16th. April 1941, Cyril took off from RAF Bicester in Oxfordshire with 746999 Sgt. Geoffrey Ernest Cook and Sgt. 747741 Peter James Cross in Bristol Blenheim Mk. IV, serial number V5881 for a night navigation training exercise. Crashed, It was reported that the Blenheim crashed into the Irish Sea between Rhyll and the Isle of Man due to engine failure, killing the crew.

Cyril died, aged 28. He has no known grave and is commemorated on Panel 46 of the Runnymede Memorial, Surrey.

 

Walter F. Lake.

No information about this man, other than he is probably the son of Arthur H. and Hannah Lake.

 

5769804 Corporal William George Osborne, 4th. Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment.

William died as a prisoner of war of the Japanese, aged 40, on Wednesday 12th. April 1944. He is buried in Grave: 1. B. 9. at Chungkai War Cemetery, Thailand.

*Note, this person is unconfirmed as the man on the memorial.

 

John Shinfield, London Heavy Rescue Service

The son of Mr. Shinfield of East Harling.

John was a member of the civilian London Heavy Rescue Service. The Service came into being as part of the Civil Defence programme and was made up of builders, plumbers, electricians and skilled workers who helped clear up the debris created by German air raids. They helped stabilise devastated area to allow the Light Rescue Service safe access to trapped civilians.

John and his unit were attending Baldwin's Gardens in Camden, where St. Alban's Building, a five storey building, housing civilians, had been hit and there were a number of people trapped beneath the rubble. As work continued to make the site safe, an undetected bomb went off among the ruins, killing the rescue crew.

John died, aged 32, on Wednesday 16th. October 1940. He is buried in the Borough of Holborn, London.

 

5772734 Private Harold Arthur Walker, 4th. Battalion, Royal Norfolk Regiment.

Born in 1908 the son of Albert and Ellen Walker, of East Harling.

Harold died whilst in training, aged 31, on Thursday 7th. September 1939. He is buried in Grave: 620 at East Harling Cemetery with the personal inscription,

'IN LOVING MEMORY

OF THE ONLY SON'

 

Edward C. Wix.

No information about this man.

 

R.I.P.

   

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza_pyramid_complex

 

The Giza pyramid complex (also called the Giza necropolis) in Egypt is home to the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx. All were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, between c. 2600 – c. 2500 BC. The site also includes several temples, cemeteries, and the remains of a workers' village.

 

The site is at the edge of the Western Desert, approximately 9 km (5.6 mi) west of the Nile River in the city of Giza, and about 13 km (8.1 mi) southwest of the city centre of Cairo. It forms the northernmost part of the 16,000 ha (160 km2; 62 sq mi) Pyramid Fields of the Memphis and its Necropolis UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979. The pyramid fields include the Abusir, Saqqara, and Dahshur pyramid complexes, which were all built in the vicinity of Egypt's ancient capital of Memphis.[1] Further Old Kingdom pyramid fields were located at the sites Abu Rawash, Zawyet El Aryan, and Meidum.

 

The Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre are the largest pyramids built in ancient Egypt, and they have historically been common as emblems of Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination They were popularised in Hellenistic times, when the Great Pyramid was listed by Antipater of Sidon as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is by far the oldest of the Ancient Wonders and the only one still in existence.

 

Literature on ancient Giza is vast; for an overview with further references, see Manuelian[3] or Lehner and Hawass.

 

Maadi settlements

The earliest settlement of the Giza plateau predates the pyramid complexes. Four jars from the Maadi culture were found at the foot of the Great Pyramid, likely from a disturbed earlier settlement. Further Maadi settlement near the site was uncovered during work on the Greater Cairo Wastewater Project. Recent reassessment of the radiocarbon dating puts the Maadi culture's eponymous settlement to c. 3800 – c. 3400 BC, which is also the likely maximum possible range for the Giza remains.

 

The Giza pyramid complex consists of the Great Pyramid (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu and constructed c. 2580 – c. 2560 BC), the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren) a few hundred metres to the south-west, and the relatively modest-sized Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinos) a few hundred metres farther south-west. The Great Sphinx lies on the east side of the complex. Consensus among Egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx is that of Khafre. Along with these major monuments are a number of smaller satellite edifices, known as "queens" pyramids, causeways, and temples.[8] Besides the archaeological structures, the ancient landscape has also been investigated.

 

Khufu's complex

Khufu's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, now buried beneath the village of Nazlet el-Samman; diabase paving and nummulitic limestone walls have been found but the site has not been excavated. The valley temple was connected to a causeway that was largely destroyed when the village was constructed. The causeway led to the Mortuary Temple of Khufu, which was connected to the pyramid. Of this temple, the basalt pavement is the only thing that remains. The king's pyramid has three smaller queen's pyramids associated with it and three boat pits.  The boat pits contained a ship, and the two pits on the south side of the pyramid contained intact ships when excavated. One of these ships, the Khufu ship, has been restored and was originally displayed at the Giza Solar boat museum, then subsequently moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum.

 

Khufu's pyramid still has a limited number of casing stones at its base. These casing stones were made of fine white limestone quarried at Tura.

 

Khafre's complex

Main articles: Pyramid of Khafre and Great Sphinx of Giza

Khafre's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, the Sphinx temple, a causeway, a mortuary temple, and the king's pyramid. The valley temple yielded several statues of Khafre. Several were found in a well in the floor of the temple by Mariette in 1860. Others were found during successive excavations by Sieglin (1909–1910), Junker, Reisner, and Hassan. Khafre's complex contained five boat-pits and a subsidiary pyramid with a serdab. 

 

Khafre's pyramid appears larger than the adjacent Khufu Pyramid by virtue of its more elevated location, and the steeper angle of inclination of its construction—it is, in fact, smaller in both height and volume. Khafre's pyramid retains a prominent display of casing stones at its apex.

 

Menkaure's complex

Menkaure's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, a causeway, a mortuary temple, and the king's pyramid. The valley temple once contained several statues of Menkaure. During the 5th Dynasty, a smaller ante-temple was added on to the valley temple. The mortuary temple also yielded several statues of Menkaure. The king's pyramid, completed c. 2510 BC, has three subsidiary or queen's pyramids.  Of the four major monuments, only Menkaure's pyramid is seen today without any of its original polished limestone casing

 

Sphinx

The Sphinx dates from the reign of king Khafre. During the New Kingdom, Amenhotep II dedicated a new temple to Hauron-Haremakhet and this structure was added onto by later rulers.

 

Tomb of Queen Khentkaus I

Main article: Pyramid of Khentkaus I

Khentkaus I was buried in Giza. Her tomb is known as LG 100 and G 8400 and is located in the Central Field, near the valley temple of Menkaure. The pyramid complex of Queen Khentkaus includes her pyramid, a boat pit, a valley temple, and a pyramid town.

 

Construction

Main article: Egyptian pyramid construction techniques

Most construction theories are based on the idea that the pyramids were built by moving huge stones from a quarry and dragging and lifting them into place. Disagreements arise over the feasibility of the different proposed methods by which the stones were conveyed and placed.

 

In building the pyramids, the architects might have developed their techniques over time. They would select a site on a relatively flat area of bedrock—not sand—which provided a stable foundation. After carefully surveying the site and laying down the first level of stones, they constructed the pyramids in horizontal levels, one on top of the other.

 

For the Great Pyramid, most of the stone for the interior seems to have been quarried immediately to the south of the construction site. The smooth exterior of the pyramid was made of a fine grade of white limestone that was quarried across the Nile. These exterior blocks had to be carefully cut, transported by river barge to Giza, and dragged up ramps to the construction site. Only a few exterior blocks remain in place at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. During the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century), people may have taken the rest away for building projects in the city of Cairo.

 

To ensure that the pyramid remained symmetrical, the exterior casing stones all had to be equal in height and width. Workers might have marked all the blocks to indicate the angle of the pyramid wall and trimmed the surfaces carefully so that the blocks fit together. During construction, the outer surface of the stone was smooth limestone; excess stone has eroded over time.

 

New insights into the closing stages of the Great Pyramid building were provided by the recent find of Wadi el-Jarf papyri, especially the diary of inspector Merer, whose team was assigned to deliver the white limestone from Tura quarries to Giza. The journal was already published, as well as a popular account of the importance of this discovery.

 

Purpose

The pyramids of Giza and others are thought to have been constructed to house the remains of the deceased pharaohs who ruled Ancient Egypt. A portion of the pharaoh's spirit called his ka was believed to remain with his corpse. Proper care of the remains was necessary in order for the "former Pharaoh to perform his new duties as king of the dead". It is theorized the pyramid not only served as a tomb for the pharaoh, but also as a storage pit for various items he would need in the afterlife. "The people of Ancient Egypt believed that death on Earth was the start of a journey to the next world." The embalmed body of the King was entombed underneath or within the pyramid to protect it and allow his transformation and ascension to the afterlife.

 

Astronomy

The sides of all three of the Giza pyramids were astronomically oriented to the cardinal directions within a small fraction of a degree. According to the disputed Orion correlation theory, the arrangement of the pyramids is a representation of the constellation Orion.

 

Workers' village

The work of quarrying, moving, setting, and sculpting the huge amount of stone used to build the pyramids might have been accomplished by several thousand skilled workers, unskilled laborers and supporting workers. Bakers, carpenters, water carriers, and others were also needed for the project. Along with the methods used to construct the pyramids, there is also wide speculation regarding the exact number of workers needed for a building project of this magnitude. When Greek historian Herodotus visited Giza in 450 BC, he was told by Egyptian priests that "the Great Pyramid had taken 400,000 men 20 years to build, working in three-month shifts 100,000 men at a time." Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three-month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid.

 

The Giza pyramid complex is surrounded by a large stone wall, outside which Mark Lehner and his team discovered a town where the pyramid workers were housed. The village is located to the southeast of the Khafre and Menkaure complexes. Among the discoveries at the workers' village are communal sleeping quarters, bakeries, breweries, and kitchens (with evidence showing that bread, beef, and fish were dietary staples), a copper workshop, a hospital, and a cemetery (where some of the skeletons were found with signs of trauma associated with accidents on a building site). The metal processed at the site was the so-called arsenical copper. The same material was also identified among the copper artefacts from the "Kromer" site, from the reigns of Khufu and Khafre.

 

The workers' town appears to date from the middle 4th Dynasty (2520–2472 BC), after the accepted time of Khufu and completion of the Great Pyramid. According to Lehner and the AERA team:

 

The development of this urban complex must have been rapid. All of the construction probably happened in the 35 to 50 years that spanned the reigns of Khafre and Menkaure, builders of the Second and Third Giza Pyramids.

Using pottery shards, seal impressions, and stratigraphy to date the site, the team further concludes:

 

The picture that emerges is that of a planned settlement, some of the world's earliest urban planning, securely dated to the reigns of two Giza pyramid builders: Khafre (2520–2494 BC) and Menkaure (2490–2472 BC).

Radiocarbon data for the Old Kingdom Giza plateau and the workers' settlement were published in 2006, and then re-evaluated in 2011.

 

Cemeteries

As the pyramids were constructed, the mastabas for lesser royals were constructed around them. Near the pyramid of Khufu, the main cemetery is G 7000, which lies in the East Field located to the east of the main pyramid and next to the Queen's pyramids. These cemeteries around the pyramids were arranged along streets and avenues. Cemetery G 7000 was one of the earliest and contained tombs of wives, sons, and daughters of these 4th Dynasty rulers. On the other side of the pyramid in the West Field, the royals' sons Wepemnofret and Hemiunu were buried in Cemetery G 1200 and Cemetery G 4000, respectively. These cemeteries were further expanded during the 5th and 6th Dynasties.

 

West Field

Main article: Giza West Field

The West Field is located to the west of Khufu's pyramid. It is divided into smaller areas such as the cemeteries referred to as the Abu Bakr Excavations (1949–1950, 1950–1951, 1952, and 1953), and several cemeteries named based on the mastaba numbers such as Cemetery G 1000, Cemetery G 1100, etc. The West Field contains Cemetery G1000 – Cemetery G1600, and Cemetery G 1900. Further cemeteries in this field are: Cemeteries G 2000, G 2200, G 2500, G 3000, G 4000, and G 6000. Three other cemeteries are named after their excavators: Junker Cemetery West, Junker Cemetery East, and Steindorff Cemetery.

 

East Field

Main article: Giza East Field

The East Field is located to the east of Khufu's pyramid and contains cemetery G 7000. This cemetery was a burial place for some of the family members of Khufu. The cemetery also includes mastabas from tenants and priests of the pyramids dated to the 5th Dynasty and 6th Dynasty.

 

Cemetery GIS

This cemetery dates from the time of Menkaure (Junker) or earlier (Reisner), and contains several stone-built mastabas dating from as late as the 6th Dynasty. Tombs from the time of Menkaure include the mastabas of the royal chamberlain Khaemnefert, the King's son Khufudjedef (master of the royal largesse), and an official named Niankhre.

 

Central Field

Main article: Central Field, Giza

The Central Field contains several burials of royal family members. The tombs range in date from the end of the 4th Dynasty to the 5th Dynasty or even later.[

 

Tombs dating from the Saite and later period were found near the causeway of Khafre and the Great Sphinx. These tombs include the tomb of a commander of the army named Ahmose and his mother Queen Nakhtubasterau, who was the wife of Pharaoh Amasis II.

 

South Field

The South Field includes mastabas dating from the 1st Dynasty to 3rd Dynasty as well as later burials. Of the more significant of these early dynastic tombs are one referred to as "Covington's tomb", otherwise known as Mastaba T, and the large Mastaba V which contained artifacts naming the 1st Dynasty pharaoh Djet. Other tombs date from the late Old Kingdom (5th and 6th Dynasty). The south section of the field contains several tombs dating from the Saite period and later. 

 

Tombs of the pyramid builders

In 1990, tombs belonging to the pyramid workers were discovered alongside the pyramids, with an additional burial site found nearby in 2009. Although not mummified, they had been buried in mudbrick tombs with beer and bread to support them in the afterlife. The tombs' proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial supports the theory that they were paid laborers who took pride in their work and were not slaves, as was previously thought. Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three-month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid. Most of the workers appear to have come from poor families. Specialists such as architects, masons, metalworkers, and carpenters were permanently employed by the king to fill positions that required the most skill.

 

Shafts

There are multiple burial-shafts and various unfinished shafts and tunnels located in the Giza complex that were discovered and mentioned prominently by Selim Hassan in his report Excavations at Giza 1933–1934. He states: "Very few of the Saitic [referring to the Saite Period) shafts have been thoroughly examined, for the reason that most of them are flooded."

 

Osiris Shaft

The Osiris Shaft is a narrow burial-shaft leading to three levels for a tomb and below it a flooded area. It was first mentioned by Hassan, and a thorough excavation was conducted by a team led by Hawass in 1999. It was opened to tourists in November 2017.

 

New Kingdom and Late Period

During the New Kingdom Giza was still an active site. A brick-built chapel was constructed near the Sphinx during the early 18th Dynasty, probably by King Thutmose I. Amenhotep II built a temple dedicated to Hauron-Haremakhet near the Sphinx. As a prince, the future pharaoh Thutmose IV visited the pyramids and the Sphinx; he reported being told in a dream that if he cleared the sand that had built up around the Sphinx, he would be rewarded with kingship. This event is recorded in the Dream Stele, which he had installed between the Sphinx's front legs.

 

During the early years of his reign, Thutmose IV, together with his wife Queen Nefertari, had stelae erected at Giza.

 

Pharaoh Tutankhamun had a structure built, which is now referred to as the king's resthouse.

 

During the 19th Dynasty, Seti I added to the temple of Hauron-Haremakhet, and his son Ramesses II erected a stela in the chapel before the Sphinx and usurped the resthouse of Tutankhamun. 

 

During the 21st Dynasty, the Temple of Isis Mistress-of-the-Pyramids was reconstructed. During the 26th Dynasty, a stela made in this time mentions Khufu and his Queen Henutsen.

 

Division of the 1903–1905 excavation of the Giza Necropolis

In 1903, rights to excavate the West Field and Pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were divided by three institutions from Italy, Germany, and the United States of America.

 

Background

Prior to the division of the Giza Plateau into three institutional concessions in 1903, amateur and private excavations at the Giza Necropolis had been permitted to operate. The work of these amateur archaeologists failed to meet high scientific standards. Montague Ballard, for instance, excavated in the Western Cemetery (with the hesitant permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Service) and neither kept records of his finds nor published them.

 

Italian, German, and American Concessions at Giza

In 1902, the Egyptian Antiquities Service under Gaston Maspero resolved to issue permits exclusively to authorized individuals representing public institutions. In November of that year, the Service awarded three scholars with concessions on the Giza Necropolis. They were the Italian Ernesto Schiaparelli from the Turin Museum, the German Georg Steindorff from the University of Leipzig who had funding from Wilhelm Pelizaeus, and the American George Reisner from the Hearst Expedition. Within a matter of months, the site had been divided between the concessionaires following a meeting at the Mena House Hotel involving Schiaparelli, Ludwig Borchardt (Steindorff's representative in Egypt), and Reisner.

 

Division of the West Field

By the turn of the 20th century, the three largest pyramids on the Giza plateau were considered mostly exhausted by previous excavations, so the Western Cemetery and its collection of private mastaba tombs were thought to represent the richest unexcavated part of the plateau. George Reisner's wife, Mary, drew names from a hat to assign three long east-west plots of the necropolis among the Italian, German, and American missions. Schiaparelli was assigned the southernmost strip, Borchardt the center, and Reisner the northernmost.

