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Spruce Goose
The Hughes H-4 Hercules (commonly known as the ''Spruce Goose''; registration NX37602) is a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight, on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood (Duramold process) because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, the aircraft was nicknamed the ''Spruce Goose'' by critics, although it was made almost entirely of birch.Parker, Dana T. ''Building Victory: Aircraft Manufacturing in the Los Angeles Area in World War II,'' pp. 49–58, Cypress, CA, 2013. . The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it had the largest wingspan of any aircraft that had ever flown until the Scaled Composites Stratolaunch first flew on April 13, 2019. T ...
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WikiProject Aircraft
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikidata, and Wikisource. They also exist in different languages, and translation of articles is a form of their collaboration. During the COVID-19 pandemic, CBS News noted the role of Wikipedia's WikiProject Medicine in maintaining the accuracy of articles related to the disease. Another WikiProject that has drawn attention is WikiProject Women Scientists, which was profiled by '' Smithsonian'' for its efforts to improve coverage of women scientists which the profile noted had "helped increase the number of female scientists on Wikipedia from around 1,600 to over 5,000". On Wikipedia Some Wikipedia WikiProjects are substantial enough to engage in cooperative activities with outside organizations relevant to the field at issue. For e ...
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Plywood
Plywood is a material manufactured from thin layers or "plies" of wood veneer that are glued together with adjacent layers having their wood grain rotated up to 90 degrees to one another. It is an engineered wood from the family of manufactured boards which include medium-density fibreboard (MDF), oriented strand board (OSB) and particle board (chipboard). All plywoods bind resin and wood fibre sheets (cellulose cells are long, strong and thin) to form a composite material. This alternation of the grain is called ''cross-graining'' and has several important benefits: it reduces the tendency of wood to split when nailed at the edges; it reduces expansion and shrinkage, providing improved dimensional stability; and it makes the strength of the panel consistent across all directions. There is usually an odd number of plies, so that the sheet is balanced—this reduces warping. Because plywood is bonded with grains running against one another and with an odd number of composite part ...
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Playa Vista, Los Angeles
Playa Vista is a neighborhood in the Westside area of Los Angeles, California. The area was the headquarters of Hughes Aircraft Company from 1941 to 1985 and the site of the construction of the Hughes H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose" aircraft. The area began development in 2002 as a planned community with residential, commercial, and retail components.Vincent, Roger (December 18, 2014"Playa Vista office complex gets makeover, draws creative tenants"''Los Angeles Times'' The community attracted businesses in technology, media and entertainment and, along with Santa Monica and Venice, Marina del Rey, Playa del Rey, Culver City, El Segundo and Mar Vista, has become known as ''Silicon Beach''. History Tongva Native Americans The Tongva people inhabited the location now occupied by Playa Vista. A Tongvan sacred burial site is located here: "about 1,000 Native American remains ..had been exhumed during construction," grave sites that were deemed sacred by the Tongva people. The rem ...
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Hughes Airport (California)
The Hughes Airport was a private airport owned by Howard Hughes for the Hughes Aircraft Company. It was located just north of the Westchester bluffs and district of Los Angeles, California, from 1940 until its closure in 1985. It was directly south of and along Jefferson Boulevard and Ballona Creek, the location of the present-day neighborhood of Playa Vista. History In 1940, Howard Hughes bought of the Ballona wetlands south of Jefferson Avenue in south-west Culver City. A total of were available for a runway and an unpaved runway 23/5 was operational in 1943. In 1948, were paved with asphalt, extended by 1962 to . Takeoffs to the west had to be coordinated with nearby Los Angeles International Airport. The field served a number of aircraft and helicopter development projects of the Hughes Aircraft Co. and Hughes Tool Company (Summa Corporation). At one time, according to Noah Dietrich, it "was the longest runway on the West Coast." Spruce Goose The "Spruce Goose", of ...
