History is comprised of a myriad of moments lost in the mists of time. These photographs bring back to life a mere handful of those moments in time. Each, in its own way, casts a sharp light on the life and times of a bygone era. 

Become entranced in how the world behaved, loved and lived in the past. 

Main picture: Carrying a Rolls Royce across a river in Nepal in 1950

Comment on photo of NASA

Life Magazine photographer was selling the public a dummy.  The equations on the board do not represent calculations as such, but rather they are some of the reference equations needed to compute orbital mechanics.  For example, the 4 highlighted equations at the bottom right are the Euler transformation equations to transform a vector quantity (X_f,Y_f) in the F – coordinate system to a vector quantity (X_a,Y_a) in the a  – coordinate system where the two coordinate systems are rotated by q around the z-axis and vice versa.

These equations would not be needed to be written out anywhere as they would be an integral part of the scientists’ brains – their ‘ meat and potatoes’.   What would be needed for general consumption would be a few of the diagrams which define the various axis systems and their relevant reference subscripts as well as the angles and distances between them.  All of that would be on typed and roneo-ed (remember the Roneo machine before Xerox came along) sheets.  This large blackboard would probably have been used to quickly look at sections of the problem as a team or to caucus an issue but the grunt work would have been done by partitioning the problem and dishing it out to human computers to iterate them.

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