 

Division of the Pyramids

Rights to excavate the Pyramids were then also negotiated between Schiaparelli, Borchardt, and Reisner. Schiaparelli gained rights to excavate the Great Pyramid of Khufu along with its three associated queens' pyramids and most of its Eastern Cemetery. Borchardt received Khafre's pyramid, its causeway, the Sphinx, and the Sphinx's associated temples. Reisner claimed Menkaure's pyramid as well as its associated queens' pyramids and pyramid temple, along with a portion of Schiaparelli's Eastern Cemetery. Any future disputes were to be resolved by Inspector James Quibell, as per a letter from Borchardt to Maspero.

 

Immediate Aftermath

This arrangement lasted until 1905, when, under the supervision of Schiaparelli and Francesco Ballerini, the Italian excavations ceased at Giza. As the Italians were more interested in sites which might yield more papyri, they turned their concession of the southern strip of the Western Cemetery over to the Americans under Reisner.

 

Modern usage

In 1978, the Grateful Dead played a series of concerts later released as Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978. In 2007, Colombian singer Shakira performed at the complex to a crowd of approximately 100,000 people. The complex was used for the final draw of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2021 World Men's Handball Championship.

 

Egypt's Minister of Tourism unveiled plans for a €17,000,000 revamp of the complex by the end of 2021, in order to boost tourism in Egypt as well as make the site more accessible and tourist-friendly. According to Lonely Planet, the refurbishment includes a new visitors' centre, an environmentally-friendly electric bus, a restaurant (the 9 Pyramids Lounge), as well as a cinema, public toilets, site-wide signage, food trucks, photo booths, and free Wi-Fi. The new facility is part of a wider plan to renovate the 4,500 year old site.

Deutsches Museum, München

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Anton Lutz (1860 - ca. 1936). Karlsbad vor 1918

Zwei Violinen, Viola und Violoncello in Skelettform mit 'Totenkopf anstatt der Schnecke. Kerbschnitt an den Korpusbügeln des Violoncello: vorne: hinten:

MEMENTO / MORJ /ANTON - LUTZ - / KARLSBAD -

ALS • ICH • LEBTE - WAR • ICH • STUMM - / JETZT • DA • ICH • TOD - KLJNG • ICH • LJEBLJCH

Sinnbild vom lebenden Baum, der zum klingenden Holz, nämlich der Geige bzw. Laute. wird. Deutsche Übersetzung des lateinischen Spruches (dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano) auf dem bekannten Stich von Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey, Lyon 1562, mit dem Portrait des ebenfalls in Lyon wirkenden und aus Füssen stammenden Lautenmachers Gaspar Duiffoprugar (auch: Caspar Tieffenbrucker). Vom Erbauer ist wenig bekannt: nach Lütgendorff (Die Geigen- und Lautenmacher, 11:307) war der Geigenmacher Anton Lutz "Sohn von Johann Lutz und wohl auch dessen Schüler. Ein tüchtiger Arbeiter, der zuletzt geisteskrank wurde und sich in diesem Zustand vergiftete." Diese Aussage ist heute allerdings nicht zu bestätigen. Als "Gedenke des Todes" vermutlich unter dem Eindruck der schrecklichen Erlebnisse im Ersten Weltkrieg entstanden, können die sogenannten "stummen Geigen" ohne Resonanzkörper nur einen dünnen Ton "wie Sphärenmusik" von sich geben Das Quartett war im Schaufenster des Instrumentengeschäftes von Anton Lutz (bekannt als "Lutzn Toni") in Karlsbad als unverkäufliches Schaustück bis in die 1930er Jahre ausgestellt.

___________________________________________________

Anton Lutz (1860 - c. 1936). Karlsbad (Karlovy Vari) before 1918

Two violins, viola and violoncello in skeletal form with death heads instead of the snail. Engravings on the corpus of the violoncello: front: rear:

MEMENTO / MORJ / ANTON - LUTZ - / KARLSBAD -

WHEN • I • LIVED • I • WAS • MUTE / NOW • WHEN • DEAD • I • SOUND • LOVELY

 

The symbol of the living tree, the sounding wood, namely the violin or lute. becomes German translation of the Latin saying (dum vixi tacui mortua dulce cano) on the famous engraving by Pierre Woeiriot de Bouzey, Lyon, 1562, with the portrait of the lute-maker Gaspar Duiffoprugar (also Caspar Tieffenbrucker), who also appears in Lyon. Little is known about the builder: according to Lütgendorff (The violin and lute maker, 11: 307), the violinist Anton Lutz was the son of Johann Lutz and probably his pupil, a skilled worker who had recently become mentally ill and poisoned himself in this state. " This statement can not be confirmed today. The so-called "mute violins" without a resonance body can only produce a thin tone "like spherical music." The quartet was exhibited in the window of Anton Lutz’s instrument shop in Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) as unsaleable goods until the 1930s.

Daehan Dawon Tea Plantation

 

Daehan Dawon Tourist Plantation is an area located in Boseong, and its main specialty is green tea which originated from the mountain valleys south of Boseong. Boseong has been a tea plantation area since the days of the Japanese occupation, and with its long history comes large plantations, their traditions, and highly skilled workers. The most famous of these is the Daehan Dawon Plantation.

 

english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=264293

 

More: asiaenglish.visitkorea.or.kr/ena/SI/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=309363

The history of the Citroën «Facile à Fabriquer, Facile à Financer», or FAF for “easy to make, easy to finance”, could be traced back to the early post-war period. Introduced in 1948, the 2CV was adapted, re-bodied and modified throughout its entire career, in particular to cope with the harsh environments of developing countries. Although Citroën introduced the Mehari in 1968 to satisfy customers on the coast or in the countryside, its plastic bodywork was not robust enough for third world countries. However, the market potential was significant, and Citroën engineers had to find a solution. The FAF project is presented in 1978 at the Dakar Fair. While the mechanical base was still derived from the 2CV, the bodywork used a unique production method. Made of sheet metal rather than plastic, the parts were cut according to a pattern and then folded along the dotted lines to form the different parts. The FAFs were to be manufactured locally, by low-skilled workers in countries without an automotive industry. Numerous versions were proposed, but without any exceptional success. In 1979, the FAF A 4x4 was presented. Equipped with a «patrol» body, it is powered by the twin-cylinder engine of the Visa and was aimed at African armies, but also at the French and Portuguese armies to replace their ageing Jeeps. A very confidential series will be produced, without any contract ever being signed. The FAF we present to you is a civilian A 4x4. Exhibited at the Porte de Versailles 4x4 and outdoor car show in September 1983, it has an original decoration, reminiscent of the “Croisières Citroën” of the 1930s. Its aesthetic is reworked: headlight grills, fake grass floor mats, specific 6 stripes paint for example. With about 2,200 km on the odometer, a dogleg gearbox and the possibility of switching between two or four wheel drive, this rare A 4x4 has only one thing to look forward to: crossing dunes, deserts or forests.

 

l'Aventure Peugeot Citroën DS, la Vente Officielle

Aguttes

Estimated : € 15.000 - 20.000

Sold for € 28.500

 

Citroen Heritage

93600 Aulnay-sous-Bois

France

September 2021

The embroidered clothing has been a very coveted form of clothing which the women of Pakistan like very much. This SME is a major source of supply for these kind of clothing and which is made at various in-house facilities where the workers prepare these stuff. The development of clothing involves great hardship and a great deal of concentration while activity is performed by the KARIGARS (skilled workers) of this industry.

 

The occasion of wedding is mostly the event which is specially considered for wearing the kind of clothing when the brides chose different colors and varieties of designs of these embroidered clothing.

A skilled worker, regardless of the job description, remains a treasure

 

(for further pictures and information please go to the end of page and by clicking on the link my modest promises will be fulfilled!)

Parliament building

The original intention was to build two separate buildings for the Imperial Council and the House of Representatives of the by the February Patent 1861 established Reichsrat (Imperial Council). After the Compromise with Hungary, however, this plan was dropped and in the year 1869 the architect Theophil von Hansen by the Ministry of the Interior entrusted with the elaboration of the monumental project for a large parliament building. The first cut of the spade followed in June 1874, the foundation stone bears the date "2nd September 1874". At the same time was worked on the erection of the imperial museums, the Town Hall and the University. Theophil Hansen took - as already mentioned - well thought out and in a very meaningful way the style of the Viennese parliament building from ancient Greece; stem important constitutional terms but also from the Greek antiquity - such as "politics", "democracy" and others. Symbolic meaning had also that from nearly all crown lands of the monarchy materials have been used for the construction of the parliament building. Thus, the structure should symbolize the confluence of all the forces "of the in the in the Reichsrat represented kingdoms and countries" in the Vienna parliament building. With the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ended the era of the multinational Parliament in Vienna.

Since November 1918, the building is the seat of the parliamentary bodies of the Republic of Austria, first the National Assembly and later the National Council in the until its destruction in 1945 remained unchanged session hall of the former Imperial Council holding meetings. During the Second World War, the parliament building was severely affected, about half of the building fabric were destroyed. On 7th February 1945 the portico by bombing suffered serious damage. Two columns were totally destroyed, the edge ceiling construction with the richly gilded coffered ceiling and a magnificent frieze painting, which was 121 meters long and 2 meters high and the most ideal and economic roles of the Parliament representing allegorically, were seriously damaged. During reconstruction, the rebuilding did not occur in the originally from Hansen originating features: instead of Pavonazzo marble for the wall plate cover Salzburg marble was used. The frieze painting initially not could be recovered, only in the 90s it should be possible to restore single surviving parts. In addition to destructions in the Chancellery Wing at the Ring Road as well as in the portico especially the Imperial Council tract was severely affected by the effects of war. The meeting room of the Imperial Council was completely burned out, in particular the figural jewelry as well as the ruined marble statues of Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Sophocles, Socrates, Pericles and Demosthenes appearing hardly recoverable. In this circumstances, it was decided not to reconstruct the old Imperial Council hall, but a new hall with a businesslike but refined and convenient furnishing for the National Council of the Republic of Austria to build. During the reconstruction of the building in the years 1945 to 1956 efforts were also made the yet by Hansen envisaged technical independence further to develop and to perfect. Thus the parliament building now has an emergency generator, which ensures, any time, adequate electricity supply of the house in case of failure of the city network, and a variety of other technical facilities, which guarantee a high supply autonomy. Not only from basic considerations in the sense of seperation of powers but also from the possibility of an extraordinary emergency, is this a compelling need. National Council and the Federal Council as the elected representative bodies of the Austrian people must at all times - especially in case of disaster - the material conditions for their activity have guaranteed. This purpose serve the mentioned facilities and many others, sometimes very complicated ones and the persons entrusted with their maintenance. To the staff of the Parliamentary Administration therefore belong not only academics, stenographers, administrators, secretaries and officials of the room service as in each parliament, but also the with the maintenance of the infrastructure of the parliament building entrusted technicians and skilled workers.

Analogous to other parliaments was for years, even decades tried to acquire or to rent one or the other object near the Parliament building. Finally one was able in 1981 to start with a basic conversion or expansion of the house Reichsratsstrasse 9 under planning by the architect Prof. Dr. Sepp Stein, in this connection was given the order the parliament building through a tunnel with the house in the Reichsratsstrasse to connect. With this tunnel not only a connection for pedestrians should be established, but also a technical integration of the two houses. In the basement of the building in which in early 1985 could be moved in, confluences the road tunnel; furthermore it serves the accommodation of technical rooms as well as of the storage, preparation and staff rooms for a restauration, a main kitchen and a restaurant for about 130 people are housed on the ground floor. On the first floor are located dining rooms for about 110 people; workrooms for MPs are in the second, offices in the third to the sixth floor housed. Ten years after the house Reichsratsstrasse 9 another building could be purchased, the house Reichsratsstrasse 1, and, again under the planning leadership of architect Prof. Dr. Sepp Stein, adapted for the purposes of the Parliament. This house also through an in the basement joining under road tunnel with the Parliament building was connected. The basement houses storage rooms, the ground floor next to an "info-shop" where information materials concerning the Austrian Parlament can be obtained, the Parliament Post Office and the printery. In the six upper floors are offices and other work spaces for different departments of the Parliamentary Administration. The previously by these departments used rooms in the Parliament building were, after it was moved into the house Reichsratsstrasse in 1994, mostly the parliamentary clubs made available. Already in 1992 by the rental of rooms in a building in the Schenkenstraße for the parliamentary staff of the deputies office premises had been created.

Pallas Athene

Parliament Vienna

The 5.5 meter high monumental statue of Pallas Athena in front of the parliament building in Vienna gives not only the outside appearance of this building a striking sculptural accent, but has almost become a symbolic figure of the Austrian parliamentarism. The Danish architect Theophil Hansen, according to which draft in the years 1874-1884 the parliament building has been built, has designed this as a "work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk)"; thus, his planning also including the figural decoration of the building. The in front of the Parliament ramp to be built monumental fountain should according to Hansen's original planning be crowned of an allegoric representation of the Austria, that is, a symbolization of Austria. In the definitive, in 1878 by Hansen submitted figure program took its place Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. The monumental statue was realized only after Hansen's death, but according to his design by sculptor Carl Kundmann in 1902.

Meeting room of the former House of Representatives

The meeting room of the former House of Representatives is largely preserved faithfully and now serves the meetings of the Federal Assembly as well as ceremonies and commemorative meetings of the National Council and the Federal Council. Architecturally, the hall is modeled on a Greek theater. Before the end wall is the presidium with the lectern and the Government Bench, in the semicircle the seats of the deputies are arranged. The from Carrara marble carved statues on the front wall - between the ​​of Unterberger marble manufactured columns and pilasters - represent Roman statesmen, the by Friedrich Eisenmenger realised frieze painting depicts the emergence of political life, and the pediment group above it should symbolize the daily routine.

Portico

The large portico, in its proportions recreating the Parthenon of the Acropolis of Athens, forms the central chamber of the parliament building and should according to the original intention serve as a meeting place between members of the House of Representatives and of the Imperial Council. Today it functions as a venue, such as for the annual reception of the President of the National Council and the President of the Federal Council for the Diplomatic Corps. When choosing materials for the parliament building, Theophil Hansen strove to use marbles and stones from the crown lands of the monarchy, thus expressing their attachment to their Parliament. For example, consist the 24 monolithic, that is, produced from one-piece, columns, each more than 16 tons of weight, of the great hypostyle hall of Adnet marble, the floor panels of Istrian karst marble. When in the last months of the Second World War the Parliament building was severely affected by bomb hits, also the portico suffered severe damage, and the two columns in the north-west corner of the hall were destroyed, the edge ceiling construction with the richly gilded coffered ceiling and below the ceiling running frieze painting by Eduard Lebiedzki have been severely damaged. The two destroyed columns in 1950 were replaced by two new ones, broken from the same quarry as the originals, but not exhibiting the same pattern. The parts of the Lebiedzki frieze which have been restorable only in the 90s could be restored.

www.wien-vienna.at/index.php?ID=1102

Checkpoint Charlie (1987)

Border between West Berlin and German Democratic Republic.

 

Photo © Eddy Westveer

www.eddywestveer.com

All rights reserved

 

Checkpoint Charlie

Checkpoint Charlie ;Checkpoint C; was the name given by the Western Allies to the most well known Berlin Wall crossing point between East Germany and West Germany during the Cold War.

The Soviet Union prompted the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 to stem the flow of Eastern Bloc emigration westward through what had become a "loophole" in the Soviet border system, preventing escape over the city sector border from East Berlin to West Berlin. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of east and west, and—for some East Germans—a gateway to freedom. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced off at the location during the Berlin Crisis of 1961.

After the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc and the reunification of Germany, the building at Checkpoint Charlie became a tourist attraction. It is now located in a museum in a Berlin suburb.

BACKGROUND

Emigration restrictions, the Inner German Border and Berlin loophole.

Further information: Eastern Bloc emigration and defection and Inner German border

By the early 1950s, the Soviet approach to controlling national movement, restricting emigration, was emulated by most of the rest of the Eastern Bloc, including East Germany.

However, in occupied Germany, up until 1952, the lines between East Germany and the western occupied zones remained easily crossed in most places. Consequently, the Inner German border between the two German states was closed, and a barbed-wire fence erected.

Even after the closing of the Inner German border officially in 1952, the city sector border in between East Berlin and West Berlin remained considerably more accessible than the rest of the border because it was administered by all four occupying powers. Accordingly, Berlin became the main route by which East Germans left for the West. Thus, the Berlin sector border was essentially a "loophole" through which Eastern Bloc citizens could still escape.

The 3.5 million East Germans that had left by 1961 totaled approximately 20% of the entire East German population. The emigrants tended to be young and well educated, leading to the brain drain feared by officials in East Germany.[6] The loss was disproportionately heavy among professionals—engineers, technicians, physicians, teachers, lawyers and skilled workers.

Berlin Wall constructed

The brain drain of professionals had become so damaging to the political credibility and economic viability of East Germany that the re-securing of the Soviet imperial frontier was imperative. Between 1949 and 1961, over 2 1/2 million East Germans fled to the West. The numbers swelled during the three years before construction of the Berlin Wall with 144,000 in 1959, 199,000 in 1960 and 207,000 in the first seven months of 1961 alone. The East German economy was on the verge of collapse.

