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English to Hungarian: James Burke: Room With (Half) A View
Source text - English James Burke
ROOM WITH (HALF) A VIEW
I MAY HAVE mentioned earlier that I live irt London, on the banks of River Thames within sight of the great Victorian railway bridge built by the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He was half French, and that first sentence was half true, because one half of the bridge is obscured by the corner of the house next door.
As you'll know if you're a regular reader of my scribble, Brunel was the architect of the SS Great Eastern, the biggest steamship ever built at the time, which ended up successfully completing the final 1866 attempt by Cyrus Field to lay the transatlantic telegraph cable. Funnily enough, long before they ever thought of using Great Eastern, the ship was being built on one side of the Thames as they were putting together the cable on the other.
In preparation for the great event, Field had taken advice from Sam Morse, who'd already done something similar, though on a much smaller scale. Two years before he blew Congress away with his famous 1844 telegraph demo, he'd transmitted signals across New York Harbor with an insulated copper cable. This may have been why he'd also given a bit of cable (and presumably a few hints) to a neighbor who, that same year, wanted to blow up a ship just off the end of Manhattan by detonating a mine under it and persuading the U.S. Navy to buy the idea. The ship went down OK. And so did Sam Colt's fortunes when he wouldn't explain to the Navy how he'd done it. His revolver hadn't been doing too well either. Then along came the U.S.-Mexican War and suddenly Colt was back in the killing game. By 1855 he had the biggest private armory in the world.
His only rival in sudden death was the Remington Company, which ended up solving a major problem for Union troops in the American Civil War. Which was that while you were standing there ramming powder down your musket barrel, dropping in a ball, and then cocking and aiming, somebody shot you. Remington's breech-loading rifle changed all that and became the most successful military rifle in history. Sold more than a million to peace-loving nations all over Europe and the Middle East. After the Civil War ended, thanks to Remington for a while the pen became mightier than the sword when they turned over some of their now-idle machine tool lines to the production of a neat gizmo an inventor in Milwaukee had come up with. He'd done so after reading a description in the July 1867 edition of Scientific American of some Brit's attempt to do the same. Christopher Scholes's thing eventually became known as the Remington typewriter, and it freed women from kitchen drudgery so they could become involved in office drudgery.
The guy who had helped Scholes with his upper-case machine was an innovative legal type named Carlos Glidden. Noodling must have run in Glidden's family, because in 1874 a very distant relative of his named Joseph, living in De Kalb, Illinois, patented another device that was to become almost as popular with troops and farmers as was the Remington (rifle, not typewriter): barbed wire. Three years later Glidden sold his shares in the Barbed Fence Company to Washburn and Company Manufacturing of Worcester, Massachusetts. They were already producing Glidden's raw material, because by 1868 they were up and running with a new kind of wire-making mill, developed by a Brit named George Bedson. This would turn twenty tons of wrought iron into a zillion feet of quarter-inch wire in ten hours. A little earlier Bedson had also invented a continuous process for dipping wire into molten zinc and galvanizing it, so that, protected against wind and weather, it was suitable to be used by Ezra Cornell as he strung his telegraph wires all across America, thus making himself rich enough to found a university.
However, back to Washburn and Company. Around 1842 they turned down an offer from a young German engineer living in Pennsylvania who'd come up with a way to make wire rope by spinning the strands of wire on site. He'd had the idea when working on a curious system known as a portage railway. Before proper railroads superseded them, now and again canals would bump up against a mountain, and the only thing their builders (the young German was one) could do was to stick the canal barges on flatbeds and haul them on rails up and over the mountain to where the canal started again on the other side. Hauling was done with hemp hawsers. Which often broke. Hence the young German's wire ropes. Perhaps Washburn
Translation - Hungarian James Burke
Szoba (fél)panorámával
Talán korábban már említettem, hogy Londonban élek a Temze partján, lakásom pedig a híres viktoriánus vasúti hídra néz, melyet a kiváló viktoriánus mérnök, Isambard Kingdom Brunel épített. Brunel félig francia volt, első mondatom pedig csupán félig igaz, hiszen az említett híd felét a szomszédos ház eltakarja.
