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Walton, Sir William Turner

(Encyclopedia)Walton, Sir William Turner, 1902–83, English composer, b. Oldham. Walton studied at Oxford. One of his earliest works was a piano quartet (1918–19). In 1923, Façade, satirical poems by Edith Sitw...

Cash, Johnny

(Encyclopedia)Cash, Johnny, 1932–2003, American singer and songwriter, b. Kingsland, Ark. Born to a farm family, he went to Memphis in 1955 and recorded such hits as “I Walk the Line” (1956) and “Ring of Fi...

Cuban Missile Crisis

(Encyclopedia)Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, major cold war confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In response to the Bay of Pigs Invasion and other American actions against Cuba as well as to P...

Spark, Dame Muriel

(Encyclopedia)Spark, Dame Muriel, 1918–2006, Scottish novelist, b. Muriel Sarah Camberg. She lived in Edinburgh, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), London, New York, and Rome, and spent her last years in Tuscany. Spark's t...

Scorsese, Martin

(Encyclopedia)Scorsese, Martin skôrsāˈzē, –sĕzˈē [key], 1942–, American film director; b...

Hardy, Thomas

(Encyclopedia)Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928, English novelist and poet, b. near Dorchester, one of the great English writers of the 19th cent. The son of a stonemason, he derived a love of music from his father and a ...

micrometer

(Encyclopedia)micrometer mīkrŏmˈətər, mīˈkrōmēˌtər [key]. 1 Instrument used for measuring extremely small distances. Typical examples are devices used in astronomical telescopes to measure the apparent d...

Marsh, Othniel Charles

(Encyclopedia)Marsh, Othniel Charles, 1831–99, American paleontologist, b. Lockport, N.Y., grad. Yale, 1860. He studied abroad, and from 1866 served at Yale as the first professor of paleontology and as curator o...

ergonomics

(Encyclopedia)ergonomics, the engineering science concerned with the physical and psychological relationship between machines and the people who use them. The ergonomicist takes an empirical approach to the study o...

Hershey, Milton Snavely

(Encyclopedia)Hershey, Milton Snavely, 1857–1945, American manufacturer and philanthropist, b. near Derry Church (now Hershey), Pa. The son of Mennonite farmers, at 15 he was apprenticed to a confectioner in Lanc...