New answers tagged united-states
5
It did so, but only initially. Over the long term, it fell behind in most areas, and once the USA was first on the Moon the space race was over with the USA the victor.
Rewind back to the beginning of the 1950s. The Cold War had just started, both the USA and USSR had lots of nukes, but the USA had a massive advantage because its bases in Europe allowed its ...
14
I think the premise of the question - that the US ought to have a technological superiority over the USSR, as it did in other areas - is quite sensible here, so I will address the Soviet side of the story.
for some context, Soviet Russia happened to have it own vast talent in STEM (as witnessed e. g. by Nobel prizes to Tamm-Frank-Cherenkov and Landau), and ...
48
It was more of a back-and-forth.
You can build a narrative of one side out-pacing the other if you cherry-pick firsts, but their capabilities were very close. The timeline of first achievements is interleaved. Firsts grab headlines and demonstrate national priorities, but they don't show capability well.
The other side would often accomplish something ...
5
Here is something from a New York Times article January 13, 1920
That professor Goddard, with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution [from which Goddard held a grant to research rocket flight], does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to ...
11
Your question is based on a misconception, which is that there was any sort of "space race" before the Soviets launched Sputnik. The US had some fairly low budget research programs, such as Project Vanguard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Vanguard Unlike the Soviet programs, they were regarded as purely scientific*, and so did not use ICBMs ...
-2
In Europe this was not the case.
It was seen as a window of opportunity (a 'New Age'), without the constraints of the Cold War ('Old Age'), to resolve problems that had plagued Europe since the demise of the Roman Empire.
However, it soon became clear that many of these problems, that had laid dormant during the 'Old Age', were still, very much, in existence....
16
It's hard to say for sure, but I strongly suspect it was named for the historic Palmyra in Syria. Most of the American settlements were only established (or renamed) after 1802 - skimming the WP articles, I get them as GA 1840, IL #1 1855, IL #2 unknown (but almost certainly later), IL #3 1814, IN 1839, ME 1807, MO 1819, NE 1870, NJ 1849, NY 1796, OH #1 1807,...
7
It appears he went as far as trying to convince African leaders of officially raising the issue.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 —The State Department and the Justice Department have begun to take an interest in Malcolm X's campaign to convince African states to raise the question of persecution of American Negroes at the United Nations.
The Black Nationalist leader ...
6
My Grandmother, who was a teacher, said that adults back then naturally thought in fractions and not decimals. You've got to consider there were no pocket calculators and for both mental arthritic and abacuses divisions in terms of ratios of natural numbers. Everything someone experienced growing up in those days: Measuring devices (no digital scales then, ...
2
I was there. (1960s) It was not confusing.
Divide one old pound by three is 6/8. (six shillings and eight pence.) Divide a modern pound or a dollar by three and...
The same goes for multiplication. Three jam doughnuts at fourpence is instantly a shilling.
Having distinctive coinage made things easier still. 7/6 is three half-crowns (Instant after nearly ...
44
[Another] question quotes Terry Prattchett as:
"The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they
thought it was too complicated."
Is this a fair comparison with its inference that British currency was
significantly more complex than decimal currency?
No. The quote is from Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett (not Prattchett) and ...
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