Ha Ön rendszeres olvasója firkálmányaimnak, bizonyára tudja, hogy a kor addigi legnagyobb gőzhajója, az SS Great Eastern is Brunel keze munkáját dicséri, s melynek közreműködésével Cyrus Field 1866-os, az atlanti távírókábel lefektetésére irányuló végső próbálkozása is sikerrel járt. Furcsa módon, még mielőtt a Great Eastern használatának gondolata felmerült volna, a Temze egyik partján a hajót építették, a másikon pedig a kábelt sodorták.
A nagy eseményre készülődve, Field megfogadta Sam Morse tanácsát, aki igaz kicsiben, de már vitt véghez hasonló dolgot. Két évvel azelőtt, hogy 1844-es távirati üzenetével elkápráztatta az amerikai kongresszust, Morse szigetelt rézhuzal felhasználásával jeleket továbbított New York Harbor-ön keresztül. Talán éppen ez késztethette arra, hogy némi kábellel (és pár hasznos tanáccsal) lássa el egyik szomszédját, aki - ugyancsak ebben az évben - egy hajót kívánt felrobbantani Manhattan déli partjánál egy víz alatti akna segítségével, csupán azzal a céllal, hogy az amerikai haditengerészetnek eladja ötletét. Az még rendben is volt, hogy a hajó elsüllyedt, azonban vele együtt Sam Colt sorsa is megpecsételődött, amikor nem volt hajlandó magyarázatot adni a haditengerészetnek arról, hogyan is robbantott. Ráadásul a revolverüzlete is pangott. Nem sokkal ezután kitört a mexikói-amerikai háború, és Colt hirtelen újra nyeregbe került. 1855-re a világ legnagyobb, magánkézben lévő fegyvergyárával büszkélkedhetett.
A hirtelen halál világában egyetlen vetélytársa akadt, a Remington cég, amely megoldást talált az amerikai polgárháborúban harcoló szövetséges csapatok egy égető problémájára: mire a katona a puskacsőbe gyömöszölte a puskaport, behelyezte a töltényt, felhúzta a kakast, célzott, már golyót is kapott. Remington hátultöltő puskája mindezt merőben megváltoztatta, és a történelem legsikeresebb katonai puskájává vált. Európa és a Közép-Kelet békeszerető nemzeteinek több mint egymillió darabot adtak el belőle. A polgárháború befejeztével, a Remingtonnak köszönhetően a toll - igaz csak rövid ideig - nemesebbnek bizonyult a kardnál, ugyanis a cég üressé vált gépsorain egy ügyes kis szerkentyű gyártását kezdte meg, mely egy milwaukee-i feltaláló agyából pattant ki. A kivitelezésben a Scientific American 1867-es júliusi kiadásának egy leírása volt segítségére, melyben egy brit ugyanilyen berendezés megépítésére tett kísérletet. Christopher Scholes találmánya Remington írógépként vált ismertté, mely ugyan felmentette a nőket a konyhai robot szerepéből, egyúttal azonban irodai rabszolgává tette őket.
A fickó, aki Scholes segítségére volt nagybetűs gépezete megalkotásában, egy kreatív ügyvéd, Carlos Glidden volt. A filózás a Glidden család vérében kellett hogy legyen, hiszen Carlos egy távoli rokona, Joseph, aki De Kalbban, Illinois államban élt, egy másik eszközt szabadalmaztatott 1874-ben, amely csaknem ugyanolyan népszerűségnek örvendett az amerikai csapatok és farmerek körében, mint a Remington (puska, nem az írógép): a szögesdrót. Három évvel később Glidden eladta részesedését a Barbed Fence Co.-ból a Massachusetts államban található worcesteri Washburn
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Years of experience: 2. Registered at ProZ.com: Dec 2008.
A resourceful, conscientious and reliable university student in Pécs who is keen to find a position as an English-Hungarian translator. Able to work individually, or as a member of a team have the ability to cooperate with others effectively and tolerantly.
Keywords: translation, English-Hungarian, IT, Social Sciences, Legal, Business, Literary
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