Active Words and Word - Combinations. accomplishment завершение

 

accomplishment              завершение

postal                               почтовый

coach                               экипаж

establish                          устанавливать

restrict                             ограничивать

rigid                                 жёсткий, негнущийся

constrain                          принуждать

quasi-public                   “полупубличный”

shield                              защищать

emerge                            появляться

 

 

1. Replace the words in brackets by the corresponding English equivalents:

 

a) The most impressive Roman accomplishment in transportation was what became the (почтовый) service.

b) (Скороходы) carried information to distant corners of the empire.

c) (Почтовые экипажи) were established to communicate (непосредственно) with the provinces.

d) This was not a true (народная) mail service.

e) Because (строительство) and (укрепление) of roads was costly, they were carefully (защищены) against overuse, with light maximum loads for various kinds of (транспортных средств).

f) With the collapse of the (империи) the truly exceptional (качества) of that system disappeared and did not emerge again until (настоящего времени).

 

2. Translate from Russian into English:

 

a) Простейшая и самая ранняя римская повозка называлась «плауструм».

b) Она была лишь немного сложнее просто доски на четырех колесах.

c) Слишком прочное закрепление колеса делало механическую эффективность транспортного средства слишком низкой.

d) Наиболее впечатляющим применением транспортных средств в Риме стала почтовая служба.

e) В течении короткого времени были созданы почтовые экипажи для связи непосредственно с провинциями.

f) Их применение ограничивалось тем, что люди ездили по делам императора или знати.

g) Из-за дороговизны строительства дорог максимальный вес груза для различных транспортных средств был низким.

 

3. Match English and Russian equivalents:

 

a) accomplishment, shield, coach, constrain, postal, rigid, restrict.

 

b) завершение, экипаж, ограничивать, жёсткий, принуждать, защищать, почтовый.

 

4. Answer the following questions:

 

a) How was the earliest and simplest four-wheel vehicle found in Rome called?

b) What did it look like?

c) What was the main disadvantage of the plaustrum?

d) What was the most impressive accomplishment in Roman transportation?

e) For which purposes were mail coaches established?

f) When did the use of the cursus publicus become subject to favouritism and misuse?

 

Make up the plan of the text. Retell the text.

 

 

PART II

Автомобили: история и современность

HISTORY OF THE AUTOMOBILE

What Was the First Car?

By William W.Bottorff

Several Italians recorded designs for wind driven vehicles. The first was Guido da Yigevano in 1335. It was a windmill type drive to gears and thus to wheels. Vaturio designed a similar vehicle which was also never built. Later Leonardo da Vinci designed a clockwork driven tricycle with tiller steering and a differential mechanism between the rear wheel

A Catholic priest named Father Ferdinand Verbiest has been said to have built a steam powered vehicle for the Chinese Emperor Chien Lung in about 1678. There is no information about the vehicle, only the event. Since Thomas Newcomen built his first steam engine only in 1712, we can guess that this was possibly a model vehicle powered by a mechanism like Hero’s steam engine, a spinning wheel with jets on the periphery.

Newcomen’s engine had a cylinder and a piston and was the first of this kind, and it used steam as a condensing agent to form a vacuum and with an overhead walking beam, pull on a rod to lift water. It was an enormous thing and was strictly stationary. The steam was not under pressure, just an open boiler piped to the cylinder. It used the same vacuum principle that Thomas Savery had patented to lift water directly with the vacuum, which would have limited his pump to less than 32 feet of lift. Newcomen’s lift would have only been limited by the length of the rod and the strength of the valve at the bottom.

Somehow Newcomen was not able to separate his invention from that of Savery and had to pay for Savery’s rights. In 1765 James Watt developed the first pressurized steam engine which proved to be much more efficient and compact than the Newcomen engine.

The first vehicle to move under its own power for which there is a record was designed by Nicholas Joseph Cugnot and constructed by M. Brezin in 1769. A replica of this vehicle is on display at the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, in Paris. The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D. C. also has a large (half size) scale model. A second unit was built in 1770 which weighed 8,000 pounds and had a top speed on 2 miles per hour, and on the cobble stone streets of Paris this was probably as fast as anyone wanted to go it. The early steam powered vehicles were so heavy that they were only practical on a perfectly flat surface as strong as iron. A road thus made out of iron rails became the norm for the next hundred and twenty five years. The vehicles got bigger and heavier and more powerful and as such they were eventually capable of pulling a train of many cars filled with freight and passengers.

