The Self Propelled Voyager

Download or read book The Self-Propelled Voyager written by Duncan R. Jamieson and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, people who wanted to travel independently either walked or rode horses. Then a newly invented machine changed forever the nature of personal transportation. The cycle—self-propelled bicycles, tricycles, and tandems—allowed almost anyone to travel around town, around their region, and around the world. While dramatic developments in equipment, clothing, road surfaces, and amenities make the physicality of cycling much different from the earlier era, the experience of cycling has seen little change. The Self-Propelled Voyager: How the Cycle Revolutionized Travel recounts how a transportation innovation opened the world for not only those who made the journey but also for the armchair travelers who read with interest the cyclists’ accounts of faraway places. Following a brief history of the development of the cycle, this book describes the exploits of long-distance riders who wrote of their experiences, their triumphs, and their tragedies. Duncan R. Jamieson chronicles their journeys, their personal stories, and the times in which they lived, revealing that, despite the continuing rise and fall of cycling interest, people continue to enjoy traveling in the slow lane. Drawing on books and articles by the women and men who rode and wrote of their travels, The Self-Propelled Voyager also features photographs from the 1880s up to the modern day, illustrating the development of the cycle through history. Accessibly written yet comprehensive in its coverage, this book will interest not only the cycling enthusiast but historians focusing on sport and sport tourism as well.

Download or read book Kings of Battle US Self-Propelled Howitzers, 1981-2022 written by David Grummitt and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2023-12-30 with total page 67 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is for good reason that artillery is known as the ‘king of battle’. In World War II the United States made good use of self-propelled howitzers, including those based on the chassis of the M4 Sherman tank. After 1945 the US developed both light and medium self-propelled howitzers, based on the M24 Chaffee, M41 Walker Bulldog and Sherman chassis. The first designs were plagued with problems and self-propelled artillery played only a minor role in the Korean War. By the mid 1960s, however, the M107 175mm, M109 155mm and M110 203mms self-propelled howitzers had entered service, and they proved their effectiveness during the Vietnam War. The M107 was relatively short-lived in US service, being retired in the late 1970s, but it played an important role with the Israel defense Forces. The M109 served with the US Army, as well as in many NATO armies and elsewhere, and saw action in the Middle East, in the Balkans, during the liberation of Kuwait, and in the invasion of Iraq. The M109 has now been in service for some sixty years and remains, in the guise of the M109A7, the current self-propelled howitzer of the US Army. The larger M110 203mm self-propelled howitzer similarly saw widespread service before it was retired in the early 1990s. Despite the emergence of rocket artillery, such as the Multiple Launch Rocket System, the self-propelled howitzer will remain one of the principal weapons systems of US military in the decades to come. The M107, M109 and M110 have proved popular subjects among modellers with a variety of kits available from the major manufacturers. As well as describing in detail the technical development and operational history of these guns, this book gives a full account of the wide range of modelling kits and accessories available in all the popular scales. Included is a modelling gallery which covers a range of variants and a section of large-scale color profiles which provide both information and inspiration for modellers and military enthusiasts alike.

Download or read book British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 written by Kristin M. Girten and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2023-01-13 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enlightenment-era writers had not yet come to take technology for granted, but nonetheless were—as we are today—both attracted to and repelled by its potential. This volume registers the deep history of such ambivalence, examining technology’s influence on Enlightenment British literature, as well as the impact of literature on conceptions of, attitudes toward, and implementations of technology. Offering a counterbalance to the abundance of studies on literature and science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, this volume’s focus encompasses approaches to literary history that help us understand technologies like the steam engine and the telegraph along with representations of technology in literature such as the “political machine.” Contributors ultimately show how literature across genres provided important sites for Enlightenment readers to recognize themselves as “chimeras”—“hybrids of machine and organism”—and to explore the modern self as “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.”