On August 13, 1961, a barbed-wire barrier that would become the Berlin Wall separating East and West Berlin was erected by East Germany. Two days later, police and army engineers began to construct a more permanent concrete wall. Along with the wall, the 830 mile zonal border became 3.5 miles wide on its East German side in some parts of Germany with a tall steel-mesh fence running along a "death strip" bordered by bands of plowed earth, to slow and to reveal the prints of those trying to escape, and mined fields.

The Checkpoint

Checkpoint Charlie was a crossing point in the Berlin Wall located at the junction of Friedrichstraße with Zimmerstraße and Mauerstraße, (which for older historical reasons coincidentally means 'Wall Street'). It is in the Friedrichstadt neighborhood. Checkpoint Charlie was designated as the single crossing point (by foot or by car) for foreigners and members of the Allied forces. (Members of the Allied forces were not allowed to use the other sector crossing point designated for use by foreigners, the Friedrichstraße railway station).

The name Charlie came for the letter C in the NATO phonetic alphabet; similarly for other Allied checkpoints on the Autobahn from the West: Checkpoint Alpha at Helmstedt and its counterpart Checkpoint Bravo at Dreilinden, Wannsee in the south-west corner of Berlin. The Soviets simply called it the Friedrichstraße Crossing Point (КПП Фридрихштрассе). The East Germans officially referred to Checkpoint Charlie as the Grenzübergangsstelle ("Border Crossing Point") Friedrich-/Zimmerstraße.

As the most visible Berlin Wall checkpoint, Checkpoint Charlie is frequently featured in spy movies and books. A famous cafe and viewing point for Allied officials, Armed Forces and visitors alike, Cafe Adler ("Eagle Café"), is situated right on the checkpoint. It was an excellent viewing point to look into East Berlin, while having something to eat and drink.

The checkpoint was curiously asymmetrical. During its 28-year active life, the infrastructure on the Eastern side was expanded to include not only the wall, watchtower and zig-zag barriers, but a multi-lane shed where cars and their occupants were checked. However the Allied authority never erected any permanent buildings, and made do with the iconic wooden shed, which was replaced in the 1980s by a larger metal structure, now on display at the Allied Museum in western Berlin. Their reason was that they did not consider the inner Berlin sector boundary an international border and did not treat it as such.

Related Incidents

Stand-off between the Soviet and the US tanks in October 1961

Shortly after the erection of the Berlin Wall, a standoff occurred between U.S. and Soviet tanks on either side of Checkpoint Charlie. It began on 22 October as a dispute over whether East German guards were authorized to examine the travel documents of a U.S. diplomat passing through to East Berlin. By October 27, 10 Soviet and an equal number of American tanks stood 100 meters apart on either side of the checkpoint. The standoff ended peacefully on October 28.

Early escapes

The Berlin Wall was erected with great efficiency by the East German government in 1961, but naturally there were many means of escape that had not been anticipated. Checkpoint Charlie was initially blocked only by a gate; a citizen of the GDR (East Germany) smashed a car through it to escape, so a strong pole was erected. Another escapee approached the barrier in a convertible, took the windscreen down at the last moment and slipped under the barrier.

 

This was repeated two weeks later, so the East Germans duly lowered the barrier and added uprights.

Death of Peter Fechter

On 17 August 1962, a teenage East German, Peter Fechter, was wounded in the pelvis, shot by East German guards while trying to escape from East Berlin. His body lay tangled in a barbed wire fence, slowly bleeding to death, in full view of the world’s media. American soldiers could not rescue him because he was a few yards inside the Soviet sector. East German border guards were reluctant to approach him for fear of provoking Western soldiers, one of whom had shot an East German border guard just days earlier. Over an hour later Fechter’s body was removed by the East German guards.

A spontaneous demonstration formed on the American side of the checkpoint, protesting the actions of the East and the inactions of the West: a few days later, the crowd stoned Soviet buses driving towards the Soviet War Memorial, located in the Tiergarten in the British sector. The Soviets tried to escort the buses with Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs). Thereafter, the Soviets were only allowed to cross via the Sandkrug Bridge crossing point (which was the nearest to Tiergarten) and were prohibited from bringing in APCs.

Western units were deployed in the middle of the night in early September with live armaments and vehicles, in order to enforce the ban. None of this ammunition was ever expended, although East German border guards in 1973 opened fire with automatic weapons, leaving bulletholes in Checkpoint Charlie, but no US personnel were hurt.

Checkpoint Charlie today

Although the wall opened in November 1989, the checkpoint remained an official crossing for foreigners and diplomats until German reunification in October 1990 when the guard house was removed; it is now on display in the open-air museum of the Allied Museum in Berlin-Zehlendorf. The course of the former wall and border is now marked in the street with a line of cobblestones. A copy of the guard house and sign that once marked the border crossing was later erected where Checkpoint Charlie once stood. It resembles the first guard house erected in 1961, behind a sandbag barrier towards the border. Over the years it was replaced several times by guard houses of different sizes and layouts (see photos). The one removed in 1990 was considerably larger than the first one and had no sandbags.

Near the location of the guard house is the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, a private museum opened in 1963 by Rainer Hildebrandt, which was augmented with a new building in the 1990s. The two Soldiers (one American and one Russian) represented at the Checkpoint Memorial were both stationed in Berlin during the early 1990s.

Developers tore down the East German checkpoint watchtower in 2000. This famous symbol of the Cold War was removed in a clandestine manner so as to attract a minimum amount of attention. The watchtower, which was the last surviving original Checkpoint Charlie structure, was demolished to make way for offices and shops. The city tried to save the tower but failed as it was not classified as a historic landmark. As of January 2006, nothing has been built at this site and the original proposals for development have been shelved.

Checkpoint Charlie has become one of Berlin's primary tourist attractions. An open-air exhibit was opened in the summer of 2006. Gallery walls along the Friedrichstraße and the Zimmerstraße inform on escape attempts, how the checkpoint was expanded, and its significance as a focal point of Cold War, in particular the facing off of Soviet and American tanks in 1961. An overview of other important memorial sites and museums on the division of Germany and the wall is presented as well. Tourists can have their pictures taken for a fee with actors dressed up as allied military policemen standing in front of the guard house. Several souvenir stands and stores proliferate as well.

 

Source: WIKIPEDIA

  

spent a beautiful day downtown on a 7th grade trip centering on immigration areas

prior to the opening of Ellis island, Baltimore was the main point of entry for immigrants coming to America, many choosing to stay here due to the high number of factory jobs for low skilled workers

The Museum of Industry in South Baltimore is on the site of the old Platt Oyster Cannery

The Huddersfield Narrow Canal runs for 20 miles between Huddersfield in West Yorkshire and Ashton under Lyne in Greater Manchester, UK.

 

The summit of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal is the highest navigable waterway in Britain.

 

Standedge Tunnel on the Huddersfield Narrow Canal is Britain's longest canal tunnel.

 

The canal has a total of 74 locks. It connects end on with the Ashton Canal and the Huddersfield Broad Canal.

 

The Huddersfield Narrow Canal re-opened to navigation in May 2001

From Cottage Industry to Factory

 

Cloth merchants, for instance, would buy raw wool from the sheep owners, have it spun into yarn by farmers' wives, and take it to country weavers to be made into textiles. These country weavers could manufacture the cloth more cheaply than city craftsmen could because they got part of their living from their gardens or small farms.

 

The merchants would then collect the cloth and give it out again to finishers and dyers. Thus they controlled clothmaking from start to finish. Similar methods of organizing and controlling the process of manufacture came to prevail in other industries, such as the nail, cutlery, and leather goods.

 

Some writers call this the putting-out system. Others call it the domestic system because the work was done in the home ("domestic" comes from the Latin word for home). Another term is cottage industry, for most of the workers belonged to the class of farm laborers known as cotters and carried on the work in their cottages.

 

This system of industry had several advantages over older systems. It gave the merchant a large supply of manufactured articles at a low price. It also enabled him to order the particular kinds of items that he needed for his markets. It provided employment for every member of a craft worker's family and gave jobs to skilled workers who had no capital to start businesses for themselves. A few merchants who had enough capital had gone a step further. They brought workers together under one roof and supplied them with spinning wheels and looms or with the implements of other trades. These establishments were factories, though they bear slight resemblance to the factories of today.

 

Why the Revolution Began in England

 

English merchants were leaders in developing a commerce which increased the demand for more goods. The expansion in trade had made it possible to accumulate capital to use in industry. A cheaper system of production had grown up which was largely free from regulation.

 

There also were new ideas in England which aided the movement. One of these was the growing interest in scientific investigation and invention. Another was the doctrine of laissez-faire, or letting business alone. This doctrine had been growing in favor throughout the 18th century. It was especially popular after the British economist Adam Smith argued powerfully for it in his great work 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776).

 

For centuries the craft guilds and the government had controlled commerce and industry down to the smallest detail. Now many Englishmen had come to believe that it was better to let business be regulated by the free play of supply and demand rather than by laws. Thus the English government for the most part kept its hands off and left business free to adopt the new inventions and the methods of production which were best suited to them.

 

The most important of the machines that ushered in the Industrial Revolution were invented in the last third of the 18th century. Earlier in the century, however, three inventions had been made which opened the way for the later machines. One was the crude, slow-moving steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen (1705), which was used to pump water out of mines. The second was John Kay's flying shuttle (1733). It enabled one person to handle a wide loom more rapidly than two persons could operate it before. The third was a frame for spinning cotton thread with rollers, first set up by Lewis Paul and John Wyatt (1741). Their invention was not commercially practical, but it was the first step toward solving the problem of machine spinning.

 

Inventions in Textile Industry

 

As the flying shuttle sped up weaving, the demand for cotton yarn increased. Many inventors set to work to improve the spinning wheel. James Hargreaves, a weaver who was also a carpenter, patented his spinning jenny in 1770. It enabled one worker to run eight spindles instead of one.

 

About the same time Richard Arkwright developed his water frame, a machine for spinning with rollers operated by water power. In 1779 Samuel Crompton, a spinner, combined Hargreaves' jenny and Arkwright's roller frame into a spinning machine, called a mule. It produced thread of greater fineness and strength than the jenny or the roller frame. Since the roller frame and the mule were large and heavy, it became the practice to install them in mills, where they could be run by water power. They were tended by women and children.

 

These improvements in spinning machinery called for further improvements in weaving. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright patented a power loom. In spite of the need for it, weaving machinery came into use very slowly. First, many improvements had to be made before the loom was satisfactory. Second, the hand weavers violently opposed its adoption because it threw many of them out of work. Those who got jobs in the factories were obliged to take the same pay as unskilled workers. Thus they rioted, smashed the machines, and tried to prevent their use. The power loom was only coming into wide operation in the cotton industry by 1813. It did not completely replace the hand loom in weaving cotton until 1850. It was not well adapted to the making of some woolens. As late as 1880 many hand looms were still in use for weaving woolen cloth.

 

Many other machines contributed to the progress of the textile industry. In 1785 Thomas Bell of Glasgow invented cylinder printing of cotton goods. This was a great improvement on block printing. It made successive impressions of a design "join up" and did the work more rapidly and more cheaply. In 1793 the available supply of cotton was increased by Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin. In 1804 J.M. Jacquard, a Frenchman, perfected a loom on which patterns might be woven in fabrics by mechanical means. This loom was later adapted to the making of lace, which became available to everyone

 

Watt's Steam Engine

 

While textile machinery was developing, progress was being made in other directions. In 1763 James Watt, a Scottish mechanic, was asked to repair a model of a Newcomen steam engine. He saw how crude and inefficient it was and by a series of improvements made it a practical device for running machinery.

 

Wheels turned by running water had been the chief source of power for the early factories. These were necessarily situated on swift-running streams. When the steam engine became efficient, it was possible to locate factories in more convenient places.

 

Coal and Iron

 

The first users of steam engines were the coal and iron industries. They were destined to be basic industries in the new age of machinery. As early as 1720 many steam engines were in operation. In coal mines they pumped out the water which usually flooded the deep shafts. In the iron industry they pumped water to create the draft in blast furnaces.

 

The iron industry benefited also from other early inventions of the 18th century. Iron was scarce and costly, and production was falling off because England's forests could not supply enough charcoal for smelting the ore. Ironmasters had long been experimenting with coal as a fuel for smelting. Finally the Darby family, after three generations of effort, succeeded with coal that had been transformed into coke. This created a new demand for coal and laid the foundation for the British coal industry. The next great steps were taken in the 1780s, when Henry Cort developed the processes of puddling and rolling. Puddling produced nearly pure malleable iron. Hand in hand with the adoption of the new inventions went the rapid development of the factory system of manufacture.

 

Changing Conditions in England

 

The new methods increased the amount of goods produced and decreased the cost. The worker at a machine with 100 spindles on it could spin 100 threads of cotton more rapidly than 100 workers could on the old spinning wheels. Southern planters in the United States were able to meet the increased demand for raw cotton because they were using the cotton gin. This machine could do the job of 50 men in cleaning cotton. Similar improvements were being made in other lines of industry. British merchants no longer found it a problem to obtain enough goods to supply their markets. On the contrary, at times the markets were glutted with more goods than could be sold. Then mills were closed and workers were thrown out of employment.

 

With English factories calling for supplies, such as American cotton, and sending goods to all parts of the world, better transportation was needed. The roads of England were wretchedly poor and often impassable. Packhorses and wagons crawled along them, carrying small loads. Such slow and inadequate transportation kept the cost of goods high. Here again the need produced the invention. Thomas Telford and John MacAdam each developed a method of road construction better than any that had been known since the ancient Romans built their famous roads.

 

Building Canals and Railways

 

Many canals were dug. They connected the main rivers and so furnished a network of waterways for transporting coal and other heavy goods. A canalboat held much more than a wagon. It moved smoothly if slowly over the water, with a single horse hitched to the towline. In some places, where it was impossible to dig canals and where heavy loads of coal had to be hauled, mine owners laid down wooden or iron rails. On these early railroads one horse could haul as much coal as 20 horses could on ordinary roads.

 

Early in the 19th century came George Stephenson's locomotive and Robert Fulton's steamboat, an American invention. They marked the beginning of modern transportation on land and sea. Railroads called for the production of more goods, for they put factory-made products within reach of many more people at prices they could afford to pay.

Following the Second World War, Minerva could not design and produce a brand new car by itself and so, following their experience of building under licence, the Standard Motor Company were approached and their Vanguard model was soon being assembled in Belgium.

 

Aware of the Belgian army's search for a new lightweight 4×4 vehicle, Minerva approached the Rover company in the Spring of 1951. In June 1951 the Rover company learned that a total of 2500 vehicles would be required and that Rover were competing against jeep manufacturer Willys for the contract. In October 1951 the deal was agreed, with documentation being finalised on 7th May 1952.

 

Under this deal it was agreed that Rover would supply full technical assistance to Minerva who would be granted permission to manufacture Land-Rovers under licence. Rover would supply Completely Knocked Down kits (with CKD chassis numbers) consisting of the chassis, engine, axle, transmission and other parts to the Minerva company in Antwerp who would then build its own steel body to suit the Belgian army.

 

The Minerva sales literature stated that 63% of the parts used in the vehicles were of Belgian origin. The chassis were later built in Belgium as they are different in a number of ways to the Land-Rover chassis, being box welded and lacking the PTO hole provision in the rear crossmember.

 

The Minerva assembly line employed about 500 skilled workers who could produce 50 vehicles a day. These vehicles produced were left hand drive, 80 inch wheelbase models, with the 2 litre Rover IoE engine. The most obvious differences between the Minerva and the Land-Rover Series one being that the front wings that are squared off and sloping. The bodywork, including the doors, were all steel and a narrower front grille was used with the Minerva badge affixed. Two styles of badges were used, the earlier version stating 'Land-Rover - manufactured under licence by Minerva' and the later having the oval Land-Rover badge at the bottom of the Minerva name (top pic). Slatted oval panels on either side of the grille cover the apertures and the front bumper was fitted with a single "pigtail" towing eye on the drivers side. The side lights were located at the bottom of the wings and the headlights were larger than usual. Smaller brake lights were fitted to the rear panels.

 

Other differences include the exhaust being emitted from beneath the drivers door and the door handles. The 80 inch army Minerva door handles were like those of its British counterpart with the canvas flap - although the door locks are slightly different. However, the civilian Minervas had external door handles.

 

The military vehicles look quite different from the rear; a three quarter height fixed tailgate being fitted. The police and military versions had the spare wheel mounted on the right and a jerry can holder mounted on the left hand side (the Minerva petrol tanks are a little smaller than the Land-Rover equivalent).

No centre seat was provided, a toolbox being fitted in its place which was about the same size as a seat base cushion. (The space under the seat which Series Ones often use as a toolbox housed one of two 6-volt batteries, the second being under the bonnet).

 

It is thought that the Belgian army stockpiled the vehicles and thus effectively brand new vehicles were, until quite recently, still entering service. They simply had the mileage of occasional trips around the warehouse which prevented them from seizing up!

 

An armoured / assault vehicle version was also produced, with heavy plating, armoured glass screens and machine gun mounts at both the front and back. The spare wheel for these was mounted on the front, in front of the grille. Field ambulance versions were produced, being basically the same as the standard vehicle but with the tilt extended at the rear to cover the overhanging stretchers. It is thought that this tilt could in fact be the same as used by the ambulance version of the Jeep.