  Many attempts had been made in England by the 1830’s to develop a practical vehicle that didn’t need rails. A series of accidents and propaganda from the established railroads caused a flurry of restrictive legislation to be passed and the development of the automobile bypassed England. Several commercial vehicles were built but they were more like trains without tracks.

  The development of the internal combustion engine had to wait until fuel was available to combust internally. Gunpowder was tried but didn’t work out. Gunpowder carburetors are still hard to find. The first gas really did use gas. They used coal gas generated by heating coal in a pressure vessel or boiler. A Frenchman named Etienne Lenoir patented the first practical gas engine in Paris in 1860 and drove a car based on the design from Paris to Joinville in 1862. His one-half horse power engine had a bore of 5 inches and a 24 inch stroke. It was big and heavy and turned 100 rpm. Lenoir died in 1900.

Lenoir had a separate mechanism to compress the gas before combustion. In 1862, Alphonse Bear de Rochas figured out how to compress the gas in the same cylinder in which it was to bum, which is the way we still do it. This process of bringing the gas into the cylinder, compressing it, combusting the compressed mixture, then exhausting it is known as the Otto cycle, or four cycle engine. Lenoir claimed to have run the car on benzene and his drawings show an electric spark ignition. If so, then his vehicle was the first to run on petroleum based fuel, or petrol, or what we call gas, short for gasoline.

Siegfried Marcus, of Mecklenburg, built a car in 1868 and showed one at the Vienna Exhibition in 1873. His later car was called the Strassenwagen had about 3/4 horse power at 500 rpm. It ran on crude wooden wheels with iron rims and stopped by pressing wooden blocks against the iron rims, but it had a clutch, a differential and a magneto ignition. One of the four cars which Marcus built is in the Vienna Technical Museum and can still be driven under its own power. In 1876, Nokoiaus Otto patented the Otto cycle engine, de Rochas had neglected to do so, and this later became the basis for Daimler and Benz breaking the Otto patent by claiming prior art from de Rochas.

In 1885, in Gottllieb Daimler’s workshop in Bad Cannstatt the wooden motorcycle was built. Daimler’s son Paul rode this motorcycle from Cannstatt to Unterturkheim and back on November 10, 1885. Daimler used a hot tube ignition system to get his engine speed up to 1000 rpm.

The previous August, Karl Benz had already driven his light, tubular framed tricycle around the Neckar valley, only 60 miles from where Daimler lived and worked. They never met. Frau Berta Benz took Karl’s car one night and made the first long car trip to see her mother, travelling 62 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim in 1888.

Also in August 1888, William Steinway, owner of Steinway & Sons piano factory, talked to Daimler about US manufacturing right and by September had a deal. By 1891 the Daimler Motor Company, owned by Steinway, was producing petrol engines for tramway cars, carriages, quadracycles, fire engines and boats in a plant in Hartford, CT. Steam cars had been built in America since the Civil War but the early ones were like miniature locomotives. In 1871, Dr. J.W. Carhart, professor of physics at Wisconsin State University, and the J. I. Case Company built a working steam car. It was practical enough to inspire the State of Wisconsin to offer a $10,000 prize to the winner of a 200 mile race in 1878. The 200 mile race had seven entries, of which two showed up for the race. One car was sponsored by the city of Green Bay and the other by the city of Oshkosh. The Green Bay car was the fastest but broke down, and the Oshkosh car finished with an average speed of 6 mph.

From this time until the end of the century, nearly every community in America had a mad scientist working on a steam car. Many old news papers tell stories about the trials and failures of these would be inventors.

By 1890 Ransom E. Olds had built his second steam powered car. One was sold to a buyer in India, but the ship it was on was lost at sea. Running by February, 1893, and ready for road trials by September, 1893, the car built by Charles and Frank Duryea, brothers, was the first gasoline powered car in America. The first run on public roads was made on September 21, 1893, in Springfield, MA. They had purchased a used horse drawn buggy for $70 and installed a 4HP, single cylinder gasoline engine. The car (buggy) had a friction transmission, spray carburettor and low tension ignition. It must not have run very well because Frank didn’t drive it again until November 10, when it was reported by the Springfield Morning Union newspaper. This car was put into storage in 1894 and stayed there until 1920 when it was rescued by Inglis M. appreciated and presented to the United States National Museum.