Archives February 2013

If you want to visit my father and do not know where he lives, just ask any one in the town and he would feel proud to help you find his home. People love him so much. It is because he spares time for their help. My father’s name is Mr. D.K. Raghav. My father was born on 26 January, 1962 at Varanasi. He received his early education in the same town and then went to Pune to study engineering. You might wonder, he has preferred to settle in a small town whereas he could have got a plump job in a major city. Once I asked him why he did so. He said, “Gandhiji said real India resides in villages and small towns. We must work there to bring India on the threshold of progress.” Presently, he is working as the Executive Engineer with the Public Works Department. My more...

The Ganga is the holiest and longest river in India. It rises in an ice cave known as Gomukh which is about 10,000 feet above the sea level. In its upper course, it joins with the Alaknanda and then rushes to Hardwar where its middle course begins. The Ganga then flows slowly by the cities and towns of Kanpur and Farukhabad. At Allahabad, it is joined by its biggest tributary, the Yamuna. The confluence of both these rivers here is considered very sacred by the Hindus.   After Allahabad, the Ganga moves eastwards flowing through Mirzapur and Benaras. Many people come here everyday to have a dip in the holy waters of the Ganga. Then the river which is by now a still large river as many tributaries and distributaries like the Kosi, Gandak, Ghaghara etc. join  it. It further moves by Patna, main flow of the river enters Bangladesh more...

No doubt war is an evil, the greatest catastrophe that befalls human beings. It brings death and destruction, disease and starvation, poverty, and ruin in its wake. One has only to look back to the havoc that was wrought in various countries not many years ago, in order to estimate the destructive effects of war. A particularly disturbing side of modern wars is that they tend to become global so that they may engulf the entire world. But there are people who  consider war as something grand and heroic and regard it as something that brings out  the best in man, but this does not alter the fact that war is a terrible, dreadful calamity. This is especially so now that a war will now be fought with atom bombs. Some people say war is necessary. A glance at the past history will tell that war has been a recurrent more...

“[Petzval] took on shortening [the Daguerreotype's] exposure time from minutes to seconds." Slovakia Today In 1839 portrait photographs took an age using simple meniscus lenses. 'All that changed when Hungarian mathematician Jozef Petzval (1807-1891) designed the first compound camera lens. The Petzval lens dramatically cut exposure times, boosted camera performance, and revolutionized photography. The "daguerreotype system," developed by Frenchman Louis Daguerre, was the forerunner to the Petzval lens. Requiring around half an hour of exposure time, this was still an improvement over existing techniques that needed several hours for successful exposure. However, this was still too long for taking portrait shots, which inevitably blurred with the slightest movement of the subject. Working with Friedrich Voigtlander at the University of Vienna, Petzval performed calculations that led him to create an achromatic portrait lens with four lenses arranged in two groups, providing six times the luminosity and an undistorted image for the more...

Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi was a great patriot, she was born at Bitur on June'15,1834. She was named Manu Bai. In her childhood  she learnt the use of weapons. She had warlike qualities. She was a clever horse rider and a clever archer. She was married to Raja Ganga Dhar Rao of Jhansi. After her marriage she was named Rani Lakshmi Bai. She could not enjoy the pleasures of married life. She became widow after two years of her marriage. She had no issue. She wished to adopt a son. Lord Dalhausi, the Governor General of India, did not allow her to do so. He wanted to make Jhansi a part of British India. Lakshmi Bai stood against him. She opposed foreign rule. She refused to obey the orders of Governor-General. She adopted a son and declared herself independent. Nana Sahib, Tantia Tope and Kanwar Singh were waiting for more...

"... In the long run... the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative." Arthur C. Clarke, novelist and writer In 1945, in an article entitled "Extra-Terrestrial Relays," British novelist Arthur C. Clarke described a way to bounce information off orbiting satellites so one side of the earth could communicate with the other almost instantly. Although the idea had been put forward previously by the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, it was Clarke's detailed description that caught the attention of Harold Rosen of Hughes Aircraft Corporation. In 1961 the project, called the SyJichronou.s Communications Satellite program (or Syncom), was given funding to make it happen. A mere seventeen months later the satellite Syncom I was launched, but it stopped sending signals before it reached orbit. Syncom II, which followed in 1963, achieved a geosynchronous orbit (it traveled at an Inclined angle, so was not stationary above one spot) but nevertheless proved more...

A library is said to be the heart and soul of a college. The quality of education given in college can be roughly judged from the type of books in its library. Buildings alone do not make a college. Every college must have a good library. Our college library is housed in a big building. It has about thirty two thousand books on various subjects. Students come to the library and take books of their choice either for reading in the library itself or for study at home. Our college library is under the charge of a qualified librarian. She is an efficient and hard working lady. She is very helpful to students and members of the staff. She encourages that students to read as many books as possible. She is a strict disciplinarian. She makes sure that there is perfect discipline in the library. Our library is assisted by more...

"This is simply two single indin'ed planes in conjunction, expanding from hill to knoll..." Robert Fulton, engineer Use of the inclined plane for the transfer of boats between water levels dates back at least to the sixth. century B.C.E., when ships were transported across the Isthmus of Corinth in wheeled cradles. Early Chinese engineers also made use of the principle, employing double slipway constructions in their canals to haul vessels between levels. Modern inclined planes were pioneered by Italian architect Daviso de Arcort in Northern Ireland in the 1770s. Coal barges were raised or lowered in stages through a total of 190 feet (58 m) onto the Coalisland Canal, drawn on sloped rails by a combination of counterweighting and horsepower. The ambitious project was fraught with problems, and closed in 1787. In 1778 William Reynolds constructed England's first inclined plane in Shropshire, followed by a steam- driven version on the more...

Before the days of British engineer Henry Maudslay, (1771-1831), screws were handmade and depended on the skill of the craftsman. Consequently, no two screws were alike or interchangeable. In 1797 Maudslay created precision machinery that enabled identical screws to be produced. Without Maudslay's standardization, tasks such as building flatpack furniture would be extremely difficult. Maudslay was the skilled apprentice of the lockmaker Joseph Bramah, Their working partnership failed when Maudslay and Bramah fell out over pay, causing Maudslay to set up his own shop in another part of London. In a quest for precision, he devised a screw-cutting lathe capable of cutting down reliably to a ten-thousandth of an inch. To existing lathe designs Maudslay introduced gears and a lead screw that changed the pitch (distance between a complete turn) of the screw. This allowed him to cut a range of thread pitches from the same machine, rapidly and with more...

In 1967, IBM was looking for a better way of sending software to its customers. Their popular System/370 mainframe computers "booted up" from big, heavy magnetic tapes, which were slow and expensive to ship. Engineer David L Noble (b. 1918) tried all sorts of improvement schemes, from better tape systems to vinyl records, just like those used for music. None of them were right for the job, so Noble proposed a new system based on a flexible disk of magnetic material. Developed by IBM over the next few years and finally released commercially in 1971, IBM's 8-inch (20 cm) "floppy" disk was made from flexible plastic. After a hunt for a package for mailing the new disks, the engineers had the idea of making a protective envelope part of the design of the disk itself. The disk was sandwiched into a square jacket that included a fabric liner—a built-in cleaning more...