NEW! 7/8 inches (20mm) diameter “near extinct” model of M-Drop steel handlebar famous and popular in the late 1960s till end 1970s for customized street bike and café racer builder. Come finished in chrome. Suitable for British, Italian and Japanese classic / street bike model customized with classic café racer or retro theme like British example: BSA, Norton, Triumph, AJS, Matchless, Royal Enfield, Ariel etc. Italian bike example: Ducati, Gilera, MV etc. Japanese retro-bikes example: Honda CB100, CB125, CB175, Suzuki T500, GT100, GT125, GT185, GT250, TRS, Yamaha L2G, RS, RD, RX, RXS, RXK, Kawasaki etc. Extreme limited stocks. Can post to address all over Malaysia.

 

Interested, please contact me at my cell phone: +6016 6816 008 or e-mail: twin_magneto@hotmail.com

 

The area of a circle = Diameter X Diameter X (0.785) : 원의 넓이 = 지름 X 지름 X (0.785)

 

The ratio of Circle Area in it to Square Area

Square Area (1) : Circle Area (0.785)

Ratio of Circle Area = (0.785)

 

Circle Area = Square Area X Ratio of Circle Area(0.785)

Circle Area = Diameter X Diameter X Ratio of Circle Area(0.785)

Circle Area = Diameter X Diameter X ( π(3.14)/4 )

Circle Area = Radius X Radius X π(3.14)

  

정사각형 넓이에 대한 그 안의 원의 넓이의 비율

정사각형 넓이(1) : 원의 넓이(0.785)

원의 넓이 비율 = (0.785)

 

원의 넓이 = 정사각형 넓이 X 원의 넓이 비율(0.785)

원의 넓이 = 지름 X 지름 X 원의 넓이 비율(0.785)

원의 넓이 = 지름 X 지름 X ( π(3.14)/4 )

원의 넓이 = 반지름 X 반지름 X π(3.14)

Waddingtons

No. 208, The Country Year (1941 or earlier)

cardboard

384 pieces, used and complete

20 in diameter

2022 piece count: 4,384

puzzle no: 4

 

A visit to Malvern Flea Fair can often result in an interesting puzzle find; this Sunday was no exception.

Wandering among the stalls I spotted a box on the ground: it contained a hodge-podge of jigsaws, both card and wood, mostly spilling out into the box and not really of interest.

And then I saw this old, battered Waddingtons box... stuffed inside was an assortment of brown envelopes. Pulling one out, I noticed it had a 1941 postmark and contained a few puzzle pieces. Hmmm... my curiosity was piqued... what could this be? A quick negotiation with the seller and I was the owner of this mystery object.

So yesterday (Monday) I settled down to find out more. Tipping out the contents of the box I found there were eight envelopes, each containing a handful of jigsaw pieces, mostly addressed to one person, and showing signs of having been re-used during World War II when paper was in short supply. They had George VI stamps and 1941/2 postmarks so I was handling (at least) 80 year old puzzle pieces. Each envelope was carefully labelled with a description of the pieces inside.

Carefully opening each envelope, I assembled the pieces and laid them aside. When I'd finished I could see that they made up the puzzle shown on the Waddingtons box, and it was complete.

But why would they have been posted in sections to the people on the envelopes? Was this some sort of wartime puzzle swapping club? And why send small sections instead of the whole puzzle? I shall probably never know...

Diameter: cca 30 / 22 / 16 cm. Blown in transparent or coloured glass, without mould, cut, grinded and polished.

 

Belongs to the article I wrote about Anna in my Modern Home Design section.

Still amazed by this tiny (less than 3/8" diameter) weed flower! (See illustration below in the comments section.)

 

.

 

Some of these photographs appear to be close-ups of regular-sized flowers; they are not. All of these photos are micro (macro) photographs of the super-tiny blooms that blossom on common weeds.

 

Weed flowers...wild flowers...whichever appellation you want to bestow on them nonetheless these almost microscopic beauties are the flowers that bloom on the weeds in my yard.

 

Many people also assume that these flowers are, for example, squash or zucchini-sized flowers, or that they are flowers 1" in diameter or larger and are perhaps on stems a foot tall or so. Nothing could be further from the truth.

 

Most of these flowers when measured petal tip to petal tip at their widest diameters measure 1/4" (6mm) across…or less...the entire bloom is that small. And the average stem height is only a few inches tall, if that.

 

The smallest weed flower I've shot yet is a small ring of flowers that measured less than 1/32" (.7mm) in diameter which encircled a spire which measured about 1/64" (0.3mm) in diameter.

 

For some photos I’ve included references to common objects such as the head of a paper match, or the head of a pin, which dwarfs some of these tiny flowers! On some others I’ve listed a description of the actual size of each object in the photo.

 

So far I've made over 700 photographs of over 50 varieties of weed flowers.

 

I hope that seeing the variety, beauty, and intricate complexity of this small world astonishes and pleases you as much as it has me.

 

Thanks for looking.

 

.

  

Micro Weed Flowers:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/motorpsiclist/sets/72157626023965740/

 

Micro Weed Flowers II:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/motorpsiclist/sets/72157633029514344/

 

Micro Weed Flowers III:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/motorpsiclist/sets/72157633029556370/

 

Micro Weed Flowers IV:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/motorpsiclist/sets/72157633025347237/

 

Micro Weed Flowers V:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/motorpsiclist/sets/72157633029592988/

  

.

  

My photographs and videos and any derivative works are my private property and are copyright © by me, John Russell (aka "Zoom Lens") and ALL my rights, including my exclusive rights, are reserved and protected by United States Copyright Laws and International Copyright Laws. ANY use without my permission in writing is forbidden by law.

 

Diameter 10 mm. Squashed appearance with thick ribs forming chevrons at the sutures between plates. The operculum of this V. stroemia opens as a single lid hinged along the straight right side (1) of the skewed ‘D’ aperture. Left and right opening opercula occur. Menai Strait, February 2011.

Full SPECIES DESCRIPTION at flic.kr/p/bAivDa

Sets of OTHER SPECIES at: www.flickr.com/photos/56388191@N08/collections/

 

The way the tower's diameter flares out a bit at the bottom, which is called a batter, was an innovation that came in at around the time this castle was built and helps date it. A sign at the castle tells you that battered walls "lessened the impact of battering rams and deterred mining, and also provided greater wall thickness, the angle of the wall also serving to keep assailant’s ladders away from it and so more exposed to missiles fired from above".

 

While all that is undoubtedly true to a greater or lesser extent, my understanding was always that a rock or similar missile dropped down a vertical wall either lands on someone's head or more likely embeds itself in the ground, whereas a rock dropped down a wall with a batter shoots off horizontally at the bottom, with much greater opportunity for doing damage in the process! The 'battered' tower seen here is the Comyn Tower at the north-west angle.

 

Also visible in this photo is a low and rather sorry looking wall on the left, behind which the gravel path disappears, which is all that remains of the north (external) gatehouse, the principal purpose of which would have been to provide access to the river - a water gate. The equally sorry looking wall to the right, along the line of trees, I suspect has something to do with the jetty. The meadow to the right may well have been water 700 years ago.

Object Details: The Soul Nebula (IC 1848) is a large emission nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Spanning 100 light-years in diameter, it lies 6,500 light-years away in the Perseus arm of our Milky Way galaxy. If visible to the naked eye, it would appear 2 degrees (i.e. 4 full moon widths) in length. Several open star clusters are embedded in the nebula, with the radiation and winds from the largest stars carving out huge cavities within the nebula. This pressure compresses the gas further triggering additional star formation; with the age of the stars becoming progressively younger as one moves outward from the center of the cavities. Together with the Heart Nebula, located 2.5 degrees away, they form a vast star-forming complex which stretches across 580 light-years of interstellar space.

 

Image Details: Processed using an HOO palette (i.e. Hydrogen-alpha mapped to the red channel and Oxygen-III mapped to both green and blue channel), I gathered this data on October 22 & 29, 2022 from the ROR observatory I built at my home here in Upstate NY under Bortle 4 skies. I used an ED80T CF (i.e. an Orion 80mm, f/6 carbon-fiber triplet apochromatic refractor) and a Televue 0.8X field flattener / focal reducer with an IDAS NBZ dual band (H-a / OIII) filter whose narrowband passes are centered on the emissions of Hydrogen-alpha (656.3 nanometers) and Oxygen III (495.9 & 500.7 nanometers). This was attached to an ASI2600MC Pro cooled CMOS camera and the 80mm was piggybacked on a vintage 1970, 8-inch, f/7, Criterion newtonian reflector and tracked using a Losmandy G-11 mount running a Gemini 2 control system. This setup was guided using PHD2 to control a ZWO ASI290MC planetary camera / auto-guider in an 80mm f/5 Celestron 'short-tube' refractor piggybacked on top of the 80mm apo.

 

The image consists of one hour and forty-two minutes of total integration time (excluding applicable dark, flat and flat dark calibration frames) and is a stack of thirty-four 3 minute long exposures. Processed using a combination of PixInsight and PaintShopPro, as presented here it has been resized down to HD resolution and the bit depth lowered to 8 bits per channel.

 

Versions of the nearby Heart Nebula shot the same nights and using the same hardware can be found at the attached links:

 

HOO Palette - www.flickr.com/photos/homcavobservatory/52689249163/

 

Narrowband Palette (starless) - www.flickr.com/photos/homcavobservatory/53022976843/

 

I'm looking forward to seeing how it might look to process this data of the Soul Nebula in a starless manner, and using a narrowband palette like that shown of the Heart Nebula at the link above (as well as to processing some of the data of other nebulae that I shot earlier this summer and still haven't had a chance to even examine - lol ).

 

Wishing clear, calm and dark skies to all !

The film Stargate (1994, directed by Roland Emmerich) forms the basis of a successful science-fiction franchise spanning four television series with 380 episodes and two direct-to-DVD films. Its premise is an incredible archaeological discovery in Egypt: In 1928, a mysterious artifact is unearthed near the pyramids of Giza - a giant ring, fifteen feet in diameter, inscribed with strange characters, and made of a metal which does not occur naturally on Earth - the eponymous ‘Stargate,’ so-called by accompanying hieroglyphic inscriptions. For more than sixty years, no one is able to decipher the unknown symbols that presumably hold the key to its function, until the arrival of wunderkind Egyptologist Dr. Daniel Jackson, recruited because the artifact’s apparent non- terrestrial origin and immense age lend credence to his unorthodox theories. When we first encounter him, Jackson is giving a passionate lecture arguing for a much greater antiquity of the pyramids and the Sphinx than conventional Egyptology will allow. Stubborn, elitist professors in the audience pillory him without mercy, asking whether he thought men from Atlantis built the pyramids - “or Martians perhaps!” Not Martians, but close. Jackson divines the purpose of the giant ring by recognizing the strange symbols as stylized star constellations: as the name implies, the Stargate is a threshold to the universe. If one enters the correct ‘address’ of seven of the thirty-nine symbols engraved on its surface, the gate opens a conduit between itself and an identical counterpart on another planet, much as one telephone dials another. Once Jackson and a team of soldiers step through this artificial ‘wormhole,’2 they are hurled across the universe within seconds and, emerging from the Stargate on the other side, find

1 I wish to thank Dylan M. Burns for helping this Egyptologist navigate the religionswissenschaftliche literature that has been essential for the story told on the following pages. I am furthermore very grateful to Ingbert Jüdt, Uwe Neuhold, and Jonas Richter for generously providing me with digital copies of some of their works cited here.

2 The popular term for a so-called ‘Einstein-Rosen Bridge,’ a sort of shortcut through space-time that has been hypothesized by astrophysicists. themselves on the desert planet Abydos, inside an Egyptian temple near a virtual duplicate of the Great Pyramid of Giza - total vindication of Jackson’s theories. The American explorers soon discover that the planet Abydos is inhabited by the descendants of Ancient Egyptians who were enslaved millennia ago by an alien tyrant who, having chanced upon Earth and primitive humans, created Egyptian civilization, assumed the persona of the sun god Ra, and took thousands of slaves through the Stargate to Abydos to work in the planet’s mines, harvesting the precious metal from which the Stargates are made and which serves as the foundation of Ra’s technological might. With impeccable timing, Ra himself soon appears in his ominous pyramid-shaped spaceship and lands on the pyramid near the gate. The Americans take up the fight against the god-king and his legions of warriors, who wield high-tech laser weapons and conceal their faces behind frightful helmets resembling the head of a falcon - the ‘Horus guards’ - while their captain Anubis wears the likeness of a jackal’s head. After the Americans are able to convince the Abydonians to rebel, Ra is eventually vanquished after a fierce battle at the pyramid, the symbol of his despotism. In the television series Stargate SG-1, the ‘Stargate Command’ battles many more (usually Egyptian or otherwise ‘Oriental’) false gods like Ra and liberates planet after planet from their despotic grasp.

From a critical standpoint, Stargate gives the initial impression of a very confused pop-cultural salad, randomly tossed together out of the vegetable bins of sci-fi, American military triumphalism, and a lot of Orientalizing Egyptomania. Yet the film was a lasting hit that developed into a franchise, complete with television spinoffs (four serials, from 1997 to 2011), merchandising, and even Stargate- inspired conspiracy-theories. Meanwhile, other films such as Mission to Mars (2000), Alien vs. Predator (2004), or Prometheus (2012) also proved commercially successful ventures in exploring the theme of extraterrestrial races interfering in Earth’s past, as have ‘non-fiction’ series such as Ancient Aliens (eleven seasons and counting). What is the cultural resonance of a story like that of Stargate, and where does such a story come from?

The present contribution seeks to address these questions by way of a multi- faceted analysis addressing questions of reception of antiquity and Egypt, as well as sociology of religion. Following general methodological remarks about reception-theory which are indebted primarily to the literary theory of reception aesthetics as well as a mnemohistorical approach in the vein of Jan Assmann, I proceed to identify the traditional images of Egypt that the film harnesses, and how they are embedded in the appropriation of contemporary discourses. One of these is the focus of my essay - the so-called Ancient Astronaut discourse (henceforth: AAD or just AA for other attributive instances of ‘Ancient Astronaut’), or Preastronautics, popularized above all by Erich von Däniken, who claimed that ancient mythologies commemorate extraterrestrial visits in Earth’s distant past. I proceed to examine the centrality of Ancient Egypt in the AAD, starting with narratives about ancient Oriental and Egyptian wisdom that have been contested since late antiquity until they were discredited around the eighteenth century and pushed to the cultural fringe, thus becoming open to appropriation by new religious currents. I illustrate how esoteric currents, particularly Theosophy, as well as popular culture and an increasing belief in extraterrestrials, all paved the way for the birth of today’s AAD.

I will then focus on the ‘Egyptian front’ of this discourse, showing that Stargate responds above all to the theories of Zecharia Sitchin and Robert Bauval. A close look at key works of the genre creates a strong impression that (the) Stargate was in a way ‘prepared’ by an increasingly technological language applied to the Great Pyramid as a literal ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Post-1994, the AAD exhibits a stunning development as the fictional origins of the Stargate device are silently dropped or explained away by conspiracy theories. I try to account for this phenomenon by adapting, in the vein of recent studies of fiction-based religions, Jean Braudillard’s theory of postmodernity. I argue that we are dealing with a ‘simulacrum,’ something that has become ‘hyper-real,’ supporting Carole Cusack’s assertion that “it is necessary to posit a definition of ‘religion’ that can harmonize with fiction and invention.”3 The AAD, we will observe, resembles in several facets a religious discourse to be located within the fringe realm of ‘occulture’ as defined by Christopher Partridge, particularly in its deep entanglement with popular culture. It serves as a neo-mythology able to re- enchant the world, to present an attractive anti-authoritarian option for identity formation and yet functionally equivalent to religion (according to traditional modern definitions) in its creationist tenets. In summary, the aims of this contribution are essentially twofold: One, to showcase the emergence of the AAD out of religious discourse as well as its continued religious functions despite all differences and pretensions to the contrary, and second, to sketch a concise literary history of this emergence itself, as well as the continuous mutual influence between the AAD and popular culture, exemplified via the rather spectacular case of Stargate. Throughout these observations, we will encounter an imaginary Egypt as providing both the primary building blocks and the general backdrop of ancient mystery from and upon which the AAD’s flying pyramids are built.

