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National Geographic : 1974 Nov
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we assembled the spheres and switched on the lights, then I ran down the stairs to my camera, set up a hundred yards away. I opened the camera shutter and waved a handkerchief. Tracing two red and orange streaks against the violet night, the spheres dropped like falling stars and landed with a simultaneous thump (page 659). Viviani also tells of Galileo's discovery of the principle of the pendulum, one of the fundamental physical discoveries of all time. Galileo's name will be forever associated with the telescope, yet he did not invent the "tube of long vision." No one knows who made the first one, probably the Dutch, but it seems certain that the first telescopes were put together by makers of spectacle lenses. There is a tablet in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence that translates: HERE LIES SALVINO D'ARMATO DEGLI ARMATI OF FLORENCE INVENTOR OF EYEGLASSES MAY GOD FORGIVE HIS SINS YEAR 1317 What is remarkable is that no one before Galileo seems to have turned the tube of long vision skyward: "But I, leaving things of the earth, turned my eyes upward to contempla tion of the heavens. "A most beautiful thing and beyond meas ure fascinating is to see the Moon's face ... It does not have a smooth and polished surface but rather it is scabrous and un As if Dante's inferno were boiling just beneath the ground, plumes of super heated steam jet from natural and man-made holes in and around the Larderello geothermal power station southwest of Siena. Cooling towers of the plant, upper right, rise above this Italian "valley of smokes"; the village of Montecerboli huddles at lower left. Here, since 1913, electricity has been commercially generated from geothermal energy. Italy, pinched for power, has launched a full steam-ahead project for further development of the nation's geothermal potential. 649
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