Time is Up!
Reading Test 46
Steam Across the Water
A look at the early history of boats powered by steam
During the 1600s, very early in the development of steam engines, inventive spirits like the Frenchman Denis Papin dreamed of – and experimented with – boats driven by steam, rather than by the wind or human effort, but many decades passed before those visions became reality.
Englishman Jonathan Hulls took out patents on a steamboat in 1736, but it was to be driven by a Newcomen engine, which was heavy and therefore inefficient, and would never be a success. In 1763, William Henry, an American, put a Watt steam engine in a boat, but it sank. Nearly 20 years later, in the 1780s, a steam-powered paddle-wheeler managed to last fifteen minutes against the current on the River Saone in France but lacked the endurance for longer trips. Developments elsewhere included a boat driven by a steam-powered water jet and able to do six kilometers per hour. However, all these steamboats were either too slow or too expensive to run. For example, American John Fitch successfully trialled his first steamboat in 1787, but although he tried a number of designs and solved many technical challenges – one of his boats could even travel at 13 km/h – he could never convince skeptics that steamboats would pay.
The 19th century came before real success could be claimed. In Scotland in 1802, Lord Dundas launched the steamboat Charlotte Dundas, which was driven by a paddle wheel and had an improved engine designed by William Symington. Barges, some weighing as much as 70 tonnes, were towed by this steamboat 30 kilometers along the Forth and Clyde Canal to Glasgow, Scotland’s second city. Soon after, success came to American Robert Fulton, whose countrymen called him ‘the father of the steamboat’. Inspired by news of the Charlotte Dundas, Fulton ran steamboat trials on the River Scinc, in an attempt to attract French support for his submarine Nautilus. He later imported a Boulton-Watt steam engine and built a boat to use it in. In 1807, the Clermont began a scheduled passenger steamboat service between New York and Albany, 250 kilometers up the Hudson River, taking 30 hours for the trip. Within a few years, steamers were running on the St Lawrence River in Canada and would soon appear on other rivers and lakes, including the Mississippi River, a most famous venue for the paddle-wheelers.
Back in Scotland, Fulton’s ideas inspired Henry Bell, who launched his Comet in 1812 on the Clyde between Glasgow and Greenock. Inside a decade, dozens of steamboats were to be seen on the rivers, lochs, and canals of Scotland, carrying cargo and occasionally passengers. The age of steamboats had come.
Once steamboats were carrying passengers and industrial goods along the inland waterways and sheltered coastlines of Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the challenge became to send steamboats onto the open ocean, such as across the Atlantic Ocean, between Europe and the US. Travelling under steam power alone would require engines to use less coal so the ship could stay at sea for several weeks. In order to provide a reliable service, it was also necessary to replace paddle wheels as a source of power with something less affected by the rolling of the ship.
Without waiting for such breakthroughs, crossings under a combination of steam and sail got underway in 1819 with the American ship Savannah. A regular service took another two decades and introduced the famous name of Cunard. Securing the British government contract for the mail service across the Atlantic, Samuel Cunard established a shipping line in 1840, soon carrying passengers as well, and offering guaranteed sailing dates. Cunard’s first ships used a sail-steam combination, but the era of the passenger liner, using steam alone, was getting close.
When it came to building the ships, the versatile British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel set the pace. Brunel, brilliant and daring, had already built the Great Western Railway. He created ever bigger ships – faster, more luxurious, and comfortable for passengers. The Great Western, launched in 1838, was 70 meters long and crossed from Bristol to New York in just fifteen days. The largest paddle steamer ever built was Brunel’s Great Eastern. Ultimately too expensive to run as a passenger ship, it was leased to lay the first submarine telegraph cable from Europe to America. His 1853 Great Britain, nearly 100 meters long and luxuriously appointed, was the first ocean-going steamship made of iron, and the first to use the underwater screw propeller for powering movement in place of paddle wheels. The idea of the screw had been around since the experiments of the American John Stevens in 1803, but only in 1838 did a large steamer use one, the riverboat Archimedes built by Francis Pettit Smith. Later ships had twin screws for reliability.
In many modern ships, steam turbines have replaced engines with pistons, with fuel oil instead of coal to fire the boilers. Diesel engines keep others moving. The largest ships afloat now would dwarf Brunel’s Great Eastern (launched in 1860); the Atlantic can be crossed in only four days. But in whatever form, the ever-evolving descendants of the original visions of Denis Papin and Robert Fulton continue to travel the seas in vast numbers.