2. Reception Theory, Cultural Memory, and the Mnemohistorical Approach

In the late 1960s, German literary theorists, beginning with Hans-Robert Jauß, developed the reception theory of reader-response criticism, or Rezeptionsästhetik.4 Its defining characteristic is the focus on the reader not as a passive recipient of preexisting authorial meaning, but as the active producer of meaning that may or may not conform to the meaning originally intended by the author.5 When the Ancient Egyptians gave expression to their worldview through their art, literature, architecture, etc., they too were encoding ‘authorial meaning’ which Egyptologists attempt to recover through reconstruction of the original cultural context of Egyptian texts and artefacts. In Gunter Grimm’s terms, these are “interpretations [...] assessed in terms of their adequacy (Adäquanz) in reflecting authorial intentions”6 - something that only became possible in 1822 with the decipherment of the hieroglyphic script and the birth of Egyptology. Preceding this paradigm shift, and since then accompanying and fighting it, lies a long history of Ägyptenrezeption - a web of passionate constructions of Egypt whose primary threads go back to ancient Greece, Rome, and Israel. These cultures incorporated ideas of Egypt into founding narratives that were of central importance for what I call, following Jan and Aleida Assmann, their respective ‘cultural memory’ - the memory (as opposed to Egyptology’s domain: factual knowledge) of Egypt in the West.7 The basic theory, laid out extensively by J. Assmann in 1992’s Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (published in English only in 2011), sets out to accomplish what Assmann’s most important predecessor, Maurice Halbwachs, had not considered: “expanding his theory of memory into the realm of a theory of culture.”8 His most brilliant case studies (most notably 1997’s Moses the Egyptian) emerged where Assmann qui Egyptologist applied to his main area of expertise (i.e., pharaonic Egypt) the notion that culture is, for all intents and purposes, the sum of its ‘memories’ (i.e., cultural constructions imagined as such, be they true or not) of founding myths that are shared by and thus consolidate a community of people. Important groundwork for this endeavor was laid in the concluding chapter of 1996’s Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte, where Assmann turns from the ancient Egyptians’ conceptions of self and world to the outside perspective - the history of the memory of Egypt that survives to this day, “enshrined in the cultural memory of western civilization.”9 Assmann emphasizes that identity-forming discourses of both Greco-Roman culture as well as Judeo-Christian religiosity - the two main ‘pillars’ on which Western cultural identity rests - look back to Ancient Egypt as their mythical place of origin. With respect to the overarching theme of this volume, these are the two most basic ‘master narratives’ of Western conceptions of Egypt: For the Greeks, it served as the glorified vault of mysteries and arcane wisdom from which civilization and knowledge of the gods itself reached Hellas; for Judaism (and then Christianity), it served as the abhorred prototype of false religion and the house of slavery - something to be resisted and overcome, instead of admired.10 As we will see, both images inform the representation of Egypt in Stargate. In adopting the premises of reception aesthetics and mnemohistory, I will consequently focus not on the veracity, but on the history and cultural relevance of the ideas that we will encounter.

3. Stargate as an Ancient Astronaut narrative

Stargate feels a bit like two movies shoehorned into one. The approximate first third covers the mythical story of Daniel Jackson’s vindication: An orphan, outcast, and misunderstood genius finds new meaning in life as he cracks an ancient mystery and is finally led to a portal to another world, where he finds himself before a giant pyramid and says blissfully, “I knew it.” At this point, his journey of (self-)discovery is essentially over, and Stargate switches gears as the American soldiers take it upon themselves to liberate the helpless and clueless ‘orientals’ from their evil God-king - a demonizing, biblical vision of Egypt as a ‘house of slavery’ that fuels a neocolonialist narrative negotiating legitimizing strategies about American military intervention in the Middle East shortly after the First Gulf War.11 Jackson’s solving of the Stargate mystery, however, is bound up with the so-called Ancient Astronaut theory (also called ‘Pre- astronautics,’ and, increasingly ‘Paleo-SETI’ [Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence]) which constitutes a popular discourse in Western industrialized societies and particularly the German-speaking countries.12 Its (in)famous founding father is, of course, Erich von Däniken, whose 1968 bestseller Chariots of the Gods? is the prototypical incarnation of the entire genre, as both his specific points and rhetorical tactics are retreaded to this day. As the ‘Bible’ of this discourse was written in German, its organized adherents are found predominantly in the germanophone sphere, and most in-depth scholarship on the subject is written in German as well (a significant exception being the work of Jason Colavito).13

In Chariots, von Däniken famously professed the idea that the gods of ancient mythology were really extraterrestrial visitors who were mistaken for deities by primitive humans, and that ancient writings and various (alleged) anomalies inthe archaeological record attest to the visits and the technology of these visitors. Von Däniken’s theory has been described by Andreas Grünschloß as a ‘ufological’ or ‘pre-astronautic Euhemerism,’ as it resembles a belief held by the philosopher Euhemerus (fl. 300 CE) that the gods were really great kings of yore who had over time been deified due to their remarkable innovations and achievements.14 As will be shown, the AAD was at the peak of its popularity in the mid-1990s when it was used as the premise for Stargate. Although it may seem that its popularity has diminished somewhat since then, the AAD is still very much alive and influential - in fact, I suspect that it is less conspicuous today because it has become normalized as an element of popular culture and lost some of its original shock value. The ‘gods’ are here to stay, and they continue to inspire ‘worship’.

4. The Road to von Däniken: Ancient Wisdom through the Ages

We have seen above that the mystification of Egypt originates with the ancient Greeks. One may specifically point to the transformation of Middle- and Neoplatonic philosophical speculation into religious narratives (such as the various incarnations of Gnosticism, Hermeticism, etc.) in late antiquity, sharing as a common legitimizing strategy the reference to a primordial wisdom possessed by the ‘barbarians’ of the Orient, including the Jews, Brahmans, Magi, and, of course, the Egyptians, usually represented by the god of wisdom Thoth, known to the Hellenistic world as Hermes Trismegistus. It was debated whether Platonic wisdom was really wisdom derived from the ancient Orient, hence the moniker ‘Platonic Orientalism.’15 In these narratives, Egypt was one of the key players: “(N)ot only was Greek philosophy seen as derived from oriental sources, but the Egyptians in particular could even claim to be the true founders of philosophy as such.”16 This controversy of how Greeks (and later, Christians) should evaluate the ‘wisdom of the pagans’ was picked up again when the sources became known in Europe during the Renaissance. While the verdict of the church fathers was overwhelmingly negative,17 the Renaissance witnessed a new apologism for ‘Oriental pagan wisdom,’ whose Egyptian chapter was largely defined by a platonizing misunderstanding of the hieroglyphic script that long obstructed its actual decipherment and that remains influential to this day.18 A crucial early figure in this resurgence of Platonic Orientalism is Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who “stands at the origin of a non-institutional current of religious speculation, the development of which can be traced in European culture through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, and where ‘Plato’ stands as a generic label for a much wider complex of practices and speculations largely inherited, as we know today, from the Hellenistic culture of late antiquity.”19 This label went on to assimilate over time all those “traditional bodies of spiritual, theurgical, magical, arithmological, astrological, and alchemical lore” attributed to ancient sages such as Hermes Trismegistus, thus accumulating the collective ‘referential corpus’ sometimes referred to today as ‘Western esotericism,’ which in this essay is to be understood as a typological umbrella term for such currents.20 This spectrum was eventually exiled into the ‘occultural’ fringe where we find it today, in large part due to new methods of philological criticism that began to view the narrative of ancient wisdom “as an inherently a-historical approach to historical questions.”21 The emerging historiographical disciplines - such as Egyptology - distanced themselves sharply from what was perceived as embarrassing and unscientific fantasy. This ‘other’ history was appropriated by new religious movements like Theosophy, founded by Helena Blavatsky (1831– 1891). She and other influential esotericists “absorbed diverse culturally available elements, interpreted this material through a hermeneutic framework of their own and presented the result as a coherent doctrine.”22 For our purposes, this means that conceptions of Egypt were embedded in a larger narrative that strings together various ‘wisdom-bearing’ cultures.23

Another important feature of many esoteric traditions that survives into the AAD is the minor significance or absence of a supreme deity.24 Instead, the focus is on contact with intermediary beings such as angels that populate the heavens, sometimes understood to be extraterrestrials.25 Blavatsky focuses on intermediary figures in a particular, salvific-historical framework crucial to the development of AAD.26 According to Blavatsky, human development had arrived at a crucial turning point: she and other theosophical leaders were in spiritual contact (via ‘channeling’) with benevolent ascended masters, “living persons who had fully evolved through many reincarnations, had acquired and become the custodians of ‘ancient wisdom,’ and now sought to impart that wisdom to humanity in order to lead it into a new age of peace, spirituality, and global community.”27

While Blavatsky’s first major work Isis Unveiled (1877) - with its “plea for the recognition of the Hermetic philosophy, the anciently universal Wisdom- Religion”28 - carried strong Egyptian connotations, her Theosophical Society soon shifted its focus permanently towards India, where Blavatsky claimed to have been initiated.29 Among the second generation of Theosophists, Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) can be said in many ways to bridge the gap between the tradition of Theosophy and the beginning of the New Age movement of the 60s and 70s;30 furthermore, the messages he claimed to receive have had a lasting impact on ‘alternative Egypts.’31 Cayce believed, as did many Theosophists, that ancient Egypt had preserved the primordial wisdom of the lost civilizations of Lemuria and Atlantis. He claimed to have experienced past lives in Ancient Egypt, around 10,500 BCE - long before Egyptian civilization even existed, according to orthodox Egyptology - and he prophesized that, beneath the Sphinx, the fabled ‘Hall of Thoth’ would be discovered. We will reencounter this dating and this prophecy as cornerstones of ‘alternative Egyptology’ and the AAD.32 While Cayce (who identified firmly as Christian) was very influential in the United States, Alice Bailey (1880–1949), who channeled messages from extraterrestrials, was the more prominent figurehead of second generation Theosophy and the ‘New Age’ in the United Kingdom and Europe.33

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the father of Anthroposophy, also integrated Egypt into a diffusionist sequence of civilizations, beginning with Atlantis. Steiner approached the ancient texts with a strong literalist tendency, interpreting, e.g., the god Osiris as an extraterrestrial visitor, and his headdress as a spiritual sense organ.34 This way of reading the ancient sources as literally true and declaring the gods extraterrestrials marks an important step towards AA rhetoric. Literalist readings became more widespread in the New Age movement,35 and messages received through channeling increasingly stem from extraterrestrials. Already in Neo-Theosophy, represented among others by Charles Webster Leadbeater (1847–1934), extraterrestrial explanations had begun to displace spiritual ones - Sanskrit, for Blavatsky the language of the gods, was declared by Leadbeater to be an extraterrestrial language, and Nirvana a sort of space station.36 While Blavatsky and other early Theosophists still considered the intermediaries angelic beings who lived on an ‘etheric plane,’ later authors like A. E. Powell already show them steering physical spaceships toward Earth.37

The ‘60s and ‘70s saw a veritable explosion of counter-culture,38 leading to the pop-cultural entanglement of the AAD, analogous to the interdependency that informs the development of UFO religions.39 Since 1947, when an alien spacecraft is alleged to have crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico, UFOs have remained something of a national obsession in the United States. This phenomenon lent further immediacy to the increased Theosophical emphasis on extraterrestrials outlined above, rooted it deeply in popular culture, and it did much to further what Christopher Partridge has called “the sacralization of the extraterrestrial.”40 Following in the tradition of the Theosophists’ ‘channeling’ of messages from ascended masters, the teachers were now extraterrestrial beings - Theosophical mythology thus began to merge with the UFO phenomenon, a synthesis that Mikael Rothstein dubs “a case of mythological modernization or updating, and...an example of Theosophical adaptability.”41 Already in 1934, Guy Ballard, who founded the I AM Activity, had claimed to be in contact with Venusian masters.42 Like in the New Age movement, UFO religions feature prominently a millennialist expectation that a new age and a transformation of humanity are upon us.43 The extraterrestrials wish to help us through this crisis, often specifically connected to the threat posed by the atomic bomb.44 Indeed, UFO religions and the AAD alike share a desire to establish a unified worldview where science and religion are no longer separate - a ‘re-enchanted’ world.45 Important early UFO contactees such as George Adamski (1891–1965) described the Venusian masters of Blavatskian myth as extraterrestrial visitors who brought civilization to earth and were remembered as gods - preparing the central belief of the later AAD.46 Recalling the extreme literalism brought to Ancient Egyptian texts by Rudolf Steiner, we encounter across the spectrum of UFO religions “the physical interpretation of scriptures and ancient mythologies” that is the basis of AA theorists’ interpretations. Those, notes Partridge, are in turn “sacralised and replicated” in religious movements: “this physicalism is explicit in the writings of all the principle [sic] individuals and groups, from Adamski to von Däniken and from the Raëlian Church to Heaven’s Gate.”47 The AAD therefore serves as an integral origin myth in various religious movements.

A crucial transformation was achieved by the veritable ‘godfather’ of AA theories, Charles Fort (1874–1932), who, with a righteous gesture of unveiling uncomfortable secrets that had been guarded jealously by conspirational orthodox historians, offered as the answer to all kinds of perceived ancient anomalies the intervention of extraterrestrial visitors in Earth’s distant past.48 Instead of spiritual enlightenment, Fort’s project was that of an alternative historiography, an agenda that was popularized in France by Louis Pauwles and Jaques Bergier, whose major work, Le matin des magiciens (1960), “is little remembered now, but it has the distinction of launching a revival of interest in the occult in the 1960s and 1970s that would culminate in the ancient-astronaut craze of the 1970s.”49 Pauwles and Bergier were both influenced by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937),50 whose most famous cosmic horror stories comprising the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ are based around monstrous extraterrestrial beings that were worshiped by primitive humans. While Colavito’s The Cult of Alien Gods certainly overstates Lovecraft’s influence on the AAD as a whole, it is nevertheless significant to note that these stories impacted the authors of Le matin des magiciens. Much of its content, as well as the works of another representative of this largely forgotten French chapter of the history of Preastronautics, Robert Charroux, were later borrowed - mostly without credit51 - by Erich von Däniken when he wrote the ‘Bible’ of the AAD, Chariots of the Gods?

5. The Egyptian Front: From Chariots to Stargates

While sidelined in the Theosophical ancient wisdom narrative, Egypt rules supreme in the AAD. Chapter seven of Chariots deals with the pyramids of Giza as “Space Travel Centers,” and several of von Däniken’s claims here would become ever-repeated tropes: First, he asserts that “ancient Egypt appears suddenly and without transition with a fantastic ready-made civilization. Great cities and enormous temples, colossal statues...splendid streets...perfect drainage systems, luxurious tombs...pyramids of overwhelming size - these and many other wonderful things shot out of the ground, so to speak. Genuine miracles in a country that is suddenly capable of such achievements without recognizable prehistory!”52 As the prehistorian Herbert Kühn noted, “nothing is more false than this. The prehistory of Egypt is known particularly well, and a great number of books documents it. Däniken knows nothing of them.”53 The notion that Egyptian civilization simply “shot out of the ground” as von Däniken puts it, or rather, “fell from the sky,” is repeated to this day, and it is representative of the anti-evolutionist overtones of AA narratives. Further important claims are the implication that the barque of the sun god Ra is actually a spaceship,54 as well as the notion that the extraterrestrials had some part in the building of the pyramids55 - both points are of course present in Stargate.

