Astronautics—Its Development During the Second Century of the RAeS (1966–2066)

1968 ◽  
Vol 72 (689) ◽  
pp. 373-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. V. Cleaver
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Second Century ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Technical Discipline ◽  
History Of ◽  
Space Age

The Royal Aeronautical Society is now 102 years old, and astronautics has already existed as a technical discipline for some 70 of these years, even if one disregards its long pre-history of mythology, science-fiction, and vague speculation. Tsiolkovsky began to make his amazing and entirely serious scientific contributions just before the dawn of the twentieth century. This suggestion that aeronautics and astronautics are much of an age would surprise many laymen, who are apt to accept literally the dating of the popular Press; this usually argues that the “Space Age” began with the launching of Sputnik I in 1957, disregarding even the first successful large rocket, the V2, which flew 15 years before Sputnik I. However, whether one argues that astronautics is already a septuagenarian, is in its vigorous and youthful twenties, or is not yet even a teenager, one must admit that its amazing development has occurred mostly in the last decade.

Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

scholarly journals The Unsolved Problem of Stellar Origins

1996 ◽  
Vol 169 ◽  
pp. 533-549
Author(s):  
Charles J. Lada
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
High Energy Physics ◽  
Gamma Ray ◽  
High Energy ◽  
Giant Molecular Clouds ◽  
Observational Astronomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Large Telescopes ◽  
The Universe

We now stand at the threshold of the 21st century having witnessed perhaps the greatest era of astronomical discovery in the history of mankind. During the twentieth century the subject of astronomy was revolutionized and completely transformed by technology and physics. Advances in technology that produced radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, UV, X and γ ray astronomy, large telescopes on the ground, in balloons, aircraft and space coupled with advances in nuclear, atomic and high energy physics forever changed the way in which the universe is viewed. Indeed, it is altogether likely that future historians of science will consider the twentieth century as the Golden Age of observational astronomy. As a measure of how far we have come in the last 100 years, recall that at the turn of this century the nature of spiral nebulae and of the Milky Way itself as an island universe were not yet revealed. The expansion of the universe and the microwave background were not yet discovered and exotic objects such as quasars, pulsars, gamma-ray bursters and black holes were not even envisioned by the most imaginative authors of science fiction. The interstellar medium, with its giant molecular clouds, magnetic fields and obscuring dust was unknown. Not even the nature of stars, these most fundamental objects of the astronomical universe, was understood.

Book Review: The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro, Transport of Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles, Rêves parisiens: L'échec de projets de transport public en France au XIXe siècle, Histoire des chemins de fer en France (History of railways in France) II, Le ferrovie in viaggio verso l'Europa: La liberalizzazione delle ferrovie (The railways in travel vis-à-Vis Europe: The liberalisation of the railways), Billy, Alfred, and General Motors: The Story of two unique Men, a Legendary Company and a remarkable Time in American History, Rozwoj koncepcji samochodu osobowego w XX wieku (The evolution of the car in the twentieth century), Das zweite Jahrhundert des Automobils. Technische Innovationen, ökonomische Dynamik und kulturelle Aspekte (The second century of the automobile: Technical innovations, economic dynamics and cultural aspects), Motorcycle, Transportgeschichte im internationalen Vergleich. Europa—China—Naher Osten (International comparison of transport history: Europe—China—Near East), Inventare gli spostamenti: Storia e immagini dell'autostrada Torino—Savona (Inventing movement: History and images of the A6 motorway), Reti mobilità, trasporti: Il sistema italiano tra prospettiva storica e innovazione (Networks of mobility and transport: The Italian system in the perspective of historical and innovation sciences), ‘Votes Count but the Number of Seats decides: A Comparative Historical Case Study of Twentieth Century Danish, Swedish and Norwegian Road Policy’, Εττόμενή στάσή: Χαμένες λεωφόροι. Μια περιδιάβασή στήν κοσμογονία τής αμερικανικής кал τής ευρωπαϊκής μήτρόπολής, Blind Landings: Low-visibility Operations in American Aviation, 1918–1958, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia, The Rescue of the Third Class on the Titanic: A Revisionist History, Verkehr. Zu einer poetischen Theorie der Moderne (Traffic: Towards a poetic theory of modern times), Gebuchte Gefühle. Tourismus zwischen Verortung und Entgrenzung (Booked feelings: Tourism from localisation to boundlessness)

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 326-353
Author(s):  
Jan Oliva ◽  
Stefano Maggi ◽  
Bob Post ◽  
Zachary M. Schrag ◽  
Sabine Barles ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Second Century ◽  
General Motors ◽  
Historical Case Study ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Cultural Aspects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Technical Innovations ◽  
Naher Osten

scholarly journals La vida imaginaria del científico. El caso del cómic ‘Los Proyectos Manhattan’

2015 ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Francisco Sáez de Adana Herrero
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Book Series ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

This article analyses the Manhattan Project comic-book series, which recounts an alternative ending to the Second World War, where the Manhattan Project hides another mission more closely related to science fiction. Here we discuss how the concept of the so-called «imaginary life», a term coined by Marcel Schwob, has been applied to the history of science in the twentieth century.

Afterlives

Melania ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Penn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Scholarly Journals ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

In 1903, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla was heir apparent to the papacy. But he became unexpectedly out of a job due to a veto by the Austro-Hungarian emperor. Rampolla retreated to a life of scholarship to edit a manuscript he had discovered in a monastic library decades earlier, Gerontius’s Life of Melania the Younger. Rampolla’s publication spawned a series of early twentieth-century reactions to Melania’s biography. This work sometimes appeared in scholarly journals. Much appeared in popular press articles such as one that compared Melania’s fasts to those of early twentieth-century suffragettes’ or a series of newspaper headlines referring to “the richest woman in the history of the world!” The hagiography also inspired early twentieth-century imitations, such as Sainte Mélanie, a pious and expanded version of Melania’s Life. This chapter examines an earlier rediscovery of this “indomitable little saint” who was seen as “Richer than Rockefeller.”

Ice, Fire and Flood: A Short Pre-history of Climate Fiction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Andrew Milner ◽  
J.R. Burgmann
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Ice Age ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Climate Fiction ◽  
The Last Man ◽  
Global Heating

This chapter argues that catastrophic climate change fictions have been organised around three main tropes: the new ice age, the burning world and the drowned world. Of these, only the last has a deep history in the Western mythos, dating back to stories of a Great Flood in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh. When modern science fiction (SF) began to take shape in the early nineteenth century, it inherited a preoccupation with the Flood from its parent cultures, for example, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Richard Jefferies’s After London and Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous. This flood motif continued to be important in American pulp SF. Cooling and warming are more recent preoccupations, dating from the widespread acceptance of ice age theory and greenhouse theory in the late nineteenth century. For most of the twentieth century both science and SF were more interested in cooling. But in the closing quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, widespread scientific concern that anthropogenic warming might more than offset longer-term cooling led to the development of contemporary ‘cli-fi’, concerned primarily with the effects of global heating.

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