PDF A Visit to Minnesota
Transcription
PDF A Visit to Minnesota
enGine ENGLISCH FÜR INGENIEURE März 2012 HISTORY AUDIO-DATEI A Visit to Minnesota ... mehr in der PRINTAUSGABE: FEATURE Englische Artikel mit Vokabelhilfe TECHNOLOGY Fachwissen auf Englisch LANGUAGE Vokabel- und Grammatikübungen WELTWEIT Interkulturelle Kommunikation RUBRIKEN Neues aus Technik und Business ... mehr unter www.engine-magazin.de History Audio-Datei A Visit to Minnesota Ein junger, deutscher Kavallerieoffizier nimmt als Beobachter am amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg teil und gönnt sich während seines Aufenthalts eine Ballonfahrt, die sein Leben verändern sollte. Die Geschichte eines der größten deutschen Luftfahrtpioniere beginnt in Minnesota. A twenty-five-year-old cavalry officer came to America from Germany in 1863 as a foreign observer of the Union Army. He was a Prussian nobleman, and when I say his name, you‘ll all recognize it. But first, I want to tell you about his adventure here. He narrowly escaped capture by Lee‘s Army in Virginia. He watched draft riots in New York. He flirted with young ladies on a Great Lakes boat from Cleveland, Ohio, to Superior, Wisconsin. He ate muskrat and hunted with Indians. His long odyssey eventually brought him to the International Hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota. Just across the street from his hotel, a balloonist named John Steiner was offering rides in his observation balloon. Our German officer decided to add a balloon ride to his American adventure. Steiner sent him up on a solo flight at the end of a sevenhundred-foot tether rope. The young man wrote a formal letter-report about the experience. Outwardly it was straightforward reporting of the military potential of observation balloons. But between the lines bubbled a barely controlled excitement. He returned to Germany in 1870, while his Minnesota experience festered. Finally, in 1891, he retired as a brigadier general and devoted himself to lighter-than-air flight. He tried, without success, to interest the German army in its potential. By then, many people had built rigid navigable balloons – or dirigibles. The French experimenter Giffard had flown the first successful one in Paris, eleven years before that balloon ride in St Paul. But no one had yet made a commercially viable dirigible. But the name of our German officer was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. And Zeppelin took up dirigible-building just after his sixtieth birthday. He flew his first airship in 1900. Zeppelin managed to synthesize all the elements other inventors had been identifying down through the nineteenth century. He lived and worked another fourteen years, creating the grandest machines in the air. The spectacular Zeppelin airships continued to dazzle the www.engine-magazin.de amazing source planted airborne onlooker ... *see list *see list avoided arrest *see list enlistment demonstrations *see list tie up cable event On the surface ... simple *see list enthusiasm brewed stopped working ... dedicated stiff controllable air ships feasible *see list impress world until the whole technology went up in flames with the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. And we‘re left with the astounding fact that the seed for all this European high technology had been sown in Western America just after the Civil War. Shortly before he died, Zeppelin wrote: While I was above St. Paul I had my first idea of aerial navigation strongly impressed on me and it was there that [the idea of] my Zeppelins came to me. Perhaps Zeppelin was so successful just because he was fulfilling a dream as atavistic as Daedalus and Icarus. Those great graceful whales in the sky had literally gestated throughout Zeppelin‘s entire adult life. n John Lienhard Dieser Text ist Teil der Radioserie „Engines of Our Ingenuity“ und wird hier mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Autors und der Radiostation KUHF wiedergegeben. Den Originaltext und weitere 2600 Kurzberichte über die Geschichte der Technik finden Sie unter www.uh.edu/engines aerial astounding atavistic bubble, to capture Count dazzle, to devote, to dirigible draft escape, to excitement experience fester, to gestate, to muskrat navigable observer outwardly Prussian retire, to rigid riot rope seed sow, to (sowed, sown) straightforward tether viable Lufterstaunlich, verblüffend atavistisch blubbern, sprudeln Gefangennahme Graf blenden, schillern widmen, hingeben Luftschiff Einberufung entkommen, entfliehen Erregung, Aufregung Erfahrung, Erlebnis schwären, eitern tragen, schwanger sein Bisamratte lenkbar Beobachter nach außen, äußerlich preußisch sich zur Ruhe setzen steif, starr Unruhe, Aufstand Seil, Leine Saat aussäen einfach, geradeheraus Halteleine, Strick rentabel, machbar ! en l l te es 66 b 3 fte -99 n e 0 h e l ze 1/38 stell n i 5 e E 1 er 06 de/b d o ax n. en 6, F gazi r ie 36 a nn 80- e-m o ab 51/3 gin e n 1 gin 06 w.e n n e zt lefo r ww t Je Te de o