Two further aspects are particularly significant for the AAD’s quasi-religious properties. First, von Däniken suggests that it may be humanity’s destiny to follow in the footsteps of the ‘gods,’ and that we too may one day be greeted as gods by the primitive inhabitants of other worlds (which happens repeatedly in Stargate and the television series Stargate SG-1).56 Second, von Däniken assures the reader that “(d)rawings and sagas actually indicated that the ‘gods’ promised to return from the stars.”57 This vague reference to “certain legends” that allegedly tell of the gods coming from the stars to earth and leaving again with a promise to return, is one of the most typical clichés of AA narratives. Which specific legend that is, and on which temple wall or papyrus one may read it, is never stated - which in the case of Egypt may be explained by the fact that no such myth exists.

Von Däniken’s influence hit America in the early 1970s, mainly to the credit of Rod Serling and Alan Landsburg, respectively the host and producer of the popular science-fiction series The Twilight Zone (who, like von Däniken’s forgotten French precursors, were also fans of H. P. Lovecraft whose stories influenced several episodes of their show). Inspired by Chariots, they cooperated on a television documentary titled In Search of Ancient Astronauts that aired on NBC in 1973, presenting von Däniken’s main claims with impressive images. The program was a huge hit, and in its wake, Chariots became a massive success in the US as well, spawning many sequels, imitators, and further television events.58

The second most influential figure in the AAD after von Däniken is Zecharia Sitchin (1920–2010). Between 1976 and 2007, Sitchin published the seven books comprising The Earth Chronicles, beginning with The Twelfth Planet (1976), where he explains that Sumerian culture, like von Däniken’s Egypt, mysteriously appeared out of nowhere. “A mysterious hand once more picked Man out of his decline and raised him to an even higher level of culture, knowledge, and civilization.”59 We learn that Sumerian civilization and the human race itself were created by extraterrestrials from Nibiru, another planet in our solar system. Those aliens, the Annunaki, were considered gods by the Sumerians, and Sitchin insists that the mythology of ancient Mesopotamia (of which all others are deemed derivative) preserves actual historical records of their activities. Sitchin’s most significant contribution to the Egyptian ‘front’ of the AAD is the second volume, The Stairway to Heaven (1980). Here we are told that, according to the usual unspecified “Egyptian traditions,” “in times immemorial ‘Gods of Heaven’ came to Earth from the Celestial Disk”60 - the latter is illustrated by the symbol of the winged sun disk (which is actually a form of the god Horus, not a dwelling- place for the gods). This misinterpretation of the ‘winged disk’ as either the planet or the spaceship of the aliens is repeated in Preastronautic literature to this day.61

Furthermore, Stitchin’s entire book is framed by a narrative concerning humanity’s eternal quest for immortality, a prevalent theme in Stargate as well: Ra takes a human body as a host “to cheat death,” and he possesses a machine in the shape of a sarcophagus in which he perpetually recharges his life forces and is potentially immortal - reminiscent of Sitchin’s assertion that “Ra...managed to live forever because he kept rejuvenating himself.”62 While Stargate’s Ra found and enslaved humanity and Sitchin’s aliens genetically engineered humans, both do so for the specific purpose of mining a precious metal: The Annunaki made Homo Sapiens as a slave race that could mine the Earth’s gold resources.63 In Stargate, Ra takes thousands of slaves through the Stargate to Abydos in order to mine the alien metal that is the basis of his technology. The entire part, the aliens as oppressors who enslave humans and abuse their status as ‘gods’ for evil, is rather atypical of the AAD, making it all the more likely that Emmerich was inspired by Sitchin.

Meanwhile, Stargate’s Daniel Jackson argues in his lecture at the beginning of the film that the only inscription inside the pyramid that gives the name of king Khufu - the main basis for Egyptologists’ ascribing the pyramid to this Pharaoh - is a forgery, at which point the room begins to empty, accompanied by laughter and jokes about Martians and Atlantis. Jackson’s argument here is that the discovery of the hieroglyphs made by Col. Richard Vyse, “was a fraud.” Sitchin was the first to make this accusation,64 and argued that, as Jackson concludes, “the Pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty did not build the great pyramids.” For Sitchin, the pyramids of Giza were built by the Annunaki as guiding beacons for their starships during landing on Earth, and all other Egyptian pyramids are just inferior imitations.65 In Stargate, Ra’s starship is seen landing on top of a pyramid as a kind of alien airport (cf. Sitchin: “the Celestial Boat of Ra was depicted as sitting atop a mountain”),66 and even the fact that Ra’s ship is itself pyramid- shaped seems lifted from Stairway, for Sitchin explains that an Egyptian funerary pyramidion, showing the deceased in adoration of the sun god (this is literally what the accompanying hieroglyphs say), actually represents the sun god who “landed on Earth” in his “Celestial Chamber.”67 According to Sitchin, just as the Pharaohs could only build inferior imitations of the great “mountains” built by the “gods,” so the journey of the deceased described in Egyptian funerary literature constitutes an emulation of actual journeys to the stars actually undertaken by the “gods” long ago. This section of his book is dominated by imagery of “doors,” “portals,” and “gates” - due to the fact that, for instance, the Book of the Dead is full of portals that the deceased needs to pass through.68 The Egyptian gods “open for the king a path and a gateway,”69 and Sitchin states that “the gods assume more technical aspects.”70 In light of all the other close correspondences, it seems very likely that this technologized ‘gate’-language inspired Emmerich to give a concrete form to one such “gate of the star gods.” Another of Emmerich’s inspirations may have been the work of Peter Krassa and Reinhard Habeck who popularized certain depictions in the temple of Dendera which supposedly (not really)71 show lightbulbs. After earlier treatments, it was in their Das Licht der Pharaonen (1992) where the “Dendera lightbulbs” are embedded in a larger Preastronautic narrative. Krassa and Habeck were in turn von Däniken’s source when he presented the same case.72 Since then, the Dendera lightbulbs have become recurring stars.73 Much emphasis is furthermore put in Das Licht der Pharaonen on the wars, weaponry, and starships used by the Egyptian “gods” - obviously inspired by Sitchin’s Mesopotamian scenarios - Krassa and Habeck even reprint (their fig. 17), and they are not the last to do so,74 Sitchin’s absurd illustration implying that Egyptian funerary pyramidia represent starships. So here we have pyramid- shaped starships, Egyptian gods as aliens with horrifying weapons, and as the formidable pilot of the “winged sun-disk” spaceship we meet the falcon-headed god Horus.75 And just two years later, Ra’s soldiers in Stargate wear falcon helmets and fly fighter jets with stylized wings. The name of Emmerich’s Egyptian planet, Abydos, may be derived from early 90s AA literature as well. In 1990, a group from the AA Society took pictures of some hieroglyphs in the funerary temple of Seti I. in Abydos that appear to depict technological contraptions, including what looks deceptively like a helicopter. First published in 1991, the (long debunked) Abydos “technoglyphs” have joined the ranks of Aegyptiaca technologica in the ever-repeated canon of Preastronautic literature.76 In 1976, the same year that saw Sitchin’s Twelfth Planet, Robert Temple claimed in The Sirius Mystery that the tribe of the Dogon in Mali possessed astronomical knowledge that they could only have inherited from the ancient Egyptians, who had it from extraterrestrials.77 This book in turn inspired Robert Bauval to construct a complex archaeoastronomical theory, published first in two articles in Discussions in Egyptology in 1989 and 1990, and most famously and comprehensively together with Adrian Gilbert in The Orion Mystery (1994), holding that the three great pyramids of Giza were all planned in advance and aligned with the three stars of the ‘belt’ of Orion, representing the god of the dead Osiris. While this alone was not outside the realm of what most Egyptologists would consider possible, the notion that the foundations for this entire monumental landscape were laid around 10,500 BCE certainly was (Cayce’s year again). The so-called ‘Orion Correlation Theory’ was popular in the 1990s, coinciding with exciting new explorations of the great pyramid of Khufu in 1993, as the UPUAUT 2 robot crawled along narrow shafts and ran into a sealed door, quickly prompting wild speculations and conspiracy theories about hidden chambers. It is this media hype around the pyramids of Giza - supposedly linked to the stars and thousands of years older than orthodox Egyptology would allow - which clearly forms the most immediate ‘occultural’ context for Stargate, released in the same year as Bauval’s and Gilbert’s Orion Mystery,78 although the simultaneous release means that Stargate could hardly have been inspired by the book, but rather by the previous popularization of its main theory. At any rate, it is surely no coincidence that it is specifically the constellation of Orion that leads Daniel Jackson to realize what the Stargate really is. Remembering Sitchin’s very technical ‘gate’ terminology that seems to have inspired (the) Stargate, it is noteworthy how Bauval and Gilbert opine with a similar tone “that the Grand Gallery looks like part of a machine, whose function is beyond us.”79 They refer to shafts in the King’s Chamber as “channels to the stars”80 and to the whole Giza complex as “the great star-clock of the epochs.”81 In 1995, one year after Stargate and The Orion Mystery, Graham Hancock made the case for a forgotten civilization that was the real originator of the pyramids and the Sphinx (Fingerprints of the Gods).82 Then, with Robert Bauval, he fused this lost civilization theory with the ‘Orion Correlation Theory’ in 1996’s Keeper of Genesis (in the US: Message of the Sphinx). Together, they aimed “to align the pyramids with Orion circa 10,500 BCE, which they claim was the date of the lost civilization’s entry into Egypt,” during the astrological Age of Leo, represented by the Sphinx. Their calculations were also meant to demonstrate the existence of a secret chamber beneath the Sphinx - thus proving Cayce’s prophecy.83 Bauval and Hancock adopt Sitchin’s conspiracy theory discrediting the inscriptions with Khufu’s name,84 and their terminology is once more striking: The shaft containing the newly discovered door is literally called a “Stargate,”85 and the pyramid is interpreted as a kind of salvific machine to which New Age millenarian hopes are attached “that the sages of Heliopolis, working at the dawn of history, could somehow have created an archetypal ‘device’, a device designed to trigger off messianic events across the ‘Ages’ – the Pyramid Age...and perhaps even a ‘New Age’ in Aquarius?”86 While these theories did not involve extraterrestrials explicitly, their 1996 articles in the London Daily Mail postulated that the ancient cultures of Earth were actually influenced by an advanced civilization from Mars, due to a renewed interest in NASA images of the red planet, where believers wanted to see the infamous ‘Mars face’ as well as various pyramids. Bauval and Hancock teamed up again, assisted by John Grigsby, to write The Mars Mystery in 1998, where they announced more carefully that aliens may or may not be the originators of the “Martian monuments.”87

A particularly interesting entry is Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince’s The Stargate Conspiracy (1999), because it is unusually critical and self-aware. The authors take several ‘celebrities,’ such as Temple, Bauval, and Hancock to court, expose flaws in their theories and conclude that there is an agenda to construct a new alternative orthodoxy about the pyramids, the Sphinx, the Mars face, and to arrive at all costs at the year 10,500 BCE, prophesized by Cayce. As far as this goes, most orthodox historians and Egyptologists would probably applaud the authors for having seen the light. However, this project of debunking is only the beginning. Picknett and Prince identify as the source of this artificial mythology a shadowy group preparing for a sinister new world order ushered in by the return of the Egyptian gods (or possibly, in the vein of Stargate, evil imposters). These gods are specifically “the Nine,” i.e., the Great Ennead of Heliopolis, the most significant genealogy in the Egyptian pantheon who have been the alleged source of messages received through ‘channeling’ since 1952.88 Picknett and Prince chronicle the activities of various organizations at Giza and relate rumors “that the US government is searching for a physical artefact or ancient device, perhaps even of extraterrestrial origin,” prompting the authors to speculate that “(i)f the Americans are involved with ancient stargate technology, then it would be the most top secret project in history, and the number of people ‘needing to know’ about it would be minimal.”89

  

The Stargate Simulacrum: Ancient Egypt, ...

 

Heidelberger OJS-Journals

journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.

  

Steph measured me and determined this to be the best size for my homemade hoop. We had a HILARIOUS time trying to figure out the circumference, in which we both forgot the equation for circumference (confusing it with area) and coming out with numbers that made NO SENSE. Luckily we are both sensible people and we didn't cut 1000+ inches of hoop for me, figuring it out before ratcheting pliers were taken to the piping.

 

also--here's a PSA regarding picking a hoop size. I'm several inches shorter than Steph so my hoop is 2" less in diameter--and it feels a LOT more comfortable to use than hers does when I play with it. So if you're starting out, measure well! We went with a number about one inch greater than the distance from the floor to my belly button.

red habanero pepper planet and a 36 inch diameter garden with 75 Chinese long beans and 6 tomato vines plants Square foot hydroponic gardens are self-contained growing systems and is a reliable method for circulating oxygen and nutrients

to the roots of your plants. By using a Drainback, your plants will flourish!

www.sqfoothydro.

Time to do some math and figure out a fixturing solution on the Bridgeport mill with the dividing plate. 17T may be tricky. 16T might be more straightforward. The 9 splines inside should be easier.

Long-tailed Weasel Tracks in fresh snow. This is the classic 2 by 2 bounding pattern of the weasel family.I saw 2 weasels near here last summer, presumably young ,and have been waiting for the snow to fall to see if they were still in the area, and sure enough they were

Original Caption: Eddystone, Pennsylvania - Railroad parts. Baldwin Locomotive Works. Machinist machining wheel to fit driving pin on above wheels (80 inches in diameter) on newest type of locomotive, March 1937

 

U.S. National Archives’ Local Identifier: 69-RP-529

 

Photographer: Hine, Lewis

  

Subjects:

The New Deal

Tennessee Valley Authority

Works Progress Administration

Work Portraits

The Great Depression

  

Persistent URL: research.archives.gov/description/518716

 

Repository: Still Picture Records Section, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S), National Archives at College Park, 8601 Adelphi Road, College Park, MD, 20740-6001.

 

For information about ordering reproductions of photographs held by the Still Picture Unit, visit: www.archives.gov/research/order/still-pictures.html

 

Reproductions may be ordered via an independent vendor. NARA maintains a list of vendors at www.archives.gov/research/order/vendors-photos-maps-dc.html

 

Access Restrictions: Unrestricted

Use Restrictions: Unrestricted

Three feet in diameter and 10 feet long, this sample section of suspension cable for the George Washington Bridge weighs an amazing 18.5 tons. The cable is made up of 26,474 individual steel wires, compacted under 400 tons of pressure. Before computers, this experimental section helped engineers model the effects of compression on the finished bridge's cables.

**Good**

 

1. Aluminum rigidity, flexibility, strength at 19mm diameter. 25mm diameter might be better. Moderate Flexibility is good

2. One person operation

3. Thrust is good underwater

4. Faster setup

5. Stability is good

 

**Bad**

 

1. One engine did not go!

2. The camera needs to be deeper and blacked out

3. The camera and brain needs to be cooled

4. In reverse cables get wet(short circuit)

5. Better, faster attachments for tubes

6. Better attachments for tubes, rudders, to stay vertical

7. Set tubes further apart for more stability

 

# Credits

- Cesar Jung-Harada

- Michael O'Brien

- Brad O'Dell

- Mathis Buchbinder

- Sanjeew Kanagaraj

- Priank Sharma

- Aidina Tleugabyl

- Raman Adiputra

- Michael Tang

- Thanks to Duy Huynh, Emma Wong, Walter Dellisanti, Roberto Pirelli

 

github.com/MakerBay/Coral_Reef_Mapping_Drone

  

www.notion.so/cesarjungharada/Coral-Reef-Mapping-Robot-V-...

