"Maynard L. Parker (1901–1976) was a Los Angeles–based architectural and garden photographer who contributed images to many of the nation’s premiere home design publications. Born and raised in Vermont, Parker first traveled cross country to Southern California in 1923.By 1942, Parker had come to the attention of Elizabeth Gordon, legendary editor of House Beautiful, and thus began an important affiliation that lasted well into the 1960s." From: http://www.huntington.org/huntingtonlibrary.aspx?id=3970
"Red Bull Stratos, a mission to the edge of space, seeks to surpass limits that have existed for 50 years. Felix Baumgartner will undertake a stratospheric balloon flight to 120,000 feet and attempt a freefall jump targeted to reach – for the first time in history – supersonic speeds". From: http://www.redbullstratos.com/
From Wiki: Verner Panton (13 February 1926 – 5 September 1998) is considered one of Denmark's most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative and futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant colors. His style was very "1960s" but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Panton's most well-known furniture models are still in production (at Vitra, among others).
Panton was trained as an architectural engineer in Odense; next, he studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi) in Copenhagen, graduating in 1951. During the first two years of his career, 1950-1952, he worked at the architectural practice of Arne Jacobsen, another Danish architect and furniture designer. Panton turned out to be an "enfant terrible" and he started his own design and architectural office. He became well known for his innovative architectural proposals, including a collapsible house (1955), the Cardboard House and the Plastic House (1960). Near the end of the 1950s, his chair designs became more and more unconventional, with no legs or discernible back. In 1960 Panton was the designer of the very first single-form injection-moulded plastic chair. The Stacking chair or S chair, which would become his most famous and mass-produced design.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Verner Panton experimented with designing entire environments: radical and psychedelic interiors that were an ensemble of his curved furniture, wall upholstering, textiles and lighting. He is best known for the design of a German boats interior, now a famous museum. He is also known for a hotel in Europe that utilized circular patterns and cylindrical furniture.
From Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-Jules_Marey Étienne-Jules Marey (March 5, 1830 – May 21, 1904) was a French scientist and chronophotographer, born in Beaune, France. His work was significant in the development of cardiology, physical instrumentation, aviation, cinematography and the science of labor photography. Marey found a way to record several phases of movements in one photo. He started by studying how blood moves in the body. Then he shifted to analyzing heart beats, respiration, muscles (myography), and movement of the body. To aid his studies he developed many instruments for precise measurements. For example, he was successful in selling an instrument called Sphygmographe to measure the pulse. In 1869 Marey constructed a very delicate artificial insect to show how an insect flies and to demonstrate the figure-8 shape it produced during movement of its wings. Then he became fascinated by movements of air and started to study bigger flying animals, like birds. He adopted and further developed animated photography into a separate field of chronophotography in the 1880s. His revolutionary idea was to record several phases of movement on one photographic surface. In 1890 he published a substantial volume entitled Le Vol des Oiseaux (“The Flight of Birds”), richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and diagrams. He also created stunningly precise sculptures of various flying birds. He published La Machine Animale in 1873. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge carried out his "Photographic Investigation" to prove that Marey was right when he wrote that a galloping horse for a brief moment had all four hooves off the ground. Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882. The instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second (all the frames were recorded on the same picture). Using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Marey also conducted the famous study about cats landing always on their feet. Marey also made movies. They were at a high speed (60 images per second) and of excellent image quality. His research on how to capture and display moving images helped the emerging field of cinematography.