 

In October 1953 a civilian version of the Minerva Land-Rover was announced. This new vehicle was different in a number of ways from the previously produced military versions. The new vehicle was fitted with three seats, a drop down tailgate and provision in the rear cross member for a rear PTO to be fitted. A choice of colours was also offered.

 

The brochure for the civilian model describes a central PTO from the main gear box to drive belts and describes the vehicle being useful for any portable apparatus - including generators, welders and water pumps. Indeed, the scenes used for the Minerva literature are virtually identical to those that Land-Rover were using - with the obvious exception of slightly different vehicles. Like our own Series Ones, Minerva versions included station wagons, hard tops, truck cabs, and tilt versions; the tilt uniquely being fitted with side windows. These vehicles were apparently well received by construction companies and farmers but are now very rare.

 

In 1954, the new 86 inch version was introduced, (as in the UK replacing the 80 inch). This vehicle was produced for the next two years, until 1956 when all contracts between Minerva and the Rover Company were terminated. During this time, only 1,100 86 inch vehicles were produced, and these are now extremely rare.

 

It is likely that these 86 inch vehicles were primarily only available as civilian models. The 86 inch model had 3 seats and rear PTO hole. The rear agricultural plate was also fitted. These vehicles had tailgates and the external door handles as fitted to the 80 inch civilian vehicles.

 

The original Belgian army order was for 2,500 vehicles although a further 3,421 were subsequently ordered. As a result, despatches for 1952 and 1953 totalled 7,859 Completely Knocked Down vehicles. However, only 200 CKD 86 inch vehicles were despatched during 1954 and this may well have contributed to the dispute between the two companies and agreement that all contracts would be terminated after a further 900 vehicles had been despatched.

 

Thus, from May 1952 until the contract between the two companies was terminated at the end of June 1956, a total of 8,959 CKD vehicles were despatched from the Rover Company to SA Societe Nouvelle Minerva of Belgium.

 

In 1956 Minerva announced the C-20 and M-20 (Civilian and Military) Tout Terrain vehicles but very few of these are believed to have been produced and the company soon experienced financial difficulties.

 

The Minerva company finally went into liquidation in 1958.

The embroidered clothing has been a very coveted form of clothing which the women of Pakistan like very much. This SME is a major source of supply for these kind of clothing and which is made at various in-house facilities where the workers prepare these stuff. The development of clothing involves great hardship and a great deal of concentration while activity is performed by the KARIGARS (skilled workers) of this industry.

 

The occasion of wedding is mostly the event which is specially considered for wearing the kind of clothing when the brides chose different colors and varieties of designs of these embroidered clothing.

Where I used to brew; where, in fact, I was this brewpub's first brewer, in 1996.

 

I've long since left, but the Manayunk Brewing Company still brews, going on twenty-one years of operation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

— Thomas Cizauskas (YFGF)

4 May 2016.

 

****************

▶ "In the 1800s, Manayunk was an exciting mill town populated by skilled workers, weavers, craftspeople, and artisans. Our building located along the heart of Main Street was built in 1822 by Ann Dawson as a cotton mill, to take advantage of the key location at the mouth of the Manayunk Canal. Surely she was one of the few, if not only, women in her time to open a factory. Nearly a hundred years later, the building was purchased by the Krook family in 1912, and transformed into a woolen mill. By this time, Manayunk had established itself on the world scene for the manufacture of truly superb textiles.

 

By the end of the 20th century, textile manufacturing had almost completely moved overseas. The Krook family operated their woolen mill until 1992, when they finally closed their doors and sold the building to local entrepreneur Harry Renner IV. He brought the lagging facility back to life as a space for retail business, and established Manayunk Brewing Company and Restaurant in the process.

 

Mr. Renner made the decision to keep the original industrial scale for weighing wool, which you can still see inside our front foyer. Our first batch of Manayunk Brewing Company beer was tapped on October 17, 1996. Since then, we have brewed more than 600 different varieties of beers, and have been selling these sought-after styles all around Philadelphia and New Jersey. Our brewers continue to explore new takes on classic styles, especially when it comes to sour ales and India Pale Ales. You will no doubt see our delivery truck bringing goods to happy customers throughout the Philadelphia region!

 

Mr. Renner’s daughter took over the building in 2004, and runs the restaurant and brewery along with her business partner Mike Rose. Since then, they have expanded the restaurant by installing a stone pizza oven and sushi bar, as well as a banquet space for weddings and meetings. "

 

***************

▶ Reprinted with permission by Yours For Good Fermentables.com.

— Follow on web: YoursForGoodFermentables.com.

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▶ Commercial use requires explicit permission, as per Creative Commons.

Maintenance activities of energy infrastructure in Tonga.

 

The Cyclone Gita Recovery Project reconstruct and climate- and disaster-proof the Nuku'alofa electricity network that was damaged by Tropical Cyclone Gita in February 2018.

 

Tonga

Energy

Cyclone Gita Recovery Project

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza_pyramid_complex

 

The Giza pyramid complex (also called the Giza necropolis) in Egypt is home to the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx. All were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, between c. 2600 – c. 2500 BC. The site also includes several temples, cemeteries, and the remains of a workers' village.

 

The site is at the edge of the Western Desert, approximately 9 km (5.6 mi) west of the Nile River in the city of Giza, and about 13 km (8.1 mi) southwest of the city centre of Cairo. It forms the northernmost part of the 16,000 ha (160 km2; 62 sq mi) Pyramid Fields of the Memphis and its Necropolis UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979. The pyramid fields include the Abusir, Saqqara, and Dahshur pyramid complexes, which were all built in the vicinity of Egypt's ancient capital of Memphis.[1] Further Old Kingdom pyramid fields were located at the sites Abu Rawash, Zawyet El Aryan, and Meidum.

 

The Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre are the largest pyramids built in ancient Egypt, and they have historically been common as emblems of Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination They were popularised in Hellenistic times, when the Great Pyramid was listed by Antipater of Sidon as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is by far the oldest of the Ancient Wonders and the only one still in existence.

 

Literature on ancient Giza is vast; for an overview with further references, see Manuelian[3] or Lehner and Hawass.

 

Maadi settlements

The earliest settlement of the Giza plateau predates the pyramid complexes. Four jars from the Maadi culture were found at the foot of the Great Pyramid, likely from a disturbed earlier settlement. Further Maadi settlement near the site was uncovered during work on the Greater Cairo Wastewater Project. Recent reassessment of the radiocarbon dating puts the Maadi culture's eponymous settlement to c. 3800 – c. 3400 BC, which is also the likely maximum possible range for the Giza remains.

 

The Giza pyramid complex consists of the Great Pyramid (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu and constructed c. 2580 – c. 2560 BC), the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren) a few hundred metres to the south-west, and the relatively modest-sized Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinos) a few hundred metres farther south-west. The Great Sphinx lies on the east side of the complex. Consensus among Egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx is that of Khafre. Along with these major monuments are a number of smaller satellite edifices, known as "queens" pyramids, causeways, and temples.[8] Besides the archaeological structures, the ancient landscape has also been investigated.

 

Khufu's complex

Khufu's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, now buried beneath the village of Nazlet el-Samman; diabase paving and nummulitic limestone walls have been found but the site has not been excavated. The valley temple was connected to a causeway that was largely destroyed when the village was constructed. The causeway led to the Mortuary Temple of Khufu, which was connected to the pyramid. Of this temple, the basalt pavement is the only thing that remains. The king's pyramid has three smaller queen's pyramids associated with it and three boat pits.  The boat pits contained a ship, and the two pits on the south side of the pyramid contained intact ships when excavated. One of these ships, the Khufu ship, has been restored and was originally displayed at the Giza Solar boat museum, then subsequently moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum.

 

Khufu's pyramid still has a limited number of casing stones at its base. These casing stones were made of fine white limestone quarried at Tura.

 

Khafre's complex

Main articles: Pyramid of Khafre and Great Sphinx of Giza

Khafre's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, the Sphinx temple, a causeway, a mortuary temple, and the king's pyramid. The valley temple yielded several statues of Khafre. Several were found in a well in the floor of the temple by Mariette in 1860. Others were found during successive excavations by Sieglin (1909–1910), Junker, Reisner, and Hassan. Khafre's complex contained five boat-pits and a subsidiary pyramid with a serdab. 

 

Khafre's pyramid appears larger than the adjacent Khufu Pyramid by virtue of its more elevated location, and the steeper angle of inclination of its construction—it is, in fact, smaller in both height and volume. Khafre's pyramid retains a prominent display of casing stones at its apex.

 

Menkaure's complex

Menkaure's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, a causeway, a mortuary temple, and the king's pyramid. The valley temple once contained several statues of Menkaure. During the 5th Dynasty, a smaller ante-temple was added on to the valley temple. The mortuary temple also yielded several statues of Menkaure. The king's pyramid, completed c. 2510 BC, has three subsidiary or queen's pyramids.  Of the four major monuments, only Menkaure's pyramid is seen today without any of its original polished limestone casing

 

Sphinx

The Sphinx dates from the reign of king Khafre. During the New Kingdom, Amenhotep II dedicated a new temple to Hauron-Haremakhet and this structure was added onto by later rulers.

 

Tomb of Queen Khentkaus I

Main article: Pyramid of Khentkaus I

Khentkaus I was buried in Giza. Her tomb is known as LG 100 and G 8400 and is located in the Central Field, near the valley temple of Menkaure. The pyramid complex of Queen Khentkaus includes her pyramid, a boat pit, a valley temple, and a pyramid town.

 

Construction

Main article: Egyptian pyramid construction techniques

Most construction theories are based on the idea that the pyramids were built by moving huge stones from a quarry and dragging and lifting them into place. Disagreements arise over the feasibility of the different proposed methods by which the stones were conveyed and placed.

 

In building the pyramids, the architects might have developed their techniques over time. They would select a site on a relatively flat area of bedrock—not sand—which provided a stable foundation. After carefully surveying the site and laying down the first level of stones, they constructed the pyramids in horizontal levels, one on top of the other.

 

For the Great Pyramid, most of the stone for the interior seems to have been quarried immediately to the south of the construction site. The smooth exterior of the pyramid was made of a fine grade of white limestone that was quarried across the Nile. These exterior blocks had to be carefully cut, transported by river barge to Giza, and dragged up ramps to the construction site. Only a few exterior blocks remain in place at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. During the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century), people may have taken the rest away for building projects in the city of Cairo.

 

To ensure that the pyramid remained symmetrical, the exterior casing stones all had to be equal in height and width. Workers might have marked all the blocks to indicate the angle of the pyramid wall and trimmed the surfaces carefully so that the blocks fit together. During construction, the outer surface of the stone was smooth limestone; excess stone has eroded over time.

 

New insights into the closing stages of the Great Pyramid building were provided by the recent find of Wadi el-Jarf papyri, especially the diary of inspector Merer, whose team was assigned to deliver the white limestone from Tura quarries to Giza. The journal was already published, as well as a popular account of the importance of this discovery.

 

Purpose

The pyramids of Giza and others are thought to have been constructed to house the remains of the deceased pharaohs who ruled Ancient Egypt. A portion of the pharaoh's spirit called his ka was believed to remain with his corpse. Proper care of the remains was necessary in order for the "former Pharaoh to perform his new duties as king of the dead". It is theorized the pyramid not only served as a tomb for the pharaoh, but also as a storage pit for various items he would need in the afterlife. "The people of Ancient Egypt believed that death on Earth was the start of a journey to the next world." The embalmed body of the King was entombed underneath or within the pyramid to protect it and allow his transformation and ascension to the afterlife.

 

Astronomy

The sides of all three of the Giza pyramids were astronomically oriented to the cardinal directions within a small fraction of a degree. According to the disputed Orion correlation theory, the arrangement of the pyramids is a representation of the constellation Orion.

 

Workers' village

The work of quarrying, moving, setting, and sculpting the huge amount of stone used to build the pyramids might have been accomplished by several thousand skilled workers, unskilled laborers and supporting workers. Bakers, carpenters, water carriers, and others were also needed for the project. Along with the methods used to construct the pyramids, there is also wide speculation regarding the exact number of workers needed for a building project of this magnitude. When Greek historian Herodotus visited Giza in 450 BC, he was told by Egyptian priests that "the Great Pyramid had taken 400,000 men 20 years to build, working in three-month shifts 100,000 men at a time." Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three-month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid.

 

The Giza pyramid complex is surrounded by a large stone wall, outside which Mark Lehner and his team discovered a town where the pyramid workers were housed. The village is located to the southeast of the Khafre and Menkaure complexes. Among the discoveries at the workers' village are communal sleeping quarters, bakeries, breweries, and kitchens (with evidence showing that bread, beef, and fish were dietary staples), a copper workshop, a hospital, and a cemetery (where some of the skeletons were found with signs of trauma associated with accidents on a building site). The metal processed at the site was the so-called arsenical copper. The same material was also identified among the copper artefacts from the "Kromer" site, from the reigns of Khufu and Khafre.

 

The workers' town appears to date from the middle 4th Dynasty (2520–2472 BC), after the accepted time of Khufu and completion of the Great Pyramid. According to Lehner and the AERA team:

 

The development of this urban complex must have been rapid. All of the construction probably happened in the 35 to 50 years that spanned the reigns of Khafre and Menkaure, builders of the Second and Third Giza Pyramids.

Using pottery shards, seal impressions, and stratigraphy to date the site, the team further concludes:

 

The picture that emerges is that of a planned settlement, some of the world's earliest urban planning, securely dated to the reigns of two Giza pyramid builders: Khafre (2520–2494 BC) and Menkaure (2490–2472 BC).

Radiocarbon data for the Old Kingdom Giza plateau and the workers' settlement were published in 2006, and then re-evaluated in 2011.

 

Cemeteries

As the pyramids were constructed, the mastabas for lesser royals were constructed around them. Near the pyramid of Khufu, the main cemetery is G 7000, which lies in the East Field located to the east of the main pyramid and next to the Queen's pyramids. These cemeteries around the pyramids were arranged along streets and avenues. Cemetery G 7000 was one of the earliest and contained tombs of wives, sons, and daughters of these 4th Dynasty rulers. On the other side of the pyramid in the West Field, the royals' sons Wepemnofret and Hemiunu were buried in Cemetery G 1200 and Cemetery G 4000, respectively. These cemeteries were further expanded during the 5th and 6th Dynasties.

 

West Field

Main article: Giza West Field

The West Field is located to the west of Khufu's pyramid. It is divided into smaller areas such as the cemeteries referred to as the Abu Bakr Excavations (1949–1950, 1950–1951, 1952, and 1953), and several cemeteries named based on the mastaba numbers such as Cemetery G 1000, Cemetery G 1100, etc. The West Field contains Cemetery G1000 – Cemetery G1600, and Cemetery G 1900. Further cemeteries in this field are: Cemeteries G 2000, G 2200, G 2500, G 3000, G 4000, and G 6000. Three other cemeteries are named after their excavators: Junker Cemetery West, Junker Cemetery East, and Steindorff Cemetery.

 

East Field

Main article: Giza East Field

The East Field is located to the east of Khufu's pyramid and contains cemetery G 7000. This cemetery was a burial place for some of the family members of Khufu. The cemetery also includes mastabas from tenants and priests of the pyramids dated to the 5th Dynasty and 6th Dynasty.

 

Cemetery GIS

This cemetery dates from the time of Menkaure (Junker) or earlier (Reisner), and contains several stone-built mastabas dating from as late as the 6th Dynasty. Tombs from the time of Menkaure include the mastabas of the royal chamberlain Khaemnefert, the King's son Khufudjedef (master of the royal largesse), and an official named Niankhre.

 

Central Field

Main article: Central Field, Giza

The Central Field contains several burials of royal family members. The tombs range in date from the end of the 4th Dynasty to the 5th Dynasty or even later.[

 

Tombs dating from the Saite and later period were found near the causeway of Khafre and the Great Sphinx. These tombs include the tomb of a commander of the army named Ahmose and his mother Queen Nakhtubasterau, who was the wife of Pharaoh Amasis II.

 

South Field

The South Field includes mastabas dating from the 1st Dynasty to 3rd Dynasty as well as later burials. Of the more significant of these early dynastic tombs are one referred to as "Covington's tomb", otherwise known as Mastaba T, and the large Mastaba V which contained artifacts naming the 1st Dynasty pharaoh Djet. Other tombs date from the late Old Kingdom (5th and 6th Dynasty). The south section of the field contains several tombs dating from the Saite period and later. 

 

Tombs of the pyramid builders

In 1990, tombs belonging to the pyramid workers were discovered alongside the pyramids, with an additional burial site found nearby in 2009. Although not mummified, they had been buried in mudbrick tombs with beer and bread to support them in the afterlife. The tombs' proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial supports the theory that they were paid laborers who took pride in their work and were not slaves, as was previously thought. Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three-month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid. Most of the workers appear to have come from poor families. Specialists such as architects, masons, metalworkers, and carpenters were permanently employed by the king to fill positions that required the most skill.

 

Shafts

There are multiple burial-shafts and various unfinished shafts and tunnels located in the Giza complex that were discovered and mentioned prominently by Selim Hassan in his report Excavations at Giza 1933–1934. He states: "Very few of the Saitic [referring to the Saite Period) shafts have been thoroughly examined, for the reason that most of them are flooded."