Diameter 5 mm. Operculum open, and yellow cirri extended (1), concealing part of tergoscutal flaps. On Fucus spiralis on sea wall near MHW, Mersey Estuary. England. October 2010.

 

Full SPECIES DESCRIPTION at: flic.kr/p/by5qTT

Sets of OTHER SPECIES at: www.flickr.com/photos/56388191@N08/collections/

 

13" diameter x 8" tall drum shade

fabricated from NOS vintage laminate parchment

 

$65.00

 

available for immediate shipment

 

to order, call 415-255-6700,

or email store@meteorlights.com

This blossom is about 3/4" in diameter!

 

The dewdrops are natural, not sprayed on.

 

.

 

The photographs in my set, "Weed Flower Micros," may appear to be close-ups of regular-sized flowers – they are not!

 

These are micro (macro) photos of tiny little flowers which bloom on ordinary weeds.

 

How tiny? The largest weed flower in the set is only, when measured across its widest part from petal tip to petal tip, 3/4" in diameter!

 

Some of these miniscule flowers are so small that the entire blossom you are looking at is 1/4" in diameter…again that’s measuring from petal tip to petal tip across the widest part of the bloom!

 

The smallest part of a weed flower that I have managed to successfully shoot and achieve good detail in is a photo I made of a bud that measured LESS than 1/16" in diameter across its widest part! For a reference to its size I have also included a photo of that bud next to the head of an ordinary paper match, which dwarfs the bud.

 

I am delighting in discovering the beauty, complexity, and variety in something so small that it’s easily ignored or downright difficult to see with the naked eye.

 

And it’s an even greater delight to realize that this incredible beauty has been growing wild in my lawn, year after year, right under my un-seeing eyes as I’ve repeatedly mown them down with my lawn mower, never realizing the unseen beauty that I was trampling under my feet.

 

I hope you enjoy viewing these as much as I do. I have a lot of fun making them for us to look at!

 

.

 

See more of these incredible, tiny jewels in my set, "Weed Flower Micros:"

 

www.flickr.com/photos/motorpsiclist/sets/72157626023965740/

 

Goodyear Corsair FG-1D (G-FGID)

 

When the Chance Vought FG-1D Corsair was introduced in 1940 it boasted the most powerful engine along with the largest diameter propeller of any fighter aircraft in history. The result of this engine and propeller combination was the first fighter to exceed 400mph. Corsairs were built right up to 1952, giving the type the honour of having the longest production run of any American piston-engined fighter.

 

The first service engagement for the Corsair was with the US Marine Corps operating from makeshift land bases across the Pacific, and it was not until later that she was operated from aircraft carriers initially with the British Fleet Air Arm. The Corsair proved to be a formidable air superiority fighter during World War II when she was the scourge of the skies across the Pacific, and continued to deliver sterling service in later years during the Korean War.

 

Our Corsair was built under licence by the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation at their facility in Akron, Ohio and allocated Bu No 88297. She was accepted by the US Navy on 9th April 1945 and delivered a mere two days later. She was initially dispatched to Guam in the Pacific, being allocated to the Aircraft Pool Airwing 2. The next piece of her known history has her at a Repair Depot in the Philippines, possibly Samar, for repairs in October 1945 and following this was returned ‘State-side’. Our Corsair then spent a number of years being allocated to various US Naval Air Reserve squadrons as well as varying periods of storage until she was eventually put up for disposal in March 1956 with a total of 1652 flying hours on the airframe. She was purchased by ALU-MET Smelters in January 1959 and languished in their yard until being rescued a year later by legendary stunt-pilot Frank Tallman. In his book The Great Planes, Frank Tallman calls her his all-time favourite aircraft.

 

Frank Tallman parted with the Corsair in 1966, and she passed through a number of other civilian owners until joining The Fighter Collection fleet in 1986.

 

The Fighter Collection’s Corsair is an extremely original example of the type as she has never been restored and has the distinction of being one of the few still flying with fabric wings.

 

Our Corsair is painted in the colours of a British Fleet Air Arm machine, KD345 of 1850 Squadron during December 1945, when they were embarked on HMS Vengeance of the British Pacific Fleet.

  

North American TF-51D Mustang 44-84847, Miss Velma, (N251RJ)

 

Built too late to see combat service in World War Two, P-51D 44-84847 was one of the last Mustangs constructed at North American Aviation’s Dallas, Texas, plant. Details of her post war service career are limited, but there is photographic evidence, from September 1951, of her serving with the 45th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron at Kimpo, South Korea, during the Korean War.

 

By late 1951 the 45th TRS were replacing their aging Mustangs with RF-80 Shooting Star jets, and so 44-84847 was shipped back the US to serve with the Air National Guard until around 1956. Around this time she slips off the radar until January 1999 when she re-appears in North Dakota as a restoration project. The airframe joined The Fighter Collection fleet the following year and was moved to Chino, California for a full restoration with the decision made to modify her to two-seat TF-51D configuration.

 

The restoration culminated in a first flight in May 2007 with Steve Hinton at the controls. Following this our Mustang was painted in the 55th Fighter Group scheme of Capt Frank Birtciel’s P-51D 44-14561, Miss Velma. Following the successful completion of her flight testing, Miss Velma was fitted with external drop tanks and flew across the Atlantic to the UK, where she arrived at Duxford on the 4th July 2007

  

NAA P-51D “Ferocious Frankie”

 

The P-51 was the most successful long-range fighter escort of World War II, but it was not an instant success. Designed for the British in only 120 days to meet their requirement to purchase more fighters, the first Mustangs were built with Allison engines; while remarkable at low altitudes, these variants were considered under-powered and disappointing at higher altitudes. Happily, in late 1942 the aircraft was transformed when, in the UK, Rolls Royce Merlin engines were tested in place of the Allison. The Merlin, as used in the Spitfire, was then license-built by Packard in the USA and in 1943 was installed in the P-51B & C models. This near perfect marriage of engine and platform made the 1944 P-51D, with its bubble canopy and six-guns, one of the most iconic and potent fighters of all time.

 

The P-51D’s range was an incredible 2,055m (3,327km), thanks to its huge fuel capacity of 1,000 litres internally and 815 litres in drop tanks. Equally impressive was a level maximum speed of 437mph (703kph) at 25,000 feet, a max diving speed of 505mph (818kph) and a service ceiling of 41,900 feet (12,800m).

 

The OFMC Mustang was built at the North American Aviation Factory at Inglewood, California and accepted by the USAAF on 27/02/1945. One month later it was sent to the 8th Air Force, via Newark and Liverpool docks, serving at Leiston in Suffolk among other stations. The aircraft stayed in England for only 11 months before returning to Newark in January 1946. Briefly kept in storage, in January 1947 it was sent to the Royal Canadian Air Force, operating from Suffield, Alberta. In 1953 with only total 433 flying hours it was completely overhauled in Winnipeg and with only an additional 81 hours time thereafter, was put into outside storage in Carberry Manitoba. Happily, in 1957, it was sold into private hands and registered as N6340T. The aircraft was bought for $5,400 in 1962 with a total of 511 airframe hours. Flying in the Unlimited Race at Reno in 1974, the effectively stock (original) aircraft finished second with an average speed of 384mph.

 

In April 1980 the aircraft flew across the Atlantic to new owners, The Fighter Collection. Re-sprayed, it became known as Candyman / Moose, with the name on one side of the fuselage and the Moose’s head on the other. The Mustang was first displayed in the UK at Biggin Hill in 1981, flown by Ray Hanna, the OFMC’s founder.

 

In 1989, after filming in ‘Memphis Belle’, the aircraft was given a complete overhaul by The Fighter Collection at Duxford. The airframe was remarkably free of corrosion and damage, but a full strip down and component overhaul was undertaken. An overhauled original flying panel was installed. The rear fuel tank in the fuselage was removed and a wartime style modification made to fit a ‘dickey’ seat. This ‘mod’ in 1944 allowed Eisenhower to survey the D-day beaches from the back of a Mustang. A special 1760hp Merlin engine currently powers the aircraft.

  

Supermarine Spitfire Mk IXb G-ASJV

• Aircraft Type: Supermarine Spitfire Mk IXb

• Operator: The Old Flying Machine Company

• Year of Manufacture: 1943

• Powered by: Rolls-Royce Merlin

• Colour Scheme: 222 Sqn. RAF 1943

 

Air tested by the legendary Alex Henshaw in early August 1943, the illustrious history of this much loved aircraft then continued service with 222 Sqn. MH434 was was flown in combat by South African pilot Flt. Lt. Henry Lardner-Burke, DFC, with seven and a half kills, three damaged. On the 27th August 1943 in the St Omar area over France, Lardner-Burke shot down a Focke-Wulf FW-190 and damaged a second during a mission to escort USAAF B-17 bombers. On the 5th September 1943 Lardner-Burke and MH434 shot down another FW-190 in the Nieuport area, and on the 8th September 1943 claimed a half share in the downing of a Messerschmitt Bf-109G in Northern France. Later flown by Flt. Sgt. (later Wing Co) Bill Burge who declared it to be ‘the perfect Spitfire’. Post war service was seen with both the Dutch and Belgian air forces before finally returning home to civilian life. Ray Hanna began his outstanding partnership with MH434 in 1970 and it has been operated by his OFMCo since 1983. She remains the jewel in the company’s crown.

Diameters of the coins are fibonnaci numbers. One of the best fits for 8 around one (1,3,21).

On a huge decaying log in Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire, the biggest one had a cap of about 1cm in diameter

Aluminum Flexible Duct

 

◆Diameters 3” to 29” （75-736mm）

◆Bend Radius 1.5” x 1.D.

◆Lengths 10 M or as to request

◆Compression ratio 1: 0.05

◆Maximum Velocity: 5500 FPM

◆Static Pressure – positive:10 in. WC

◆Temperature Range: -20°F to 250°F

 

Our clients choose us for reasons

1.We take care the qualtiy as our life

2.Reasonable price,We are manufactory.

3.Convenient traffic , around 1.5 hours to Shanghai ,

60 km distance to the Ningbo port

  

Constructed of a heavy duty 3-ply, aluminum foil laminate, encapsulating a high density, corrosion resistant wire helix, forming an air tight, easy to use, quality air connector.

The product comes conveniently boxed in 25 foot lengths, compressed for easy shipping and handling.

It’s work perfect when in the High temperature environments for exhaust system.

Very flexible, ideal for difficult installs

    

Amanda Wu(sales representative)

on line (14:00-23:00) chinese time

on line (3:00~10:00) USA Time

 

MSN: amanda-duct@hotmail.com

Mail: amanda@duct-charm.cn

yahoo message: amandawqq@yahoo.com

Skype:amandawqq

Cell phone:86-13777184468 Fax:86-57462085805

Add.: xiao cao e town,yuyao,zhejiang

www.duct-charm.cn

On-line flying cut-off saw allows precise cutting of large diameter tubing or wide extruded profiles.

A hold full of large diameter steel pipes being discharged at the ABES Terminal at the 5th Haven Dock from the bulk carrier "Port Macau" (IMO 9423475)

 

Length over all : 189,99m

Beam : 32,26m

Max. draught : 12,82m

Gross registered tonnage : 32415

Nett tonnage : 19353

Deadweight : 58730

Built : 2008

Yard : Tsuneishi Group (Zhoushan) Shipbuilding – China

Gear : 4 cranes with 30 tons SWL

Consumtion at sea : 32,2 tons / day

Speed : 14,2 kn

Overall Diameter 22.2 cm

Bottom Diameter 21.4 cm

Height 30 cm

 

This artefact was unearthed in 2004 at Jing De Zhen Zhushan North

Dream Catcher

8 inches in diameter.

Wrapped in hand-cut strips of black buckskin leather.

        

Very detailed. The outer edge of the web is beaded with bone and glass beads. The inside of the web is beaded with tiny glass seed beeds, green and black. In the middle is a stone. I am actually unsure of what type .. it was given to me as a free gift when I ordered beads. It's gorgeous though. It is teal/brown in color.

        

Leather fringe hangs generously on the bottom of the Dream Catcher. I've added black bone beads to hang the feathers in place. Also hanging on the fringe is black and teal glass pony beads.

        

The feathers used are Peacock "Eyes", Peacock plumage, and black Rooster hackle feathers that have a bright green sheen over them.

    

I can't take my "EYES" off of you!

About 8+ hours went into this beauty!

        

Peacocks are said to be a symbol of renewal because they shed their feathers and grow new ones each year.

    

For sale on Etsy:

www.etsy.com/listing/105034898/dream-catcher-beaded-with-...

The Postcard

 

A postally unused postcard published by the American Art Publishing Co. on behalf of F.W. Woolworth.

 

On the divided back is printed:

 

'The Woolworth Building,

New York City.

Occupies a plot 152x197 feet

at Broadway and Barclay Street.

It is the tallest building in the

world, rising to a height of

750 feet, 55 stories above the

ground.

The foundation consists of

caissons 19 feet in diameter

sunk to bedrock, 110 to 130

feet below the ground.

Total cost is estimated at

$15,000,000.

H. Finkelstein & Son'.

 

The Woolworth Building

 

The Woolworth Building is a residential building and early skyscraper at 233 Broadway in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in NYC.

 

Designed by Cass Gilbert, it was the tallest building in the world from 1913 to 1930, with a height of 792 feet (241 m). More than a century after its construction, it remains one of the 100 tallest buildings in the U.S..

 

The Woolworth Building consists of a 30-story base topped by a 30-story tower. Its façade is mostly decorated with architectural terracotta, though the lower portions are limestone, and it features thousands of windows.

 

The ornate lobby contains various sculptures, mosaics, and architectural touches. The structure was designed with several amenities and attractions, including a now-closed observatory on the 57th. floor and a private swimming pool in the basement.

 

F. W. Woolworth, the founder of a brand of popular five-and-ten-cent stores, conceived the skyscraper as a headquarters for his company. Woolworth planned the skyscraper jointly with the Irving National Exchange Bank, which also agreed to use the structure as its headquarters.

 

The Woolworth Building had originally been planned as a 12- to 16-story commercial building, but it underwent several revisions during its planning process. Construction started in 1910, although the building's final height was not decided upon until January 1911. The building officially opened on the 24th. April 1913.

 

The Woolworth Building has undergone several changes throughout its history. The façade was cleaned in 1932, and the building received an extensive renovation between 1977 and 1981.

 

The Irving National Exchange Bank moved its headquarters to 1 Wall Street in 1931, but the Woolworth Company (later Venator Group) continued to own the Woolworth Building for most of the 20th. century.

 

The structure was sold to the Witkoff Group in 1998. The top 30 floors were sold to a developer in 2012 and converted into residences.

 

Office and commercial tenants use the rest of the building.

 

-- Architecture of the Woolworth Building

 

Cass Gilbert designed the Woolworth Building in the neo-Gothic style. The building resembles European Gothic cathedrals; Reverend S. Parkes Cadman dubbed it "The Cathedral of Commerce" in a booklet published in 1916.

 

F. W. Woolworth, who had devised the idea for the Woolworth Building, had proposed using the Victoria Tower as a model for the building; he reportedly also admired the design of Palace of Westminster.

 

Gilbert, by contrast, disliked the comparison to religious imagery. The architect ultimately used 15th.- and 16th.-century Gothic ornament on the Woolworth Building, along with a complementary color scheme.

 

The Woolworth Building was designed to be 420 feet (130 m) high, but was eventually raised to 792 feet (241 m).

 

The Woolworth Building was 60 stories tall when completed in 1913, though this consisted of 53 usable floors topped by several mechanical floors.

 

The building's ceiling heights, ranging from 11 to 20 feet (3.4 to 6.1 m), make it the equivalent of an 80-story building. It remained the tallest building in the world until the construction of 40 Wall Street and the Chrysler Building in 1930, both in New York City.

