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USES OF THE INTERNET

access/ advertising/ chat/ communicate/ communication companies/ distribute/ enable/ information/ introduction online/ scholars/ ways

From the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the Internet was (1)_ and research tool used almost exclusively for academic and military purpose. This changed radically with the World Wide Web (WWW) IN 1989. Today individuals, companies, and institutions use the Internet in many (3) _. Businesses use the Internet to provide (4) _ to complex databases, such as financial databases. Companies carry out electronic commerce, including (5) _, selling, buying, distributing products, and providing after-sales services. Businesses and institutions use the Internet for voice and video conferencing and other forms of communication that (6) _ people to telecommute, or work from a distance. The use of electronic mail over the Internet has greatly speeded communication between (7) _, and between other individuals. Media and entertainment companies use the Internet to broadcast audio and video, including live radio and television programs. They also offer online (8) _ groups, in which people carry on discussions using written text, and (9) _ news and weather programs. Scientists and (10) _ use the Internet to (11) _ with colleagues, to perform research, to (12) _ lecture notes and course materials to students, and to publish papers and articles. Individuals use the Internet for communication, entertainment, finding (13) _, and to buy and sell goods and services.

RUSSIA’S BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Russian inventors have rarely been able to realize their ideas in their own country. The world knows the name Sikorsky, who moved from Russia to America in time, but practically no one abroad has heard of Kulibin who stayed home a century earlier. Ivan Kulibin was born to the family of a petty trader in Nizhny Novgorod, a center of trade and enterprise on the Volga River. In his younger years, Ivan already showed an interest in all sorts of weathercocks, mills, and particularly, the wooden mechanism of the wall clock. He learned to read from a local sexton, but received no formal education. The boy’s talent for making mechanical objects was noticed by a wealthy local merchant, Kostromin, who became his sponsor. Kostromin’s money enabled Kulibin to make an incredibly complicated clock the shape and size of a duck’s egg. The clock chimed melodiously every hour, and a pair of tiny gates opened to reveal inside the Holy Sepulchre (гроб господен) surrounded by armed warriors (silver figurines). An angel then pushed a stone from the grave, the guards fell to the ground, and the chimes played the melody of the resurrection prayer three times. After each performance, the gates closed again. The clock’s mechanism consisted of a thousand tiny parts.

When Catherine the Great visited Nizhny Novgorod in 1768, Kulibin was presented to her with the as yet unfinished clock, telescope, microscope, and electric machine, all of which he had also made himself. As a result, Vladimir Orlov, the Director of the Academy of Sciences, invited him to come to St. Petersburg. In 1769, he completed the clock and presented it to Catherine the Great. In 1770 he began service at the Academy of Sciences with a wage of 300 rubles a year, supervising the mechanical and optical shops and teaching the academy’s artists his mechanical skills. He was promised 100 rubles for every artist he trained. His instruments were used by all the scientific expeditions of the age, and Kulibin shared with scientists the credit for many of the period’s discoveries.

Perhaps Kulibin’s most famous projects, never realized, was the design and scale model of a single-arch bridge. In 1772 the London Royal Society announced a contest for the best design of a 250-meter single –arch bridge across the Thames. Kulibin had just been thinking of building a permanent bridge across the Neva. Working on his own, he invented the first truss bridge in the world (or so say Russian scholars). The bridge consisted of a single 300-meter arch without any supports in between. Kulibin built a scale model of the bridge, which was about 15 meters long. It was demonstrated to a group of elite scientists at the academy in 1776. Outstanding scientist Daniel Bernoulli called Kulibin a great artist. In an age when bridges were made of stone and wood, Kulibin suggested using metal. The scientists were unanimous in their high praise for the bridge model. Typically for Russia, the bridge was never built, although Kulibin was awarded 2,000 rubles and a gold medal for his design. In 1792 he was granted membership in the Imperial Free Economic Society.

Kulibin lived for 83 years and made innumerable inventions, none of which were destined to have any practical significance. He invented an optical telegraph with a system of signal posts, a searchlight, unusual watermills, a tricycle, a vessel that moved upstream without any outside assistance, a mechanical sowing machine, pumps, loading mechanisms, and lots of other curiosities. Meanwhile for at least a century longer peasant Russia continued to draw water, sow, plough and harvest with the most primitive implements. All of Kulibin’s inventions remained on paper, and technology was brought to Russia exclusively from the West. In 1801 Kulibin retired from the Academy with an annual pension of 3,000 rubles. He also received a 12,000 lump sum to build a vessel for the Volga. He returned to Nizhny Novgorod, and the vessel was tested in 1804. in 1813 a fire destroyed almost all of Kulibin’s property. Yet, undaunted, Kulibin continued to work until the last years of his life. In 1814 he submitted a model of a three-arch iron bridge to span the Neva River. A model and a large engraving of this extraordinary bridge have come down to us. But once again, the bridge itself was never built. Although Catherine the Great, Paul I, and Alexander I occasionally paid Kulibin considerable sums of money for his inventions, the inventor spent his last years in poverty, alone and forgotten.

In any other civilized country Kulibin’s talents would have been put to better use. His natural abilities were incredibly versatile. However, being uneducated, Kulibin often worked on problems that had already been solved, wasting time and talent. He died on June 30, 1818.

Kulibin’s life and legacy in his country were in many respects similar to those of Benjamin Franklin in America. Both Ivan Kulibin and Benjamin Franklin lived in countries which, at the time, were marginal to mainstream civilization. And for that reason much of the work both did was simply a repetition of earlier achievements in Europe. In American schoolbooks Benjamin Franklin was credited with inventing the rocking chair and flying a kite to capture electricity in a thunderstorm. In fact, rocking chairs were known in medieval Europe, while research on electricity had been done much earlier in Europe by others. The “firsts” attributed to Kulibin in Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as to such scientists as Mikhail Lomonosov, were, in fact, mostly derived from developments in West European science. In the 19th and early 20th century, however, Russia began to close the gap separating it from other West European countries. One of the men who took part in developing Russian mining and industry was Ivan Kulibin’s grandson Nikolai Kulibin (1831–1903).

Unlike his gifted grandfather, Nikolai received an excellent education in Russia and abroad to become one of the country’s leading mining engineers. He spent two years in Belgium and Germany to study metallurgical science and testing. In 1873 he was sent to Scotland and England to enlarge his knowledge. In Russia he traveled to the major mining areas, where he carried out experiments and studied production processes. In 1880 he became honorary professor of the College of Mines, and in 1882 was appointed director of the Mining Department. He also taught at the Institute of Technology, Forestry College, and the Naval Academy. Nikolai’s brilliant career certainly seems to confirm the power of genes. It also tends to show that Russia was on its way to becoming a major industrial power. Politics, however, were Russia’s undoing. And politics are still preventing Russians from realizing their natural abilities. If Kulibin lived in Russia today, he would probably go abroad to bring his projects to fruition.

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