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Strategic Material
Strategic material is any sort of raw material that is important to an individual's or organization's strategic plan and supply chain management. Lack of supply of strategic materials may leave an organization or government vulnerable to disruption of the manufacturing of products which require those materials. It can also refer to a group or department that manages these materials. In government terms, they are materials, usually raw materials that have a particular strategic significance to a government or nation, often in time of war. Their strategic need is because of their crucial importance for either economic or military purposes. Some materials are relatively simple, but are required in great quantities during wartime. Others are obscure and technically complex. Although not required in large quantities, their irreplaceability and critical need makes them especially valuable. Foodstuffs are not generally classed as strategic materials: although vital, they are treated ...
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Glenn Odekirk
Glenn Odekirk (born Waseca, Minnesota May 9, 1905 – died Las Vegas, Nevada January 12, 1987) was an American aerospace engineer who made significant contributions to the work of Hughes Aircraft. Biography The son of Edward John and Louise (Lewis) Odekirk, Glenn, also known by his nickname 'Ode' (pronounced "OH-dee"), was an engineer who graduated from Oregon State University in 1927. During the 1930s and through World War II, Odekirk was the assistant to the businessman Howard Hughes, the president of Hughes Aircraft, with whom he had a very close professional relationship. Odekirk met Hughes on the set of his movie '' Hell's Angels'', and Hughes was very impressed with him. For several years, the two flew around the country together, testing the young engineer's ideas and arguing constantly over the most trivial matters of airplane construction. In 1935, Odekirk co-designed the Hughes H-1 Racer. It set a world speed record of 352.39 miles per hour in September of that year, bea ...
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M4 Sherman
} The M4 Sherman, officially Medium Tank, M4, was the most widely used medium tank by the Military history of the United States during World War II, United States and Allies of World War II, Western Allies in World War II. The M4 Sherman proved to be reliable, relatively cheap to produce, and available in great numbers. It was also the basis of several other Armoured_fighting_vehicle, armored fighting vehicles including self-propelled artillery, Tank_destroyer, tank destroyers, and Armoured_recovery_vehicle, armored recovery vehicles. Tens of thousands were distributed through the Lend-Lease program to the British Empire#Second World War, British Commonwealth and Soviet Union. The tank was named by the British after the American Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman. The M4 Sherman evolved from the M3 Lee, M3 Medium Tank, which for speed of development had its main armament in a side sponson mount. The M4 retained much of the previous mechanical design, but moved the 75_mm ...
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Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, record-setting pilot, engineer, film producer, and philanthropist, known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an important figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness. As a film tycoon, Hughes gained fame in Cinema of the United States, Hollywood beginning in the late 1920s, when he produced big-budget and often controversial films such as ''The Racket (1928 film), The Racket'' (1928), ''Hell's Angels (film), Hell's Angels'' (1930), and ''Scarface (1932 film), Scarface'' (1932). He later acquired the RKO Pictures film studio in 1948, recognized then as one ...
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Liberty Ship
Liberty ships were a class of cargo ship built in the United States during World War II under the Emergency Shipbuilding Program. Though British in concept, the design was adopted by the United States for its simple, low-cost construction. Mass-produced on an unprecedented scale, the Liberty ship came to symbolize U.S. wartime industrial output. The class was developed to meet British orders for transports to replace ships that had been lost. Eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships between 1941 and 1945 (an average of three ships every two days), easily the largest number of ships ever produced to a single design. Their production mirrored (albeit on a much larger scale) the manufacture of "Hog Islander" and similar standardized ship types during World War I. The immensity of the effort, the number of ships built, the role of female workers in their construction, and the survival of some far longer than their original five-year design life combine to make them th ...
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Henry J
The Henry J is an American automobile built by the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation and named after its chairman, Henry J. Kaiser. Production of six-cylinder models began in their Willow Run factory in Michigan on July 1950, and four-cylinder production started shortly after Labor Day, 1950. The official public introduction was on September 28, 1950. The car was marketed through 1954. Development The Henry J was the idea of Henry J. Kaiser, who sought to increase sales of his Kaiser automotive line by adding a car that could be built inexpensively and thus affordable for the average American in the same vein that Henry Ford produced the Model T. The goal was to attract "less affluent buyers who could only afford a used car" and the attempt became a pioneering American compact car. To finance the project, the Kaiser-Frazer Corporation received a federal government loan in 1949. This financing specified various particulars of the vehicle. Kaiser-Frazer would commit to design a vehicl ...
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