 

The building is assigned its own ZIP Code; it was one of 41 buildings in Manhattan that had their own ZIP Codes as of 2019.

 

-- The Form of the Woolworth Building

 

The building's tower, flush with the main frontage on Broadway, joins an office block base with a narrow interior court for light. The base occupies the entire lot between Park Place to the north, Broadway to the east, and Barclay Street to the south.

 

The site measures 155 feet (47 m) wide on Broadway and 200 feet (61 m) wide on both Park Place and Barclay Street. The base contains two "wings" extending westward, one each on the Park Place and Barclay Street frontages, which form a rough U-shape when combined with the Broadway frontage.

 

This ensured that all offices had outside views. The U-shaped base is approximately 30 stories tall. All four elevations of the base are decorated, since the building has frontage on all sides.

 

The tower rises an additional 30 stories above the eastern side of the base, abutting Broadway. Above the 30th. floor are setbacks on the north and south elevations. There are additional setbacks along the north, south, and west elevations on the 45th. and 50th. floors.

 

The 30th. through 45th. floors measure 84 by 86 feet (26 by 26 m); the 46th. through 50th. floors, 69 by 71 feet (21 by 22 m); and the 51st. through 53rd. floors, 69 by 61 feet (21 by 19 m).

 

The tower has a square plan below the 50th.-story setback and an octagonal plan above. Though the structure is physically 60 stories tall, the 53rd. floor is the top floor that can be occupied. Above the 53rd. floor, the tower tapers into a pyramidal roof.

 

-- The Façade of the Woolworth Building

 

The lowest four stories are clad in limestone. Above that, the exterior of the Woolworth Building was cast in limestone-colored, glazed architectural terracotta panels.

 

F. W. Woolworth initially wanted to clad the skyscraper in granite, while Gilbert wanted to use limestone. The decision to use terracotta for the façade was based on both aesthetic and functional concerns.

 

Terracotta was not only fireproof but also, in Gilbert's mind, a purely ornamental addition clarifying the Woolworth Building's steel construction. Each panel was of a slightly different color, creating a polychrome effect.

 

The façade appeared to have a uniform tone, but the upper floors were actually darker and more dense. Behind the terracotta panels were brick walls; the terracotta pieces are attached to the brick walls by metal rods and hangers.

 

The Atlantic Terra Cotta Company provided the original terracotta cladding. The panels were manufactured in shades of blue, green, sienna, and rose. The terracotta panels were partially vitrified, allowing them to bear large loads.

 

Gilbert also asked that John Donnelly and Eliseo V. Ricci create full-size designs based on Atlantic Terra Cotta's models.

 

In 1932, Atlantic Terra Cotta carried out a comprehensive cleaning campaign of the Woolworth's façade in order to remove blackening caused by the city's soot and pollution.

 

The Ehrenkrantz Group restored the building's façade between 1977 and 1981. During the renovation, much of the terracotta was replaced with concrete and Gothic ornament was removed.

 

The building has several thousand windows: the exact number is disputed, but various sources state that the Woolworth Building has 2,843, 4,400, or 5,000 windows.

 

Windows were included for lighting and comfort; because the Woolworth Building was built before air conditioning became common, every office is within 10 feet (3.0 m) of a window.

 

Some of the Woolworth Building's windows are set within arch-shaped openings. Most of the building's spandrels, or triangles between the top corners of the window and the top of the arch, have golden Gothic tracery against a bright blue backdrop.

 

On the 25th., 39th., and 40th. stories, the spandrels consist of iconography found in the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom.

 

Gold-on-blue tracery is also found on the 26th., 27th., and 42nd. floors.

 

-- The Base of the Woolworth Building

 

The main entrance on Broadway is a three-story Tudor arch, surrounded on either side by two bays: one narrower than the main arch, the other wider. The five bays form a triumphal arch overhung by a balcony and stone motifs of Gothic design.

 

The intrados of the arch contains 23 niches. The topmost niche depicts an owl; the lowest niches on both sides depict tree trunks; and the other twenty niches depict animated figures.

 

The spandrel above the left side of the arch depicts Mercury, classical god of commerce, while that above the right side depicts Ceres, classical goddess of agriculture.

 

Above all of this is an ogee arch with more niches, as well as two carvings of owls hovering above a "W" monogram. There are salamanders within niches on either side of the main entrance.

 

Inside the triumphal arch, there is a smaller arch with a revolving door and a Tudor window; it is flanked by standard doors and framed with decorations. There is a pelican above this smaller arch.

 

-- The Tower Section of the Woolworth Building

 

At the 45th.- and 50th.-story setbacks, there are turrets at each corner of the tower. The northeast corner turret concealed a smokestack.

 

There is a pyramidal roof above the 53rd. floor, as well as four ornamental tourelles at the four corners of the tower. The roof was originally gilt but is now green. The pyramidal roof, as well as the smaller roofs below, used 40,000 square feet (3,700 m2) of gold leaf.

 

The main roof is interspersed with small dormers, which contain windows into the maintenance levels inside. The pyramidal roof is topped by another pyramid with an octagonal base and tall pointed-arch windows. In turn, the octagonal pyramid is capped by a spire.

 

The three layers of pyramids are about 62 feet (19 m), or five stories tall. An observation deck was located at the 55th. floor, about 730 feet (220 m) above ground level. The deck, which was octagonal in plan, measuring 65 feet (20 m) across, was accessed by a glass-walled elevator.

 

It was patronized by an estimated 300,000 visitors per year, but was closed as a security measure in 1941 after the Pearl Harbor attack.

 

Strongly articulated piers, which carry right to the pyramidal cap without intermediate cornices, give the building its upward thrust. This was influenced by Aus's belief that:

 

"From an engineering point of view,

no structure is beautiful where the

lines of strength are not apparent."

 

The copper roof is connected to the Woolworth Building's steel superstructure, which serves to ground the roof electrically. The Gothic detailing concentrated at the highly visible crown is over-scaled, and the building's silhouette could be made out from several miles away.

 

Gilbert's choice of the Gothic style was described as "an expression of the verticality of the tower form", and as Gilbert himself later wrote, the style was "light, graceful, delicate and flame-like".

 

Gilbert considered several proposals for exterior lighting, including four powerful searchlights atop nearby buildings and a constantly rotating lamp at the apex of the Woolworth Building's roof.

 

Ultimately, the builders decided to erect nitrogen lamps and reflectors above the 31st. floor, and have the intensity of the lighting increase with height.

 

-- Structural Features of the Woolworth Building

 

-- The Substructure

 

In contrast to other parts of Manhattan, the bedrock beneath the site is relatively deep, descending to between 110 and 115 feet (34 and 35 m) on average. The site also has a high water table, which is as shallow as 15 feet (4.6 m) below ground level.

 

Due to the geology of the area, the building is supported on 69 massive caissons that descend to the bedrock. The caissons range in depth from 100 to 120 feet (30 to 37 m).

 

To give the structure a sturdy foundation, the builders used metal tubes 19 feet (5.8 m) in diameter filled with concrete. These tubes were driven into the ground with a pneumatic caisson process to anchor the foundations to the bedrock.

 

Because the slope of the bedrock was so sharp, steps had to be carved into the rock before the caissons could be sunk into the ground. The caissons were both round and rectangular, with the rectangular caissons located mainly on the southern and western lot lines.

 

The caissons are irregularly distributed across the site, being more densely concentrated at the northeastern corner. This is because the building was originally planned to occupy a smaller site at the corner of Broadway and Park Place; when the site was enlarged, the caissons that had already been installed were left in place.

 

The two basement levels, descending 55 feet (17 m), are constructed of reinforced concrete.

 

-- The Superstructure

 

Whereas many earlier buildings had been constructed with load-bearing walls, which by necessity were extremely thick, the Woolworth Building's steel superstructure was relatively thin, which enabled Gilbert to maximize the building's interior area.

 

Engineers Gunvald Aus and Kort Berle designed the steel frame. Each column carries a load of 24 tons per square foot, supporting the building's overall weight of 233,000 tons.

 

Where the columns of the superstructure did not match up with the caissons, they were cantilevered above on plate girders between two adjoining caissons. These girders are extremely large; one such girder measures 8 feet (2.4 m) deep, 6.75 feet (2 m) wide, and 23 feet (7.0 m) long.

 

For the wind bracing, the entire Woolworth Building was considered as a vertical cantilever, and correspondingly large girders and columns were used in the construction.

 

-- Interior

 

Upon completion, the Woolworth Building contained seven water systems — one each for the power plant, the hot-water plant, the fire-protection system, the communal restrooms, the offices with restrooms, the basement swimming pool, and the basement restaurant.

 

Although the water is obtained from the New York City water supply system, much of it is filtered and reused. A dedicated water system, separate from the city's, was proposed during construction, but workers abandoned the plan after unsuccessfully digging 1,500 feet (460 m) into Manhattan's bedrock.

 

The Woolworth Building was the first structure to have its own power plant, with four Corliss steam engine generators totaling a capacity of 1,500 kilowatt-hours; the plant could support 50,000 people.

 

The building also had a dedicated heating plant with six boilers producing 2,500 horsepower. The boilers were fed from subterranean coal bunkers capable of holding over 2,000 tons of anthracite coal.

 

-- Lobby

 

The ornate, cruciform lobby, known as the "arcade", was characterized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission as:

 

"One of the most spectacular of

the early 20th. century in New

York City".

 

It consists of two perpendicular, double-height passageways with barrel-vaulted ceilings. Where the passageways intersect, there is a domed ceiling. The dome contains pendentives that may have been patterned after those of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.

 

Veined marble from the island of Skyros in Greece covers the lobby. Patterned glass mosaics that contain blue, green, and gold tiling with red accents decorate the ceilings.

 

There are other Gothic-style decorations in the lobby, including on the cornice and the bronze fittings. Twelve plaster brackets, which carry grotesques depicting major figures in the building's construction, are placed where the arcade and the mezzanine intersect.

 

These ornaments include Gilbert with a model of the building, Aus taking a girder's measurements, and Woolworth holding nickels and dimes. Two ceiling murals by C. Paul Jennewein, titled Labor and Commerce, are located above the mezzanine where it crosses the south and north wings, respectively.

 

The staircase hall is a two-story room located to the west of the arcade. It consists of the ground level, which contains former storefronts, as well as a mezzanine level above it. The ground floor originally contained 18 storefronts.

 

A 15-foot-wide (4.6 m) marble staircase leads westward from the arcade to a mezzanine, where the entrance to the Irving National Exchange Bank office was formerly located. The mezzanine contains a stained-glass skylight surrounded by the names of several nations. The skylight contains the dates 1879 and 1913, which respectively signify the years of the Woolworth Company's founding and the building's opening.

 

The skylight is also surrounded by sculpted grotesques, which depict merchandising activities in the five-and-dime industry.

 

There is a smaller space west of the staircase hall with a one-story-high ceiling. This room contains a coffered ceiling with a blue-green background. The crossbeams contain Roman portrait heads, while the cornice contains generic sculpted grotesques.

 

-- Basement

 

The basement of the Woolworth Building contains an unused bank vault, restaurant, and barbershop. The bank vault was initially intended to be used for safe-deposit boxes, though it was used by the Irving National Exchange Bank in practice.

 

In 1931, Irving moved some $3 billion of deposits to a vault in its new headquarters at 1 Wall Street, and the Woolworth Building's vault was converted into a storage area for maintenance workers.

 

There is also a basement storage room, known as the "bone yard", which contains replacement terracotta decorations for the facade.

 

The basement also contains closed entrances to two New York City Subway stations. There was an entrance to the Park Place station directly adjacent to the building's north elevation, served by the 2 and ​3 trains. This entrance was closed after the September 11 attacks in 2001.

 

Another entrance led to the City Hall station one block north, now served by the R and ​W trains, but this was closed in 1982 because of concerns over crime.

 

A private pool, originally intended for F. W. Woolworth, exists in the basement. Proposed as early as 1910, the pool measured 15 by 55 feet (4.6 by 16.8 m) and had a marble perimeter.

 

The pool was later drained, but was restored in the mid-2010's as part of the conversion of the Woolworth Building's upper floors into residential units.

 

-- Offices

 

At the time of construction, the Woolworth Building had over 2,000 offices. Each office had ceilings ranging from 11 to 20 feet (3.4 to 6.1 m) high. Gilbert had designed the interior to maximize the amount of usable office space, and correspondingly, minimize the amount of space taken up by the elevator shafts.

 

The usable-space consideration affected the placement of the columns in the wings, as the columns in the main tower were positioned around the elevator shafts and facade piers.

 

Each of the lowest 30 stories had 31 offices, of which ten faced the light court, eight faced Park Place, eight faced Barclay Street, and five faced Broadway. Above the 30th.-story setback, each story had 14 offices.

 

For reasons that are unknown, floor numbers 42, 48, and 52 are skipped.

 

Woolworth's private office on the 24th. floor, revetted in green marble in the French Empire style, is preserved in its original condition. His office included a mahogany desk with a leather top measuring 7.5 by 3.75 feet (2.29 by 1.14 m).

 

That desk contained a hidden console with four buttons to request various members of his staff.

 

The marble columns in the office are capped by gilded Corinthian capitals. Woolworth's reception room contained objects that were inspired by a visit to the Château de Compiègne shortly after the building opened.

 

These included a bronze bust of Napoleon, a set of French Empire-style lamps with gold figures, and an inkwell with a depiction of Napoleon on horseback.

 

The walls of the office contained portraits of Napoleon, and gold-and-scarlet chairs were arranged around the room. At some point, Woolworth replaced the portrait of Napoleon with a portrait of himself.

 

-- Elevators

 

The Woolworth Building contains a system of high-speed elevators capable of traveling 650 feet (200 m) or 700 feet (210 m) per minute. The Otis Elevator Company supplied the units, which were innovative in that there were "express" elevators, stopping only at certain floors, and "local" elevators, stopping at every floor between a certain range.

 

There were 26 Otis electric elevators with gearless traction, as well as an electric-drum shuttle elevator within the tower once construction was complete. Of these, 24 were passenger elevators. Two freight elevators and two emergency staircases were placed at the rear of the building.

 

The elevator doors in the lobby were designed by Tiffany Studios. The patterns on the doors are arabesque tracery patterns in etched steel set off against a gold-plated background.

 

-- History of the Woolworth Building

 

-- Planning

 

F. W. Woolworth, an entrepreneur who had become successful because of his "Five-and-Dime" (5- and 10-cent stores), began planning a new headquarters for the F. W. Woolworth Company in 1910.

 

Around the same time, Woolworth's friend Lewis Pierson was having difficulty getting shareholder approval for the merger of his Irving National Bank and the rival New York Exchange Bank.

 

Woolworth offered to acquire shares in New York Exchange Bank and vote in favor of the merger if Pierson agreed to move the combined banks' headquarters to a new building he was planning as the F. W. Woolworth Company's headquarters.

 

Having received a commitment from the banks, Woolworth acquired a corner site on Broadway and Park Place in Lower Manhattan, opposite City Hall.

 

Woolworth and the Irving National Exchange Bank then set up the Broadway-Park Place Company to construct and finance the proposed structure. Initially, the bank was supposed to purchase the company's stock gradually until it owned the entire company, and thus, the Woolworth Building.

 

Irving would be able to manage the 18 floors of rentable space on a 25-year lease. While negotiations to create the Broadway-Park Place Company were ongoing, Woolworth and his real estate agent Edward J. Hogan purchased several parcels from the Trenor Luther Park estate and other owners.

 

The entire footprint of the current building, a rectangular lot, had been acquired by the 15th. April 1910, at a total cost of $1.65 million (about $37.7 million in 2022).

 

-- Original designs

 

Woolworth commissioned Cass Gilbert to design the new building. Gilbert later mentioned that he had received the commission for the Woolworth Building after getting a phone call from Woolworth one day.