 

Osiris Shaft

The Osiris Shaft is a narrow burial-shaft leading to three levels for a tomb and below it a flooded area. It was first mentioned by Hassan, and a thorough excavation was conducted by a team led by Hawass in 1999. It was opened to tourists in November 2017.

 

New Kingdom and Late Period

During the New Kingdom Giza was still an active site. A brick-built chapel was constructed near the Sphinx during the early 18th Dynasty, probably by King Thutmose I. Amenhotep II built a temple dedicated to Hauron-Haremakhet near the Sphinx. As a prince, the future pharaoh Thutmose IV visited the pyramids and the Sphinx; he reported being told in a dream that if he cleared the sand that had built up around the Sphinx, he would be rewarded with kingship. This event is recorded in the Dream Stele, which he had installed between the Sphinx's front legs.

 

During the early years of his reign, Thutmose IV, together with his wife Queen Nefertari, had stelae erected at Giza.

 

Pharaoh Tutankhamun had a structure built, which is now referred to as the king's resthouse.

 

During the 19th Dynasty, Seti I added to the temple of Hauron-Haremakhet, and his son Ramesses II erected a stela in the chapel before the Sphinx and usurped the resthouse of Tutankhamun. 

 

During the 21st Dynasty, the Temple of Isis Mistress-of-the-Pyramids was reconstructed. During the 26th Dynasty, a stela made in this time mentions Khufu and his Queen Henutsen.

 

Division of the 1903–1905 excavation of the Giza Necropolis

In 1903, rights to excavate the West Field and Pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were divided by three institutions from Italy, Germany, and the United States of America.

 

Background

Prior to the division of the Giza Plateau into three institutional concessions in 1903, amateur and private excavations at the Giza Necropolis had been permitted to operate. The work of these amateur archaeologists failed to meet high scientific standards. Montague Ballard, for instance, excavated in the Western Cemetery (with the hesitant permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Service) and neither kept records of his finds nor published them.

 

Italian, German, and American Concessions at Giza

In 1902, the Egyptian Antiquities Service under Gaston Maspero resolved to issue permits exclusively to authorized individuals representing public institutions. In November of that year, the Service awarded three scholars with concessions on the Giza Necropolis. They were the Italian Ernesto Schiaparelli from the Turin Museum, the German Georg Steindorff from the University of Leipzig who had funding from Wilhelm Pelizaeus, and the American George Reisner from the Hearst Expedition. Within a matter of months, the site had been divided between the concessionaires following a meeting at the Mena House Hotel involving Schiaparelli, Ludwig Borchardt (Steindorff's representative in Egypt), and Reisner.

 

Division of the West Field

By the turn of the 20th century, the three largest pyramids on the Giza plateau were considered mostly exhausted by previous excavations, so the Western Cemetery and its collection of private mastaba tombs were thought to represent the richest unexcavated part of the plateau. George Reisner's wife, Mary, drew names from a hat to assign three long east-west plots of the necropolis among the Italian, German, and American missions. Schiaparelli was assigned the southernmost strip, Borchardt the center, and Reisner the northernmost.

 

Division of the Pyramids

Rights to excavate the Pyramids were then also negotiated between Schiaparelli, Borchardt, and Reisner. Schiaparelli gained rights to excavate the Great Pyramid of Khufu along with its three associated queens' pyramids and most of its Eastern Cemetery. Borchardt received Khafre's pyramid, its causeway, the Sphinx, and the Sphinx's associated temples. Reisner claimed Menkaure's pyramid as well as its associated queens' pyramids and pyramid temple, along with a portion of Schiaparelli's Eastern Cemetery. Any future disputes were to be resolved by Inspector James Quibell, as per a letter from Borchardt to Maspero.

 

Immediate Aftermath

This arrangement lasted until 1905, when, under the supervision of Schiaparelli and Francesco Ballerini, the Italian excavations ceased at Giza. As the Italians were more interested in sites which might yield more papyri, they turned their concession of the southern strip of the Western Cemetery over to the Americans under Reisner.

 

Modern usage

In 1978, the Grateful Dead played a series of concerts later released as Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978. In 2007, Colombian singer Shakira performed at the complex to a crowd of approximately 100,000 people. The complex was used for the final draw of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2021 World Men's Handball Championship.

 

Egypt's Minister of Tourism unveiled plans for a €17,000,000 revamp of the complex by the end of 2021, in order to boost tourism in Egypt as well as make the site more accessible and tourist-friendly. According to Lonely Planet, the refurbishment includes a new visitors' centre, an environmentally-friendly electric bus, a restaurant (the 9 Pyramids Lounge), as well as a cinema, public toilets, site-wide signage, food trucks, photo booths, and free Wi-Fi. The new facility is part of a wider plan to renovate the 4,500 year old site.

June 8, 2015 - LUXOR, Egypt. Egypt Emergency Labor Intensive project aims at creating short term employment opportunities for unemployed unskilled and semi skilled workers and provide access to basic infrastructure services. These construction workers are building stronger river banks along the Nile river to protect it from erosion. Photo © Dominic Chavez/World Bank

 

Photo ID: Egypt_Luxor_Final_Edit_0007

  

Global corporations have discovered the rich lime goo makes for great rocket fuel! The race is on the exploit the Agreon's natural resource for personal gain. With skilled workers highly sought after from many planets, it's likely you might see someone you recognise.

 

The mountain contains a black light to illuminate the alien barracks.

 

Plasmo's franchises are deploying to all major planetary systems, call today to find out how you can be a part of the interstellar grog syndicate!

 

Hope you like my biggest layout to date. It was too large to set up at home unless I clear the garage out. I had a little help from Taz-maniac, Bricktron and Intrastella on the left side of the display.

The Cathedral of San Vigilio – the Duomo di Trento - was erected on an area which housed an ancient temple dedicated to the city's Patron Saint. A church built in the Padania style was probably found here before the death of the Saint. In the 11th century, the Prince-Bishop Uldarico II began works on the cathedral. In 1212 this first building was almost completely demolished by Federico Vanga - one of the Bishops who contributed the most to the city's urban-artistic development - to make room for a cathedral in the Romanesque-Lombard style. The Bishop entrusted the project to a team of Campione-based skilled workers, headed by Adamo d'Arogno. At the end of the 13th century, the cathedral's Northern transept was decorated with an allegorical rose window known as the Wheel of Fortune. In the 14th century, the church got expanded, and Gothic features were added to it. In 1628, the Crucifix Chapel was planned by Giuseppe Alberti. Built in the Baroque style, it houses a group of wooden sculptures at whose feet the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-1563) were issued.

 

Знаменитый романский храм с тремя нефами является сокровищницей сакрального искусства с живописными и скульптурными свидетельствами от раннего христианского века до девятнадцатого века. Здание собора начали строить еще в 1130 году. Ранее на этом месте находилась римская базилика, однако, к 12 столетию она была почти полностью разрушена и местные власти решили построить тут католический храм. Кстати, часть древнеримской базилики до сих пор сохранилась здесь, однако просто так ее увидеть нельзя, ведь она спрятана в подземной крипте. В 1545 году в именно в здании Кафедрального собора Сан-Виджилио прошел известный Тридентский собор — важнейшее собрание в истории католицизма, когда главные представители католической церкви во главе с Папой решали как им остановить столь масштабное распространение протестантизма в мире.

The Commercial Cable Building is valued for its age; its role in the development of the community; its enduring importance in maintaining the heritage character of Hazel Hill; for its role in the development of global communications technology; and as one of the few surviving trans-Atlantic cable stations in North America.

 

The Commercial Cable Company established operations outside Canso in the early 1880s. The area was favoured by the Company as the closest point of land to run their cable from Europe to mainland North America. Built at the beginning of the hey-day of cable communications, the station carried messages (daily average of three thousand) from all over the world, including important breaking news such as the sinking of the “Titanic,” and the end of World War I, making the station a vital link in communication for North American newspapers. The station was also a key part of communication between the London and New York stock exchanges.

 

To operate the station, engineers, skilled workers and their families were brought from England. To support this influx a small, formally planned community surrounding the station was established. Hazel Hill was one of the few planned ‘white collar’ communities in North America. To support its highly educated workforce, the Commercial Cable Company not only built its employees new and stylish homes, but amenities such as a tennis court, cricket field, curling rink, and a manager’s home complete with a ballroom. The community differed greatly from the nearby fishing community of Canso, which often lead to conflicts between the two communities.

 

The Commercial Cable Building is one of the few surviving trans-Atlantic cable stations. Built in 1888, it is Neo-classical in style and is a sharp departure from the mainly vernacular surrounding architecture of the Canso area. In 1899 an addition was added that kept within the form and massing of the original building, however the addition does not follow the arched window openings of the original portion of the building. Instead they consist of granite caps and sills. The size, attention to detail, and cutting edge elements such as a suspended concrete floor, illustrates the vital role of the industry at the time and the success of the Company in the global marketplace.

 

The Company ceased operations in 1962 and the building slowly fell into disrepair; however many original elements remain, including the trans-Atlantic cables, arched windows, masonry work, and arched entrance. The building remains a landmark in the area and together with the remaining company houses provides a tangible link to a period in the area’s history when it was at the centre of global communications.

 

Source: Municipality of the District of Guysborough Heritage Property files, Commercial Cable Building.

Character-Defining Elements

 

Character-defining elements of the Commercial Cable Building include:

 

- form and massing;

- location over-looking Hazel Hill Lake;

- granite foundation;

- brick building materials;

- metal seamed roof;

- granite sills and caps in 1899 section;

- cast iron gutters;

- hipped roof.

 

Character-defining elements of the Commercial Cable Building relate to its Neo-classical style and include:

 

- arched main entrance;

- arched windows (1888 section);

- corbelled brick and gutter;

- arched windows in gabled second storey forming enclosed main entrance;

- arched transom above main door.

 

Interior character-defining elements of the Commercial Cable Building relate to its original use as a trans-Atlantic cable station and include:

 

- remnants of trans-Atlantic cable;

- remains of mosaic tile floor;

- pressed metal ceiling;

- mantles;

- remnants of original trim;

- arched interior walls and doorways;

- remnants of suspended concrete floor in addition.

八取物語 - 木造師傅知道先生 / 每一個人都是一部小說故事 - 世事浮沉如醉如醒一言難盡

The story of the Eight Take - The wood makes skilled worker Mr. Knew / Each people are a novel story - The humans affair vicissitude like is drunk like awakes the words is endless

八取の物語 - ぼうっとしてい先生"知っている"先生をつくります / すべての人はすべて1部の小説のストーリです - もし世事の浮き沈みは酔ってもし目が覚めて訴えて言い終わらないならばならば

La historia de la toma ocho - La madera hace a Sr. Knew del trabajado cualificado / Cada pueblo es una historia de la novela - La vicisitud asunto de los humanos como se bebe como despierta las palabras no tiene fin

Die Geschichte des Nehmens acht - Das Holz bildet gelernter Arbeiter Herrn Knew / Jedes Volk ist ein Roman Geschichte - Die Menschen Affäre Wandel wie betrunken ist wie die Worte erwacht ist endlos

L'histoire de la prise huit - Le bois fait M. Knew de travailleur qualifié / Chaque peuple est une histoire romanesque - La vicissitude affaire des êtres humains comme on boit comme réveille les mots est sans fin

 

Anping Tainan Taiwan / Anping Tainan Taiwán / 台灣台南安平

 

向八取知道先生致敬 / Saluting to Mr. Knew

八取知道先生に向って敬意を表します / Saluting to Mr. Knew

Begrüßung zu Herrn Knew / Salutation à M. Knew

 

心茫茫 / 古早夜曲

My mind is boundless / Ancient early tune

{ Homeward tune / 古代早い調子 }

 

{View large size on fluidr}

 

{My Blog / 台南運河風情-歷史與生活}

{My Blog / The character and style of the Tainan transport river-The history and life}

{Mi blog el carácter de / The y el estilo de la Tainan transportan el río - La historia y la vida}

{My Blog / 台南運河の風情-歴史と生活}

{Mein Blog / The-Buchstabe und Art des Tainans transportieren Fluss - Die Geschichte und das Leben}

{Mon blog / Le caractère et le modèle de Tainan transportent le fleuve - L'histoire et la vie}

  

家住安南鹽溪邊

The family lives in nearby the Annan salt river

 

隔壁就是聽雨軒

The next door listens to the rain porch

 

一旦落日照大員

The sunset Shineing to the Taiwan at once

 

左岸青龍飛九天

The left bank white dragon flying in the sky

ТАНКОВЫЙ МУЗЕЙ В КУБИНКЕ

KUBINKA TANK MUSEUM. Moscow

 

The Infantry Tank Mark II known as the Matilda II (sometimes referred to as Matilda senior or simply an 'I' tank) was a British infantry tank of the Second World War. It was also identified from its General Staff Specification A12.

 

It served from the start of the war to its end and became particularly associated with the North Africa Campaign. It was replaced in service by the Infantry Tank Mk III Valentine.

 

When the earlier Infantry Tank Mark I which was also known as "Matilda" was removed from service the Infantry Tank Mk II simply became known as the Matilda.

 

Development history

The first suggestion for a larger Infantry Tank was made in 1936, with specification A12 and contractor decided around the end of the year.

The Infantry Tank Mk II was designed at the Royal Arsenal, to General Staff specification A.12 and built by the Vulcan Foundry. The design was based on the A7 (which had started development in 1929) rather than on the Infantry Tank Mk I, which was a two-man tank with a single machine gun for armament.

When war was recognised as imminent, production of the Matilda II was ordered and that of the Matilda I curtailed. The first order was placed shortly after trials were completed with 140 order from Vulcan Foundry in mid 1938.

Design

The Matilda Senior weighed around 27 tons (27 tonnes or 60,000 lb) more than twice as much as its predecessor, and was armed with a QF 2 pounder (40 mm) tank gun in a three-man turret. The turret traversed by hydraulic motor or by hand through 360 degrees; the gun itself could be elevated through an arc from -15[nb 2] to +20 degrees. One of the most serious weaknesses of the Matilda II was the lack of a high-explosive round for its main gun. A high-explosive shell was designed for the 2 pounder but for reasons never explained it was never placed in production. With its heavy armour the Matilda II was an excellent infantry support tank, but had to rely on its machine gun when operating with infantry units.

Like many other British infantry tanks, it was heavily armoured; from 20 mm at the thinnest it was 78 mm (3.1-inch) at the front, much more than most contemporaries. The turret armour was 75 millimetres (3.0 in) all round, the hull side armour was 65 to 70 millimetres (2.6 to 2.8 in), and the rear armour, covering the engine, was 55 millimetres (2.2 in). The frontal armour was 75 millimetres (3.0 in), although the nose plates top and bottom were thinner but angled. The turret roof was the same thickness as the hull roof and engine deck: 20 millimetres (0.79 in). The German Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks, of the same period, had 30 to 50 millimetres (1.2 to 2.0 in) thick hull armour. The shape of the nose armour was based on the US Christie design, and came to a narrow point with storage lockers added on either side. The heavy armour of the Matilda's cast turret became legendary; for a time in 1940–41 the Matilda earned the nickname "Queen of the Desert". The sheer thickness of its armour made the tank impervious to the 37 mm and 50 mm calibre anti-tank guns that were then commonly used by the Germans, as well as the 47 mm used by the Italians in North Africa; only the 75 mm PAK 40 anti-tank gun and 88 mm anti-aircraft gun could penetrate its armour reliably.

While the Matilda possessed a degree of protection that was then unmatched in the North African theatre, the sheer weight of the armour mounted on the vehicle contributed to a very low average speed of about 6 mph (9.7 km/h) on desert terrain. At the time, this was not thought to be a problem since British infantry tank doctrine prioritized heavy armour and trench-crossing ability over speed and cross-country mobility (which was considered to be characteristic of cruiser tanks such as the Crusader). This was further exacerbated by a troublesome suspension and a comparatively weak power unit, the latter of which was actually created using two bus engines linked to a single shaft. This arrangement was both complicated and time-consuming to maintain, as it required technician crews had to work on each engine separately and subjected automotive components to uneven wear-and-tear. It did however, provide some mechanical redundancy, since failure in one engine would not prevent the Matilda from travelling under its own power using the other.

The tank was carried by 5 double wheel bogies on each side. Four of the bogies were paired on a common coil spring. The fifth, rearmost, bogie was sprung against a hull bracket. Between the first bogie and the idler wheel was a "jockey wheel". The first Matildas had return rollers; these were replaced in later models by track skids, which were far easier to manufacture.

The turret carried the main armament with the machine gun to the right in a rotating internal mantlet. Two smoke grenade launchers were carried on the right side of the turret. The grenade launcher mechanisms were cut down Lee-Enfield rifles, each firing a single smoke grenade.

 

Production history

The first Matilda was produced in 1937 but only two were in service when war broke out in September 1939. Following the initial order from Vulcan Foundry, a second order was placed shortly after with Ruston & Hornsby.[21] Some 2,987 tanks were produced by the Vulcan Foundry, John Fowler & Co. of Leeds, Ruston & Hornsby, and later by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway at Horwich Works; Harland and Wolff, and the North British Locomotive Company Glasgow. The last were delivered in August 1943. Peak production was 1,330 in 1942, the most common model being the Mark IV.[22]

The Matilda was difficult to manufacture. For example, the pointed nose was a single casting that, upon initial release from the mould, was thicker than required in some areas. To avoid a needless addition to the tank's weight, the thick areas were ground away. This process required highly skilled workers and additional time. The complex suspension and multi-piece hull side coverings also added time to manufacturing.

