63. Найдите в тексте предложения, точно отвечающие на следующие вопросы:

1. What did the investigations of the Kara-Kum Desert led by Fersman result in?

2. What was discovered in the Kola Peninsula as a result of Academi­cian Fersman's investigations there?

3. What method did Boky introduce into mining?

4. What is the leading organization in Russia working out theoretical problems connected with mining?

5. What problems did Melnikov pay special attention to?

6. What deposits did Gubkin take particular interest in?

7. What institute did he found?

8. How many scientific works did Gubkin write?

64. Найдите в тексте 7 английские эквиваленты следующих русских сочетаний слов:

среди самых выдающихся советских геологов; чисто описательная наука; ряд научных экспедиций; обогатительная фабрика; обработка серы; следует отдать должное; предотвращение подземных пожаров; запасы энергетического топлива; охватывать (включать) различные области геологии; заниматься изучением и разведкой нефти; оценивать запасы нефти.

65. Определите, какой из трех заголовков наиболее соответствует содержанию текста:

1. Prominent Mining Scientists.

2. Prominent Geologists.

3. Russian School of Mining and Geology.

Prominent Scientist In Mining Abroad

Text 8

ISAAC TYSON, Jr. (1792-1861)

Pioneer Baltimore Industrialist, Isaac Tyson. Jr. was the Renaissance man of the early United States minerals and chemicals industries. In a day when specialists were scarce, Tyson was a man of many titles: geologist, mineralogist, essayist, mining engineer, metallurgist, industrial chemist, inventor, business manager, banker and economist. Tyson recognized the need for a resource base to underpin industrial development, and from 1810, every aspect of United States resource development captured his interest. Tyson fathered the American chromium industry, first as an exporter of chrome ore, and then as a manufacturer of chromium-based chemicals. Although chromium was first discovered in France in 1797, by 1810 Tyson had identified chromites in the Bare Hills near Baltimore and had begun to export it to chemical plants in England.

Tyson's business grew slowly until 1827, when he discovered additional chromites deposits in Maryland and Pennsylvania. For 20 years following these discoveries, when major deposits were discovered in Turkey, Tyson dominated world trade in chromites ore.

In 1845, Tyson founded the Baltimore Chrome Works, a plant that continued production for 140 years, until 1985.

In 1827, Tyson obtained a patent for a new method for making copperas, an iron salt used in dyeing and as a disinfectant. The copperas patent led Tyson to an interest in iron pyrite deposits, and he became associated with the backers of the major US iron pyrite mine at the time, in South Strafford, Vermont.

The presence of chalcopyrite, a copper-sulphide mineral found in the South Strafford ore, prompted the group to attempt to smelt copper while also producing sulphur at the mine site. In 1833, Ty-son spent 15 months at South Strafford working toward that end. During those months, he devised the use of a hot air blast, using anthracite fuel to smelt copper, perhaps tor the first time. In lfcS4, Tyson obtained a patent for applying heated air to the smelting of copper ores.

Tyson's pioneering experiments led him to iron making. In 1837, he installed a furnace at Plymouth, Vermont, which, using charcoal as a fuel, continued to produce iron for 20 years.

During the 1830s and 1840s, Tyson worked intensely to develop Maryland copper deposits, and in 1850, he joined a group of investors in establishing the Baltimore Copper Smelting Co. in Baltimore. Tyson also helped find and finance lead, iron, manganese, copper and coal mines at numerous locations throughout New England and the Middle Atlantic states.

In the chemical industry, Tyson is best remembered as an innovative and pioneering industrial chemist. He was an American original and one of its truly great industrialists.

Text 9

OUTSTANDING SCIENTISTS

Thomas Newcomen, British Engineer

Born February 28, 1663, Dartmouth, Devon, England, died August 5, 1729, London

In 1712, he built his atmospheric steam engine, a precursor of James Watt's engine. In the Newcomen’s engine, atmospheric pressure pushed the piston down after the condensation of steam had created a vacuum in the cylinder. Newcomen’s engines were used for some years in the draining of mines and in raising water to power waterwheels.