 

Woolworth wanted his new structure to be of similar design to the Palace of Westminster in London, which was designed in the Gothic style. At the time, Gilbert was well known for constructing modern skyscrapers with historicizing design elements.

 

Gilbert was originally retained to design a standard 12- to 16-story commercial building for Woolworth, who later said:

 

"I have no desire to erect a monument

that would cause posterity to remember

me".

 

However, Woolworth then wanted to surpass the nearby New York World Building, which sat on the other side of City Hall Park and stood 20 stories and 350 feet (110 m).

 

A drawing by Thomas R. Johnson, dated April 22 1910, shows a 30-story building rising from the site. Because of the change in plans, the organization of the Broadway-Park Place Company was rearranged.

 

Woolworth would now be the major partner, contributing $1 million of the planned $1.5 million cost. The Irving Bank would pay the balance, and it would take up a 25-year lease for the ground floor, fourth floor, and basement.

 

By September 1910, Gilbert had designed an even taller structure, with a 40-story tower on Park Place adjacent to a shorter 25-story annex, yielding a 550-foot (170 m)-tall building.

 

The next month, Gilbert's latest design had evolved into a 45-story tower roughly the height of the nearby Singer Building. After the latest design, Woolworth wrote to Gilbert in November 1910 and asked for the building's height to be increased to 620 feet (190 m), which was 8 feet (2.4 m) taller than the Singer Building, Lower Manhattan's tallest building.

 

Woolworth was inspired by his travels in Europe, where he would constantly be asked about the Singer Building. He decided that housing his company in an even taller building would provide invaluable advertising for the F. W. Woolworth Company and make it renowned worldwide.

 

This design, unveiled to the public the same month, was a 45-story tower rising 625 feet (191 m), sitting on a lot by 105 by 197 feet (32 by 60 m). Referring to the revised plans, Woolworth said:

 

"I do not want a mere building.

I want something that will be an

ornament to the city."

 

He later said that he wanted visitors to brag that they had visited the world's tallest building.

 

Louis J. Horowitz, president of the building's main contractor Thompson-Starrett Company, said of Woolworth:

 

"Beyond a doubt his ego was a thing

of extraordinary size; whoever tried to

find a reason for his tall building and

did not take that fact into account would

reach a false conclusion."

 

Even after the revised height was unveiled, Woolworth still yearned to make the building even taller, as it was now close to the 700-foot (210 m) height of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, then the tallest building in New York City and the world.

 

On the 20th. December 1910, Woolworth sent a team of surveyors to measure the Metropolitan Life Tower's height and come up with a precise measurement, so that he could make his skyscraper 50 feet (15 m) taller.

 

He then ordered Gilbert to revise the building's design to reach 710 or 712 feet (216 or 217 m), despite ongoing worries over whether the additional height would be worth the increased cost.

 

In order to fit the larger base that a taller tower necessitated, Woolworth bought the remainder of the frontage on Broadway between Park Place and Barclay Street. He also purchased two lots to the west, one on Park Place and one on Barclay Street; these lots would not be developed, but would retain their low-rise buildings and preserve the proposed tower's views.

 

Such a tall building would produce the largest income of any building globally.

 

On the 1st. January 1911, the New York Times reported that Woolworth was planning a 625 feet (191 m) building at a cost of $5 million.

 

By the 18th. January 1911, Woolworth and Hogan had acquired the final site for the project at a total cost of $4.5 million; (about $103 million in 2022) the lot measured 152 feet (46 m) on Broadway, 192.5 feet (58.7 m) on Barclay Street, and 197.8 feet (60 m) on Park Place.

 

In a New York Times article two days later, Woolworth said that his building would rise 750 feet (230 m) to its tip. In order to fit the correct architectural proportions, Gilbert redesigned the building to its current 792-foot (241 m) height.

 

Renderings by the illustrator Hughson Hawley, completed in April 1911, are the first official materials that reflect this final height.

 

Gilbert had to reconcile both Woolworth's and Pierson's strict requirements for the design of the structure. The architect's notes describe late-night conversations that he had with both men. The current design of the lobby, with its arcade, reflected these conflicting pressures.

 

Sometimes Gilbert also faced practical conundrums, such as Woolworth's requirement that:

 

There must be many windows so divided

that all of the offices should be well lighted,

and so that tenants could erect partitions to

fit their needs."

 

Gilbert wrote that:

 

"This requirement naturally

prevented any broad wall

space".

 

Woolworth and Gilbert sometimes clashed during the design process, especially because of the constantly changing designs and the architect's fees. Nevertheless, Gilbert commended Woolworth's devotion to the details and beauty of the building's design, as well as the entrepreneur's enthusiasm for the project.

 

Such was the scale of the building that Gilbert noted:

 

"For several years my sense of scale was

destroyed because of the unprecedented

attuning of detail to, for these days, such

an excessive height".

 

-- Construction of the Woolworth Building

 

In September 1910, wrecking crews demolished the five and six-story structures which previously occupied the site. Construction officially began on the 4th. November 1910, with excavation by The Foundation Company, using a contract negotiated personally by Frank Woolworth.

 

The start of construction instantly raised the site's value from $2.25 million to $3.2 million. The contract of over $1 million was described as the largest contract for foundation construction ever awarded in the world.

 

It took months for Woolworth to decide upon the general construction company. George A. Fuller's Fuller Company was well experienced and had practically invented skyscraper construction.

 

However Louis Horowitz's Thompson-Starrett Company was local to New York, and despite being newer, Horowitz had worked for Fuller before, and thus had a similar knowledge base.

 

On the 20th. April 1911, Thompson-Starrett won the contract with a guaranteed construction price of $4,308,500 for the building's frame and structural elements.

 

The company was paid $300,000 for their oversight and management work, despite Woolworth's attempts to get the company to do the job for free due to the prestige of the project.

 

On the 12th. June 1911, the Atlantic Terra Cotta Company received a $250,000 contract to manufacture the terracotta.

 

The next month, Donnelly and Ricci received the $11,500 contract for the terracotta work and some of the interior design work. Gilbert requested Atlantic Terra Cotta use an office next to his while they drew several hundred designs.

 

The construction process involved hundreds of workers, and daily wages ranged from $1.50 for laborers (equivalent to $44 in 2022) to $4.50 for skilled workers (equivalent to $133 in 2022).

 

By August 1911, the building's foundations were completed ahead of the target date of the 15th. September; construction of the skyscraper's steel frame began on the 15th. August.

 

The steel beams and girders used in the framework weighed so much that, to prevent the streets from caving in, a group of surveyors examined them on the route along which the beams would be transported.

 

The American Bridge Company provided steel for the building from their foundries in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh; manufacturing took over 45 weeks.

 

The first above-ground steel had been erected by October 1911, and installation of the building's terracotta began on the 1st. February 1912.

 

The building rose at the rate of 1½ stories a week, and the steelworkers set a speed record for assembling 1,153 tons of steel in six consecutive eight-hour days.

 

By the 18th. February 1912, work on the steel frame had reached the building's 18th. floor. By the 6th. April 1912, the steel frame had reached the top of the base at the 30th. floor, and work then began on constructing the tower of the Woolworth Building.

 

Steel reached the 47th. floor by the 30th. May, and the official topping out ceremony took place two weeks ahead of schedule on the 1st. July 1912, as the last rivet was driven into the summit of the tower.

 

The skyscraper was substantially completed by the end of that year. The final estimated construction cost was US$13.5 million (equivalent to $400,000,000 in 2022), up from the initial estimates of US$5 million for the shorter versions of the skyscraper (equivalent to $148,000,000 in 2022).

 

Woolworth provided $5 million, while investors provided the remainder, and financing was completed by August 1911.

 

-- Opening and the 1910's

 

The building opened on the 24th. April 1913. Woolworth held a grand dinner on the building's 27th. floor for over 900 guests, and at exactly 7:30 p.m. EST, President Woodrow Wilson pushed a button in Washington, D.C., to turn on the building's lights. Additional congratulations were sent via letter from former President William Howard Taft, Governor of New Jersey James Fairman Fielder and United States Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels.

 

The building was declared ready for occupancy on the 1st. May 1913, and Woolworth began advertising the offices for rent beginning at $4.00 per square foot.

 

To attract tenants, Woolworth hired architecture critic Montgomery Schuyler to write a 56-page brochure outlining the building's features. Schuyler later described the Woolworth Building as the "noblest offspring" of buildings erected with steel skeletons.

 

On completion, the Woolworth Building topped the record set by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower as the world's tallest building, a distinction it held until 1930.

 

Woolworth had purchased all of the Broadway-Park Place Company's shares from the Irving National Exchange Bank by May 1914; his company held no ownership stake in the building.

 

The building contained offices for as many as 14,000 employees. By the end of 1914, the building was 70% occupied and generating over $1.3 million a year in rents for the F. W. Woolworth Company.

 

-- The Woolworth Building in the 1920's to 1960's

 

During the Great War, only one of the Woolworth Building's then-14 elevators was turned on, and many lighting fixtures in hallways and offices were turned off. This resulted in about a 70% energy reduction compared to peacetime requirements.

 

The building had more than a thousand tenants by the 1920's, who generally occupied suites of one or two rooms. These tenants reportedly collectively employed over 12,000 people in the building.

 

In 1920, after F. W. Woolworth died, his heirs obtained a $3 million mortgage loan on the Woolworth Building from Prudential Life Insurance Company in order to pay off $8 million in inheritance tax.

 

By this point, the building was worth $10 million and grossed $1.55 million per year in rental income. The Broadway-Park Place Corporation agreed to sell the building to Woolco Realty Co., a subsidiary of the F. W. Woolworth Company, in January 1924 at an assessed valuation of $11.25 million (about $153 million in 2022).

 

The company paid $4 million in cash and obtained a five-year, $11 million mortgage from Prudential Life Insurance Company at an annual interest rate of 5.5%. The sale was finalized in April 1924, after which F. W. Woolworth's heirs no longer had any stake in the building.

 

In 1927, the building's pinnacle was painted green, and the observation tower was re-gilded for over $25,000 (about $340,647 in 2022). The Atlantic Terra Cotta Company cleaned the Woolworth Building's façade in 1932.

 

Prudential extended its $3.7 million mortgage on the building by ten years in 1939, and the observation deck was closed after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941.

 

Ten of the building's 24 elevators were temporarily disabled in 1944 because of a shortage of coal. The next year, the building's owners replaced the elevators and closed off the building above the 54th. story.

 

By 1953, a new chilled water air conditioning system had been installed, bringing individual room temperature control to a third of the building.

 

The old car-switch-control elevators had been replaced with a new automatic dispatching systems and new elevator cars. The structure was still profitable by then, although it was now only the sixth-tallest building, and tourists no longer frequented the Woolworth Building.

 

The building's terracotta façade deteriorated easily, and, by 1962, repairs to the terracotta tiles were occurring year-round.

 

The Woolworth Company had considered selling the building as early as the 1960's, though the planned sale never happened.

 

-- Restoration and Landmark Status

 

The National Park Service designated the Woolworth Building as a National Historic Landmark in 1966. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) considered giving the Woolworth Building official city-landmark status in 1970. The F. W. Woolworth Company called the landmark law "onerous" since it would restrict the company from making modifications to many aspects of the building.

 

The commission ultimately declined to give the Woolworth Building a designated-landmark status because of the company's opposition to such a measure, as well as the increased costs and scrutiny.

 

The lobby was cleaned in 1974.

 

The F. W. Woolworth Company commissioned an appraisal of the building's façade in 1975 and found serious deterioration in the building's terracotta. Many of the blocks of terracotta had loosened or cracked from the constant thermal expansion and contraction caused by New York's climate.

 

The cracks in the façade had let rain in, which had caused the steel superstructure to rust. By 1976, the Woolworth Company had placed metal netting around the façade in order to prevent terracotta pieces from dislodging and hitting pedestrians.

 

The issues with the façade were exacerbated by the fact that very few terracotta manufacturers remained in business, making it difficult for the company to procure replacements.

 

The New York City Industrial and Commercial Incentives Board approved a $8.5 million tax abatement in September 1977, which was to fund a proposed renovation of the Woolworth Building.

 

The Woolworth Company still occupied half the building; its vice president for construction said:

 

"We think the building merits

the investment, in part because

F. W. Woolworth had used his

own wealth to fund the building's

construction."

 

Much of the remaining space was occupied by lawyers who paid rentals of between $7 to $12 per square foot ($75 to $129/m2).

 

The F. W. Woolworth Company began a five-year restoration of the building's terracotta and limestone façade, as well as replacement of all the building's windows, in 1977.

 

Initially, the company had considered replacing the entire terracotta façade with concrete; however this was canceled due to its high cost and potential backlash from preservationists.

 

The renovation, carried out by Turner Construction to plans by the New York architectural firm Ehrenkrantz Group, involved the replacement of roughly one-fifth of the building's terracotta.

 

Since there were so few remaining terracotta manufacturers, Woolworth's replaced 26,000 of the tiles with concrete lookalikes; many of those tiles had to be custom-cut. The concrete was coated with a surface that was meant to be replaced every five years, like the glazing on the terracotta blocks.

 

Similarly, the original copper windows were replaced with aluminum frames which allowed them to be opened, whereas the originals were sealed in place.

 

The company also removed some decorative flying buttresses near the tower's crown and refaced four tourelles in aluminum because of damage.

 

The building's renovation was completed without fanfare in 1982. The estimated cost of the project had risen from $8 million to over $22 million. Much of the renovation was financed through the city government's tax break, which had increased to $11.4 million.

 

The LPC again considered the Woolworth Building for landmark designation in early 1982, shortly after the renovation was completed. However upon the request of the building's lawyers, the LPC postponed a public hearing for the proposed landmark designation to April 1982.

 

That year, the building's entrance to the City Hall subway station was closed because of fears over crime. The LPC granted landmark protection to the building's façade and the interior of its lobby in April 1983.

 

The Woolworth Company (later Venator Group) continued to own the building for a decade and a half. After struggling financially for years, and with no need for a trophy office building, Venator Group began discussing a sale of the building in 1996.

 

To raise capital for its other operations, Venator formally placed the Woolworth Building for sale in April 1998.

 

-- Witkoff Group Ownership

 

Venator Group agreed to sell the building in June 1998 to Steve Witkoff's Witkoff Group and Lehman Brothers for $155 million (about $261 million in 2022). However before the sale was finalized in December 1998, Witkoff renegotiated the purchase price to $137.5 million (about $231 million in 2022), citing a declining debt market.

 

Venator shrunk its space in the building from eight floors to four; this was a sharp contrast to the 25 floors the company had occupied just before the sale.

 

Witkoff also agreed to license the Woolworth name and invest $30 million in renovating the exterior and interior of the building.

 

After purchasing the building, the Witkoff Group rebranded it in an attempt to attract entertainment and technology companies. In April 2000, the Venator Group officially moved their headquarters to 112 West 34th. Street, and Witkoff indicated that he would sell the upper half of the building as residential condominiums.

 

That October, the company proposed a two-story addition to the 29th.-floor setbacks on the north and south elevations of the tower, to be designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, who were also leading the renovation of the building. The LPC denied the proposal.

 

The company unveiled an ambitious plan in November 2000 that would have converted the top 27 floors of the building into 75 condominiums, including a five-story penthouse. The plan would have included a new residential lobby on Park Place, a 100-space garage, a 75-seat underground screening room, and a spa in the basement.

 

The developers planned to spend $60 to $70 million on the conversion which would be ready for occupancy by August 2002. However the LPC opposed the plan because it would have required exterior changes to the roof.

 

The commission eventually approved a modified version of the plan. Following the September 11 attacks and the subsequent collapse of the nearby World Trade Center, the proposal was later canceled.