French Campaign of 1940

The Matilda was first used in combat by the 7th Royal Tank Regiment in France in 1940. Only 23 of the unit's tanks were Matilda IIs; the rest of the British Infantry Tanks in France were A11 Matildas. Its 2-pounder gun was comparable to other tank guns in the 37 to 45 mm range. Due to the thickness of its armour, it was largely immune to the guns of the German tanks and anti-tank guns in France. The famous 88 mm anti-aircraft guns were pressed into service as the only effective counter. In the counter-attack at Arras, although British Matilda IIs (and Matilda Is) were able briefly to disrupt German progress, being unsupported their losses were high. All vehicles surviving the battles around Dunkirk were abandoned when the BEF evacuated.

North Africa 1940 to 1942

Up to early 1942, in the war in North Africa, the Matilda proved highly effective against Italian and German tanks, although vulnerable to the larger calibre and medium calibre anti-tank guns.

  

In late 1940, during Operation Compass, Matildas of the British 7th Armoured Division wreaked havoc among the Italian forces in Egypt. The Italians were equipped with L3 tankettes and M11/39 medium tanks, neither of which had any chance against the Matildas. Italian gunners were to discover that the Matildas were impervious to a wide assortment of artillery. Matildas continued to confound the Italians as the British pushed them out of Egypt and entered Libya to take Bardia and Tobruk. Even as late as November 1941, German infantry combat reports show the impotence of ill-equipped infantry against the Matilda.[25]

Ultimately, in the rapid manoeuvre warfare often practised in the open desert of North Africa, the Matilda's low speed and unreliable steering mechanism became major problems. Another problem was the lack of a high-explosive shell (the appropriate shell existed but was not issued). When the German Afrika Korps arrived in North Africa, the 88 mm anti-aircraft gun was again pressed into service against the Matilda, causing heavy losses during Operation Battleaxe, when sixty-four Matildas were lost. The arrival of the more powerful 50mm Pak 38 anti-tank gun also provided a means for the German infantry to engage Matilda tanks at combat ranges. Nevertheless, during Operation Crusader Matilda tanks of 1st and 32nd Army Tank Brigades were instrumental in the breakout from Tobruk and the capture of the Axis fortress of Bardia .[26] The operation was decided by the infantry tanks after the failure of the cruiser tank equipped 7th Armoured Division to overcome the Axis tank forces in the open desert.

  

As the German army received new tanks with more powerful guns, as well as more powerful anti-tank guns and ammunition, the Matilda proved less and less effective. Firing tests conducted by the Afrikakorps showed that the Matilda had become vulnerable to a number of German weapons at ordinary combat ranges .[28] Due to the "painfully small" size of its turret ring - 54 inches (1.37 m) - the tank could not be up-gunned sufficiently to continue to be effective against more heavily armoured enemy tanks. It was also somewhat expensive to produce. Vickers proposed an alternative the Valentine tank, which had the same gun and a similar level of armour protection but on a faster and cheaper chassis derived from that of their "heavy cruiser" tank. With the arrival of the Valentine in autumn 1941, the Matilda was phased out by the British Army through attrition, with lost vehicles no longer replaced. By the time of the battle of El Alamein (October 1942), few Matildas were in service, with many having been lost during Operation Crusader and then the Gazala battles in early summer of 1942. Around twenty-five took part in the battle as mine-clearing, Matilda Scorpion mine flail tanks.

Minor campaigns

In early 1941, a small number of Matildas were used during the East Africa Campaign at the Battle of Keren. However, the mountainous terrain of East Africa did not allow the tanks of B Squadron 4th Royal Tank Regiment to be as effective as the tanks of the 7th Royal Tank Regiment had been in Egypt and Libya.

A few Matildas of the 7th RTR were present on Crete during the German invasion, and all of them were lost

Pacific Theatre

 

In the Pacific Japanese forces were lacking in heavy anti-tank guns and the Matilda remained in service with several Australian regiments in the Australian 4th Armoured Brigade, in the South West Pacific Area. They first saw active service in the Huon Peninsula campaign in October 1943. Matilda II tanks remained in action until the last day of the war in the Wewak, Bougainville and Borneo campaigns, which made the Matilda the only British tank to remain in service throughout the war

Foreign use

The Red Army received 1,084 Matildas.[3] The Soviet Matildas saw action as early as the Battle of Moscow and became fairly common during 1942. Unsurprisingly, the tank was found to be too slow and unreliable. Crews often complained that snow and dirt were accumulating behind the "skirt" panels, clogging the suspension. The slowness and heavy armour made them comparable to the Red Army's KV-1 heavy tanks, but the Matilda had nowhere near the firepower of the KV. Most Soviet Matildas were expended during 1942 but a few served on as late as 1944. The Soviets modified the tanks with the addition of sections of steel welded to the tracks to give better grip

Production history Designer Mechanization Board and Messrs Vulcan[1] Designed 1937[1] Manufacturer Vulcan Foundry and others Produced 1937–1943 Number built 2,987 Variants see Variants below

 

Type Infantry tank[1] Place of origin United Kingdom[1] Service history In service 1939-1945 Used by United Kingdom

Australia

Soviet Union Wars Second World War

1948 Arab–Israeli War Production history Designer Mechanization Board and Messrs Vulcan[1] Designed 1937[1] Manufacturer Vulcan Foundry and others Produced 1937–1943 Number built 2,987 Variants see Variants below Specifications Weight 25 tons[2] Length 15 ft 11 in (6.0 m) Width 8 ft 6 in (2.6 m)[3] Height 8 ft 3 in (2.5 m) Crew 4 [3] (Driver, gunner, loader, commander)

 

Armour 20 to 78 mm max Main

armament 2 pounder (40 mm),

93 armour-piercing rounds[5] Secondary

armament 7.92 mm

2,925 rounds[5] Engine 2 diesel, AEC 6-cylinder engines[nb 1][5] or 2 diesel Leyland engines[2]

94 Brake horsepower – 95 Brake horsepower[6] Power/weight 6.55 hp/tonne Transmission Wilson epicyclic pre-selector gearbox, 6 speeds[4] Suspension Coil spring[2] Operational

range 160 miles (257 km) [3] Speed 16 miles per hour (26 km/h) (on road)[3

9 miles per hour (14 km/h) (off road) Steering

system Rackham clutch

 

During wartime condiitons and due to the vast number of homes destroyed a programme of constructing prefabricated houses was begun in the UK in an effort to start to deal with displaced persons housing needs in a way that was efficient to deliver. In the post-war years of austerity this need was even greater, allied to a shortage of materials such as steel and of skilled workers, and the idea behind pre-fabrication as a constructional technique was heavily promoted. The idea of being able to easily assemble housing units, largely works built and including basic interior finishes and components, appeared compelling as it allowed a uniformity of construction standards and a lesser need for 'wet trades' to fit them out. I recall this debate continuing to this day in London Underground where the search for 'standardised components' for construction and finishes continues as it does on the railways.

 

The idea was sound and indeed many Continental countries and to an extent the US perservered, whereas in the UK many were constructed but seemed destined to problematic life span and constructional issues, such as around insulation. Indeed, the programme of tower block construction using a similar 'panel' construction in the 1960s and '70s came to an abrupt end given the massive structural failure following the blast at Ronan Point, in east London, where defective and poor workmanship played a major part in the disaster.

 

This article in the May 1948 issue of Architectural Review, and of very period appearance in terms of typography and graphic design, looks at the Arcon permanent home that seems to have been a continuation of the construction of the Arcon pre-fabricated home. As can be seen this two-story home, in terrace, used a mix of on-site wet trades and supplied components. I'm sure Taylor Woodrow were the company behind this, but I'm not sure. The article shows a prototype group at Cranford Park, Southall, Middlesex. I can find little mention of the Arcon permanent method so I'm not sure how may were constructed or if this group survive? They appear to have used relatively lightweight materials (no doubt to eke out materials and construction time) and also used asbestos in various forms, the latter history of which we are all to sadly aware.

Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America. It is the second-largest of the Great Lakes by volume (1,180 cu mi (4,900 km3)) and the third-largest by surface area (22,404 sq mi (58,030 km2)), after Lake Superior and Lake Huron. To the east, its basin is conjoined with that of Lake Huron through the 3+1⁄2 miles (5.6 kilometers) wide, 295 feet (90 meters; 49 fathoms) deep, Straits of Mackinac, giving it the same surface elevation as its easterly counterpart; the two are technically a single lake.

 

Lake Michigan is the world's largest lake by area in one country. Located in the United States, it is shared, from west to east, by the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. Ports along its shores include Milwaukee and the City of Green Bay in Wisconsin; Chicago in Illinois; Gary in Indiana; and Muskegon in Michigan. Green Bay is a large bay in its northwest, and Grand Traverse Bay is in the northeast. The word "Michigan" is believed to come from the Ojibwe word ᒥᓯᑲᒥ (michi-gami or mishigami) meaning "great water".

 

Some of the most studied early human inhabitants of the Lake Michigan region were the Hopewell Native Americans. Their culture declined after 800 AD and for the next few hundred years, the region was the home of peoples known as the Late Woodland Native Americans. In the early 17th century, when western European explorers made their first forays into the region, they encountered descendants of the Late Woodland Native Americans: the historic Chippewa; Menominee; Sauk; Fox; Winnebago; Miami; Ottawa; and Potawatomi peoples. The French explorer Jean Nicolet is believed to have been the first European to reach Lake Michigan, possibly in 1634 or 1638. In the earliest European maps of the region, the name of Lake Illinois has been found in addition to that of "Michigan", named for the Illinois Confederation of tribes. During the 1640s and 1650s, the Beaver Wars over the fur trade with the European colonies, initiated by the Iroquois, forced a massive demographic shift as their western neighbors fled the violence. They sought refuge west and north of Lake Michigan.

 

Lake Michigan is joined via the narrow, open-water Straits of Mackinac with Lake Huron, and the combined body of water is sometimes called Michigan–Huron (also Huron–Michigan). The Straits of Mackinac were an important Native American and fur trade route. Located on the southern side of the straits is the town of Mackinaw City, Michigan, the site of Fort Michilimackinac, a reconstructed French fort founded in 1715, and on the northern side is St. Ignace, Michigan, site of a French Catholic mission to the Indians, founded in 1671. In 1673, Jacques Marquette, Louis Jolliet and their crew of five Métis voyageurs followed Lake Michigan to Green Bay and up the Fox River, nearly to its headwaters, in their search for the Mississippi River. By the late 18th century, the eastern end of the straits was controlled by Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island, a British colonial and early American military base and fur trade center, founded in 1781.

 

With the advent of European exploration into the area in the late 17th century, Lake Michigan became used as part of a line of waterways leading from the Saint Lawrence River to the Mississippi River and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. French coureurs des bois and voyageurs established small ports and trading communities, such as Green Bay, on the lake during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In the 19th century, Lake Michigan was integral to the development of Chicago and the Midwestern United States west of the lake. For example, 90% of the grain shipped from Chicago traveled by ships east over Lake Michigan during the antebellum years. The volume rarely fell below 50% after the Civil War even with the major expansion of railroad shipping.

 

The first person to reach the deep bottom of Lake Michigan was J. Val Klump, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1985. Klump reached the bottom via submersible as part of a research expedition. In 2007, a row of stones paralleling an ancient shoreline was discovered by Mark Holley, professor of underwater archeology at Northwestern Michigan College. This formation lies 40 feet (12 m) below the surface of the lake. One of the stones is said to have a carving resembling a mastodon. The formation needed more study before it could be authenticated. The warming of Lake Michigan was the subject of a 2018 report by Purdue University. In each decade since 1980, steady increases in obscure surface temperature have occurred. This is likely to lead to decreasing native habitat and to adversely affect native species survival, including game fish.

 

Chicago is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Illinois and in the Midwestern United States. With a population of 2,746,388 in the 2020 census, it is the third-most populous city in the United States after New York City and Los Angeles. As the seat of Cook County, the second-most populous county in the U.S., Chicago is the center of the Chicago metropolitan area, which is often colloquially called "Chicagoland".

 

Located on the shore of Lake Michigan, Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 near a portage between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River watershed. It grew rapidly in the mid-19th century. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed several square miles and left more than 100,000 homeless, but Chicago's population continued to grow. Chicago made noted contributions to urban planning and architecture, such as the Chicago School, the development of the City Beautiful Movement, and the steel-framed skyscraper.

 

Chicago is an international hub for finance, culture, commerce, industry, education, technology, telecommunications, and transportation. It has the largest and most diverse derivatives market in the world, generating 20% of all volume in commodities and financial futures alone. O'Hare International Airport is routinely ranked among the world's top six busiest airports by passenger traffic, and the region is also the nation's railroad hub. The Chicago area has one of the highest gross domestic products (GDP) of any urban region in the world, generating $689 billion in 2018. Chicago's economy is diverse, with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce.

 

Chicago is a major tourist destination. Chicago's culture has contributed much to the visual arts, literature, film, theater, comedy (especially improvisational comedy), food, dance, and music (particularly jazz, blues, soul, hip-hop, gospel, and electronic dance music, including house music). Chicago is home to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera of Chicago, while the Art Institute of Chicago provides an influential visual arts museum and art school. The Chicago area also hosts the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Chicago, among other institutions of learning. Chicago has professional sports teams in each of the major professional leagues, including two Major League Baseball teams.

 

In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by the Potawatomi, an indigenous tribe who had succeeded the Miami and Sauk and Fox peoples in this region.

 

The first known permanent settler in Chicago was trader Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African descent, perhaps born in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and established the settlement in the 1780s. He is commonly known as the "Founder of Chicago."

 

In 1795, following the victory of the new United States in the Northwest Indian War, an area that was to be part of Chicago was turned over to the U.S. for a military post by native tribes in accordance with the Treaty of Greenville. In 1803, the U.S. Army constructed Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed during the War of 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn by the Potawatomi before being later rebuilt.

 

After the War of 1812, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the 1833 Treaty of Chicago and sent west of the Mississippi River as part of the federal policy of Indian removal.

 

On August 12, 1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 6,000 people. On June 15, 1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as Receiver of Public Monies. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4, 1837, and for several decades was the world's fastest-growing city.

 

As the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicago's first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848. The canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River.

 

A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad. Manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade (established 1848) listed the first-ever standardized "exchange-traded" forward contracts, which were called futures contracts.

 

In the 1850s, Chicago gained national political prominence as the home of Senator Stephen Douglas, the champion of the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the "popular sovereignty" approach to the issue of the spread of slavery. These issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage. Lincoln was nominated in Chicago for U.S. president at the 1860 Republican National Convention, which was held in a purpose-built auditorium called the Wigwam. He defeated Douglas in the general election, and this set the stage for the American Civil War.

 

To accommodate rapid population growth and demand for better sanitation, the city improved its infrastructure. In February 1856, Chicago's Common Council approved Chesbrough's plan to build the United States' first comprehensive sewerage system. The project raised much of central Chicago to a new grade with the use of jackscrews for raising buildings. While elevating Chicago, and at first improving the city's health, the untreated sewage and industrial waste now flowed into the Chicago River, and subsequently into Lake Michigan, polluting the city's primary freshwater source.

 

The city responded by tunneling two miles (3.2 km) out into Lake Michigan to newly built water cribs. In 1900, the problem of sewage contamination was largely resolved when the city completed a major engineering feat. It reversed the flow of the Chicago River so that the water flowed away from Lake Michigan rather than into it. This project began with the construction and improvement of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, and was completed with the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal that connects to the Illinois River, which flows into the Mississippi River.

 

In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed an area about 4 miles (6.4 km) long and 1-mile (1.6 km) wide, a large section of the city at the time. Much of the city, including railroads and stockyards, survived intact, and from the ruins of the previous wooden structures arose more modern constructions of steel and stone. These set a precedent for worldwide construction. During its rebuilding period, Chicago constructed the world's first skyscraper in 1885, using steel-skeleton construction.

 

The city grew significantly in size and population by incorporating many neighboring townships between 1851 and 1920, with the largest annexation happening in 1889, with five townships joining the city, including the Hyde Park Township, which now comprises most of the South Side of Chicago and the far southeast of Chicago, and the Jefferson Township, which now makes up most of Chicago's Northwest Side. The desire to join the city was driven by municipal services that the city could provide its residents.

 

Chicago's flourishing economy attracted huge numbers of new immigrants from Europe and migrants from the Eastern United States. Of the total population in 1900, more than 77% were either foreign-born or born in the United States of foreign parentage. Germans, Irish, Poles, Swedes, and Czechs made up nearly two-thirds of the foreign-born population (by 1900, whites were 98.1% of the city's population).

 

Labor conflicts followed the industrial boom and the rapid expansion of the labor pool, including the Haymarket affair on May 4, 1886, and in 1894 the Pullman Strike. Anarchist and socialist groups played prominent roles in creating very large and highly organized labor actions. Concern for social problems among Chicago's immigrant poor led Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr to found Hull House in 1889. Programs that were developed there became a model for the new field of social work.