Mattew Boulton, British manufacturer and engineer

England, died August 17, 1809, Birmingham Born September 3, 1728, Birmingham, Warwickshire,

With James Watt and William Murdock (1754-1839), he established the steam-engine industry by installing pumping engines to drain the Cornish tin mines. Foreseeing great industrial demand for steam power, he urged Watt to make various design improvements. Applying steam power to coining machinery, he made large quantities of coins for the British East India Co. and also supplied ma-

chinery to the Royal Mint. By 1800, almost 500 steam engines had been installed in the British Isles and abroad.

James Watt (1736-1819)

Watt was born at Greenock, Scotland. His father was a merchant. As a young man, Watt received training as a mathematical-instrument maker, and, as such, attempted to establish himself at Glasgow. (Apparently, he wasn't able to set himself up in business because of the troubles which the local inions, or guilds, gave to him; being hired by the university, however, Watt was able to carry on with his trade as an instrument builder.) Due to the nature of his work (and more likely to the nature of Watt himself) Watt was led into a number of related activities, including being involved in the survey work needed for the building of canals and the deepening of the Scottish rivers such as the Clyde and the Forth. One day, in 1759, being the handy man he was, Watt was called upon to fix a Newcomen’s steam engine (named after its English inventor, Thomas Newcomen (1663-1729), an engine which had long been used to lift water out of mines). Well, Watt fixed this engine, alright, and, in the process of striping it down, realized that a number of practical improvements might be made to it. By 1774, patents having been secured, and in partnership with Matthew Boulton, new and improved steam engines were being turned out at the Soho Engineering Works located at Soho, Birmingham.

Text 10

THOMAS EDISON (1847-1931)

Edison's Childhood

Thomas Edison was born in 1847 in Milan, Ohio. He grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. From an early age, Edison was curious about the world around him and always tried to teach himself through reading and experiments.

As a boy, Edison worked as a gatekeeper at his father's observatory for tourists, and worked on a railway selling newspapers and candy to passengers.

In 1869, when Edison was twenty-two years old, he patented his first invention and advertised that he "would hereafter devote his full time to bringing out his inventions."

During the eighty-four years of his life. Edison became one of the greatest inventors and industrial leaders in history. Edison obtained 1,093 United States patents, the most issued to any individual.

The Menlo Park Laboratory

During his most inventive years, Edison conducted experiments at his Menlo Park New Jersey, laboratory. He did not work alone. A team of talented workers assisted him all hours of the day and night. These men had the skills to make Edison's ideas and sketches into real devices of wood, wire, glass and metal.

The laboratory at Menlo Park was an "invention factory and a business. Bookkeepers and secretaries kept track of the money needed to run the business.

On December 31, 1879, Thomas Edison demonstrated his most famous invention, the first practical incandescent electric lamp. He was not, however, the first inventor to experiment with electric light. When Edison began testing possibilities for incandescent lamps, the arc light was already becoming popular for lighting streets, department stores and other large areas.

Incandescent lamps make light by using electricity to heat a thin strip of material (called filament) so hot that it glows. Many inventors tried to perfect incandescent lamps to "subdivide" electric light or make it smaller and weaker. These lamps are examples of less successful versions of the incandesce lamp patented by other inventors before Edison completed his practical lamp in 1879.

One of the important features of Edison's lamp and electrical sys-tem was the simple, modern socket familiar us today.

Edison tried to find a material that would become incandescent and not melt when heated by electricity. For a long time, he tried platinum, but finally he made his filaments by carbonizing a kind of cardboard called Bristol board.

In earlier lamps, too much oxygen caused the filaments to burn. Edison acquired the best vacuum pumps so he could empty his bulbs of as much air as possible. Because of this, his carbon filaments did not burn.

Edison's men used vacuum pumps to evacuate electric lamps. Edison also developed an entire system to make electricity and distribute it to many places at the same time. Edison's system included dynamos, switches, electric meters, fuses, distribution lines and regulators.

Edison spent the next few years working on an electrical system that would be successful commercially. This meant he had to be certain that he could make a central power station and that his electricity would be cheap enough for people to afford.