This quiz is for logged in users only.
How sleep helps us learn
Researchers are uncovering the link between sleep and learning and how it changes throughout our lives.
A
Most research into the relationship between memory and sleep has traditionally been conducted using young adults or animals. By the early 2000s, scientists had found that sleep helps young adults consolidate memory by reinforcing and filing away daytime experiences. But the older adults that Rebecca Spencer was studying at the U.S. University of Massachusetts Amherst didn’t seem to experience the same benefit. Spencer wondered if age altered the relationship between sleep and memory, and chose nearby preschool children as subjects. She found that the children who regularly had short sleeps during the day benefited the most from daytime rest, largely because their memories decayed the most without these naps. “By staying awake, they have more interference from daytime experiences,” Spencer explains.
B
The studies on young adults carried out in the early 2000s suggested that reduced sensory inputs during sleep allow the brain to replay daytime experiences during a period relatively free of distracting information. This may help to solidify connections and transfer daytime memories from one part of the brain known as the hippocampus into long-term storage in the brain region called the cortex. But how sleep and memory interact at different periods of our lives remained an open question.
C
In children younger than 18 months, learning is thought to occur in the cortex because the hippocampus isn’t yet fully developed. As a result, researchers hypothesise that infants don’t replay memories during sleep, the way adults do. Instead, sleep merely seems to prevent infants from forgetting as much as they would if they were awake. “The net effect is that sleep permits infants to retain more of the redundant details of a learning experience,” says experimental psychologist Rebecca Gómez of the University of Arizona. “By the time they are two years old, we think that children have brain development that supports an active process of consolidation,” she adds.
D
From the age of two, adequate sleep during the hours of darkness becomes critical for learning. Toddlers who sleep less than 10 hours display lasting cognitive deficits, even if they catch up on sleep later in their development. The effects are particularly strong in children with developmental disorders, who often suffer from disturbed sleep. Jamie Edgin of the University of Arizona studied children with the genetic disorder Down’s syndrome, comparing those who were sleep-impaired with those who slept normally. She found that there were large differences in language knowledge and observed that the non-sleep-impaired children could learn up to 190 new words, even after controlling for behavioural differences.
E
Understanding the impact of sleep on memory could also help another at-risk group of learners at the other end of the age spectrum. Previous research has suggested that older adults don’t remember recently acquired motor skills as well as young adults do. But neuroscientist Maria Korman and her colleagues at the University of Haifa in Israel recently demonstrated that taking a nap soon after learning can allow the elderly to retain procedural memories just as well as younger people. Korman hypothesizes that by shortening the interval between learning and consolidation, the nap prevents intervening experiences from weakening the memory before it solidifies. “Overnight sleep might be even better, if the motor skills—in this case, a complex sequence of finger and thumb movements on the non-dominant hand—are taught late enough in the day.”
F
Optimising the timing of sleep and training in the elderly exploits something Korman sees as a positive side of growing old. “As we age, our neural system becomes more aware of the relevance of the task,” Korman says. Unlike young adults, who solidify all the information they acquire throughout the day, older people consolidate those experiences that were tagged by the brain as very important.
G
Tests on older adults’ memories are generating new findings about the relationship between sleep and memory at other ages as well. After learning at a conference about a memory test for cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults, neuroscientist Jeanne Duffy of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston wondered if sleep could help strengthen the connection between names and faces. She and her colleagues found that young adults who slept overnight after learning a list of 20 names and faces showed a 12 percent increase in retention when tested 12 hours later, compared with subjects who didn’t sleep between training and testing. The findings have “an immediate real-world application,” Duffy says, as they address a common memory concern among people of all ages.
H
Developing a fuller picture of what happens to memories during sleep—and how best to modify sleep habits to aid the recall process—could benefit some of society’s most sleep-deprived members of every age. “We need to understand this role of sleep in memory because there is such potential for intervention,” Spencer says. “Now that we have a well-founded concept of what sleep can do for memory, it’s time to put it to the test.”
This quiz is for logged in users only.
200 Years of Australian Landscapes at the Royal Academy in London
This exhibition promises to chart the evolution of a nation through its art, but not everyone agrees with the reasons behind the choice of artwork.