 

During the 1870s and 1880s, Chicago attained national stature as the leader in the movement to improve public health. City laws and later, state laws that upgraded standards for the medical profession and fought urban epidemics of cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever were both passed and enforced. These laws became templates for public health reform in other cities and states.

 

The city established many large, well-landscaped municipal parks, which also included public sanitation facilities. The chief advocate for improving public health in Chicago was John H. Rauch, M.D. Rauch established a plan for Chicago's park system in 1866. He created Lincoln Park by closing a cemetery filled with shallow graves, and in 1867, in response to an outbreak of cholera he helped establish a new Chicago Board of Health. Ten years later, he became the secretary and then the president of the first Illinois State Board of Health, which carried out most of its activities in Chicago.

 

In the 1800s, Chicago became the nation's railroad hub, and by 1910 over 20 railroads operated passenger service out of six different downtown terminals. In 1883, Chicago's railway managers needed a general time convention, so they developed the standardized system of North American time zones. This system for telling time spread throughout the continent.

 

In 1893, Chicago hosted the World's Columbian Exposition on former marshland at the present location of Jackson Park. The Exposition drew 27.5 million visitors, and is considered the most influential world's fair in history. The University of Chicago, formerly at another location, moved to the same South Side location in 1892. The term "midway" for a fair or carnival referred originally to the Midway Plaisance, a strip of park land that still runs through the University of Chicago campus and connects the Washington and Jackson Parks.

 

During World War I and the 1920s there was a major expansion in industry. The availability of jobs attracted African Americans from the Southern United States. Between 1910 and 1930, the African American population of Chicago increased dramatically, from 44,103 to 233,903. This Great Migration had an immense cultural impact, called the Chicago Black Renaissance, part of the New Negro Movement, in art, literature, and music. Continuing racial tensions and violence, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919, also occurred.

 

The ratification of the 18th amendment to the Constitution in 1919 made the production and sale (including exportation) of alcoholic beverages illegal in the United States. This ushered in the beginning of what is known as the gangster era, a time that roughly spans from 1919 until 1933 when Prohibition was repealed. The 1920s saw gangsters, including Al Capone, Dion O'Banion, Bugs Moran and Tony Accardo battle law enforcement and each other on the streets of Chicago during the Prohibition era. Chicago was the location of the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, when Al Capone sent men to gun down members of a rival gang, North Side, led by Bugs Moran.

 

Chicago was the first American city to have a homosexual-rights organization. The organization, formed in 1924, was called the Society for Human Rights. It produced the first American publication for homosexuals, Friendship and Freedom. Police and political pressure caused the organization to disband.

 

The Great Depression brought unprecedented suffering to Chicago, in no small part due to the city's heavy reliance on heavy industry. Notably, industrial areas on the south side and neighborhoods lining both branches of the Chicago River were devastated; by 1933 over 50% of industrial jobs in the city had been lost, and unemployment rates amongst blacks and Mexicans in the city were over 40%. The Republican political machine in Chicago was utterly destroyed by the economic crisis, and every mayor since 1931 has been a Democrat.

 

From 1928 to 1933, the city witnessed a tax revolt, and the city was unable to meet payroll or provide relief efforts. The fiscal crisis was resolved by 1933, and at the same time, federal relief funding began to flow into Chicago. Chicago was also a hotbed of labor activism, with Unemployed Councils contributing heavily in the early depression to create solidarity for the poor and demand relief; these organizations were created by socialist and communist groups. By 1935 the Workers Alliance of America begun organizing the poor, workers, the unemployed. In the spring of 1937 Republic Steel Works witnessed the Memorial Day massacre of 1937 in the neighborhood of East Side.

 

In 1933, Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was fatally wounded in Miami, Florida, during a failed assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1933 and 1934, the city celebrated its centennial by hosting the Century of Progress International Exposition World's Fair. The theme of the fair was technological innovation over the century since Chicago's founding.

 

During World War II, the city of Chicago alone produced more steel than the United Kingdom every year from 1939 – 1945, and more than Nazi Germany from 1943 – 1945.

 

The Great Migration, which had been on pause due to the Depression, resumed at an even faster pace in the second wave, as hundreds of thousands of blacks from the South arrived in the city to work in the steel mills, railroads, and shipping yards.

 

On December 2, 1942, physicist Enrico Fermi conducted the world's first controlled nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. This led to the creation of the atomic bomb by the United States, which it used in World War II in 1945.

 

Mayor Richard J. Daley, a Democrat, was elected in 1955, in the era of machine politics. In 1956, the city conducted its last major expansion when it annexed the land under O'Hare airport, including a small portion of DuPage County.

 

By the 1960s, white residents in several neighborhoods left the city for the suburban areas – in many American cities, a process known as white flight – as Blacks continued to move beyond the Black Belt. While home loan discriminatory redlining against blacks continued, the real estate industry practiced what became known as blockbusting, completely changing the racial composition of whole neighborhoods. Structural changes in industry, such as globalization and job outsourcing, caused heavy job losses for lower-skilled workers. At its peak during the 1960s, some 250,000 workers were employed in the steel industry in Chicago, but the steel crisis of the 1970s and 1980s reduced this number to just 28,000 in 2015. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. and Albert Raby led the Chicago Freedom Movement, which culminated in agreements between Mayor Richard J. Daley and the movement leaders.

 

Two years later, the city hosted the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention, which featured physical confrontations both inside and outside the convention hall, with anti-war protesters, journalists and bystanders being beaten by police. Major construction projects, including the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower, which in 1974 became the world's tallest building), University of Illinois at Chicago, McCormick Place, and O'Hare International Airport, were undertaken during Richard J. Daley's tenure. In 1979, Jane Byrne, the city's first female mayor, was elected. She was notable for temporarily moving into the crime-ridden Cabrini-Green housing project and for leading Chicago's school system out of a financial crisis.

 

In 1983, Harold Washington became the first black mayor of Chicago. Washington's first term in office directed attention to poor and previously neglected minority neighborhoods. He was re‑elected in 1987 but died of a heart attack soon after. Washington was succeeded by 6th ward alderperson Eugene Sawyer, who was elected by the Chicago City Council and served until a special election.

 

Richard M. Daley, son of Richard J. Daley, was elected in 1989. His accomplishments included improvements to parks and creating incentives for sustainable development, as well as closing Meigs Field in the middle of the night and destroying the runways. After successfully running for re-election five times, and becoming Chicago's longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley declined to run for a seventh term.

 

In 1992, a construction accident near the Kinzie Street Bridge produced a breach connecting the Chicago River to a tunnel below, which was part of an abandoned freight tunnel system extending throughout the downtown Loop district. The tunnels filled with 250 million US gallons (1,000,000 m3) of water, affecting buildings throughout the district and forcing a shutdown of electrical power. The area was shut down for three days and some buildings did not reopen for weeks; losses were estimated at $1.95 billion.

 

On February 23, 2011, Rahm Emanuel, a former White House Chief of Staff and member of the House of Representatives, won the mayoral election. Emanuel was sworn in as mayor on May 16, 2011, and won re-election in 2015. Lori Lightfoot, the city's first African American woman mayor and its first openly LGBTQ mayor, was elected to succeed Emanuel as mayor in 2019. All three city-wide elective offices were held by women (and women of color) for the first time in Chicago history: in addition to Lightfoot, the city clerk was Anna Valencia and the city treasurer was Melissa Conyears-Ervin.

 

On May 15, 2023, Brandon Johnson assumed office as the 57th mayor of Chicago.

 

Illinois is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Great Lakes to its northeast, the Mississippi River to its west, and the Wabash and Ohio rivers to its south. Its largest metropolitan areas are Chicago and the Metro East region of Greater St. Louis. Other metropolitan areas include Peoria and Rockford, as well as Springfield, its capital, and Champaign-Urbana, home to the main campus of the state's flagship university. Of the fifty U.S. states, Illinois has the fifth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), the sixth-largest population, and the 25th-largest land area.

 

Illinois has a highly diverse economy, with the global city of Chicago in the northeast, major industrial and agricultural hubs in the north and center, and natural resources such as coal, timber, and petroleum in the south. Owing to its central location and favorable geography, the state is a major transportation hub: the Port of Chicago has access to the Atlantic Ocean through the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence Seaway and to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River via the Illinois Waterway. Chicago has been the nation's railroad hub since the 1860s, and its O'Hare International Airport has been among the world's busiest airports for decades. Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States and a bellwether in American culture, exemplified by the phrase Will it play in Peoria?.

 

Present-day Illinois was inhabited by various indigenous cultures for thousands of years, including the advanced civilization centered in the Cahokia region. The French were the first Europeans to arrive, settling near the Mississippi and Illinois River in the 17th century in the region they called Illinois Country, as part of the sprawling colony of New France. Following U.S. independence in 1783, American settlers began arriving from Kentucky via the Ohio River, and the population grew from south to north. Illinois was part of the United States' oldest territory, the Northwest Territory, and in 1818 it achieved statehood. The Erie Canal brought increased commercial activity in the Great Lakes, and the small settlement of Chicago became one of the fastest growing cities in the world, benefiting from its location as one of the few natural harbors in southwestern Lake Michigan. The invention of the self-scouring steel plow by Illinoisan John Deere turned the state's rich prairie into some of the world's most productive and valuable farmland, attracting immigrant farmers from Germany and Sweden. In the mid-19th century, the Illinois and Michigan Canal and a sprawling railroad network greatly facilitated trade, commerce, and settlement, making the state a transportation hub for the nation.

 

By 1900, the growth of industrial jobs in the northern cities and coal mining in the central and southern areas attracted immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Illinois became one of America's most industrialized states and remains a major manufacturing center. The Great Migration from the South established a large community of African Americans, particularly in Chicago, who founded the city's famous jazz and blues cultures. Chicago became a leading cultural, economic, and population center and is today one of the world's major commercial centers; its metropolitan area, informally referred to as Chicagoland, holds about 65% of the state's 12.8 million residents.

 

Two World Heritage Sites are in Illinois, the ancient Cahokia Mounds, and part of the Wright architecture site. Major centers of learning include the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, and Northwestern University. A wide variety of protected areas seek to conserve Illinois' natural and cultural resources. Historically, three U.S. presidents have been elected while residents of Illinois: Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Barack Obama; additionally, Ronald Reagan was born and raised in the state. Illinois honors Lincoln with its official state slogan Land of Lincoln. The state is the site of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and the future home of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Skilled worker @ Ladder Street , Zeiss Planar 80mmf/2.8 0n 503CW

All workers rights and benefits that workers enjoy today were fought for and not given out of the goodness and kindness of corporations. Remember that!

 

Lawrence textile strike

 

Founded in 1845, Lawrence was a flourishing but deeply troubled textile city. By 1900 the mechanization and deskilling of labor in the textile industry enabled factory owners to eliminate skilled workers and employ large numbers of unskilled immigrant workers, the majority of whom were women. Work in a textile mill took place at a grueling pace. The labor was repetitive and dangerous. A number of children under the age of fourteen worked in the mills. Half of the workers in the four Lawrence mills of the American Woolen Company, the leading employer in the industry and the town, were girls between fourteen and eighteen.

  

A new Massachusetts law reduced the maximum number of hours of work per week for women and children from fifty-six to fifty-four, effective January 1, 1912. On January 11, workers discovered what many of them had feared would happen: their employers had reduced their weekly pay to match the reduction in their hours. That difference in wages would amount to several loaves of bread for hard-pressed workers.

 

When Polish women weavers at Everett Cotton Mills realized that their employer had reduced their pay by thirty two cents they stopped their looms and left the mill, shouting "short pay, short pay!" Workers at other mills joined the next day; within a week more than 20,000 workers were on strike.

 

Joseph Ettor of the IWW had been organizing in Lawrence for some time before the strike; he and Arturo Giovannitti of the IWW quickly assumed leadership of the strike, forming a strike committee made up of two representatives from each ethnic group in the mills, which took responsibility for all major decisions. The committee, which arranged for its strike meetings to be translated into twenty-five different languages, put forward a set of demands; a fifteen percent increase in wages for a fifty-four-hour work week, double time for overtime work, and no discrimination against workers for their strike activity.

 

The City responded to the strike by ringing the city's alarm bell for the first time in its history; the Mayor ordered a company of the local militia to patrol the streets. The strikers responded with mass picketing. When mill owners turned fire hoses on the picketers gathered in front of the mills, they responded by throwing ice at the plants, breaking a number of windows. The court sentenced thirty-six workers to a year in jail for throwing ice; as the judge stated, "The only way we can teach them is to deal out the severest sentences". The governor then ordered out the state militia and state police. Mass arrests followed.

 

At the same time the United Textile Workers attempted to break the strike, claiming to speak for the workers of Lawrence. The workers ignored them and the AFL, while opposed to the IWW, did not press the point, offering rhetorical support for the strikers' rights.

A local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board attempted to frame the strike leadership by planting dynamite in several locations in town a week after the strike began. He was fined $500 and released without jail time. William Wood, the owner of the American Woolen Company, who had made a large payment to the defendant under unexplained circumstances shortly before the dynamite was found, was not charged.

 

The authorities later charged Ettor and Giovannitti with murder for the death of striker Anna LoPizzo, likely shot by the police. Ettor and Giovannitti had been three miles away, speaking to another group of workers at the time. They and a third defendant, who had not even heard of either Ettor or Giovannitti at the time of his arrest, were held in jail for the duration of the strike and several months thereafter. The authorities declared martial law, banned all public meetings and called out twenty-two more militia companies to patrol the streets.

 

The IWW responded by sending Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and a number of other organizers to Lawrence. The union established an efficient system of relief committees, soup kitchens, and food distribution stations, while volunteer doctors provided medical care. The IWW raised funds on a nation-wide basis to provide weekly benefits for strikers and dramatized the strikers' needs by arranging for several hundred children to go to supporters' homes in New York City for the duration of the strike. When city authorities tried to prevent another hundred children from going to Philadelphia on February 24 by sending police and the militia to the station to detain the children and arrest their parents, the police began clubbing both the children and their mothers while dragging them off to be taken away by truck; one pregnant mother miscarried. The press, there to photograph the event, reported extensively on the attack.

 

The police assault on the children and their mothers sparked a national outrage. Congress convened investigative hearings, eliciting testimony from teenaged workers who described how they had to pay for their drinking water and to do unpaid work on Saturdays. Helen Herron Taft, the wife of President Taft, attended the hearings; Taft later ordered a nationwide investigation of factory conditions.

The national attention had an effect: the owners offered a five percent pay raise on March 1; the workers rejected it. American Woolen Company agreed to all the strikers' demands on March 12, 1912. The rest of the manufacturers followed by the end of the month; other textile companies throughout New England, anxious to avoid a similar confrontation, followed suit. The children who had been taken in by supporters in New York City came home on March 30.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_textile_strike

“He who leads the green economy will lead the world economy"

 

“Our competitors are waging a historic effort to build clean energy sources. China and Germany are right now building facilities just like this one. No one is playing for second place."

 

“The Tesla-NUMMI partnership is a symbol of progress… Tesla is joining with Toyota in a venture to put a thousand skilled workers back to work manufacturing an all-electric car. And this is only the beginning.”

 

"The spill in the gulf, which is heartbreaking, only underscores the necessity of seeking alternative fuel sources"

 

"We're not going to transition out of oil next year, or 10 years from now, but think about it — part of what's happening in the gulf is that oil companies are drilling a mile under water before they hit ground, and then a mile below that before they hit oil. ... We're not going to be able to sustain this kind of fossil fuel use. This planet can't sustain it."

 

"We are making progress, but we still have more work to do. That’s why I am going to fight to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation in Washington, and we’re going to get it done this year. I want to create incentives that will fully unleash the potential to grow technology and jobs in this sector.”

 

Some other sights below…

Kharkhorin, Mongolia

Back in the 13th Century, Kharkhorin was constructed as a capital city of Mongol Empire (Yuan Dynasty) which attracted traders, dignitaries and skilled workers from across Asia and even Europe.

Yuan was the first dynasty to make Beijing (called Dadu by the Yuan) its capital, moving it there from Karakorum (now in Mongolia) in 1267.

哈爾和林, 蒙古古都

早在 13 世紀，哈爾和林就被建成為蒙古帝國（元朝）的首都，吸引了來自亞洲乃至歐洲的商人、政要和技術工人。

元朝是第一個將北京（元朝稱為大都）定都的朝代，並於 1267 年從喀喇崑崙（今蒙古境內）遷至北京。

Mongolia

2023/6/22

hx24617

dans.photo@gmail.com

Ada Dorothy, a Belfast registered tug is being completed at Richard Dunston's ship building yard in Thorne, South Yorkshire.

It was one of the over fifteen hundred vessels built at this yard over the years and was still hard at work certainly until 2017. It is now based south of the border in Dublin. A great credit to the skilled workers who constructed this vessel almost fifty years ago.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza_pyramid_complex

 

The Giza pyramid complex (also called the Giza necropolis) in Egypt is home to the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx. All were built during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of ancient Egypt, between c. 2600 – c. 2500 BC. The site also includes several temples, cemeteries, and the remains of a workers' village.