Soon Edison demonstrated that his system could become a commercial success. Harper's Weekly published this drawing of men laying tubes for electrical wires to Edison's system in June, 1882. That year, the Pearl Street generating station began to supply electricity to streets and buildings in a small area of New York City.

The Lab Comes to Greenfield Village

Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory complex and the inventions he made there are over 100 years old. When Edison built the laboratory in 1876, it was the first industrial research laboratory in the United States.

By 1886, Edison and his entire team had abandoned the Menlo Park site. In the 1920s, Henry Ford wanted to move the old "invention factory" to his museum in Dearborn, Michigan. When Ford and Edison went to New Jersey to recover the buildings, they found that most of them had been removed or had collapsed. Ford had his staff reconstruct the Menlo Park buildings from photographs and a few surviving original materials.

Thomas Edison's Inventions

While working on the phonograph, Edison began working on a device that "does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear;" this was to become motion pictures. Edison first demonstrated motion pictures in 1891, and began commercial production of "movies" two years later in a peculiar looking structure built on the lab-oratory grounds, known as the Black Maria. Like the electric light and phonograph before it, Edison developed a complete system developing everything needed to both film and show motion pictures. Edison's initial work in motion pictures was pioneering and original. However, many people became interested in this third new industry Edison created, and worked to further improve on Edison's early motion picture work. There were therefore many contributors to the swift development of motion pictures beyond the early work of Edison. By the late 1890s, a thriving new industry was firmly established, and by 1918, the industry had become so competitive that Edison got out of the movie business all together.

The success of the phonograph and motion pictures in the 1890s helped offset the greatest failure of Edison's career. Throughout the decade, Edison worked in his laboratory and in the old iron mines of northwestern New Jersey to develop methods of mining iron ore to feed the insatiable demand of the Pennsylvania steel mills. To finance this work, Edison sold all his stock in General Electric. Despite ten years of work and millions of dollars spent on research and development, Edison was never able to make the process commercially practical, and lost all the money he had invested. This would have meant financial ruin had not Edison continued to develop the phonograph and motion pictures at the same time. As it was, Edison entered the new century still financially secure and ready to take on another challenge.

Edison's new challenge was to develop a better storage battery for use in electric vehicles. Edison very much enjoyed automobiles and owned a number of different types during his life, powered by gasoline, electricity and steam. Edison thought that electric propulsion was clearly the best method of powering cars, but realized that conventional lead-acid storage batteries were inadequate for the job. Edison began to develop an alkaline battery in 1899. It proved to be Edison's most difficult project, taking ten years to develop a practical alkaline battery. By the time Edison introduced new alkaline battery, the gasoline powered car had been so improved that electric vehicles were becoming increasingly less common, being used mainly as delivery vehicles in cities. However, the Edison alkaline battery proved useful for lighting railroad cars and signals, maritime buoys and miners' lamps. Unlike iron ore mining the heavy investment Edison made over ten years was repaid handsomely, and the storage battery eventually be-came Edison's most profitable product. Further, Edison's work paved the way for the modern alkaline battery.

By 1911, Thomas Edison had built a vast industrial operation in West Orange.

Like Ben Franklin, Thomas Alva Edison was both a scientist and an inventor. Born in 1847, Edison would see tremendous change take place in his lifetime. He was also to be responsible for making many of those changes occur. When Edison was born society still thought of electricity as a novelty, tad. By the time he died, en-tire cities were lit by electricity. Much of the credit for that progress goes to Edison. In his lifetime, Edison patented 1,093 inventions, earning him the nickname "The Wizard of Menlo Park." The most famous of his inventions was an incandescent light bulb. Besides the light bulb, Edison developed the phonograph and the "kinetoscope," a small box for viewing moving films. He also improved upon the original design of the stock ticker, the telegraph and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. He believed in hard work, sometimes working twenty hours a day.

Edison was quoted as saying, "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." In tribute to this important American, electric lights in the United States were dimmed for one minute on October 21, 1931, a few days after his death.

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