 

-- Security Increases and New Plan

 

Prior to the September 11 attacks, the World Trade Center was often photographed in such a way that the Woolworth Building could be seen between the complex's twin towers.

 

After the attacks occurred only a few blocks away, the Woolworth Building was without electricity, water and a telephone service for a few weeks; its windows were broken, and falling rubble damaged a top turret.

 

Increased post-attack security restricted access to most of the ornate lobby, previously a tourist attraction. New York Times reporter David W. Dunlap wrote in 2006 that a security guard had asked him to leave within twelve seconds of entering the Woolworth Building.

 

However, there was renewed interest in restoring public access to the Woolworth Building during planning for its centennial celebrations. The lobby reopened to public tours in 2014, when Woolworth Tours started accommodating groups for 30- to 90-minute tours.

 

The tours were part of a partnership between Cass Gilbert's great-granddaughter, Helen Post Curry, and Witkoff's vice president for development, Roy A. Suskin.

 

By 2007, the concrete blocks on the Woolworth Building's façade had deteriorated because of neglect. A lack of regular re-surfacing had led to water and dirt absorption, which had stained the concrete blocks.

 

Though terracotta's popularity had increased since the 1970's, Suskin had declined to say whether the façade would be modified, if at all.

 

Around the same time, Witkoff planned to partner with Rubin Schron to create an "office club" on the top 25 floors building to attract high-end tenants like hedge funds and private equity firms. The plan would have restored the 58th. floor observatory as a private amenity for "office club" tenants, in addition to amenities like a private dining room, meeting rooms, and a new dedicated lobby.

 

The partners planned to complete the project by the end of 2008, but the financial crisis of 2007–2008 derailed the plans, leaving the top floors gutted and vacant.

 

-- Residential Conversion

 

On the 31st. July 2012, an investment group led by New York developer Alchemy Properties which included Adam Neumann and Joel Schreiber, bought the top 30 floors of the skyscraper for $68 million (about $86.1 million in 2022) from the Witkoff Group and Cammeby's International.

 

The firm planned to renovate the space into 33 luxury apartments and convert the penthouse into a five-level living space. The lower 28 floors are still owned by the Witkoff Group and Cammeby's International, who planned to maintain them as office space.

 

The project was expected to cost approximately $150 million including the $68 million purchase price. The Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the changes to the building in October 2013.

 

When the sale was first announced in 2012, the developers expected the building's conversion to be complete by 2015. However, construction took longer than expected.

 

Workers could not attach a construction hoist to the building's façade without damaging it, and they were prohibited from using the elevators because of the active office tenants on the lower floors and the regular public tours of the landmarked lobby.

 

The renovation included many restorations and changes to the building's interior. Two of the elevator shafts only went to the 29th. floor, allowing extra floor space for the residents above.

 

A new private lobby was also built for residents, and the coffered ceiling from F. W. Woolworth's personal 40th. floor office was relocated to the entryway. Each unit received space in a wine cellar, along with access to the restored private pool in the basement.

 

The 29th. floor was converted to an amenity floor named the "Gilbert Lounge" after the structure's architect, while the 30th. floor hosts a fitness facility.

 

In August 2014, the New York Attorney General's office approved Alchemy's plan to sell 34 condos at the newly branded Woolworth Tower Residences for a combined total of $443.7 million. After a soft launch in late 2014, units at the building were officially listed for sale in mid-2015.

 

Alchemy initially intended to leverage an in-house sales staff, and hired a director from Corcoran Sunshine to lead the effort. However, the new sales director left at the end of 2015 amid rumors of slow sales. Following his departure, the company hired Sotheby's International Realty to market the units.

 

The building's penthouse unit, dubbed "The Pinnacle", was listed at $110 million, the highest asking price ever for an apartment in downtown Manhattan. If it had sold at that price, the unit would have surpassed the record $50.9 million penthouse at Ralph Thomas Walker's Walker Tower, and even the $100.5 million record price for a Manhattan penthouse set by Michael Dell at Extell's One57 in 2014.

 

Due to delays, the conversion was expected to be completed by February or March 2019, about six and a half years after Alchemy bought the property. However by February 2019, only three of the building's 31 condos had been sold, since the developers had refused to discount prices, despite a glut of new luxury apartments in NYC.

 

The still-vacant penthouse's asking price was reduced to $79 million. By 2021, Alchemy had sold 22 condominiums to tenants such as the entrepreneur Rudra Pandey.

 

-- Corporate Tenants

 

On the building's original completion, the F. W. Woolworth Company occupied only one and a half floors. However, as the owner, the Woolworth Company profited from renting space out to others.

 

The Woolworth Building was almost always fully occupied because of its central location in Lower Manhattan, as well as its direct connections to two subway stations.

 

The Irving Trust Company occupied the first four floors when the building opened. It had a large banking room on the second floor accessible directly from a grand staircase in the lobby, vaults in the basement, offices on the third-floor mezzanine, and a boardroom on the fourth floor.

 

In 1931, the company relocated their general, out-of-town, and foreign offices from the Woolworth Building after building their own headquarters at 1 Wall Street.

 

Columbia Records was one of the Woolworth Building's tenants on opening day and housed a recording studio in the skyscraper. In 1917, Columbia made what are considered the first jazz recordings, by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, in this studio.

 

Shortly after the building opened, several railroad companies rented space. The Union Pacific Railroad and Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad occupied the ground floor retail space with ticket offices.

 

The inventor Nikola Tesla also occupied an office in the Woolworth Building beginning in 1914; he was evicted after a year because he could not pay his rent.

 

Scientific American moved into the building in 1915 before departing for Midtown Manhattan in 1926. The Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America was present at the building's opening, occupying the southern half of the 18th. floor.

 

By the 1920's, the building also hosted Newport News Shipbuilding and Nestlé.

 

In the 1930's, prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey maintained his offices in the building while investigating racketeering and organized crime in Manhattan. His office took up the entire fourteenth floor, and was heavily guarded.

 

During World War II, the Kellex Corporation, part of the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons, was based here.

 

During the early 1960's, public relations expert Howard J. Rubenstein opened an office in the building. In 1975, the city signed a lease for state judge Jacob D. Fuchsberg's offices in the Woolworth Building.

 

-- Educational Tenants

 

The structure has a long association with higher education, housing a number of Fordham University schools in the early 20th. century. In 1916, Fordham created "Fordham Downtown" at the Woolworth Building by moving the School of Sociology and Social Service and the School of Law to the building.

 

The Fordham University Graduate School was founded on the building's 28th. floor in the same year, and a new Teachers' College quickly followed on the seventh floor.

 

In September 1920, the Business School was also established on the seventh floor, originally as the School of Accounting. By 1929, the school's combined programs at the Woolworth Building had over 3,000 enrolled students.

 

Between 1916 and 1943 the building was also home at various times to the Fordham College (Manhattan Division), a summer school, and the short-lived School of Irish Studies.

 

In 1943, the Graduate School relocated to Keating Hall at Fordham's Rose Hill campus in Fordham, Bronx, and the rest of the schools moved to nearby 302 Broadway because of reduced attendance due to World War II.

 

The New York University School of Professional Studies' Center for Global Affairs leased 94,000 square feet (8,700 m2) on the second, third, and fourth floors in 2002 from defunct dot-com startup FrontLine Capital Group.

 

The American Institute of Graphic Arts also moved its headquarters to the Woolworth Building.

 

-- 21st-Century Tenants

 

By the early 2000's, the Woolworth Building was home to numerous technology tenants. Digital advertising firm Xceed occupied 65,000 square feet (6,000 m2) across four floors as its headquarters. Organic, Inc. took 112,000 square feet (10,400 m2), and advertising agency Fallon Worldwide used two floors.

 

Xceed terminated its lease in April 2001 during the midst of the Dot-com bubble collapse in order to move to smaller offices in the Starrett–Lehigh Building.

 

One month after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) Northeast Regional Office at 7 World Trade Center was destroyed in the September 11 attacks, the commission's 334 employees moved into 140,000 square feet (13,000 m2) across five floors of the Woolworth Building. The SEC left for a larger space in Brookfield Place in early 2005.

 

The General Services Administration took over the commission's space on the 1st. November 2005 and used it as offices for approximately 200 staff of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services System.

 

The New York City Police Department pension fund signed a lease for 56,000 square feet (5,200 m2) on the 19th. and 25th. floors in April 2002.

 

Starbucks opened a 1,500-square-foot (140 m2) location on the ground floor in the spring of 2003. In 2006, Levitz Furniture moved its headquarters to the 23rd. floor from Woodbury, Long Island, after declaring bankruptcy a second time.

 

In May 2013, SHoP Architects moved the company's headquarters to the entire 11th. floor, occupying 30,500 square feet (2,830 m2) of space. In February 2016, the New York City Law Department leased the entire 32,000 square feet (3,000 m2) fifth floor for the Department's tort office.

 

Joseph Altuzarra's namesake fashion brand, Altuzarra, signed on to occupy the 14th. floor in June 2016. In 2017, the New York Shipping Exchange moved into the 21st floor. In May 2018, architecture and design firm CallisonRTKL signed a lease for the entire 28,100 square feet (2,610 m2) 16th. floor.

 

-- Impact of the Woolworth Building

 

Before construction, Woolworth hired New York photographer Irving Underhill to document the building's construction. These photographs were distributed to Woolworth's stores nationwide to generate enthusiasm for the project.

 

During construction, Underhill, Wurts Brothers, and Tebbs-Hymans each took photographs to document the structure's progression. These photos were often taken from close-up views, or from far away to provide contrast against the surrounding structures.

 

They were part of a media promotion for the Woolworth Building. Both contemporary and modern figures criticized the photos as:

 

"Standard solutions at best and

architectural eye candy at worst".

 

Later critics praised the building. Amei Wallach of Newsday wrote in 1978 that the building resembled:

 

"A giant cathedral absurdly

stretched in a gigantic fun

mirror. The lobby certainly

looks like a farmboy's dream

of glory".

 

A writer for The Baltimore Sun wrote in 1984 that:

 

"The lobby's lighting, ceiling mosaic,

and gold-leaf decorations combine

for a church-like atmosphere, yet the

grotesques provide a touch of

irreverence".

 

Richard Berenholtz wrote in his 1988 book Manhattan Architecture that:

 

"At the Woolworth Building, Gilbert

succeeded in uniting the respected

traditions of architecture and

decoration with modern technology".

 

In a 2001 book about Cass Gilbert, Mary N. Woods wrote that:

 

"The rich and varied afterlife of

the Woolworth Building enhances

Gilbert's accomplishment".

 

Dirk Stichweh described the building in 2005 as being:

 

"The Mozart of skyscrapers".

 

In 2007, the building ranked 44th. among 150 buildings in the AIA's List of America's Favorite Architecture.

 

In recognition of Gilbert's role as the building's architect, the Society of Arts and Sciences gave Gilbert its gold medal in 1930, calling it:

 

"An epochal landmark in the

history of architecture".

 

On the 40th. anniversary of the building's opening in 1953, one news source called the building:

 

"A substantial middle-aged lady, with

a good income, unconcern over years—

and lots of friends".

 

A one-third-scale replica of the Woolworth Building, the Lincoln American Tower in Memphis, Tennessee, was also built in 1924.

 

-- The Woolworth Building in the Media

 

The Woolworth Building has had a large impact in architectural spheres, and has been featured in many works of popular culture, including photographs, prints, films, and literature.

 

One of the earliest films to feature the skyscraper was Manhatta (1921), a short documentary film directed by painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand.

 

Since then, the building has made cameo appearances in several films, such as the 1929 film Applause. It was also the setting of several film climaxes, such as in Enchanted (2007), as well as the setting of major organizations, such as in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016).

 

The television show Ugly Betty used the Woolworth Building as the 'Meade Publications' building, a major location in the series, while one of the vacant condominiums was used in filming the TV series Succession in 2021.

 

The building has also appeared in literature, such as Langston Hughes's 1926 poem "Negro" and the 2007 novel Peak.

The 250 collectors diameter is larger than the 125 whic is a big help to fit over the bigger 38mm carburetor.

The winding handle is made from 1" diameter Delrin. It's bored out just oversize so it can ride on a stainless sleeve over a steel bolt. It's quite solid, and feels better in the hand than the handle on my extension cord reel. No sharp edges, no parting lines from molding, it's comfy. And after field testing I decide it's not comfy enough, I can always make a different one!

 

This is part of the Kite Line Winder set.

Here is the sequence to setup this machining operation.

 

The rotary table is placed on the mill bed, and the absolute X,Y of the mill DRO is set to the center of rotation. An edge finder is used with a central diameter to find the rotation center.

 

The X,Y table is mounted on the rotary table, and the rotation angle is adjusted to be true to the mill X,Y axes. An indicator is run along the table edge to find the true angle.

 

The former hold-down aluminum block is bolted to the X,Y table. An indicator is used while tightening the bolts to have the hold down true to the X,Y mill axes.

 

The dimensions of the aluminum block are known, along with the location of the former attachment holes. An edge finder is used to move the X,Y table so that the former mounting bolt coinciiding with the backhead diameter center is positioned at the center of rotation.

 

The wood former is bolted to the aluminum block. The straight former sides can be trued to the mill axes using an indicator if the straight sides are to be milled.

 

To true the diameter, the end mill is moved to Y=0, X=(R shape + r cutter). The rotary table can then be moved and the cutter will cut a true diameter.

 

The part cutting proceeds by moving the end mill cutter in towards the desired final radius, while allowing for tweak moves of the X,Y table, a few thousands in X,Y to make the cutting as even as possible on the sides of the curve.

Model 2H101, 1954-1957. Fab 1950s "flying saucer" shaped wall clock, 10" in diameter. This model came in several variations: brushed copper with black or white numerals, brushed aluminum with black or white numerals, and in 1956 a black version with white numerals was added to the lineup.

Skechers Men’s Diameter Casual Slip On,Dark Brown,6.5 M

  

Take home the trophy for cool casual style in the SKECHERS Diameter-Heisman shoe. Smooth leather or oiled smooth leather upper in a sport casual slip on with stitching, overlay and perforation accents. Metal stud detail. Wide width...

 

vmississippi.com/womens-fashion/skechers-mens-diameter-ca...

Background

(as of 2015-07-09)

 

Object: (436724) 2011 UW158

Approximate Diameter: 330 m - 750 m (1082.68 feet to 2460.63 feet)( Absolute Magnitude: H= 19.5 )

Orbit Type: Amor [PHA] (JPL listed it as an Apollo, MPC list as an Amor)

On the Sentry Risk Table: NO ( Removed 2011-11-17 08:50 UTC )

On the NEODyS CLOMON2 risk page: NO

First Observed on: 2011-10-25.41860

First Observed By: Pan-STARRS 1 (MPC Code F51) (The Discovery M.P.E.C.: MPEC 2011-U90 : 2011 UW158 )

Last Observed: 2015-07-09.18879

Data-Arc Span: 1353 days (3.70 yr)

Number Oppositions : 4

Number of Observations Made: 213

Next Close-Approach: will safely pass Earth on 2015-Jul-19 at a Nominal Distance of 0.016440038277755 (AU), (6.398 Lunar Distance (LD)) or 1,528,197.03 miles (2,459,394.72 KM)

Near-Earth Object Human Space Flight Accessible Targets Study (NHATS): YES

On the Goldstone Asteroid Schedule: YES, Dates: 2015 July 13-26 ( Needs Astrometry: Yes Physical Observations: Yes)

On the Arecibo Asteroid Schedule: YES, Dates: 2015 July 12-17 (Request Optical Astrometry: No, Request Optical Lightcurve:Yes, Request Optical Characterization Yes) and 2015 August 29(Request Optical Astrometry: No, Request Optical Lightcurve:No, Request Optical Characterization No)

 

Observing Run of (436724) 2011 UW158 on 2015-07-01

 

On 2015-07-01 I ran a series of 60 -- 15 Second Luminance BIN2 Images on itelescope.net's (TEL T31

0.50-m f/6.8 astrograph + CCD + f/4.5 focal reducer) at Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. (MPC Q62) and did data reduction on four images.