 

The site is at the edge of the Western Desert, approximately 9 km (5.6 mi) west of the Nile River in the city of Giza, and about 13 km (8.1 mi) southwest of the city centre of Cairo. It forms the northernmost part of the 16,000 ha (160 km2; 62 sq mi) Pyramid Fields of the Memphis and its Necropolis UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 1979. The pyramid fields include the Abusir, Saqqara, and Dahshur pyramid complexes, which were all built in the vicinity of Egypt's ancient capital of Memphis.[1] Further Old Kingdom pyramid fields were located at the sites Abu Rawash, Zawyet El Aryan, and Meidum.

 

The Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre are the largest pyramids built in ancient Egypt, and they have historically been common as emblems of Ancient Egypt in the Western imagination They were popularised in Hellenistic times, when the Great Pyramid was listed by Antipater of Sidon as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It is by far the oldest of the Ancient Wonders and the only one still in existence.

 

Literature on ancient Giza is vast; for an overview with further references, see Manuelian[3] or Lehner and Hawass.

 

Maadi settlements

The earliest settlement of the Giza plateau predates the pyramid complexes. Four jars from the Maadi culture were found at the foot of the Great Pyramid, likely from a disturbed earlier settlement. Further Maadi settlement near the site was uncovered during work on the Greater Cairo Wastewater Project. Recent reassessment of the radiocarbon dating puts the Maadi culture's eponymous settlement to c. 3800 – c. 3400 BC, which is also the likely maximum possible range for the Giza remains.

 

The Giza pyramid complex consists of the Great Pyramid (also known as the Pyramid of Cheops or Khufu and constructed c. 2580 – c. 2560 BC), the somewhat smaller Pyramid of Khafre (or Chephren) a few hundred metres to the south-west, and the relatively modest-sized Pyramid of Menkaure (or Mykerinos) a few hundred metres farther south-west. The Great Sphinx lies on the east side of the complex. Consensus among Egyptologists is that the head of the Great Sphinx is that of Khafre. Along with these major monuments are a number of smaller satellite edifices, known as "queens" pyramids, causeways, and temples.[8] Besides the archaeological structures, the ancient landscape has also been investigated.

 

Khufu's complex

Khufu's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, now buried beneath the village of Nazlet el-Samman; diabase paving and nummulitic limestone walls have been found but the site has not been excavated. The valley temple was connected to a causeway that was largely destroyed when the village was constructed. The causeway led to the Mortuary Temple of Khufu, which was connected to the pyramid. Of this temple, the basalt pavement is the only thing that remains. The king's pyramid has three smaller queen's pyramids associated with it and three boat pits.  The boat pits contained a ship, and the two pits on the south side of the pyramid contained intact ships when excavated. One of these ships, the Khufu ship, has been restored and was originally displayed at the Giza Solar boat museum, then subsequently moved to the Grand Egyptian Museum.

 

Khufu's pyramid still has a limited number of casing stones at its base. These casing stones were made of fine white limestone quarried at Tura.

 

Khafre's complex

Main articles: Pyramid of Khafre and Great Sphinx of Giza

Khafre's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, the Sphinx temple, a causeway, a mortuary temple, and the king's pyramid. The valley temple yielded several statues of Khafre. Several were found in a well in the floor of the temple by Mariette in 1860. Others were found during successive excavations by Sieglin (1909–1910), Junker, Reisner, and Hassan. Khafre's complex contained five boat-pits and a subsidiary pyramid with a serdab. 

 

Khafre's pyramid appears larger than the adjacent Khufu Pyramid by virtue of its more elevated location, and the steeper angle of inclination of its construction—it is, in fact, smaller in both height and volume. Khafre's pyramid retains a prominent display of casing stones at its apex.

 

Menkaure's complex

Menkaure's pyramid complex consists of a valley temple, a causeway, a mortuary temple, and the king's pyramid. The valley temple once contained several statues of Menkaure. During the 5th Dynasty, a smaller ante-temple was added on to the valley temple. The mortuary temple also yielded several statues of Menkaure. The king's pyramid, completed c. 2510 BC, has three subsidiary or queen's pyramids.  Of the four major monuments, only Menkaure's pyramid is seen today without any of its original polished limestone casing

 

Sphinx

The Sphinx dates from the reign of king Khafre. During the New Kingdom, Amenhotep II dedicated a new temple to Hauron-Haremakhet and this structure was added onto by later rulers.

 

Tomb of Queen Khentkaus I

Main article: Pyramid of Khentkaus I

Khentkaus I was buried in Giza. Her tomb is known as LG 100 and G 8400 and is located in the Central Field, near the valley temple of Menkaure. The pyramid complex of Queen Khentkaus includes her pyramid, a boat pit, a valley temple, and a pyramid town.

 

Construction

Main article: Egyptian pyramid construction techniques

Most construction theories are based on the idea that the pyramids were built by moving huge stones from a quarry and dragging and lifting them into place. Disagreements arise over the feasibility of the different proposed methods by which the stones were conveyed and placed.

 

In building the pyramids, the architects might have developed their techniques over time. They would select a site on a relatively flat area of bedrock—not sand—which provided a stable foundation. After carefully surveying the site and laying down the first level of stones, they constructed the pyramids in horizontal levels, one on top of the other.

 

For the Great Pyramid, most of the stone for the interior seems to have been quarried immediately to the south of the construction site. The smooth exterior of the pyramid was made of a fine grade of white limestone that was quarried across the Nile. These exterior blocks had to be carefully cut, transported by river barge to Giza, and dragged up ramps to the construction site. Only a few exterior blocks remain in place at the bottom of the Great Pyramid. During the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century), people may have taken the rest away for building projects in the city of Cairo.

 

To ensure that the pyramid remained symmetrical, the exterior casing stones all had to be equal in height and width. Workers might have marked all the blocks to indicate the angle of the pyramid wall and trimmed the surfaces carefully so that the blocks fit together. During construction, the outer surface of the stone was smooth limestone; excess stone has eroded over time.

 

New insights into the closing stages of the Great Pyramid building were provided by the recent find of Wadi el-Jarf papyri, especially the diary of inspector Merer, whose team was assigned to deliver the white limestone from Tura quarries to Giza. The journal was already published, as well as a popular account of the importance of this discovery.

 

Purpose

The pyramids of Giza and others are thought to have been constructed to house the remains of the deceased pharaohs who ruled Ancient Egypt. A portion of the pharaoh's spirit called his ka was believed to remain with his corpse. Proper care of the remains was necessary in order for the "former Pharaoh to perform his new duties as king of the dead". It is theorized the pyramid not only served as a tomb for the pharaoh, but also as a storage pit for various items he would need in the afterlife. "The people of Ancient Egypt believed that death on Earth was the start of a journey to the next world." The embalmed body of the King was entombed underneath or within the pyramid to protect it and allow his transformation and ascension to the afterlife.

 

Astronomy

The sides of all three of the Giza pyramids were astronomically oriented to the cardinal directions within a small fraction of a degree. According to the disputed Orion correlation theory, the arrangement of the pyramids is a representation of the constellation Orion.

 

Workers' village

The work of quarrying, moving, setting, and sculpting the huge amount of stone used to build the pyramids might have been accomplished by several thousand skilled workers, unskilled laborers and supporting workers. Bakers, carpenters, water carriers, and others were also needed for the project. Along with the methods used to construct the pyramids, there is also wide speculation regarding the exact number of workers needed for a building project of this magnitude. When Greek historian Herodotus visited Giza in 450 BC, he was told by Egyptian priests that "the Great Pyramid had taken 400,000 men 20 years to build, working in three-month shifts 100,000 men at a time." Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three-month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid.

 

The Giza pyramid complex is surrounded by a large stone wall, outside which Mark Lehner and his team discovered a town where the pyramid workers were housed. The village is located to the southeast of the Khafre and Menkaure complexes. Among the discoveries at the workers' village are communal sleeping quarters, bakeries, breweries, and kitchens (with evidence showing that bread, beef, and fish were dietary staples), a copper workshop, a hospital, and a cemetery (where some of the skeletons were found with signs of trauma associated with accidents on a building site). The metal processed at the site was the so-called arsenical copper. The same material was also identified among the copper artefacts from the "Kromer" site, from the reigns of Khufu and Khafre.

 

The workers' town appears to date from the middle 4th Dynasty (2520–2472 BC), after the accepted time of Khufu and completion of the Great Pyramid. According to Lehner and the AERA team:

 

The development of this urban complex must have been rapid. All of the construction probably happened in the 35 to 50 years that spanned the reigns of Khafre and Menkaure, builders of the Second and Third Giza Pyramids.

Using pottery shards, seal impressions, and stratigraphy to date the site, the team further concludes:

 

The picture that emerges is that of a planned settlement, some of the world's earliest urban planning, securely dated to the reigns of two Giza pyramid builders: Khafre (2520–2494 BC) and Menkaure (2490–2472 BC).

Radiocarbon data for the Old Kingdom Giza plateau and the workers' settlement were published in 2006, and then re-evaluated in 2011.

 

Cemeteries

As the pyramids were constructed, the mastabas for lesser royals were constructed around them. Near the pyramid of Khufu, the main cemetery is G 7000, which lies in the East Field located to the east of the main pyramid and next to the Queen's pyramids. These cemeteries around the pyramids were arranged along streets and avenues. Cemetery G 7000 was one of the earliest and contained tombs of wives, sons, and daughters of these 4th Dynasty rulers. On the other side of the pyramid in the West Field, the royals' sons Wepemnofret and Hemiunu were buried in Cemetery G 1200 and Cemetery G 4000, respectively. These cemeteries were further expanded during the 5th and 6th Dynasties.

 

West Field

Main article: Giza West Field

The West Field is located to the west of Khufu's pyramid. It is divided into smaller areas such as the cemeteries referred to as the Abu Bakr Excavations (1949–1950, 1950–1951, 1952, and 1953), and several cemeteries named based on the mastaba numbers such as Cemetery G 1000, Cemetery G 1100, etc. The West Field contains Cemetery G1000 – Cemetery G1600, and Cemetery G 1900. Further cemeteries in this field are: Cemeteries G 2000, G 2200, G 2500, G 3000, G 4000, and G 6000. Three other cemeteries are named after their excavators: Junker Cemetery West, Junker Cemetery East, and Steindorff Cemetery.

 

East Field

Main article: Giza East Field

The East Field is located to the east of Khufu's pyramid and contains cemetery G 7000. This cemetery was a burial place for some of the family members of Khufu. The cemetery also includes mastabas from tenants and priests of the pyramids dated to the 5th Dynasty and 6th Dynasty.

 

Cemetery GIS

This cemetery dates from the time of Menkaure (Junker) or earlier (Reisner), and contains several stone-built mastabas dating from as late as the 6th Dynasty. Tombs from the time of Menkaure include the mastabas of the royal chamberlain Khaemnefert, the King's son Khufudjedef (master of the royal largesse), and an official named Niankhre.

 

Central Field

Main article: Central Field, Giza

The Central Field contains several burials of royal family members. The tombs range in date from the end of the 4th Dynasty to the 5th Dynasty or even later.[

 

Tombs dating from the Saite and later period were found near the causeway of Khafre and the Great Sphinx. These tombs include the tomb of a commander of the army named Ahmose and his mother Queen Nakhtubasterau, who was the wife of Pharaoh Amasis II.

 

South Field

The South Field includes mastabas dating from the 1st Dynasty to 3rd Dynasty as well as later burials. Of the more significant of these early dynastic tombs are one referred to as "Covington's tomb", otherwise known as Mastaba T, and the large Mastaba V which contained artifacts naming the 1st Dynasty pharaoh Djet. Other tombs date from the late Old Kingdom (5th and 6th Dynasty). The south section of the field contains several tombs dating from the Saite period and later. 

 

Tombs of the pyramid builders

In 1990, tombs belonging to the pyramid workers were discovered alongside the pyramids, with an additional burial site found nearby in 2009. Although not mummified, they had been buried in mudbrick tombs with beer and bread to support them in the afterlife. The tombs' proximity to the pyramids and the manner of burial supports the theory that they were paid laborers who took pride in their work and were not slaves, as was previously thought. Evidence from the tombs indicates that a workforce of 10,000 laborers working in three-month shifts took around 30 years to build a pyramid. Most of the workers appear to have come from poor families. Specialists such as architects, masons, metalworkers, and carpenters were permanently employed by the king to fill positions that required the most skill.

 

Shafts

There are multiple burial-shafts and various unfinished shafts and tunnels located in the Giza complex that were discovered and mentioned prominently by Selim Hassan in his report Excavations at Giza 1933–1934. He states: "Very few of the Saitic [referring to the Saite Period) shafts have been thoroughly examined, for the reason that most of them are flooded."

 

Osiris Shaft

The Osiris Shaft is a narrow burial-shaft leading to three levels for a tomb and below it a flooded area. It was first mentioned by Hassan, and a thorough excavation was conducted by a team led by Hawass in 1999. It was opened to tourists in November 2017.

 

New Kingdom and Late Period

During the New Kingdom Giza was still an active site. A brick-built chapel was constructed near the Sphinx during the early 18th Dynasty, probably by King Thutmose I. Amenhotep II built a temple dedicated to Hauron-Haremakhet near the Sphinx. As a prince, the future pharaoh Thutmose IV visited the pyramids and the Sphinx; he reported being told in a dream that if he cleared the sand that had built up around the Sphinx, he would be rewarded with kingship. This event is recorded in the Dream Stele, which he had installed between the Sphinx's front legs.

 

During the early years of his reign, Thutmose IV, together with his wife Queen Nefertari, had stelae erected at Giza.

 

Pharaoh Tutankhamun had a structure built, which is now referred to as the king's resthouse.

 

During the 19th Dynasty, Seti I added to the temple of Hauron-Haremakhet, and his son Ramesses II erected a stela in the chapel before the Sphinx and usurped the resthouse of Tutankhamun. 

 

During the 21st Dynasty, the Temple of Isis Mistress-of-the-Pyramids was reconstructed. During the 26th Dynasty, a stela made in this time mentions Khufu and his Queen Henutsen.

 

Division of the 1903–1905 excavation of the Giza Necropolis

In 1903, rights to excavate the West Field and Pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were divided by three institutions from Italy, Germany, and the United States of America.

 

Background

Prior to the division of the Giza Plateau into three institutional concessions in 1903, amateur and private excavations at the Giza Necropolis had been permitted to operate. The work of these amateur archaeologists failed to meet high scientific standards. Montague Ballard, for instance, excavated in the Western Cemetery (with the hesitant permission of the Egyptian Antiquities Service) and neither kept records of his finds nor published them.

 

Italian, German, and American Concessions at Giza

In 1902, the Egyptian Antiquities Service under Gaston Maspero resolved to issue permits exclusively to authorized individuals representing public institutions. In November of that year, the Service awarded three scholars with concessions on the Giza Necropolis. They were the Italian Ernesto Schiaparelli from the Turin Museum, the German Georg Steindorff from the University of Leipzig who had funding from Wilhelm Pelizaeus, and the American George Reisner from the Hearst Expedition. Within a matter of months, the site had been divided between the concessionaires following a meeting at the Mena House Hotel involving Schiaparelli, Ludwig Borchardt (Steindorff's representative in Egypt), and Reisner.

 

Division of the West Field

By the turn of the 20th century, the three largest pyramids on the Giza plateau were considered mostly exhausted by previous excavations, so the Western Cemetery and its collection of private mastaba tombs were thought to represent the richest unexcavated part of the plateau. George Reisner's wife, Mary, drew names from a hat to assign three long east-west plots of the necropolis among the Italian, German, and American missions. Schiaparelli was assigned the southernmost strip, Borchardt the center, and Reisner the northernmost.

 

Division of the Pyramids

Rights to excavate the Pyramids were then also negotiated between Schiaparelli, Borchardt, and Reisner. Schiaparelli gained rights to excavate the Great Pyramid of Khufu along with its three associated queens' pyramids and most of its Eastern Cemetery. Borchardt received Khafre's pyramid, its causeway, the Sphinx, and the Sphinx's associated temples. Reisner claimed Menkaure's pyramid as well as its associated queens' pyramids and pyramid temple, along with a portion of Schiaparelli's Eastern Cemetery. Any future disputes were to be resolved by Inspector James Quibell, as per a letter from Borchardt to Maspero.

 

Immediate Aftermath

This arrangement lasted until 1905, when, under the supervision of Schiaparelli and Francesco Ballerini, the Italian excavations ceased at Giza. As the Italians were more interested in sites which might yield more papyri, they turned their concession of the southern strip of the Western Cemetery over to the Americans under Reisner.

 

Modern usage

In 1978, the Grateful Dead played a series of concerts later released as Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978. In 2007, Colombian singer Shakira performed at the complex to a crowd of approximately 100,000 people. The complex was used for the final draw of the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations and the 2021 World Men's Handball Championship.

 

Egypt's Minister of Tourism unveiled plans for a €17,000,000 revamp of the complex by the end of 2021, in order to boost tourism in Egypt as well as make the site more accessible and tourist-friendly. According to Lonely Planet, the refurbishment includes a new visitors' centre, an environmentally-friendly electric bus, a restaurant (the 9 Pyramids Lounge), as well as a cinema, public toilets, site-wide signage, food trucks, photo booths, and free Wi-Fi. The new facility is part of a wider plan to renovate the 4,500 year old site.

Two engineers Arif Sheikh (left) and and Haris Bin Khalid at the Foundation Wind Energy-I Limited (FWEL-I) wind power generation plant located in KhuttiKun New Island, Taluka Mirpur Sakro, Thatta District, Pakistan.

 

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