1. James Watt (1736-1819): a Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer, renowned for his improvements of the steam engine. Watt was born on January 19, 1736, in Greenock, Scotland. He worked as a mathematical instrument maker from the age of 19 and soon became interested in improving the steam engines, invented by the English engineers Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, which were used at the time to pump water from mines. Watt determined the properties of steam, especially the relation of its density to its temperature and pressure, and designed a separate condensing chamber for the steam engine that prevented enormous losses of steam in the cylinder and enhanced the vacuum conditions. Watt’s first patent, in 1769, covered this device and other improvements on Newcomen’s engine, such as steam-jacketing, oil lubrication, and insulation of the cylinder in order to maintain the high temperatures necessary for maximum efficiency. The misconception that Watt was the actual inventor of the steam engine arose from the fundamental nature of his contributions to its development. The centrifugal, which he invented in 1788, and which automatically regulated the speed of an engine, is of particular interest today. It embodies the feedback principle of a servomechanism, linking output to input, which is the basic concept of automation. The electrical unit, the watt, was named in his honor. Watt was also a renowned civil engineer, making several surveys of canal routes. He invented, in 1767, an attachment that adapted telescopes for use in measurement of distances. Watt died in Heathfield, England, on August 19, 1819. The web site http://www.phm.gov.au/exhibits/exib_perm/boult.htm presents an online exhibit about the steam engine built by Mathew Boulton and James Watt.
2. Scotland: an administrative division of the United Kingdom, occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain. Scotland is bounded on the north by the Atlantic Ocean; on the east by the North Sea; on the southeast by England; on the south by Solway Firth and by the Irish Sea; and on the west by the North Channel and by the Atlantic Ocean. As a geopolitical entity Scotland includes 186 nearby islands, a majority of which are contained in three groups — the Hebrides, also known as the Western Isles, situated off the western coast; the Orkney Islands, situated off the northeastern coast; and the Shetland Islands, situated northeast of the Orkney Islands. The largest of the other islands is the Island of Arran. The total land area, including the islands, is 78,790 sq km (30,420 sq mi). Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and its second largest city. The web sites http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/scottishhistory/ and http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/scotland/scotland.html offer an online companion to their series on Scottish history, including public records, historic documents, oral histories, games, and photographs.
3. Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922): an American inventor and teacher of the deaf, most famous for his invention of the telephone. Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland, and educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London. He immigrated to Canada in 1870 and to the United States in 1871. In the United States he began teaching deaf-mutes, publicizing the system called visible speech. The system, which was developed by his father, the Scottish educator Alexander Melville Bell, shows how the lips, tongue, and throat are used in the articulation of sound. In 1872 Bell founded a school to train teachers of the deaf in Boston, Massachusetts. The school subsequently became part of Boston University, where Bell was appointed professor of vocal physiology. He became a naturalized US citizen in 1882. The web site http://www2.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/library/96mar/bell.html offers a feature on American inventor A.G. Bell, including a biography, information about his inventions, and interactivities.
4. Brookhaven National Laboratory: a US center for basic and applied research based on atomic energy. Founded in 1947, it is located at Upton, a part of Brookhaven Town on Long Island, New York, and is operated by the nonprofit Associated Universities, Inc., under a primary contract with the US Department of Energy (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission). The laboratory is dedicated entirely to the peacetime uses of atomic energy and embraces a wide spectrum of research in the physical, life, chemical, and related sciences. Among its major research facilities are a high-flux beam reactor, a medical research reactor, the 33-billion-electron-volt proton Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, a cyclotron, a vertical accelerator, various Van de Graaff accelerators, and a high-intensity radiation development laboratory. The web site http://www.bnl.gov/ hosts this interactive table providing information on the elemental nuclides used in nuclear chemistry.
