The Art of Fighting: Its Evolution and Progress, with Illustrations from Campaigns of Great Commanders
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Electricity in Theory and Practice; Or, the Elements of Electrical Engineering
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Electricity in Theory and Practice (Classic Reprint)
(The design of this book is to form a bridge between the m...)
The design of this book is to form a bridge between the many works written on the theory of electricity and the many works written on its practical applications. It has been my experience that practical men and students have found great difficulty in seeing the relation between the theory of electricity and its practical applications, because they have had to study the theory from books devoted wholly to abstruse theory, and the practical applications from books devoted wholly to the practical applications. I have, moreover, been often told by practical men that a book showing the principles upon which practice depends, and explaining the theory 4f the practical applicationS ywould be a help to many. This want I have tried to meet. May be my endeavor will at least serve to stimulate abler hands to labor in what seems to me a very useful field.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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Rear Admiral Bradley Allen Fiske was an officer in the United States Navy who was noted as a technical innovator.
Background
He was born in Lyons, New York, the eldest of four children of William Allen and Susan (Bradley) Fiske. His father, whose English forebear, William Fiske, had settled in Salem, Massachussets, in 1637, was an Episcopal minister. The family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1860 and six years later to Cincinnati.
Education
After attending public schools, Fiske was appointed a cadet midshipman in the United States Naval Academy when he was barely sixteen.
He graduated in 1874, the second in his class.
Career
For the next twenty-five years, Fiske performed the generally unexciting duties that filled out the ordinary naval career of the period. Cruising along the coastal sea-lanes or sailing in the waters surrounding American naval stations in distant lands, he served as navigator, gunnery officer, or executive officer on small ships.
He was, however, on the Yorktown in 1891 when that gunboat was sent to Valparaiso, Chile, after several American sailors had been killed in the streets by an angry mob; and two years later he was aboard the San Francisco, flagship of a squadron that put in at Rio de Janeiro to protect American merchant ships from revolutionary elements of the Brazilian navy. This was a memorable occasion because for the first time in years vessels of the navy cleared for action and fired warning shots across the bows of ships of another nation.
As navigator of the Petrel in 1898, Fiske saw more dangerous action in the battle of Manila. For his "conspicuous" and "heroic" conduct in standing in an exposed position to take the range of the Spanish ships with a stadimeter--one of his own inventions--he was commended by Admiral George Dewey.
Following the peace with Spain he remained in the islands, serving on the Monadnock and the Yorktown and taking part in the frequent bombardment of shore installations during the subsequent Filipino insurrection. He rose more rapidly in the first decade of the new century, becoming captain, in turn, of the cruiser Minneapolis, the coast-defense monitor Arkansas, and the armored cruiser Tennessee.
Promoted to rear admiral in 1911, he commanded various battleship divisions in the Atlantic Fleet before his final assignment to shore duty. What gave Fiske his importance and distinction in the navy, however, was not so much the competent performance of his regular duties as his restless investigation of the new technology which, during his lifetime, was transforming the design of ships and ordnance as well as the nature of naval warfare.
Without much formal training in engineering, but supported by a logical and inquiring mind, he educated himself during the long empty hours at sea in physics, optics, and especially in the growing field of electricity.
Such preparations, coupled with his increasing curiosity about mechanical matters, enabled him to develop a series of significant inventions, including an electric ammunition hoist, wireless-controlled ships and torpedoes, the torpedo plane, a new kind of ship communication system, and electrically controlled gun turrets. Fiske's most important invention was the naval telescope sight which he devised in 1891, while on leave from the Yorktown. Initially condemned as useless by his commanding officer, Robley D. Evans, within seven years it had become standard issue for all ships.
Together with the stadimeter, his electric rangefinder, these instruments laid a solid foundation for a new kind of naval gunnery which, as has often been said, converted what had been an uncertain art into an exact science.
He formed a remarkable group of enlightened officers--Stephen B. Luce, Henry Clay Taylor, William S. Sims [Supp. 2], Albert Lenoir Key, William F. Fullam--who in this period were fighting to raise the intellectual level of the service and to increase the amount of military energy, as opposed to the inertia of simple maintenance, that flowed through the directing offices of the Department.
Less at home in political situations than the others, and without the sense of crusade that stirred in some of them, Fiske nevertheless was indispensable to the purposes they all sought because he supplied them with the technical improvements they could fight for.
Fiske's contribution to the reform of the navy was recognized by his appointment in 1913 as aide for operations, the chief military adviser to Secretary of the Navy. This capstone to his career brought him little but frustration because of his continuous differences with Secretary Josephus Daniels, a man of humane impulses but a provincial who misunderstood in almost every possible way what a navy was about.
Fiske therefore resigned in 1915. Shortly thereafter, in 1916, Bradley Fiske retired from active duty, as he was required by law to do at the age of sixty-two.
He lived for the remaining quarter-century of his life most of the time in New York City, at the Hotel Commodore and later at the Waldorf-Astoria.
He continued his intelligent interest in the naval service and wrote three useful books: The Navy as a Fighting Machine (1916); his illuminating autobiography, From Midshipman to Rear Admiral (1919); and The Art of Fighting (1920).
Fiske died in New York City in 1942 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He was one of the very small group of officers who had most to do with taking the navy from the timeless days of sail into the modern conditions of steel, steam, high explosives, and electricity.
He was a member of the Navy's General Board (1911) and the Army-Navy Joint Board.
Personality
Whether on active duty or in retirement, Fiske was a civilized man, literate, humorous, liberal in spirit, and warm in sympathy, with an attractive elegance in person and manner.
Connections
On February 15, 1882, he married Josephine Harper, daughter of Joseph Wesley Harper of the New York publishing firm; they had one daughter, Caroline Harper.