Download or read book The War of the Wheels written by Jeremy Withers and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid apocalyptic invasions and time travel, one common machine continually appears in H. G. Wells’s works: the bicycle. From his scientific romances and social comedies, to utopias, futurological speculations, and letters, Wells’s texts abound with bicycles. In The War of the Wheels, Withers examines this mode of transportation as both something that played a significant role in Wells’s personal life and as a literary device for creating elaborate characters and complex themes. Withers traces Wells’s ambivalent relationship with the bicycle throughout his writing. While he celebrated it as a singular and astonishing piece of technology, and continued to do so long after his contemporaries abandoned their enthusiasm for the bicycle, he was not an unwavering promoter of this machine. Wells acknowledged the complex nature of cycling, its contribution to a growing dependence on and fetishization of technology, and its role in humanity’s increasing sense of superiority. Moving into the twenty-first century, Withers reflects on how the works of H. G. Wells can serve as a valuable locus for thinking through many of our current issues and problems related to transportation, mobility, and sustainability.

Download or read book Famous for a Time written by Jason Wilson and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating Canadian athletes and sporting history. The cultural impact of sport on a nation is not slight. Famous for a Time explores a number of important, if not well remembered, Canadian athletes and the sports they played to help explain the nation’s complicated history, sporting and otherwise. It is an exploration that reveals the socio-cultural trends that have shaped Canada since Confederation. Through the prism of some exceptional athletes, the prevailing attitudes of many Canadians about class, race, masculinity, femininity, and national identity are laid bare. Here, from the sidelines, we learn how these attitudes have changed — or not, as the case may be — over time. From team sports such as lacrosse, baseball, and cricket to Canada’s cycling craze, track and field, and boxing, each chapter offers insight into an important aspect of the nation’s narrative. The winners and losers of Canada’s games simply mirror the larger questions that have faced Canadian society across three centuries.

Download or read book The Wheels of Chance by H G Wells written by Jeremy Withers and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr Hoopdriver is an overworked Londoner who spends most every day servilely waiting on customers at his job as a draper's assistant. When it comes time for his annual holiday, he decides to put his newfound skills on a bicycle to the test by going on a ten-day cycling trip to the southern coast of England. A routine trip is turned upside down, however, when Hoopdriver crosses paths with Jessie, a young lady fleeing the constraints of conventional Victorian womanhood. The two cyclists eventually join up and try to help each other find a brighter future. Written at the height of the late-19th century bicycle craze and rich in geographical detail of southern England, The Wheels of Chance is a captivating portrayal of two people attempting to break free of the dreary life society has carved out for them. The novel is also among Wells's funniest works, rivalling his other comedic masterpieces such as Kipps and The History of Mr Polly. Using a copy text of the 1925 Atlantic edition of the novel, this edition includes a full introduction providing historical context on the novel and biographical information on Wells, a further reading list, detailed notes, a map of Hoopdriver's journey, a selection of contemporary reviews, and excerpts of letters by Wells relevant to the novel. The work has been specially prepared for student engagement and classroom use.

Download or read book Signs of Life written by Stephen Fabes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young doctor cycles around the world and discovers how societies treat their most vulnerable, in this thought-provoking and witty medical odyssey When Stephen Fabes left his job as an emergency-room doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. The daily challenges of life on the road stack up as he navigates deserts—coaxing a few more miles from ‘Ol’ Patchy’ (his most faithful innertube)—and learns to live with the seeming constant threat posed by local wildlife, be it mangy dogs in Indonesia, grizzly bears in Alaska, or, in Australia, the common death adder, three words he was dismayed to find exist in sequence. But leaving medicine behind was not as easy as it seems. As Stephen crossed continents—on a journey that would take six years and cover more than 53,000 miles—he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma, or circumstance and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards. In this gripping blend of true adventure and medical narrative, Stephen learns the value of listening to lives—not just solving diagnostic puzzles. Signs of Life challenges us to see care for the sick as a duty born of our compassion and our humanity.