Gresham GI Special Edition Stainless Steel Tonnaeu Case White and Blue Colourway Watch G1-0001-WHT

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There were two key questions people always had about curves, known as “quadrature” and “rectification”. Quadrature is finding the area under a curve. Galileo approximated the quadrature by making a cycloid out of metal and weighing it, but he didn’t know the exact formula. We don’t know for sure when he did this, but he wrote in 1640 that he’d been studying cycloids for 50 years. At any rate, it took until the 1630s for the correct solution to be found (probably first by Gilles de Roberval): if the rolling circle has area π r 2 , then the area under each cycloid arch is 3π r 2 . Very nice. But the cycloid had still not been “rectified”: this means finding its length. The first person to do this, of all the illustrious mathematicians who had studied it, was Christopher Wren. He showed that the length is another beautifully simple formula. If the rolling circle has diameter d , its circumference is πd , and each cycloid arch has length precisely 4d . (Actually, Roberval claimed to have done this first too, but he did that a lot. He only started making this claim after Wren told Pascal the result, and Wren’s proof was the first to be published, as far as I know. The general consensus at the time and since seems to be that Wren was indeed the first to rectify the cycloid.) Keen to recapture the initiative from the British, the French government organized an International Conference on Time in 1912, which established a generally accepted system of establishing the time and signaling it round the globe. The Eiffel Tower was already transmitting Paris time by radio signals, receiving calculations of astronomical time from the Paris Observatory. At 10 a.m. on 1 July 1913, it sent the first global time-signal, directed at eight different receiving stations dotted around the world. Thus, as one French commentator boasted, Paris, 'supplanted by Greenwich as the origin of the meridians, was proclaimed the initial time centre, the watch of the universe'. The coming of wireless telegraphy had indeed signaled the death-knell for the remaining local times. Robert Hooke, oil painting on board by Rita Greer, history painter, 2009, who has made the digitized version available under the Free Art Licence http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/. It’s available from Wikimedia https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:17_Robert_Hooke_Engineer.JPG

The following paper is a helpful summary of Wren’s mathematical work which gives detail of the original sources, for example the places in Wallis’s Tractatus de Cycloide where he explain’s Wren’s rectification of the cycloid and solution to Kepler’s problem. Wren the Mathematician, D.T. Whiteside, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 15, pp107-111 (1960).We’ve got a huge range of 100% genuine luxury watches from leading brands such as Rolex, Tag Heuer, Omega and Breitling, all individually assessed and valued by our expert buyers.

Spiral-like shapes crop up regularly in nature. There’s a particular kind of spiral, called a logarithmic spiral that was familiar to Wren. Logarithmic spirals were first mentioned by the German artist and engraver Albrecht Durer, and studied in great detail by the mathematician Jacob Bernoulli – he gave them the name “spira mirabilis”, or “miraculous spiral”. In a logarithmic spiral, the distance r from the centre is a power of the angle we’ve moved through (or conversely the angle is a logarithm of the distance, hence the name). This means that the gap between consecutive rings of the spiral is increasing each time. One example of a logarithmic spiral, shown below, is r= 2 θ/360(where we are measuring our angles in degrees). With every complete revolution, the distance of the spiral from the origin doubles. It crosses the x -axis at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on. In the course of my exploration I will not simply confine myself to English or even British history, for Britain was connected to Europe and the wider world in multifarious ways during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone seeking an illustration of this could do worse than to cast an eye over the Table of Contents of A. N. Wilson'sThe Victorians, with its chapters on France, Germany and Italy, India, Jamaica and Africa, and its coverage of Wagner, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Many of the ideas, beliefs and experiences of the Victorians were shared by people in a variety of different countries, from Russia to America, Spain to Scandinavia, and were reflected in the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, up to the outbreak of the First World War. Beyond this, overseas Empire loomed ever larger in the consciousness of the Victorians, until it came to express itself in an ideology, the ideology of imperialism. The story of the y = x 3approximation to the perfect masonry dome, and a derivation of the correct equation, is given in Hooke's Cubico-Parabolical Conoid, by Jacques Heyman, in Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 39-50 https://www.jstor.org/stable/532075. You’ll find everything from classic models to modern styles, featuring materials such as gold, silver and diamond, so you’re sure to find the perfect men’s or ladies' designer watch. The scale of the British Empire and the dominance of British industry ensured that in 1890 nearly two-thirds of the telegraph lines in the world were owned by British companies, which controlled 156,000 kilometers of cables. But the influence of the system extended far beyond the British Empire. The growth of the new global communication networks meant, as the writer Max Nordau noted in 1892, that the simplest villager now had a wider geographical horizon than a head of government a century before. If he read a paper he 'interests himself simultaneously in the issue of a revolution in Chile, a bush-war in East Africa, a massacre in North China, a famine in Russia'.Gresham introduces the latest in cutting edge watch design and construction, fusing architectural elegance with the intricacy of traditional watch making.