For the casual viewer, the exhibition of landscapes, Australia, selected by the Royal Academy of Art will be a spectacular guide through Australian art history. Included in the exhibition are a range of artists and styles, dating from the earliest days of colonial art and progressing through expressionism and modernism to the artists of the 20th century, culminating with the current generation of Australian artists. It is hardly surprising, then, that this results in a flexible, wide-ranging notion of landscape. But this landmark exhibition gives rise to some questions, and perhaps problems, regarding Britain’s relationship with its former colony. By choosing a style of painting at which British artists excel, the Academy could be seen as inviting criticism that hints at a telling attitude towards art by comparison. But it is the very theme of landscape painting that makes this a controversial selection. To consider condescending is perhaps too strong, but for Joanna Mendelssohn, Australian critic and Associate Professor at the University of NSW’s College of Fine Arts (COFA), there is a suggestion that British artistic values have directed this exhibition, rather than allowing Australia the freedom to demonstrate its maturity.
What Mendelssohn found surprising about the exhibition was the underlying rules for the selection of works seemed to have been so conservative. Since the landscape is a very strong British artistic theme, it appeared to her that when the British looked to the art of a former colony, there was a tendency for them to think that those colonies would continue to be like the British themselves. In reviewing Australia, the British insisted on looking at the genre of landscape painting. Because of colonial ties, it was inevitable during Australian art’s formative years that it would reflect Britain’s devotion to the beloved landscape before its own character and idiosyncrasies took shape. And while Mendelssohn’s concern over the exhibition’s conventional selection is valid, the Academy is nevertheless embracing the peculiarities of Australian art from the mid-19th century onward, albeit within the boundaries of landscape.
“Australia is curated by Kathleen Soriano, director of exhibitions at the Royal Academy. ‘Certainly the influence of English, French or German art is much more evident in the early periods, in the early 1800s to mid-1800s,’ she says. ‘What I wanted to show was how Australian art develops a real distinctiveness, associated with the landscape and the light.’”
The fusion of ‘tradition’ of the European kind with something more specifically Australian, and often personal, is crucial to the exhibition and extends particularly to some of the more contemporary artists involved. Sydney-born video artist Shaun Gladwell is a good example of this. Gladwell’s most famous piece, which is featured in the exhibition, is Storm Sequence (2000), a video of Gladwell skateboarding on the Bondi seafront as one of Sydney’s signature brutal storms gathers offshore. It is his acknowledgement of landscape (or seascape) tradition, coloured by Gladwell’s own individualism.
“To exhibit my work in this show might make some sense because I was interested in Turner and the idea of atmosphere affecting vision, something I was really interested in around the time of Storm Sequence. I was thinking about this tradition of Romantic landscape, but I wanted to make it personal,” says Gladwell. But he didn’t want to just embark on borrowing imagery from elsewhere. He wanted to bring it to his experience and his world through skateboarding and beach culture.
So while it may seem narrow for Britain to reduce Australian art to the genre of landscape, there can be little denying that British landscape painting is still relevant to a current generation of Australian practitioners, however indirectly.
Visitors to the exhibition encounter Australian Aboriginal art first, the idea being that these works warrant a prominent position because they were ‘first’. Over the last couple of decades, London has hosted many successful exhibitions of Aboriginal art in smaller spaces, but for Soriano, Australia represents an opportunity to place such art within the context of new relationships to the art of the settlers and white Australia. “One of the reasons landscape was seen as being the right theme was because Australia art started in and on the landscape,” she says. “[The exhibition is] a beautiful meshing of the two different kinds of art that allowed me to bring them together comfortably and honestly within this theme. It was important for me to present Indigenous art to audiences, and I felt it was most accurate to be seen as part of Australian art history, rather than a separate exhibition of its own.”
Meanwhile, Australian critic Mendelssohn also points out that London is increasingly less important to today’s generation of artists, and this somewhat weakens the ceremony surrounding the exhibition in London. “China is the most important art market in the world,” she says. “If you’ve made it in Shanghai, you’ve made it. The world has changed. My students in Australia, who come from all over the world, really want to see Venice Biennale and Art Basel, but they’re less interested in going to London. When I was growing up, London was the destination, and then when I was at university all the smart young things wanted to go to New York,” she added. “Now they want to go everywhere. There’s no such thing as the centre and the periphery like there used to be. It’s much more complicated.”
This quiz is for logged in users only.