 

Video Data: The Near-Earth Object (436724) 2011 UW158 on 2015-07-09 From from Siding Spring Observatory, Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. (MPC Q62) 56 -- 15 Second Luminance BIN2 Images using iTelescope.net's (Telescope T31) from 2015-07-09 10:26 UTC to 10:58 UTC

Diameter- 25cm,

Water color on Paper,

1995

 

Giant puffball - 10" diameter. Compare with apple for size. Lycoperdon. Fremont National Forest, Oregon.

 

Photo by: L.D. Bailey

Date: 1932

 

Image credit: National Archives and Records Administration

RG# 95-GP. Records of the Forest Service. General Subject Files.

Forest Service Negative Number: 270121

NARA local identifier: 95-GP-5017-270121

 

Image provided by USDA Forest Service, Region 6, State and Private Forestry, Forest Health Protection: www.fs.usda.gov/main/r6/forest-grasslandhealth

USS Iowa (BB-61) launched in 1942, with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in attendance. To ferry President Roosevelt to the Cairo & Tehran Conferences, the Iowa was fitted w/ a bathtub for the President's (paralyzed in 1921) convenience. The Iowa transferred to the Pacific Fleet in 1944 & saw much action. She was Adm. Halsey's flagship at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. During the Korean War, the Iowa served in raids on the N. Korean coast. Reactivated in 1984, she operated in both Atlantic & Pacific Fleets. In 1989, an explosion wrecked her #2 gun turret, killing 47 sailors. The ship finally was decommissioned in 1990. On 7 July, 2012, she was opened to the public at the Port of Los Angeles, San Pedro, as battleship museum and memorial.

Iowa's 16-inch-diameter guns were the biggest ever sent to sea on a U.S. ship. It took at least 77 men to fire the three guns in a single turret. The Iowa has three of these turrets. Ship's length: 887'. Beam: 108'. Speed: 33 knots. Compliment: 151 officers, 2637 enlisted

Adult, 8 mm diameter. Grey furrows of juveniles lost from wall plates, and the profile is higher, but not columnar, when crowded. Four wall plates differentiate this species from other British species which have six wall plates. The tergoscutal flaps distinguish it from Balanus crenatus, but they are similar to those of Semibalanus balanoides.

1: carina. 2: tip of tergum. 3: cirri extended, concealing much of tergoscutal flaps.

Mersey Estuary. October 2010.

 

Full SPECIES DESCRIPTION at: flic.kr/p/by5qTT

Sets of OTHER SPECIES at: www.flickr.com/photos/56388191@N08/collections/

 

With a diameter of 100 meters, the Radio Telescope Effelsberg is one of the largest fully steerable radio telescopes on earth. Since operations started in 1972, the technology has been continually improved (i.e. new surface for the antenna-dish, better reception of high-quality data, extremely low noise electronics) making it one of the most advanced modern telescopes worldwide.

 

The telescope is employed to observe pulsars, cold gas- and dust clusters, the sites of star formation, jets of matter emitted by black holes and the nuclei (centres) of distant far-off galaxies.

 

Effelsberg is an important part of the worldwide network of radio telescopes. The combination of different telescopes in interferometric mode makes possible to obtain the sharpest images of the universe.

 

Text (C) Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy

www.mpifr.de

 

The telescope may receive radio signals from a distance of up to 12bn light years. Together with a redio telescope in the US (Green Bank, Virginia), it is the largest radio telescope in the world.

The photos show the telescope at different angles because it was turning quite a bit during our visit.

"The Franklin Terrestrial Globe", 30-inch diameter by H.B. Nims & Co. at the Allis-Bushnell House. The figure-eight device on the lower right is an "analemma", a diagram showing the variation in the position of the Sun in the sky over the course of a year, as viewed at a fixed time of day and from a fixed location on the Earth. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma for more info on this diagram.

See madisonhistory.org/allis-bushnell-house/ for historical info about this site.

See other views of this historical site at flic.kr/s/aHskdwmbMp. (Photo credit - Bob Gundersen www.flickr.com/photos/bobphoto51/albums)

With a diameter of 100 meters, the Radio Telescope Effelsberg is one of the largest fully steerable radio telescopes on earth. Since operations started in 1972, the technology has been continually improved (i.e. new surface for the antenna-dish, better reception of high-quality data, extremely low noise electronics) making it one of the most advanced modern telescopes worldwide.

 

The telescope is employed to observe pulsars, cold gas- and dust clusters, the sites of star formation, jets of matter emitted by black holes and the nuclei (centres) of distant far-off galaxies.

 

Effelsberg is an important part of the worldwide network of radio telescopes. The combination of different telescopes in interferometric mode makes possible to obtain the sharpest images of the universe.

 

Text (C) Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy

www.mpifr.de

 

The telescope may receive radio signals from a distance of up to 12bn light years. Together with a radio telescope in the US (Green Bank, Virginia), it is the largest radio telescope in the world.

The photos show the telescope at different angles because it was turning quite a bit during our visit.

Diameter: 67 mm

 

Ohmden, Germany.

Lower jurassic, liassic.

Perfect tuntable wheel for endless list of crafting projects. This vintage Kingspin sculpting wheel is 6" in diameter and is made of high grade cast metal for years of use. There is plenty of room under the wheel for your hand so that you can rotate it while you work.

 

As you can see, we are showcasing the piece as an industrial decor item. The industrial cloche is so unique as a decorative or kitchenware display and is great for displaying all sorts of things... from collectibles to food. The domed plastic cloche keeps them in place and adds to the visual pleasure.

 

For a painter, sculptor or decorator working in ceramics, pottery, floral arranging, model-making, clay design, cake decorating and other artistic work you will find this wheel a perfect choice.

 

Approximate Measurements:

10" T cloche

7" diameter wheel

 

Excellent vintage condition. The top spins smoothly if you plan to use it for artistic pruposes. The metal shows some signs of age and the plastic dome is slightly cloudy with one split in the plastic at the top.

The Dome

 

Facts About the Dome

 

•Height, from base to weather vane: 121'

•Diameter at base: 40'

•Construction begun: 1785

•Interior work completed: 1797

•Wood used in dome construction: Timber from Maryland’s Eastern Shore, supplied by Dashiell family of Cypress Swamp, Somerset County.

•Architect of the dome: Joseph Clark

•Possible model for design of the dome: Schloßturm, the dome of the free-standing tower next to the palace of Karl-Wilhelm, Markgraf of Baden, in Karlsruhe, Germany

 

History of the State House Dome

 

When the Continental Congress came to Annapolis to meet in the Old Senate Chamber from November 1783 – August 1784, they found a State House which was still unfinished. Although the Old Senate Chamber was complete, the roof was not and it had leaked during the last few winters, damaging the upstairs rooms. The dome—or cupola—atop the State House was variously described as inadequate, unimpressive, and too small for the building and, it, too, leaked.

 

In order to rectify the situation, Joseph Clark, an Annapolis architect and builder, was asked to repair the roof and the dome. Clark first raised the pitch of the roof to facilitate the runoff of water and covered it with cypress shingles. The crowning achievement of Clark’s work on the State House was, of course, the extraordinary dome which he designed and built. It is not known where Clark’s inspiration for the unusual design of the dome came from, but it is very similar to one in Karlsruhe, Germany called the Schloßturm.

 

By the summer of 1788, the exterior of the new dome was complete. It was constructed of timber and no metal nails were used in its construction and, to this day, it is held together by wooden pegs reinforced by iron straps forged by an Annapolis ironmonger.

 

Although the exterior of the dome was completed by 1788, the interior was not completed until 1797. Tragedy struck the project in 1793 when a plasterer named Thomas Dance fell to his death from the inside of the dome. By 1794, Joseph Clark was completely disillusioned with the project and left it to John Shaw, the noted Annapolis cabinetmaker, to oversee completion. Over the years, John Shaw did much of the maintenance work on the State House, built various items for it and, in 1797, made the desks and chairs which furnished the Old Senate Chamber.

 

The First Dome: 1769-1774

 

Just as the Articles of Confederation did not effectively govern the country, the first dome of the State House at Annapolis did not survive more than a decade of Maryland weather. In 1769, the General Assembly of Maryland passed an act to erect a new state house, securely covered with slate tile or lead. The architect was Joseph Horatio Anderson, and the undertaker or builder of the project was Charles Wallace. According to William Eddis in 1773, the work was carried on with great dispatch and when completed would “be equal to any public edifice on the American continent.”

 

The exact date of the completion of the first dome or cupola is not known but evidence suggests that it was completed by the year 1774. In a 1773 Act of Assembly, Charles Wallace was instructed to fix an iron rod pointed with silver or gold at least six feet above the cupola. The General Assembly also recommended that the roof be covered with copper because the slate originally specified would require frequent repairs and cause other inconveniences. According to Charles E. Peterson’s “Notes on Copper Roofing in America to 1802”, it was more than likely that local copper was put on the roof to advertise the new industry of Maryland.

 

The Second Dome: 1785-1794

 

According to the Intendent of Revenue, Daniel St. Thomas Jenifer, the first dome of the State House was a contradiction of architectural design. A survey of the timbers in 1784 revealed that they were so decayed by water damage that a new dome would be required.

 

“It was originally constructed contrary to all rules of architecture; it ought to have been built double instead of single, and a staircase between the two domes, leading up to the lanthorn. The water should have been carried off by eaves, instead of being drawn to the center of the building, to two small conductors, which are liableto be choked by ice, and overflowed by rains. That it was next to impossible, under present construction, that it could have been made tight”.

 

On February 24, 1785 Jenifer placed a notice in the Maryland Gazette for carpenters work to be made to the dome and roof under the execution of Joseph Clark

 

“The work We are a Doing is to put a Roof on the Governor’s House and we are going to take the Roof of the State house and it is a going to Raise it one story higher and the Doom is to be Sixty foot higher then the old one”.

 

Clark raised the pitch of the dome to facilitate the runoff of excess water, the chief reason the timbers rotted in the original dome.

 

“The Annapolis dome is in its proportions like the original Karlsruhe tower. Possibly its more classical feeling is a result of the universal trend of architectural styles rather than the influence of the altered Schloßturm. Yet the arched windows below the architrave in Annapolis, one with the lower part closed, are like the windows below the Architrave in Karlsruhe in all of which the lower parts are closed. The horizontal oval windows below the main curving section of the dome in Annapolis resemble the vertical ovals in the equivalent part of the Karlsruhe tower. The small square windows above the balustrades and the architraves themselves in both buildings are similarly placed.”

Deterioration of fire-killed Douglas-fir. Cross-section 33 inches diameter inside bark (DIB) at 40 feet above base. Showing 4-5 inches penetration by Asemum and rot. T1S; R6W; Section 2. Tillamook Burn, Oregon.

 

Photo by: Robert L. Furniss

Date: May 18, 1943

 

Credit: USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Region, State and Private Forestry, Forest Health Protection.

Collection: Portland Station Collection; La Grande, Oregon.

Image: PS-632

 

To learn more about this photo collection see:

Wickman, B.E., Torgersen, T.R. and Furniss, M.M. 2002. Photographic images and history of forest insect investigations on the Pacific Slope, 1903-1953. Part 2. Oregon and Washington. American Entomologist, 48(3), p. 178-185.

 

For additional historical forest entomology photos, stories, and resources see the Western Forest Insect Work Conference site: wfiwc.org/content/history-and-resources

 

Image provided by USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Region, State and Private Forestry, Forest Health Protection: www.fs.usda.gov/main/r6/forest-grasslandhealth

Preciosa Ornela now offers your favourite PRECIOSA Candy™ Pressed Bead in the new PRECIOSA Candy Rose variant. The well-known two-hole, low cabochon with a round base with a diameter of 8 and 12 mm is now highlighted with engraving at the top arches so that it resembles a rose.

 

This new version enables the creation of contrast when it is combined with the smooth original bead. The traditional shallow curvature in the lower section, similar to that in the PRECIOSA Candy™ Pressed Bead, greatly simplifies sewing around the bead and stringing it with other beads of the same type or indeed using it with other seed beads and selected beads from the PRECIOSA Traditional Czech BeadsTM brand.

 

Make use of the options provided by these low, two-hole cabochons, supplement them with PRECIOSA Rocailles in a suitable color or combine them with other popular shapes, such as PRECIOSA Twin™ or PRECIOSA Solo™, and create an elegant fashion accessory.

 

TECHNICAL DATA:

Article no.: 111 01 385

Sizes: 8, 12 mm

No. of 12 mm beads in 1 kg: ca 700

1 bundle (1200 beads of the 12 mm size) weighs 1.73 kg

No. of 8 mm beads in 1 kg: ca 1830

1 bundle (1200 beads in the 8 mm size) weighs 0.67 kg

 

Visit our website for more information about the PRECIOSA Candy Rose

 

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It was circular, of solid construction, about forty feet in diameter and the same in height. In 1796, with a garrison of 38 men and three not very large guns, it had withstood attack from two warships of the British Navy, one with 74 guns, and one with 32. The Board of Ordnance were so impressed by the tower's resistance to fire-power, that they adopted the design for their own towers. These too were round, or oval, and in their construction used up to a million bricks, most of which came from near London. The Aldeburgh Martello Tower is the exception, because instead of being round, it is quatrefoil in shape: in effect four towers fused into one. The reason for this is not recorded. It might have been a piece of lateral thinking resulting from the quatrefoil arrangement of a platform for four guns; or, as has been suggested by Sheila Sutcliffe in her book Martello Towers (1972), it might have been an earlier design proposed for the Dymchurch Wall in Kent in 1804 but never built.

The tower was designed for four guns, although in 1815 it was noted that there were only two 24-pounders there. These were fired over the parapet, off timber gun carriages shackled to ring mounts which still hang from their stone blocks. In the late nineteenth century, new guns were provided, with rifled barrels for more effective fire. The old guns, of which there were by then four, were sunk into the roof to act as pivots. The tower would have been garrisoned by the local Volunteer Artillery. On the main barrack room floor, there were double berths for eight soldiers, and single berths for five NCOs. The northern bay was partitioned off with a canvas screen, to provide a private room for the officer in charge. There were two fireplaces for cooking. The lower floor was used for storage - coal, water, food and ordnance. The powder magazine was reached by a separate stair, but lit by a window from the main store. It was placed on the landward side, for safety.

The tower did not originally stand on its own as it does today. It was once part of the village of Slaughden, of which the last houses survived into this century, but finally vanished due to erosion before the last War. The sea has also swept away part of the moat surrounding the tower itself, until stopped by the building of coastal defences of a different kind in the 1950s. In 1931 the tower, by then abandoned and derelict, was sold by the Ministry of Defence to a Mr Walter Wenham. Over the next few years it was occasionally used by the Mitford family for camping holidays. Then in 1936, it was sold to Miss Debenham, who commissioned the architect Justin Vulliamy to convert it into a studio. This was done very carefully by adding to its top an elegant penthouse, hardly affecting the interior or original structure of the tower at all.

By 1971, the Thirties penthouse had in turn become derelict, and the tower itself was badly in decay. This time it was acquired by the Landmark Trust. Extensive repairs were carried out, and the tower itself converted to provide holiday accommodation.

Diameter 32 cm.Finds by my son Milan Kustera 8 years old.Well knew in Russian homeopathy medicine./cancer,diabetes/

3D printed some caps that fit a vernier caliper, to measure a specific part's female groove diameter. Although the exact measurement is off,, measuring the offset results in simple math to get the correct measurement. Balls are glued in place.