4.1 Condition of the bridge: an overview An investigation was put into motion by the Board of Trade (BoT) as soon as news of the catastrophe reached London. Three commissioners were appointed to consider the evidence. They proceeded at their task with haste, knowing the country looked to them for an explanation of the accident. Fifty photographs were taken of the remains of the bridge about a week after the collapse at the request of the BoT enquiry team. The photographs are vital evidence of the way the bridge piers fai
3.5 Sunday 28 December 1879 The morning of Sunday 28 December 1879 was quiet. When Captain Wright took his ferry boat, the Dundee, across the firth at 1.15 pm, he noted that the weather was good and the water was calm. The 4.15 pm crossing was just as uneventful, but the captain noted that the wind had freshened. By 5.15 pm a gale was moving in from the west and the river, in the words of the captain ‘was getting up very fast’. The local shuttle train left Newport at 5.50 pm and arrived at Dundee statio
Bridge girders Figures 11 and 12, below, are photographs of the bridge taken from the south and north banks of the firth. The girders of the bridge were supported on a total of 85 piers. The first 14 piers were made from brick and masonry, built up as a solid structure. The rest were fabricated from iron on masonry platforms, and by comparison, appeared rather insubstantial (Author(s):
3.1 Overview The Tay Bridge disaster came towards the end of a period of intense development of the railway system in the UK. The bridge had materials that were well known. Cast iron was used for the columns and wrought iron for the trussed girders. The construction of the bridge was, at the time, the largest single engineering project in Britain, the Tay estuary being about two miles wide near Dundee, and the bridge was the longest in the world. In the shallower approaches in the estuary, con
2.4 Early disasters Many of the earliest bridges were simply a wooden trestle type of construction, an efficient and easy-to-build structure, yet providing a secure and safe passage for heavy metal trains. Although we tend to associate such structures with the United States, they were in fact widely used in Britain in the early days of steam locomotion. However, they had a limited lifetime owing to rot, so were gradually replaced by wrought iron girder bridges, often laid on brick or masonry piers. Designe
2.1 Overview Catastrophes of human origin can be just as traumatic as those of natural origin, and are studied with even greater intensity for their causes. There are several ways disasters of human origin can be classified, depending on cause or size or origin. Another way of looking at them is by the kind of human activity – perhaps mining, fishing or transportation. Equally, disasters could be classified according to the kind of event that occurred during the accident – perhaps collision, sinking,
1.2 Earthquakes and volcanoes The disasters that first come to mind are those where the earth itself changes in an unpredictable and sudden way: earthquakes volcanic eruptions tidal waves These natural phenomena are now known to be interconnected: earthquakes result from vast plates of the earth's crust meeting and moving against one another. Volcanic explosions, such as Krakatoa (1883) and Mount St Helens (1980) are also manifestations
Learning outcomes After studying this unit, you should be able to: understand the basic structural issues of the Forth Road Bridge; give examples of how engineers are trying to alleviate the wear and tear on the bridge.
Acknowledgements The following material is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence Figure 7: The Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh Figure 8: The Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh Figure 20: taken from www.acmi.net.au/AIC/BLATTNER_STILLE.html Figure 13 and 25: Ampex GB Limited We also thank Nigel Bewley (British Library Sound Archive), Daniel Leech-Wilkinson (King's College, London) and Robert Philip
Figures
4 Unit summary Sound recording really took off once the public's demand for recorded music had been acknowledged. The choice of technology, cylinder or disc, was determined more by the selection of the artist and material than the quality of the sound. Development of disc technology was slow due to the lack of better alternatives, remaining substantially unchanged for over fifty years. The development of radio broadcasting caused a slump in the record industry but eventually it not only provided improvement
3.5 Studio tape recorders The importance of tape recording to record production cannot be overemphasised. From its development until the coming of digital tape recorders in the late 1970s, the analogue tape recorder was at the heart of the professional music recording studio. Initially, the full width of the standard quarter-inch tape was used for making monophonic recordings. Stereo needed two tracks – one for each channel. Rather than doubling the tape width, a decision was made to halve the track width by incorpo
3.2 Recording on the wire A paper published by Oberlin Smith in an 1888 issue of Electrical World discussed the possibilities for recording sound using the property of magnetism. He envisaged a cotton thread impregnated with steel dust passing through a coil carrying a current controlled by a microphone. The variations with the sound in the strength of the current would cause corresponding magnetic fluctuations in the magnetic medium. Unfortunately he dismissed his idea because, as he said in his paper, he thou
2.6 Turning the handle The owners of the original hand-cranked gramophones were instructed that the standard velocity for ‘seven-inch plates’ was about 70 revolutions per minute. The owner was also warned that failure to turn the plate at the correct speed would lead to a lowering of the pitch if turned too slow, or a raising of the pitch if turned too fast. It is doubtful if true reproduction of the recorded sound was ever achieved by the owners of these machines! A better power source was needed and as electr
Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should be able to: explain correctly the meanings of the emboldened terms in the main text and use them correctly in context; give a brief account of the history of the record industry; describe the methods used for storing analogue audio recordings introduced in the main text, highlighting their technological aspects; make informed judgements as to the quality of a sound recording through analysis of the a
Introduction This unit looks at the ways in which technology has influenced the music industry and how this has changed the way we listen to music and buy records. It is a brief history of the recording industry from its beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century. Step changes in technology will be highlighted in a story that often is as much about the people who built the industry and the recordings they made as about the technologies that were developed and used. Please note that Author(s):
Module team
Academic staff
Dr Alec Goodyear (course chair) Professor Nicholas Braithwaite Jan Kowal Dr Tony Nixon Dr Sally Organ Robin Harding (critical reader) James McLannahan (critical reader) Dr Martin Rist (critical reader) Dr George Weidmann (critical reader) Peta Jellis (course manager) P
T356 course team
External assessor
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:
Figure 7 (a): PDB ID 1BKV Kramer, R. Z., Bella, J., Mayville, P., Brodsky, B. and Berman, H. M. (1990) ‘Sequence dependent conformational variations of collagen triple-helical structure’, Natural Structural Biology, vol. 6, pp. 454–57
Figure 7(b): PDB ID 1ATN Kabsch, W., Mannherz, H. G., Suck, D., Pai, E. F. and Holmes, K. C. (1990) ‘Atomic structure
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4 Engineering with proteins What are the prospects for designing and making new proteins for specific purposes? The technology exists to build polypeptide chains unit by unit in a test tube, but this is time-consuming and expensive. Often a more practical approach is to find ways of working with nature to produce useful substances in a form that we can use. This might involve extracting a naturally occurring protein and chemically modifying it in some way, or using genetic engineering to produce a particular protein in
3.1 Protein diversity Of course, our bodies can't just be made up of squidgy bubbles of phospholipid, or we would collapse in a heap on the floor! Stiffer frameworks, both inside and outside the cells, also exist and help to define shape and add strength. These frameworks are formed largely from structural proteins, a class of polymeric materials that form fibres and filaments to provide mechanical support for cells and tissues. Structural proteins are made inside cells but are often then moved into the spa
2 Construction with lipids The cell membrane is constructed from lipids. Chemically, lipids are a rather varied group of compounds that include all the substances you might already think of as fats or oils. What they have in common is that they are all insoluble in polar liquids like water, but soluble in organic (carbon-based) solvents: by this I mean the sort of smelly solvents you tend to find in paints, glues and degreasing agents; chloroform is one example. Lipids make up the fatty components of living organisms a
